What's The Difference Between Therapy And Coaching?

What's the difference between a therapist and a coach? This is a question I get asked a lot!

So, let's get into it! 🤓

Therapy is conducted by mental health professionals, including psychotherapists and psychologists (though exact credentials and qualifying processes may be different depending on where you live). It is often focused on understanding past traumas, and doing childhood deep dives with the purpose of self-understanding, getting things out of your system, and more.

Therapy is often recommended for people who primarily struggle with clinical depression and anxiety, and for people who are going through crisis and severe mental health struggles.

In my own experience as a therapy client, I find psychotherapy to be much more past-oriented and backward looking than coaching. In therapy, my therapist was less interested in telling me what to to do next and how to do it, and instead, helped me understand my childhood and why I developed certain triggers and frames of mind.

Therapists are specialized (as a mental health service), and as such do not tend to be as multimodal and holistic in their approach as what I offer as a coach. Therapists also will not incorporate spiritual practices such as tarot and seasonal cycles into the work they do with you. Their scope of practice does not include this.

Coaching is a little different.

While you absolutely can tell me everything you’d like to tell me about your childhood - I’m happy to listen - I don’t need to know everything about your youth in order to help you.

Coaching is often more focused on the here and now: what’s happening in your life in the present moment, what you can do about it, and how you can more forward to improve your circumstances.

The way I coach can be either action oriented and analytical, or it could be more spiritually or emotionally oriented, depending on your needs. Coaching can include work on creativity, sexuality, mindset, identity, energy work, tarot, etc - whatever that is within my areas of expertise and scope of practice that is supportive to you.

I am also very direct, and will call my clients out when necessary for their growth. Therapists generally do not do this.

Coaches are not well suited to work with people in crisis or active addiction. Coaching works best when coachees are mentally stable and motivated to take action and shift their lives to be more aligned, even if they’re not sure how to do it yet or what needs to change!

Learn more about my coaching practice and other work here: https://www.sabrinamscott.com/coaching

Any questions? Feel free to reach out to me privately. No inquiry is too weird - trust me, I've heard it all. :)