Coach or Councilor?
Why I’m a Coach
Firstly, I want to help people see their current distress or illness in the context of the journey of personal growth.
I experienced serious anxiety for over 30 years. I saw two psychiatrists, a psychologist, and a clinical counselor. A diagnosis was eventually made, Generalized Anxiety, and therapies were prescribed. The system worked, I was helped, but I suffered for years because of the way anxiety is viewed. Clinicians see it as an illness or disorder. I used to as well, but now I see it as a pattern that emerges from positive natural attributes.
Dr. Russell Kennedy describes anxiety as part of an alarm system that typically originates from early experiences of feeling unseen, unprotected, or abandoned. James Hollis says there are two roots to our adaptive patterns — being overwhelmed or abandoned as a child. Dr. Tracy Foose’s reframes anxiety, “not as a frailty, but as the biological scaffolding of empathy, humility, and restraint.”
Anxiety is part of our empathy, humility, and restraint system and develops in response to feeling abandoned, unprotected, unseen, or overwhelmed in childhood. It is our trained alarm system reacting to indications in our relationships or environment that conditions look similar to our childhood experiences and we should pay attention.
Both Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Foose have anxiety themselves, and see it as part of their overall makeup, not simply as a symptom to be eliminated. Once I shifted to this view it became clear that Jungian coaching is tailor-made to help people accept and make sense of things like anxiety, by re-framing them as avenues to individuated wholeness.
Secondly, mental illness is not what I want to focus on. I worked for Island Crisis Care Society for over 24 years and saw the depth of human suffering, especially as related to mental health and addiction. In that setting a clinical diagnosis and assessment are essential. Clinical training requires a large amount of academic knowledge about mental illness and high level of responsibility when designing or overseeing treatment. I’m more interested in helping people with shift their perspective, see things in a different way and uncover unconscious impediments that are keeping them stuck.
Trauma Informed
As a point of reassurance, I am trauma informed, and believe that everyone has experienced some sort of trauma in their life, but I’m not a trauma counselor. Coaching often uncovers historic trauma that is unrecognized or was repressed, but coaches do not generally work with people experiencing or recovering from acute trauma. A psychiatrist, psychologist, or medical doctor with training in trauma therapy should be your first visit after an event such as a vicious attack, a life threatening event, or exposure to a serious military event or war related trauma. Clinical counselors are excellent at guiding you through the recovery process and when you feel stable, then coaching can have a positive effect both making sense of your symptoms and experiences, and integrating them in to a meaningful life.
I will often explore symptoms as a doorway into what your True Self is calling you to, but I try to facilitate your own insight and solutions rather then counsel you on how to solve your problems. The insights and wisdom you discover for yourself has the most lasting impact.
I bring a wealth of specialized information to the table, as well as a lifetime of experience, and I will offer perspectives and feedback if asked and when I think it might be helpful. I know from experience that “coaching and counseling jargon” can be extremely frustrating when a direct answer is sought.
What is Jungian Coaching?
Like Counseling, Jungian Coaching is a therapeutic relationship. It can reduce distress, anxiety, and depression through a kind presence and specific methods learned from the Jungian tradition.
Instead of offering counsel or the problem-solving often associated with other forms of coaching, Jungian Coaches use curiosity, sensitivity to the unconscious, and experiential exercises to explore your symptoms for a deeper calling.
Often this is described as “finding out what your unconscious is trying to tell you.” The unconscious speaks in symbols. Some are universal, such as the stories in myths and the imagery in religious traditions, and some are very specific to you and your life experience.
As I get to know you, I listen for your specific language of symbols and emotions as we look at things like your dreams, meaningful events, poignant memories, conflicts, triggers, and images from your drawings, writing, and active imagination.
Is Coaching for you?
Most people benefit from seeing a counselor or coach or both. Which practitioner you choose depends on your needs, your goals, and your level of stability. Here is a table I created to give a general overview of all the different types of therapeutic practitioners.
To see a list of specific areas where still stream coaching can help, see Is Stream Work Right for me? — you can also set up a free investigation call from that page.
Can I see you if I have a Mental Illness?
Coaches can not and do not diagnose or treat serious mental illness. Such conditions benefit most from the highly specialized support of a clinician. If you have a serious mental illness and are interested in seeing me, ask your primary clinician (doctor, psychologist, social worker, clinical counselor, psychiatrist) what they recommend. They are best qualified to determine how to include Jungian Coaching in your overall treatment plan.
Jungian Coaching can uncover unknown (shadow) sides to yourself that you might find unsettling or discouraging and your clinician will determine if and when to start the coaching relationship. Often this is done through an assessment of your emotional stability, ego strength, and general readiness to expose yourself to deeper questions of meaning, purpose, and personal growth.