Every once in a while the list servs for psychotherapists that I follow get all aflutter with talk about life coaches and whether or not they practice beyond their level of skill.
Now this is, in part, a legitimate concern, I think. Because of course we want anyone who works in a helping capacity with others to be knowledgeable about psychology and mental health issues. But something in one of the posts on one of those lists made me think a bit more about what the issue actually is. This person mentioned that there are many therapists in her area struggling to make a living and yet life coaches with less training are staking claims to much of the same population of potential clients. Hmmm, says I, is this perhaps a turf issue rearing its head again in the guise of concern for the consumer?
I have myself expressed concern about the lack of foundation requirements for most life coach training programs. But the more I think about this and the deeper I look at my own concerns, the more I have to wonder if they matter a whole lot.
I began to practice as a therapist back in the early 1970's when community mental health was the big thing. And one of the features of community mental health was a recognition that what we called "paraprofessionals" and "natural gatekeepers" could and did do as well with people as many therapists did. In fact the mental health clinic where I first worked ran a training program for bartenders and beauticians, whom we knew were often the recipients of confidences from their clients. We taught them some basic listening skills and gave them some indicators of when it might be wise to refer a person to more skilled help. We also trained several people from the community to work with groups of kids and parents -- we created a three month training program and taught them the basics of listening to folks, a variety of behavioral intervention techniques and the like. And there was research to support what we were doing, that showed the effectiveness of these so-called "non-professionals" and "paraprofessionals".
I also remember well the battles between professional groups that ran through the early 90's as first psychologists, then social workers, then psychiatric nurses, and finally clinical counselors pursued licensing for their professional group. The expressed purpose for said licensing was always consumer protection, but it seemed to me, as each group criticized the next one for lacking adequate training -- psychiatrists, who were there first with licensing, accused each subsequent group of practicing medicine without a license -- it dawned on me that this was about economics and defending turf far more than it was about concern for the public. There was never any evidence that any of the professional groups was any more effective working with clients than any other group. There were no studies comparing professions that I know of. Because efficacy was not the point. On a very basic level, preserving the pool of available clients was the goal. And each successive professional group wanted access to that pool.
And who had become the guardian of the gates to the pool? Health insurance companies and behavioral managed care companies. As potential clients came more and more to expect that their health insurance should cover the costs of therapy, the perceived need for licensing increased -- because insurers could set who was and was not reimbursable. And therapists believed, and most continue to believe, that without third party reimbursability, they could not make a living.
Note: As someone asked me, I want to clarify, I am referring here to turf battles over psychotherapy/counseling/coaching.