Marriage Counseling and Related Therapies

What is the difference between counseling, psychotherapy, training, teaching, consultancy and mentoring?

Counseling - usually works as a remedial problem solving process.

Psychotherapy - attempts to provide relief from psychological and/or physical symptoms. Therapy works on emotional healing. The therapist explores past issues or events, uncovers motivation or psychological processes, offers interpretations or seeks to develop a transferential relationship with the client. A coach in contrast does not psychoanalyze, offer interpretations or seek to develop a transferential relationship with the client. 

Both psychotherapy and counseling are remedial in nature and usually help a client move away from pain or discomfort rather than moving towards desired goals. They are likely to involve understanding and working with past experience. If you have issues from the past or painful feelings to sort out, psychotherapy or counseling may be the best way to go.

Training is the process of acquiring the skills by study and experience. The trainer usually is the expert; they know and can do something the student cannot. Training is usually one-to-many rather than one to one. If you need to learn or develop a particular skill training is the way to go.

Teaching is similar to training in that the teacher knows something the student does not and the student learns directly. The learner has the questions; the teacher has the answers.

Training and teaching are similar to coaching in that they usually focus on skills, but the approach is different. The student learns directly from the teacher or the trainer.

Consultancy - the consultant is the expert hired to provide advice and apply specialized knowledge.

Mentoring - a senior who provides support, advice and serves as a role model. A mentor usually has a lot of experience in a particular area that they are providing advice on. If you want on-going guidance while on-the-job and input from someone on a specific subject matter you need a mentor.

What skills should a coach possess?

According to Ian McDermott and Wendy Jago, authors of "The Coaching Bible",

"Since the late 1980s there has been an explosion of interest in coaching. The downside of this has been the bandwagon effect: suddenly everybody is a 'coach'. The upside has been the development of numerous credible coaching schools, a drive to establish professional standards, the undertaking of research into the efficacy of coaching, and more recently business and academic recognition."

Hence, when hiring a coach for yourself, it is up to you to perform the necessary due diligence.

Qualifications

Do they have specific coaching qualifications? Do they have specific training in coaching skills? Having a traditional degree in psychology/psychotherapy or counseling qualifications may provide one with psychotherapy skills, not coaching skills. Even then, in many countries, one can only qualify as a practicing psychologist after completing a doctorate in the field. Check what is the case in your own country.

However a coach without medical/advanced psychotherapy qualifications is not allowed to handle cases such as schizophrenia, something which a psychiatrist/psychologist can. It is illegal for any coach to claim that they can cure an illness, no matter how powerful the therapy has proven itself to be.

Skills of a Coach

- Knows how to ask the right questions to bring about change that you desire in the shortest amount of time. Knows how to extract answers from your unconscious mind, which is the realm of your genius.

- Is skilled in the use of advanced language patterns. Knows how to use language patterns to communicate with both the conscious and unconscious mind to bring about results that you desire in the best possible way.

- Has the ability to spot patterns in your behavior/thinking and bring it to your attention. Works with you to change unresourceful patterns. Reinforces resourceful patterns. Is skilled in the formulation of mental strategies for installation of new patterns of behavior.

- Constantly upgrades skills and knowledge related to the coaching field.

- Skilled in using intervention processes.

- Is able to work with your value/belief system. Should not transfer their values onto you. For instance, if you believe in Reiki and feel that you need to incorporate this into certain mental practices, the coach should allow for this. The coach should be able to perform interventions according to your spiritual belief system, irregardless of whether you are atheist, religious or into the New Age field.

- Facilitates rather than give advice/solutions. Giving advice/offering solutions is very common in low-grade or pseudo-coaching, according to "The Coaching Bible".  Advice is judgmental. It puts the advisor in an all knowing position. It also disempowers the client when the client does not have the resources to carry out the advice. When advice conflicts with the client's identity, beliefs or capability, the client will retaliate or act defensively. The advisor then may start to label the client as being "stubborn" for not following their advice. Advice based therapy often creates dependence on the advisor.

Some advice can be in the form of:

"If I were you, I would ..."

"Why don't you ..."

"How about ... ?"

"I think you should ..."

"You really should be more ..."

"What you should really do is ..."

"I would not put up with that if I were you ..."

"Leave him ..."

"That may not work."

Other forms of advice are enveloped in metaphysical context, which makes it seem like the person giving it having a lot of authority over you. It also makes it seem harder to counter. It creates a me-right, you-obviously-wrong atmosphere. Such forms of advice can induce a lot of guilt feelings in a client. One of the goals of any form of therapy should be emotional clearing, not introducing negative emotions. Also the client will inevitably end up judging the advisor in return to see if they are congruent in terms of what is being said and what is being practiced by themselves, as words only constitute 7% of communication, non-verbal 93%. If the congruence is not detected, the advice given by the advisor, will automatically be rejected.

"What you are doing is not line in with what God/Spirit would want from you."

"What you are doing is not of the vibrations of love, kindness, compassion..."

"The right way is to act more compassionately, kindly, gratefully...."

If as a client, you are confronted with such advice and you feel disempowered by it, it is your right to ask the question, "According to who?". Realize that in a judgment, the "judge" making the judgment is often left out of the sentence.

Such forms of advice/solution giving puts the advisor in the driver's seat, not the client. Effectively, it says to the client that "You can't manage this on your own".

It takes far more skills and aptitude, by any measure, to ask the right questions, investigate positive intentions, check whether the outcome is in line with the beliefs/values/who the client is, investigate root causes, give client more useful conscious/unconscious resources to act on, than to give judgmental advice.

Difference between Marriage Advice and Coaching

Due to the nature of coaching, it is not necessary to be an expert in the content to help. It is far more important to be skilled in the areas of language patterns, pattern recognition, intervention processes, art of questioning etc to achieve the best results in a client. Expert NLP coaches Ian McDermott and Wendy Jago believe that it will help coaching in staying focused if the coaches don't know too much.

However if a marriage advisor is giving advice to somebody, then they have to be an expert in the area that they are giving advice on. It would be best if the advisor has gone through the same systemic model of reality that you have. For example, I was reading about how a woman was saying that dressing up as a French-maid to spice up sex life advice from a marriage self-help book will not work on her because her husband wanted an open marriage. This clearly conflicted with her values and identity. It is one one thing to experience

marriage troubles with essentially a family-centered husband and quite another to experience the same with an alternative-marriage centered husband.

NLP Coaching

Is outcome focused

An NLP coach will ask for what you want and uses the necessary tools that work with both your unconscious and conscious resources to achieve them in the best possible way.

NLP coaches can also investigate root causes just enough to facilitate emotional clearing and re-installation of more useful unconscious resources, so that you have these resources available to you to achieve your outcome.

NLP does not attempt to give you feel-good metaphysical phrases of love, compassion, oneness, we are love, we should be loving, we should be kind etc. However, if what you want is to be more compassionate, kind and Spirit-centered, it will help you with the practical strategies to achieve that outcome.

Is brief therapy and beyond

NLP focuses on achieving a desired outcome as soon as possible. Psychoanalytical therapy is often long drawn because it explores deeper and deeper into the past, and that only costs you money.

Moreover, NLP is more than about just asking the right questions, that is found in other forms of outcome-oriented coaching therapies. It also has powerful techniques/interventions to draw resources from a client's unconscious mind to achieve faster and lasting results, with relative ease.

Assumes that you have all the resources and answers within you

Assumes that the client has all the resources they need to solve their problem. The role of the coach is to draw out useful resources in a client, with the help of the client. Once the client knows how to use the tools and strategies, they will be surprised at their own resourcefulness.

NLP assumes that you are not broken and don't need to be 'fixed'.

NLP assumes that any behavior, even undesirable ones, has a positive intent. The key is to identify the intent and fulfill it through another form of behavior. In this way, the old behavior naturally outgrows the person. The person was not broken, he merely had a behavior which served a positive intention.

Non-judgmental

Even when your way of thinking is less effective than you'd like, it is not wrong.  Virtually all mental strategies work in some situations and not as well in others. The role of NLP is to highlight to you what they are, so that you have more options over what you want to keep/change and can thereby, be more effective most of the time.

NLP is about what strategies and tools works for you. There is no one solution fits all type of thing. You will not be beaten into responding to one mode of tools/techniques.

Increases your awareness of your patterns

Once you are aware of your current patterns, you can change the unproductive ones and reinforce the productive ones.

Knowing NLP does not mean that you will never face problems in your life again. It just gives you the tools to generate more options for you, which is better than remaining in a stuck, helpless state.

Ethics

- A coach must keep all client information confidential. Gossiping about it even with colleagues working in the same office is highly unethical.

- A coach without medical qualifications is not allowed to handle cases such as schizophrenia, substance abuse.

- If you are suffering physical abuse in your marriage, seek the help of a qualified professional psychologist/contact the relevant authorities in your country.

- It is illegal for any coach to claim that they can cure an illness, no matter how powerful the therapy is.

Credits:
- Coaching With NLP, Joseph O' Connor and Andrea Lages
- Coaching with NLP, Ian McDermott and Wendy Jago
- The Coaching Bible, Ian McDermott and Wendy Jago