When Coaching Replaces Therapy

Once upon a time-- specifically it was in 2008-- I started a blog. I entitled it, Had Enough Therapy? In time I added a Substack, for those who prefer to subscribe. I did it to chronicle my own transition, from psychoanalyst and psychotherapist to life and executive coach.

Recently, on the blog and the Substack I have been offering some case fictions, dramatized versions of what happens in coaching sessions. These have been appearing on Fridays. I recommend them to your attention.

I had practiced and written about the psycho arts for decades, so I felt the need to explain myself. In time, specifically in 2014, I bid adieu to psychoanalysis one last time in a book entitled The Last Psychoanalyst. It is still available on Amazon. 

As you might imagine, I was ahead of my time. I was probably not the first and certainly not the last psycho professional to take up one or another form of coaching. On August 6 the New York Times wrote a long feature article, to the effect, that the tech bros of Silicon Valley had largely replaced therapy with coaching. 

I give myself points for prescience.

I trust that my longtime readers will feel that I did not let them down.

Naturally, it needs to be mentioned, when we are talking about therapy we are talking about talk therapy, especially the kind that involves exploring your feelings, getting in touch with your emotions and learning how best to whine and complain.

We are not talking about cognitive and behavioral therapies, and we are certainly not talking about psychiatry, about treatment via medication.

Perhaps therapy has simply become a caricature of itself. Given its Freudian provenance, therapy obsesses over desire. As the Spice Girls so aptly summarized it: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

When a supposedly professional practice reduces to a lyric from a pop song, you may conclude that it is not very serious. And this is true even if you wrap it all in every imaginable theory.

As far as a serious alternative goes, we find the basis for coaching in a pamphlet written by management consultant Peter Drucker. It is called, Managing Oneself. I have long recommended it, because it shows that living your life involves something other than getting in touch with your feelings or following your bliss or living your desire.

The more idiotic forms of therapy revolve around the question-- How does that make you feel? Freudian treatment involves asking what you really, really want. When it comes to coaching, the issue is: What should we do about this? It’s about addressing and solving problems.

Consider this, a point that the article does not make. Increasingly, therapy has become a woman’s profession. It promulgates feminine values, helping people to get in touch with their feelings or else to function within romantic or familial relationships.

Evidently, the tech bros in Silicon Valley do not care about getting in touch with their feminine side. They want to learn to function in the business world. As the Times points out, many of them are software engineers. When it comes to managing people, they are out of their element. 

Coaching, as the term suggests, teaches people how to play a game. In truth, it might be the game of interpersonal and romantic relationships or it might be the game of business management. Many people understand that the business world and the marketplace function like games, but they fail to notice that romance is also a game.

To play a game you need to know the rules and the players. You also need to know the score. You need to practice your skills, to perfect them to the point where they are nearly automatic. Whether its practitioners know it or not, coaching applies mostly to learning how to play a game, to play it well and to win.

The Times article explains:

As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital invested by people who dislike losing capital. No surprise, then, that tech investors and executives now hire people with expertise in psychology or that they prefer to do this under the label of coaching instead of therapy.

And, of course, you can spend hours unearthing childhood traumas, and you still will have learned nothing about management. You can learn about how you developed bad relationship habits by adapting to your toxic childhood environment. But, that teaches you nothing about how to practice good relationship habits.

You can be in touch with all of your feelings and you can have a heart full of empathy-- or something else-- you still do not know how to play the game.

Worse yet, therapy is regulated by the government and this limits what therapists can and cannot do.

In therapy, people expect to burn hours — weeks, months, years — exploring childhood trauma. If they intend to bill health insurance, they will almost certainly end up with a psychiatric diagnosis. Psychotherapy is heavily regulated, too, by confidentiality laws and professional codes that discourage therapists from telling clients much about themselves, communicating with clients outside regularly scheduled treatment hours or talking to anyone else in the client’s life. This all makes therapy too slow for startup founders in a dead sprint.

It’s one thing to consider that you need to learn how to play a game. It’s quite another to brand yourself as sick or disfunctional and to spend years trying to figure out why this should be the case.

I now have some free consultation hours in my coaching practice. If you would like to consult, please email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.