I talk to people every day who are exploring Real Love for the first time, and many of them have been treated with a long line of traditional—and non-traditional—therapeutic modalities. Understandably, they ask me to explain the difference between therapy and Real Love coaching.
• Therapists see the people they treat as patients, which of course implies that they have something wrong with them.
• Coaches see people in pain, not people as defective.
• Therapy attempts to “fix” broken people.
• Real Love coaches love people and provide an atmosphere where their wounds can heal.
• The aim of therapy is to decrease the patient’s pain.
• Coaches help people identify and eliminate the real cause of pain. This often requires facing and feeling the pain, rather than covering it up or artificially diminishing it.
• Therapists spend a great deal of time exploring the past, to understand the wounds that underlie the symptoms in the present.
• Coaches quickly identify the real cause of present wounds, and then they focus on healing them, rather than describing them in detail.
• Therapists help people become more functional in the world.
• Coaches help people to revolutionize the way they see themselves and everything around them, so they can truly thrive.
• Therapists help people discover who they really are and what their life purpose is.
• Real Love coaches love and teach people to the point that their fears disappear, after which people just naturally and gradually discover who they are and what they want to do with their lives.
• Therapists usually avoid upsetting their patients.
• Real Love coaches recognize that genuine change is inherently unsettling and even painful, so they don’t help people avoid pain but instead help them to learn from it and grow with it.
• Therapists analyze the past in detail.
• Coaches love and teach so that people can see, feel, and behave differently right now.
• Therapy is a process, with many techniques and approaches.
• Coaching is simply loving and teaching, tailored minute-to-minute in ways that enable people to adopt new—and truer—perspectives, and to feel loved.
• Therapists listen for information about their clients.
• Real Love coaches listen to people as one of many demonstrations of their love for them.
• Therapists establish clinical goals for their patients.
• Coaches set goals only for themselves—to love and teach—and observe the effect that those two activities have on other people.
• Therapists function as mental health care providers, using a medical model.
• Real Love coaches function as the unconditionally loving and guiding parent(s) people never had.
• Therapists help people decrease their pain.
• Coaches help people find and maintain joy.
