This article first appeared in the July 2025 issue of Coaching Today, published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. ©BACP 2025.
‘I’m uncomfortable with you calling yourself “a therapeutic coach”.’
Uh-oh. Maybe I’d overstepped. I’d just made the bold move of identifying myself as a ‘therapeutic coach’ on social media. I knew there were strong opinions in the coaching world about this, and I
expected a certain amount of push back. But I’d given it lots of thought and sought counsel from coaches whose opinions I respect. I could claim 13 years of experience, a professional coaching credential through the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and the privilege of having mentored and supervised nearly 100 coaches. I believed I was practising within my code of ethics.
But some responses to my social media post – both actual as well as those I imagined – challenged me. I knew some coaches say that coaching is impactful precisely because the coach doesn’t take a therapeutic stance. Some believe the therapeutic label assigns a healing role to practitioners who therefore hold greater knowledge and power than their client, which violates the coaching emphasis on equity. And some believe doing, or having, any therapeutic impact on a client is outside the coaching scope of practice, and even unethical.
But to me, such beliefs reveal commonly-held misunderstandings about both therapy and coaching, and what ‘therapeutic’ means; misunderstandings that I hoped to challenge and clarify precisely by adopting the label of ‘therapeutic coach’.
Coaching vs. therapy
History and context offer insight into the controversy. Both psychotherapy and coaching are relatively young fields; therapy as we know it today is about 125 years old, and coaching is around 60. Both are Western, US and European-based, middle-and-upper-class human development modalities.
However, they differ when it comes to regulation. While the psychotherapy field is largely regulated, it’s generally more highly controlled in Canada and the US than in many other countries. Meanwhile, the coaching field has actively resisted external oversight – citing reasons like the wide diversity of coaching approaches, fear of stifling flexibility and innovation, and the difficulty of defining clear standards. Another reason is the common view that coaching offers consumers personal growth tools rather than professional interventions that present potential risks (like therapy does).
To bridge the gap between non-regulation and reputation, the coaching field has opted to self-regulate though professional organisations that define ethics and competences, assess coach qualifications, and issue certifications or credentials. Today, the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the most dominant and sought-after coaching organisation worldwide. The
International Association of Coaching (IAC) in the US and European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) are also well-recognised, and the Center for Credentialing and Education (CCE), also here in the US, offers board certification that is valued by many entities around the globe.
Partly because of the absence of external regulation, the public (and many coaches) lack clarity about what coaching is, how the coaching scope of practice differs from that of psychotherapy, and where they overlap. I define coaching simply as ‘the facilitation of self-discovery in the client’. The ICF defines it as ‘partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential’.
Here in the US, where there is a strict separation between coaching and therapy, the ICF strives to clearly differentiate between the two. The practice of ‘integrated coach-therapy’ not only doesn’t exist here, but would be considered far more controversial a term than ‘therapeutic coaching’. In fact, in 2018, the ICF published a white paper declaring that ‘…coaching focuses on visioning, success, the present and moving toward the future’, while ‘therapy emphasises psychopathology, emotions and the past to understand the present, and it works more with developing skills for
managing emotions or past issues than does coaching’.
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