Relationship Coaching or Counseling — Which?

Couples go to counseling to improve their relationship - don't they? Well, not necessarily. Many couples enter counseling so consumed with anger at each other and with what is wrong with their relationship that positive change scarcely enters their minds. They have no vision of a better marriage and consequently no goals that could reorient them in a healing direction.

Unfortunately, so compelling is the temptation to blame the other partner and so intense is the anger and hurt that many couples in counseling never move beyond a negative fixation on all that is wrong with their relationship. They have nowhere positive to go and consequently never get there.

It take a well-trained and forceful couples counselor to insist, after a period of venting, that partners drop their negative focus and start creating a better future together. Unfortunately, counselors who do insist on a positive focus to the work sometimes discover that "getting better together" is not really what couples have in mind. Knowing what you don't like is easy. Changing focus - deciding what you want instead and working toward it - is not easy.

Enter relationship coaching. Coaching is an action-focused process for bringing about change. It emphasizes visioning a desirable future, developing specific goals to realize the vision and committing oneself to the process of achieving those goals.

Asked what they want from counseling, new clients will often reply with a variation of, "I want to understand why we have such an awful marriage." A typical coaching client response would be, "I want to build a better marriage."

Relationship counseling and coaching differ. The difference is more of degree than of kind, however. And some forms of counseling - notably short-term, solutions-oriented counseling - is in practice very much like coaching.

In general, counseling stresses understanding; coaching stresses action. Counseling is more psychological, coaching more behavioral. Feelings are more prominent in counseling. Goals and action steps to achieve them are more important in coaching. Counseling focuses on the past and the present, coaching on the future and the present.

Counseling is more "Why?," coaching more "How?" Counseling is more concerned with obstacles to action, coaching with the action itself. In practice, counseling attends more to problems than to goals and to personal inadequacies more than to strengths. Coaching is the opposite. Counseling is one of the healing arts. Coaching is an educational process. Counseling wants to make well. Coaching wants to make successful.

It follows that coaching and counseling attract different sorts of people, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say - people at different stages of the growth process and, therefore, with different needs. As a generalization, we can say that coaching attracts people who want to act more than they want to understand, while the people who come for counseling want understanding more - and healing.

If you want help with your marriage or couple relationship, should you go to a couples counselor or a relationship coach? That depends on what sort of condition the relationship is in and, since the relationship is you and your partner, what sort of condition you both are in.

If the relationship is very unstable and you are too emotionally upset to work together, try counseling until the relationship settles down, then turn to relationship coaching, if that option is open to you. Similarly, if either one or both of you feels so emotionally clogged with anger or hurt that you feel incapable of even contemplating cooperating together on goals for the future, then again - counseling is probably the better short-term direction.

When you are committed to change, go for coaching or work with a counselor who has had coaching training and integrates coaching methods in his practice. And by the way - the need to heal the relationship does not in itself argue for counseling rather than coaching. It is very healing to discover through coaching, first, that you can behave better toward each other despite your pain and, second, that your improved behavior can suggest a new and positive future.

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Copyright © 2005 Dr. David E. Sanford All rights reserved.
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