Our world today is highly attuned to the idea of psychotherapy and coaching for mental and relational health.
The stigma once attached to patients who sought out support has almost entirely dissolved. There is no longer anything wrong with seeking help to navigate our increasingly complicated world… and many, many people regularly choose to work with a professional coach or therapist.
In fact, a recent study by the University of Phoenix revealed that 32% of Americans have undergone some kind of professional treatment or counseling for mental health issues and there are over half a million mental health professionals in the United States. Certainly, there is no shortage of psychological counseling or treatment.
However, within the new environment of therapy, a problem has surfaced: Traditional approaches to therapy and coaching often fail to produce lasting transformation or results.
Clients either end therapy because it has not helped them resolve the issues that brought them there in the first place, or they feel as if they will remain stuck forever in a loop of treatment, never getting the answers they need.
Attempts to understand one’s history or to modify behavior are never quite enough to bring about transformation and lasting change.
What is it about traditional therapy and coaching that causes them to fail so often?
There are three primary shortcomings:
In therapy, the therapist employs treatment approaches that simply do not take into account the full complexities and pragmatics of human experience. Essentially, insight into one’s past is simply not enough to bring transformation.
In coaching, the coach often lacks the sufficient skills and understanding of human experience to engage people at their level of deepest need.
In both, the therapist and coach get stuck in the loop of their own agenda, lacking the capacity to be fully present to whom their client is in the process of becoming.
No doubt, there is an abundance of psychotherapeutic theories and techniques, all of which have their good points and can be very helpful. However, as we see it here at interself, the aforementioned approaches often fail because they are impersonal: Too often clients are stuck into trying to fit a model, rather than model made to fit them.
The complex factors involved in human experience and making actual progress are reduced or ignored all together in the name of fitting some model or agenda rather than achieving the client’s goal of transformation.
There is more to the incredibly complex human experience than any single approach can capture. Without recognizing this, the client’s goal of personal transformation is jeopardized.
You can choose your own metaphor: Square peg into a round hole, tailoring the person to fit the dress, being made to walk around in shoes that don’t fit…
Traditional therapy and coaching are limited by the way in which their approaches limit both the practitioner (therapist or coach) and the client.
Equally as problematic as the limitations imposed by traditional treatments is the resulting limitations on the relationship between the therapist, or coach, and the client.
Therapist and client sit in a room together and talk. The client speaks of his or her issues. The therapist (you hope) advances insights into their past, and the coach (you hope) pumps them up, saying: “you can do this.” Then, the client is charged to take the aforementioned solutions home and somehow apply.
But what happens when an even slightly different issue presents itself? Or, the pumping up wears off and you find your zeal waning, doomed to feel the same or repeat the same thing over and over and over?
Once you can move past how lowly you think of yourself, back to the therapist’s office and to what amounts to symptomatic treatment of the patient’s problem – problems which in reality are as vast as the complexity of human experience.
There is a very old saying: give a person a fish, you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for life.
Traditional therapy and coaching often amount to nothing more than a regular handing-over of fish for the day.
interself believes in teaching our clients to fish and that's what makes our approach unique.
Click here, if you'd like to know more about the interself Approach.
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