Therapy or Coaching?

Coaching is generally oriented toward the future: goals, performance, decisions, accountability. It assumes you are fundamentally well and want to get somewhere faster. Good coaching can be genuinely useful for that.

Therapy is for when something hurts, or keeps repeating, or does not make sense — grief that has not moved, anxiety that runs your days, relationships that keep going the same painful way, a childhood that will not stay in the past. Therapy is allowed to go down before it goes forward, and sometimes it has to.

Anyone can call themselves a coach. There is no required training, no license, no board to answer to. Therapists, by contrast, complete graduate degrees, thousands of supervised hours, licensing exams, and ongoing education — and are legally accountable for their work. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in California (LCSW #106887), with graduate degrees from Tulane University.

That structure exists to protect you, especially when the material is tender. If you are working through grief, trauma, or old wounds, you want someone trained and accountable for exactly that.

A rough rule of thumb: if your main question is how do I get there, coaching may serve you. If your question is why do I keep doing this, or why does this still hurt, that is therapy's territory. And the two are not enemies — some people do coaching after therapy has cleared the ground.

If you are unsure which fits, that is a reasonable thing to bring to a consultation. A free 15-minute call is an easy way to ask.