Therapy or Coaching?

I’ve been in therapy since 2015. 

I’ve had a coach since 2018. 

Both have been indispensable.

In therapy I gained labels and language to understand my past experiences. I learned to identify my relational and emotional patterns, and released a lot of built up pain from the past.

From receiving coaching, I saw there were better options available for how to build a life for myself. The possibilities of choice, creativity, and autonomy were opened up. I figured out how to integrate the blessings and curses of my past to forge something more authentic moving forward.

I’m frequently asked about the difference between therapy and coaching. The truth is, when done well, both provide what I believe we as a society are most desperately in need of: warm presence, active listening, validation, mirroring, and unconditional positive regard. 

They both serve as a forcing function to slow down, go inward, and do some inner maintenance and planning. 

Therapy and coaching primarily diverge in the time horizon they focus on. Therapy is more about the past. Coaching is more about present and future. I’d argue that all of these time horizons matter. 

If forced to draw a hard line between the two in my own life, I’d say therapy got me through anxiety, chronic health challenges, and PTSD. Coaching got me through a divorce, relocation, career change, a pandemic, and starting a business.

But in terms of my actual felt experience, all of these things were intimately intertwined and making such a clean-cut distinction is a major oversimplification.

(The combined effects of both, plus my own nutritional, meditative, writing, and spiritual work, alleviated my codependency and chronic depression – so I integrate those practices into the coaching I offer my clients, to speed things up for them.)

If you’re struggling to decide which modality is most appropriate for you, here is a more detailed matrix breaking down the overlaps and differences between therapy and coaching.

If you have to choose just one or the other, it’s worth spending a few minutes to reflect on which of these features (the left column of the matrix) are most important to you right now.

If you’re still torn, reach out to a few coaches and therapists for an introductory call and trust your gut when you feel that magic “click” with one of them.