Why Therapy Isn’t Enough for Me
If you are reading this, there is a pretty high likelihood that you are psychologically savvy, a therapist or helping professional yourself. Perhaps you follow a lot of self-development accounts on social or you have done your fair share of therapy in your lifetime. Or maybe you are just more compassionate and heart-centered than most around you.
Whatever the case, you have a superpower for love and you are a woman driven towards personal development, or you may call it enlightenment, peace or abundance. I am too.
So I will share with you my personal opinions and insights about the field of psychotherapy and why, as a therapist of over 15 years, while I still run a really awesome psychotherapy practice, I no longer practice as a psychotherapist and choose to coach instead. And why I choose to work with coaches rather than therapists at this juncture in my personal development.
Over my many years as a psychotherapist, I faced many challenges in trying to find work that was not toxic or draining. My first paid position was as a home-based counselor, driving for hours a day to support clients that would most likely either not open the door or would harass me emotionally. At times, in that position and others, I found myself in dangerous positions, alone with clients and no security measures in place. Prior to that job, I had interned at a state forensic hospital where I sat, unguarded, alone with murders in locked rooms. I dug into their vulnerable stories, hoping for healing rather than the triggering of whatever wounds in them that may have caused them to crack and harm/kill others in their past.
As my career marched on, I continued to try to create more safety and grounding, not knowing at the time that that was what I was doing. I spent a year and half working for a psychiatric hospital that required that I drive through a blizzard or be fired - so I could run my 5+ art therapy groups of 20+ patients a day. I witnessed brutal psychiatric holds being placed on individuals - done by techs with minimal psychiatric training. The majority of my time in the field, I worked in an agency where I was deemed skilled enough to help children and teens heal from suicidal and homicidal ideation - though had no training in the matter.
Looking back at these experiences, there are a few aspects of the psychotherapy field I would love to be transparent with you about. And while I believe that psychotherapy is a VITAL part of one’s healing journey, it is not perfect and there is a time when I believe it is better to move on. Mind you, I own a psychotherapy practice and I highly believe in the importance of psychotherapy at the beginning stages of your healing journey. I see healing as on a continuum and psychotherapy is a step you cannot bypass. When you need to be seen for support, stability and healing from trauma, you must go to therapy. When you are happy enough, functional and stable, and looking for more, then it may be time for coaching.
So here are some of my grievances with the field of psychotherapy:
1. We aren’t well trained out of school - The truth is that the craft of psychotherapy is a lifelong journey of development for us therapists. It isn’t just about experience, it is also about advanced (post-graduate) training and our own personal development. In grad school, we get the basics - attentive listening, reflecting back, holding safe space for emotions. But there is much more to learn beyond those basics. Every therapist is on a spectrum of development of their skills and can improve with post-grad education, experience in the field and most importantly, their own personal development work.
2. We don’t always know what we are doing - We are often encouraged to work beyond the scope of our training out of school and quickly burn out, get jaded or completely leave the field - As I mentioned, I was hired to support individuals with suicidal and homicidal ideation to heal. I had no training in how to do so and was thrown into the deep end and told I was capable. I needed a job and they had a full time gig. I had to get my hours for licensure and the only way you can do that in most states is by working at an agency that can bill under someone else’s licensure. But that means, when you are desperate for a job, you take what you can get. Several of my classmates left the field after 2-5 years. The rest of us became hardened and jaded and had to work our way into healthier job opportunities as we became more experienced, having to do the work of releasing the cynicism and pain we experienced in the field as we continued on.
3. We are often burnt out - After 8 years in the field, I was still working essentially 3 jobs to pay the bills and try to get ahead. I was burnt out and the only way I could do the work I was doing was to detach from my body and emotional experience. I am still unpacking this burnout in the now.
4. We often keep you stuck in your pain - We aren’t trained in school to help clients move out of pain and into expansion. We are trained to bring clients into their pain and help them connect it to family of origin patterns. But we are NOT trained to help people move all the way through the pain, to alchemize it and then find expansion.
5. We don’t necessarily tell you the full truth - We are ethically not supposed to share what we know about our clients’ unhealthy patterns until our clients come to realize their patterns for themselves - This one really kills me. Some may argue this is not the case, but those are people doing more coaching and not realizing it. We are taught to go at the pace of the client, to not give away any awareness we may have about what the client is doing that is getting in their way, but instead to gently hold space for the client to figure it out themselves. All I know is that is NOT what I wanted when I was in psychotherapy trying to get unstuck from deep depression and self-sabotaging patterns.
6. We might waste your money - We aren’t trained to graduate clients. While we are told that graduating our clients is the goal of therapy, often we are met with issues at agencies around meeting quotas. Sometimes, the flip happens, where clients are not seen enough to make progress as community mental health programs are too full to properly see their clients. Kaiser is a good example of that problem. And in private practice, making enough money to pay the bills may subconsciously cause a therapist not to work as hard as they potentially could in or trump the clients’ readiness to move on from a therapeutic relationship. Therapists are inherently codependent. So at times therapists can really struggle emotionally to let go of relationships with clients.
7. We can’t provide you body to body modeling of living a life in abundance, spaciousness and beyond the box living - If we are still operating in the field of psychotherapy, that most likely means that we are seeing tons of clients, not making enough money to live in financial abundance and are energetically maxed out. We are still living within the path that was laid out for us within our career. And I believe healing has to happen from body to body - so if you are looking to expand, you need your support person to have made the expansion you are looking for. Therefore, if you are wanting to live outside the box, you want to have financial abundance without trading your time for money, and you want a spacious lifestyle, most therapists cannot model this for you.
Now knowing all of this, I still HIGHLY BELIEVE in psychotherapy!!! I believe that at the start of your journey of self-development, what you need is:
A safe space to talk about your life
To build the trust in you and other people that it can be safe to have and experience your emotions and truth
One person to show you what compassion really looks like so you can heal from the belief that all people are going to hurt you and then not repair the hurt
Help to navigate the stressors and logistics of life
Emotional literacy
To understand where your patterns and beliefs stem from
Stability through the healing of trauma
The way I see it, at a certain point, you have mastered the above goals and the potential cons of the psychotherapy field begin to outweigh the pros. For me, this happened when I had spent 3 years with the same “great” psychotherapist, meeting weekly and finding very little relief or progress. One day, I decided I had put in enough hours with that therapist and started seeking out someone with a stronger skill set. I was given the name of a coach by a colleague and promptly started working with her. It was a leap of faith for me to sign on with her. Her rate was $250/hour versus the $100 I was paying my therapist. And that kind of fee was definitely a stretch for me. I didn’t know this woman and knew better than to trust the testimonials on her website. But already in our short consult call, I felt more seen and heard than I ever had before. In 3 months I accomplished lightyears more progress with this coach than I had in the 3 years I spent with that therapist. The work was different. Sarah was the coach’s name. She handled the work differently from anything I had experienced prior.
She created structured plans with goals and steps
She directed me through the entire session
She guided me through spiritual and emotional embodiment processes
She shared pertinent personal experiences with me and treated me like an equal
She provided me with education and compassionately called out patterns I was displaying in the moment they were occurring
She gave me homework and held me accountable to complete it
It was like suddenly my lifeforce was being awakened. The depression I had been dealing with for years prior was being lifted, not from psychotherapy but from coaching work. For the first time, someone was able to explain the patterns I was stuck in and gave me tools to get unstuck. She walked me into the pain, through it and then to a new place I had never been - expansion.
Not to say that there are not therapists out there that can do this. I know some that do and can. And I have, during periods of my life since meeting Sarah, my first coach, have employed therapists to support me in breaking through issues around self-trust. However, these therapists are likely not as directive and would not name the issues they clearly saw me cycling in. Therapists can be incredible sources of support AND they are likely not living as expansively, as out of the box, as many coaches do and can not support you as well in achieving more efficient and magnificent transformations if they have not made them themselves.
So here we are. At this point, I do not choose to work with therapists myself. They cannot offer me the expansion I am seeking because they are not living as expansively as I am. I choose to work with coaches that value their time and lifeforce, want to produce efficient and massive transformations in our work together and believe in creating a life outside of the box. I hope this is helpful for you in understanding the differences between coaching and psychotherapy and when you are more ready for a coach. I tell you, it felt good to speak truth about the issues I have with the field of psychotherapy! So good!
If you are curious about what coaching really looks like, I would be happy to chat with you about it. Shoot me a quick email at kim@kimmassale.com and we can set up a quick 15 minute chat.
Comments? Feedback? Connect with me at kim@kimmassale.com!