Many assume therapy is just for anxiety, depression or grief. This can’t be further from the truth! Therapy and life coaching are helping countless individuals with a wide range of needs. Check out this list below and see for yourself!

1. Career Counseling

What Is Career Counseling? A career coach partners with you in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires you to maximize your personal and professional potential. It can help you evaluate your current job satisfaction and see if a change needs to be made. If so, a career clinician can help you set goals that lead to you landing the job of your dreams.

How Can Career Counseling Help? Accountability, positive encouragement and confidence are critical for goal setting and job change. Career coaching provides all of this and more. Achieving your career goals can lead to positive changes in all areas of your life. Coaching empowers and educates you on how to take charge of your career and achieve the success you’ve dreamed of.

2. Co-Parent Coaching During/After Divorce

What’s the Goal of Co-Parent Coaching During/After Divorce? Learning conflict prevention/conflict management skills in order to work with your ex-partner for the betterment of your child’s life

How Can Co-Parent Coaching Help? By meeting with a therapist in the office, you will learn to speak up, be heard and listen to one another. The aim is to reduce conflict, improved cooperation by improving communication, the development of negotiation skills, parenting education and support as well as to bring awareness to each home’s structure, boundaries, expectation, consequences, follow through and consistency.

3. Infertility, Infant Loss and Miscarriage

What’s the Goal of Infertility Counseling? Coping with overwhelming pain, grief, and loss. Many individuals who have experienced a miscarriage or infant loss do not share it with their co-workers or friends. Therapy is a place where you can express emotion safely and privately.

How Can Infertility Counseling Help? You will feel unconditional support and encouragement during a very difficult time in your life. You won’t feel isolated, alone or disconnected. It is an excellent place for couples to open up and share their individual experiences with infant loss or infertility. Often, this is not discussed at home because the emotions are so intense and raw. Therapy can provide normalization, validation and the ability to get back on your feet. You are not alone!

4. Processing A Tough Breakup

What’s the Goal of Counseling After a Breakup? Emotional support from someone other than your friend or family member. A relationship break-up can be any of the following:

  • Ending of a marriage
  • Ending of a relationship with a long-term partner
  • Ending of a relationship with a family member
  • Ending of a friendship
  • Ending of a relationship with work colleagues

How Can Counseling After a Breakup Help? Therapy after a painful or confusing breakup can be extremely healing. You may be experiencing depressive thoughts, lack of energy, insomnia, change in appetite, irritability, and lack of motivation at school or work. A therapist office is a safe place to discuss all the details with no judgment and no risk of your buddies saying “Just get over it already! Move on!”. A therapist can help you work through the anxiety, sadness, trauma and lack of closure. If you are having trouble functioning in your daily life (parenting, academics, career, exercise) or if you are turning to substances to help you cope, it is time for professional support.

5. Social Skills and Life Coaching for Asperger’s Syndrome/Autism Spectrum Disorder

What’s the Goal of Social Skills Coaching? To help the child or adult learn new skills and modified behaviors that close the gap in social-emotional reciprocity, emotional expression, communication skills and interpersonal relationships. Cognitive-behavioral approaches are often used and are very effective. CBT is a pragmatic approach that does not use insight to understand issues as other forms of treatment do. Instead, CBT requires the breakdown of problems using intellectual analysis, which is a strength of individuals with Asperger’s Disorder.

How Can Social Skills Coaching Help? Depending on what the patient needs, various CBT therapy approaches can be applied. These may include skills for problem-solving, goal setting, assertiveness, time management and increasing daily activities, and sleep hygiene. Social skills groups and social skills coaching can help patients learn social cues, social reciprocity, conversation skills, specific behaviors/concepts such as friendship or love and body language. Many individuals with ASD have never developed the necessary life skills to navigate our complex social world. Therapists/life coaches seek to help individuals with ASD build those critical skills. In a safe and positive environment, the patient can practice social rules (e.g., do not discuss your lousy day in far too much depth when a stranger asks ‘how you are doing today’) and social principles (e.g., it is sometimes okay to tell a white lie to avoid upsetting somebody). Often treatment includes discussing and practicing higher level skills, like understanding the emotions and intentions of others.

6. Isolation: Loneliness in a Super Connected Instant Facebook Tweeting Society

What’s the Goal Counseling for Isolation and Loneliness? To help individuals of all ages balance their life in a healthy way that does not include extensive amounts of time on social media/the internet. Excessive internet or smartphone use is impacting the social development and brain development of the younger generation. This arena is somewhat complicated for therapists because, unlike other clinical issues or addictions, the goal of treatment cannot be total abstinence from using the internet. This is not realistic because the internet is an integral element of today’s professional and leisure culture. Instead, the primary goal is controlled use of the internet and its respective functions, particularly social networking applications. Another primary goal is preventing overuse using strategies developed within cognitive behavioral therapies.

How Can Counseling for Isolation and Loneliness Help? The age of “Screen Time” has started to take its toll on our society. A Pew Research Center study reported in April that 92% of teenagers go online daily, with 71% using more than one social media site. Twenty-four percent of the teens surveyed said they went online “almost constantly”. Though no cause-and-effect link has been proven at this time, new research is showing that teens who spend a significant amount of time using social media are more likely to report new or worsening mental health concerns. Issues with feeling left out, fear of missing out, feeling rejected, feeling jealous, etc. are commonly reported. Kids and adults alike are comparing their lives to the Facebook “highlight reels” of other people’s lives and it results in deep sadness, resentment or anger. The biggest problem by far is cyber bullying, which has exacerbated depression and suicide in the younger population especially. Seeing a therapist or life coach can help you re-frame your emotional struggles with the online world.

7. Chronic Pain

What’s the Goal of Counseling for Chronic Pain? The goal is to help patients learn to accept where they stand with their pain/condition at that time while also developing positive coping skills to lessen pain. Chronic pain affects many different areas of life. The interaction between biological/physical (pain and medical issues), psychological (cognition and affect/emotion), and social influences helps to explain the variability between individuals and their reports of pain.

How Can Counseling for Chronic Pain Help? Chronic pain can often develop as a result of a mental health condition, and it is a more common symptom of psychological concerns than many people may realize. Chronic pain and depression are also often closely related: the stress of living with chronic pain can often lead to depression, and because some people may manifest depression in the form of physical symptoms instead of psychological ones, depression can also result in chronic pain. The stress that chronic pain might cause an individual to experience can also lead to increased pain by triggering muscle tension and spasms. Stress can also lead to certain health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Managing emotions and stress with techniques such as meditation often both help to relieve pain and improve an individual’s general health.

Maybe I’ll Give Therapy/Life Coaching a Try …….

In summary, therapy is incredibly useful for all seven of the above issues. It is also good for “everyday life” problems! It doesn’t have to be depression or anxiety. You can seek professional help to better your life at any time. Life coaching and therapy are not just for treating disorders. Treatment is also available to help good lives become great through removing unnecessary blockages, expanding limiting beliefs, and encouraging healthy risks. Stepping outside the comfort zone is worth it.

Written by Katy Webb, LCSW of Thriveworks Chesterfield