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The Difference Between Therapy vs Life Coaching
Finding the right professional to help you with your struggles requires knowing your options. This guide explains the difference between therapy and coaching.
What Is Therapy?
Therapy, also called counseling, helps with resolving mental health challenges. If you battle with mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, or addiction, or you have been through traumatic events, you may benefit from therapy.
Talking with a psychotherapist may be the start of your healing journey. You will most likely address early childhood and past trauma to understand the patterns that continue to show up in your life that are affecting your emotional well-being.
Many therapists have specializations and service-specific locations. Seeking anxiety therapy in Puerto Rico or the Bay Area is key if you are ready to address your mental health concerns.
What are life coaches?
Life coaches do not focus on discovering the core of your anxiety and stress or other mental health conditions. Rather, coaching focuses on the here and now and helps you to build self-confidence and self-efficacy by setting goals and taking immediate action.
Life coaching can be beneficial, especially if you're ready to make changes, but need help with accountability and motivation. Therapy can help with some of your underlying issues, while coach is more goal focused on taking action to move forward with your life. Coaching might be seen as the "how" to make changes, while therapy focuses more on the "why" or "what" we're doing that keeps us stuck.
What Is the Difference between therapy vs life coaching?
You may be asking, "what is the difference between therapy vs life coaching?" There are five main distinctions:
1. The Issues You Struggle With
Therapy addresses many mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and stress, unresolved trauma, or addictive behavior. A therapist in the Bay Area can help you to uncover the root of the your mental health struggles.
Life coaching, on the other hand, does not address the cause of mental health conditions. Life coaching helps you move forward while you are emotionally stable, but want to create a plan of how achieve your goals. Coaching will usually begin when you are ready to make a change in your life.
Sometimes coaches may have personal experience of a particular mental health situations. However, they are still instructed to refer you to a licensed therapist since that is outside their scope of practice.
2. The Orientation
A therapist will help you look deeper into your symptoms and mental health condition. Often, this means going back to your past experiences. In a nutshell, therapy looks into how your past continues to affect your present day life.
Therapy can help you recognize what that contributed to how you cope with certain situations, the reoccurring thoughts that are difficult to manage, and patterns in relationships. Therapy can help you begin your healing journey. This is where anxiety therapy or therapy for your specific situation can help.
Coaching is more focused on the present. A trained coach will look into the now and help you to assess what is working well and what needs to be modified in your life. Coaches help you put into action what you want to make the necessary changes.
In coaching, you will work with the resources you have available at the given moment. This will help you with making shifts that will move you forward.