What Is Life Coaching?

Since no one is quite sure what it means to therapy the psyche-- there are a multitude of divergent therapies for psychic torment-- one should not expect a clear and concise definition of life coaching. 

Lately, given the failures of psycho therapy, more and more people have been trying out life coaching. We have no reason to believe that it is better or worst than other forms of therapy.

And yet, it might be worth the trouble to provide some fictional case studies, the better to show what life coaching can and cannot do. At the very least-- if therapy wants you to get out of your life and into your mind, life coaching helps you to get out of your mind and into your life.

It beats an extended and barely intelligible theoretical disquisition. If you insist on having some theory with your morning coffee, I recommend Peter Drucker’s pamphlet, “Managing Oneself.”

For my part I am going to present a series of case fictions, conducted by different fictional life coaches with different fictional clients. For today, I will begin with the case of one Clarissa, whose coach I have named Imogen.

Given the length of these fictions, I can only present half today. The rest of this case will be posted next week. In ensuing weeks I will present different case fictions with different clients and different coaches.

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As she dropped for the first time into her coach’s consultation chair, Clarissa was distraught. Imogen, her life coach, observed that the handsome young woman was well put together. Sporting a stylist maroon gabardine suit, Clariss had taken care that her hair was well-coiffed, her face carefully made up. And yet, her attractive appearance was belied by her darting eyes and her hang-dog expression.

A 39 year old wife and mother, Clarissa spent most of her time making a home for her anesthesiologist husband, Garrett, and their  8-year-old daughter, Chloe.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke College and Columbia Business School, she had joined McKinsey as a consultant, but had abandoned her career when job obligations began intruding on her private life. When she fell in love with Garrett, her work seemed less engaging. Discovering that she could not travel hither and yon while still cultivating her relationship, she sacrificed her career for domesticity. Soon after marrying Garrett she gave birth to Chloe, by all accounts a marvelous child. Clarissa wanted to have another.

Hesitantly, she presented herself to Imogen. Clarissa presented herself as a traditional woman, somewhat out of step with contemporary mores, but nonetheless comfortable with her choices. In Garrett she found an affectionate partner, a man with whom she could converse easily and love more easily still.

And he provided well for her and their child. Some of her friends were envious of her decision to abandon career for family, but she thought that the gains outweighed the losses. She had had little difficulty adopting to the role of doctor’s wife, and within a certain segment of the New York medical community, Clarissa and Garrett were a golden couple. They had everything and the future promised more of the same.

When someone who is clearly depressed and anxious still maintains the appearance of normality, she has not yet given in to despair. Thus, in her first remark to her new client, Imogen offered her explicit approval of Clarissa’s decisions. In the past a nod would have sufficed, but given the general attitude toward full-time housewives, Imogen wanted to be precise about expressing her own views. Had she done otherwise, she thought, Clarissa would not have been able to confide in her.

Hearing words of approval, Clarissa relaxed enough to explain her problem. Two months earlier she began to remark subtle, but detectable changes in her husband. At first, he appeared slightly distracted and forgetful, missing Chloe’s dance recital, almost forgetting Chloe’s birthday. Outwardly, he seemed cheerful, but he was becoming inattentive and incommunicative. Sometimes they had lively conversations over dinner, but at others he would be looking away from her, closing up, bantering less, and responding more with grunts and groans than with fleshed-out thoughts. Many evenings he would excuse himself from dinner before Chloe had finished her dessert. Then, in slow motion, he would plod toward his study, slink into his black Eames chair and stare into space. Their normally healthy sex life had vanished into the night. Clarissa started feeling that she was living with a stranger.

At first, she imagined that he was ill, but his most recent physical-- he had bragged about it-- had not revealed anything suspicious. Then she hypothesized that he was depressed, but he assured her that he was feeling fine, that he was working and sleeping well. 

When he occasionally broke out of his bad mood he would make a point of telling her that, you see, he was not depressed. Lately, these rays of sunlight had become increasingly infrequent.

And yet, at social functions, he seemed like himself, upbeat and engaged. Yet, some of his remarks were bizarre. At one point he started touting the benefits of channeling, at another, he expressed an interest in attending a seance.

When Clarissa confided in friends, they told her to forget about it. They seemed incapable of imagining that such a golden couple was having problems. And yet, she intuited that something was wrong.

Since Garrett seemed impenetrable, she chose to follow the advice her friends had been giving her-- to avoid any dramatic conversation. But, she began looking for clues. On a few occasions she had picked up the telephone only to be greeted by an immediate hang-up. Garrett began to come home late from work. And it was not because he was spending more time at the racquet club. In fact, he had stopped exercising and rarely finished his meals. He was spending more time chatting with strangers on the computer and had become less fastidious about his appearance. He started buying strange weekend wear, the kind that made him look like an overgrown teenager.

Finally, the idea that Clarissa had been fending off with all her moral strength broke through her defenses and planted itself firmly in her mind. She became convinced that her husband had fallen in love with another woman.

However much she did not wish to pry, Imogen felt that she needed to offer come conversational support:

“Do you know who this other woman might be?”

“Not really,” Clarissa answered quickly, “but I have visions of her, with bleached hair, synthetic breasts, someone who is vulgar.”

She paused for a moment: “And I see her with Garrett, sweaty and gross, in our bed…. I want to punish them both, to torture them, to hurt them for what they have done to me.”

Of course, Clarissa repudiated such thoughts. She had been well brought up and did not entertain such fantasies.

Imogen then asked a question that she knew, almost immediately, would better have been left unsaid:

 

“Can you describe some of the fantasies?”

Clarissa then confessed to seeing herself as a dominatrix caning her husband, to the point of drawing blood. She saw herself forcing his mistress to parade naked down Central Park West, her hands tied behind her back.

Imogen became increasingly uncomfortable listening to these gruesome stories. She knew intuitively that Clarissa required a benign explanation. Any interpretation that suggested that she was a repressed sadist would have alienated her. 

She said: “You have felt excluded from your husband’s world and the fantasies portray you as an active participant. Evidently, you feel that you can only participate by forcing yourself into the scene.”

Hearing this, Clarissa managed a half-grin. She said: “That makes a lot of sense.” By now, Imogen did not want to press the issue. She wanted to shift the focus.

So, she asked the obvious question: “Have you confronted your husband directly with your suspicions?”

Imogen did not think that this would have been a good thing. She feared that such a scene had already taken place.

Clarissa responded: “Not at all. I did not want to hear the answer.”

Nevertheless, she had begun her own investigation. She had scrutinized his credit card bills, tracked his comings and goings, made surprise phone calls to check up on him. She had imagined hiring a private detective to follow Garret, but she could think of no way to hide the expense.

Clarissa was not merely consumed by jealousy; she also felt like a snoop. She no longer trusted her husband and she felt that she was no longer trustworthy herself.

Imogen half agreed with this judgment, but she feared that Clarissa had been demeaning herself excessively, and thus required some support.

Imogen said: “I understand how you would have these feelings, but sometimes when a woman feels that she needs to protect her home and family she engages in activities that do not make her feel very proud.”

After saying “perhaps,” Clarissa started describing herself as a woman consumed by jealousy, increasingly distant from her husband and her child. She had concluded that Garrett’s better days were those when he saw his mistress. Thus, his wife had become an obstacle to his desire. Was he trying to drive her away so that she would grant him an easy divorce.

The more Clarissa obsessed about her husband’s infidelity, the more she imagined that there was something wrong with her. This made her increasingly disinclined to ask him anything, so for the first time she decided that she needed some coaching, some direction to help her to manage the situation.

She was not looking for a new cause, and she was not seeking the meaning of life. Such large metaphysical questions had barely pierced the carapace of her consciousness. Nor did she have any interest in going on a voyage of mystical self-discovery. Imagen judged that Clarissa was not trying to figure out that those intrusive sadistic impulses had lain dormant in her unconscious since early childhood. Such Freudian insights would have done nothing to help her to manage her current situation.

Imogen was willing to take Clarissa at her word. She was not inclined to ignore everyday crises, the better to plunge into an exploration of deeper issues. Providing Clarissa with a pile of insights into her sordid motivations would not have relieved her distress. 

Imagen knew that many traditional therapies induce their patients into ignoring everyday issues and thus induce inaction. Clarissa’s fantasies were crying out for a better way to re-engage with her current dilemma.

Imagen had suffered through psychotherapy, but she had never granted too much credence to the ancient and empty shibboleth, that it’s all in your mind. She did not accept the modern version, that it’s all in your feelings.

She saw feelings as an indication of current problems and believed that they indicated difficulty in managing them. Detaching feelings from reality was, for her, the royal road to solipsism. When therapists made a fetish of feeling, their patients became involved with their feelings, with how they felt about their feelings and with how they felt their feelings in the past. This rendered patients inactive, incapable of dealing with everyday dilemmas. 

As her first consultation ended, Clarissa pronounced herself calmed. She expressed satisfaction in her session and scheduled another one for two days later. Imagen noted that she was more composed than when she first entered the office. Doubtless, the reason was that she felt that she had found someone who could help her to manage the situation.

As the door closed Imagen indulged an extended reverie about the larger issues raised by a client like Clarissa. Her next slot was open and this offered a much-needed time for reflection, especially about the use and misuse of feelings in therapy and coaching.

Imogen recalled listening to her colleague Gus expound about feelings during a grand rounds presentation at the hospital. Gus was a man of feeling; he honed in on the patient’s feelings. No matter the patient’s real life circumstances, Gus kept saying the same thing: How did that make you feel? Had Gus been working with Clarissa he would have cared less about her husband’s depressive state and more about her feelings of jealousy.

Strangely, Gus would have provided Clarissa with a false sense of comfort. By implying that her feelings arose from childhood experience, not from actual circumstances, he would have been inducing her to believe that the problem was not with her husband, but with her. 

Gus might even have suggested that her feelings were a sign of repressed homosexual impulses. And he would have told her not to do anything until she resolves the infantile sources of this jealousy. This would induce her to withdraw from her life and to engage a passionately intense relationship with him. This relationship is called transference. It would convince Clarissa that she has as much power to manage her life as the audience in a movie theatre can modify the outcome of a film.

For her part, Imogen believed that Clarissa was suffering from inaction. Clarissa knew that she had to do something; she did not know what or how.

She believed that the therapy profession was colluding with this solipsism by placing too much emphasis on feeling. Once at a lecture, after listening to a therapist wax eloquent over the need to get in touch with one’s feelings, Imogen caused great consternation when she offered an offhand remark: If you want to get in touch with your feelings, where do you put your hands.

Imagen believed that feelings provide information, not about past feelings or even forgotten traumas, but about present circumstances. A therapist like Drusilla would have insisted on the importance of the simple fact that Clarissa first experienced jealousy when her world was disrupted by the arrival of her little sister, Georgina. And Drusilla would happy weave that into the notion that Claraissa was her mother’s rival for her father’s affection. 

In the end Clarissa and Drusilla would have agreed that Clarissa’s life had been a succession of romantic failures. The explanation is as intellectually gratifying as it is useless. Imogen reflected that if you tell a woman that she is doomed to fail you give her a stake in failure. If she succeeds she will be refuting her therapist’s belief. 

Besides, if she is as hopeless as these therapists are pretending, then her husband might have done well to stray. 

Any treatment that convinces Clarissa that she is an emotional defective will aggravate her depression.  And yet, if one looks at reality one discovers that Clarissa functioned well in a good marriage for some twelve years. She has been raising a happy and well-adjusted child. What is gained by persuading her that her life has been a series of failures punctuated by superficial successes. Will such a belief improve her chances to manage her current crisis?

To be continued… next Friday.

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If you should be interested in life coaching I have some free hours in my practice. Drop me a note at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.