Parent Coaching vs. Therapy: What’s The Difference?
Therapy helps individuals and families deal with mental health difficulties.
Therapy starts with diagnosis and assessment and then moves into treatment planning and treatment. Therapy is a collaborative relationship between you and your therapist to help you develop solutions, provide direction, and set goals.
Therapists are educated with a minimum of a master’s degree in psychology or counseling, and are licensed in the states they offer services in.
Therapists complete 4,000 hours of supervised practice and are bound by ethical codes that govern their conduct. If a therapist behaves inappropriately or makes a mistake, there is recourse through filing a complaint with the state licensing board. Therapists cannot provide therapy to clients outside of the states in which they are licensed.
Therapists assist you using hundreds of science and research-proven methods like cognitive behavior therapy, motivational interviewing, dialectical behavior therapy, and cognitive processing therapy, internal family systems, just to name a few.
Therapists collaborate with clients to develop strengths-based objectives, and in providing skill building for communication, reality testing, problem-solving, and reframing.
Therapists can also help you probe relationship and career issues with counseling and coaching. Therapists provide a health service and are trained to do so, but they also provide all the same services that life coaches do.
If you have an emotional or mental health problem – especially ones like anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder that can put you at a greater risk of other health concerns – a therapist will be able to help you in a way that a life coach simply can’t.
Therapy will focus on your thoughts and feelings and how they are informed by your past. Life coaching may touch on these concepts as you break down your limiting beliefs, but its ultimate focus is always on the present and the future.
Therapists are well-versed in coordinating with medical doctors, psychiatrists and other therapists when necessary and work with other mental health professionals they can refer you to when needed.
Therapists are also bound by ethics and state and federal law to maintain your privacy and confidentiality.
Coaching is currently an unregulated profession. At present, there are no state licensing boards or universally accepted standards of education or training for coaches.
A coach may or may not hold an advanced degree or any certificate in coaching.
At Kaleidoscope Coaching and Counseling our coaches have extended training and certifications in the areas that they provide coaching – such as ADHD coaching and Parent coaching.
Our practitioners CAN provide coaching to clients outside of the states where they currently reside.
Life coaches can’t work with mental health problems, should one arise, but they can help you with education and coaching your thought processes to improve performance, develop your potential, help you with solutions, provide direction, and with assistance in goal setting.
