Life coaching deals with the present and future. It does not examine the past but instead creates your future. Many of my clients have found the coaching I provide to be therapeutic, but it is not therapy. Counseling and psychotherapy usually deal with problems and healing. It entails working with the past as well as the present. Also, life coaching is not considered a mental health service per se and is therefore not covered by health insurance.

Counseling and psychotherapy are focused on analyzing or finding the reason behind a problem. Some therapists believe that in order to make life changes, the client must understand why they are behaving in a certain way. Coaching is focused on creating a future based on where the client stands in the present. It concentrates on tracking patterns of language and behavior. Coaches then work with those patterns so that the client can make useful changes in their lives.

Often people ask what makes pastoral counseling different than other therapy. One answer is that we encourage the whole person in our work: body, mind, and spirit. We do not operate only on the medical model of illness and pathology. Sometimes our problems and challenges are physical and often mental, but many times they are spiritual. Pastoral counseling is a unique form of psychotherapy which uses spiritual resources as well as psychological understanding for healing and growth.

Counseling or psychotherapy is the process where someone seeks help for problems of an emotional nature from a trained professional in a confidential setting. By establishing a positive, trusting relationship, the therapist will work with you to learn how to cope with the problem by learning new skills and/or different ways of looking at situations. In the beginning stage of therapy, your therapist will ask about your concerns and goals to gain a deeper understanding of you.

Body-centered coaching employs a learning paradigm, which assumes your wholeness and ability to learn how to make your life, relationships and work more easeful and fulfilling right now. The therapy paradigm requires that you first identify a wound or something wrong with you before you can succeed. It often focuses on past events, which can keep you from moving forward with your life.

I do trancework. I am skilled at a variety of trance-based modalities such as Waking Dreams, Focused Trance Thoughtforms, Hypnosis, Guided Imagery, Meditation, Hyperempria, Creative Visualization, Neurolinguistic Programming, Active Imagination, and other approaches. I don't do counselling work per se nor do I do psychotherapy. What I do is more akin to coaching or mentoring utilizing focused trance.

Counseling helps people deal with particular problems in day-to-day living. The counselor works with you to identify problems, to set realistic goals, and to develop skills in problem solving, coping, and interpersonal relations. Psychotherapy is a more intensive process that promotes emotional awareness and psychological development. The process can strengthen one’s sense of confidence, self-acceptance, and responsibility in daily life.

Health insurance companies cause the biggest problems with confidentiality. When you authorize me to bill your health insurance company, you also authorize me to answer their questions, and most managed care companies ask many questions about mental health treatment. What happens to your privacy after the information gets to the insurance company is anybody's guess. Insurance companies routinely share information with each other, and many employers consider health records when hiring.

Therapy generally focuses on family-of-origin issues, and can help individuals understand the origins of dysfunction in their life. Negative behaviors, relationships, addictions and/or belief systems are often identified and analyzed to enhance an individual's mental and emotional health. Integral coaching does not generally dwell on family-of-origin issues.

The best time to seek counseling or therapy is before your problems or symptoms have become too severe. This will give you the best chance of feeling better quickly and preventing more complicated problems. Even today, many people still feel a sense of stigma or shame around seeking help. Just about everybody can benefit from therapy at some point in his or her life.

Historically, counseling referred to help with everyday problems and psychotherapy was used to describe treatment for mental illness. Today, these terms are used interchangeably. Lakeview Center's therapists have degrees in psychology, psychiatry, social work, or counseling, but we all work with a wide range of problems using a similar approach. (See our approach to therapy). Pharmacotherapy is the use of medication to address emotional difficulties.

While these three terms are used randomly and is more of a matter of semantics rather than clinical meaning and there are major overlaps between these three practice modalities, there are some differences in my understanding that I would like to share with you. Psychotherapy tends to be associated with a process of psychological treatment that is longer-term and open ended.

Pastoral Counseling is generally used for both pastoral counseling and pastoral psychotherapy. Technically though there is a difference. Technically speaking pastoral counseling is brief and focuses on an identified issue; “My parent just died,” “I lost my job and need some support,” “I’m thinking about changing jobs,” etc.

A neuro (sometimes called "neurosuspension") is a cryonics patient for whom only the head − rather than the whole body − has been cryopreserved. If future technology can repair freezing damage and regenerate or re-create organs and tissues, it should not be difficult to create skin, bones, and all the organs and tissues needed for a new body − provided the brain has been preserved.

Coaching is NOT psychotherapy. Psychotherapy focuses on treating diagnosable psychological disorders. Because of the vulnerability of individuals who come to psychotherapy, this is a special relationship in the eyes of the law, with specific rules and protections. Psychotherapy is about healing, while coaching is about facilitating your growth from a place of health. Coaching assumes that you are emotionally healthy and able to participate equally in creating the future you desire.

Psychotherapy focuses on helping clients overcome past problems that impede their ability to function in a normal day to day manner. A therapist directs her clients to revisit the past events to discover and resolve conflicting issues that have burdened them. Therapists are not equal partners. Therapist and their clients frequently form a strong confidential bond. The life coaching process focuses on you, the client, achieving your chosen future coaching goals.

While Psychotherapy offers tools for understanding your limitations and blocks, NLP offers the tools for change. Although Psychotherapy can assist with insight and understanding, psychotherapy alone is often unable to change the problem behaviour, as many long-term psychotherapy clients will attest. Whilst valuing the process of understanding and insight, the outcome of change is equally important.