Fire Your Therapist: Why Therapy Might Not Be Working for You and What You Can Do about It

By Joe Siegler

Build the life you want with the powerful alternative to therapy "This is a terrific book about you achieving peak performance, better balance, and success. Think of it as your own personal guide to getting from good to great in your life. Dr. Siegler actually does what many before have set out to accomplish-bright, ambitious people of all ages now have a proven path to transformation." —Stewart Emery, coauthor of the international bestsellers Success Built to Last and Do You Matter? "Dr. Siegler possesses the qualities of the best catalysts for profound change: clarity, compassion, and the courage to see each client with brand new eyes. This book is the essential guide for finding your way through the confusing thicket of self-mastery options." —Raphael Cushnir, author of The One Thing Holding You Back and Surfing Your Inner Sea "Finally, a new paradigm-that is refreshing, daring, cutting edge, and client-centric-that can yield the life and career you want. With Fire Your Therapist, Dr. Siegler ushers in a new era of self-improvement." —Josh Baran, author of The Tao of Now Feel like therapy isn't working for you? Wish there were a better way to achieve your goals? Fire Your Therapist introduces a new, holistic approach to creating the life you want. Based on Dr. Siegler's groundbreaking Spheres of Life Coaching Method, this book explains how to move beyond the "talking cure" of traditional therapy to a more creative, results-oriented way of achieving your goals. You'll be inspired by the experiences of clients who have benefited from Dr. Siegler's proven methods. Fire Your Therapist is the essential step-by-step guide for anyone who wants to create a more successful life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Jun 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9780470461785

Book preview

Introduction

Fire Your Therapist is written for normal people who know or suspect that therapy isn’t the optimal vehicle for reaching their life goals. By normal, I mean anyone who doesn’t have a serious actively symptomatic psychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia. You may become depressed every so often; you may be neurotic; you may be convinced that you’ll never have a good romantic relationship; and you may believe that your career is a failure. You may feel abnormal because of these issues, but the fact is that you fall within the broad boundaries of normal. And that makes it likely that you need another approach besides therapy to work on these issues.

If you’re currently in therapy, you can take advantage of the assessment tool in chapter 4 that will help you determine if and in what ways your therapy is falling short. In chapter 5, I’ll also help you weigh the pros and cons of therapy versus coaching so you can look at both comparatively and determine what makes sense for you.

In that regard, I’ll discuss my belief that therapy is no longer the treatment of choice if you’re normal and how the talking cure of therapy is a myth. More to the point, I’ll explain why coaching is necessary for behavioral change and life optimization to occur. New, highly effective coaching tools and methods are available, and I’ll talk about how you can take advantage of these approaches.

Through coaching and other methods, you can figure out how to transform mediocrity into greatness and an unfulfilled life into one filled with purpose and satisfaction. That is my goal in writing this book, and I hope it is your goal in reading it.

I am fascinated with greatness—great individuals, great leaders, great companies, and great countries. I deeply wonder about what makes some people settle for so little from themselves and from their lives, and then what causes other people to try to be the best they can be in the face of many challenging obstacles. I wonder how some companies aspire to greatness and others just seem to be interested in making money no matter what the cost. I watch some leaders inspire with vision and values while others only care about accumulating power and exerting influence. People can choose to be great in some or all areas of life, and this book is written to help you pursue this goal in the areas of your life that are of interest to you.

More specifically, I hope Fire Your Therapist helps you achieve greatness. It will help you do so if you’re concerned about both enjoying life in the moment and in your future; if you’re willing to put in the time and discipline to develop a life plan and then implement it incrementally. This approach is also different from the vague promises of positive thinking advocates, instead offering a way to create and implement a lasting plan for a better, fuller life. By learning how to enjoy the moment in extreme happiness—also known as nirvana—in combination with strategy and implementation of goals, you can create what you want in your life.

Fire Your Therapist gives you permission to question the value of the therapy, mentoring, or life advice you are receiving. It provides concrete ways to measure whether your life is improving, and it can aid in creating an alternative plan for either boosting the effectiveness of your current approach or modifying it to produce a more fulfilling life.

How This Book Evolved

Over time as a psychiatrist, I discovered that more and more patients were entering therapy who did not fit the classic patient profile. Many of them were not struggling with severe traumatic childhood issues or experiencing severe mental health symptoms of depression, bipolar illness, or psychosis. Instead, they were unhappy because of a series of bad romantic relationships; they were frustrated because of dissatisfaction with their careers; they were seeking a spiritual connection; they were looking for ways to lead a more meaningful and effective life. While their issues may have resembled those of low grade symptoms of mental illness—unhappiness, anger, even guilt—their problems were much closer to the surface and less intense. These issues they were confronting ranged far and wide, including everything from dissatisfaction with body image, financial problems, bad habits, and mild addictions to wanting a more meaningful life. They were struggling to optimize their ability to have a good life, not just address problems.

In writing this book, I will tell the story of how I learned to help people obtain greater satisfaction in all aspects of their lives. This learning began when I launched a groundbreaking coaching organization called Full Life Centers in the winter of 1999 and went on to build the first specially designed coaching center in the fall of 2002. My own journey from young physician and psychiatrist to founder of this new facility is instructive. During my early years as a physician, I saw my mission and methods expanding with my fascination for truly assisting people to achieve desired changes in their lives. By creating coaching methodologies and new tools for clients, I continued to build on the best of my medical and psychiatric training, and then I found that the synergy of the three disciplines would offer clients a new paradigm and method for working on changing their lives and meeting their goals.

I set out to give people tools to design and implement the life they want to live. Human beings have the unique capability to evolve and change over their lifetime. This book will lay out new methods regarding how people will go about both enjoying and planning their lives.

Interestingly, I began this book ten or so years ago, just as I was forming my new company. At that time I called the book Wellness as Power. My idea was that wellness resulted from achieving life balance and optimal performance. At that time, few knew how to help people achieve these life optimizing goals.

When I started my company, I focused on developing the tools and exercises to enable my clients to achieve these goals. As a result, I delayed working on this book until I could test my concepts in the real world with many real clients. Fortunately, my methods not only turned out to be viable, but they also provided me with compelling substantiation of their effectiveness—evidence you’ll find in these pages.

Respect for the Past of Therapy

I hope you will use this book not simply to judge or fire your therapist, but also to influence your own course of life planning and optimization so you can deal successfully with the issues and goals that most concern you.

I have deep respect for the credentials, training, and intentions of most licensed therapists. Their clinical training sets them apart from others claiming to help people, such as coaches, advisers, and mentors. I am a big believer in professional training in a clinical field such as psychiatry, psychology, or social work. I believe that this training combined with coaching creates the best results. How else can a coach know how to navigate all aspects of a client’s issues and goals? For example, a client may be in grief from losing his job as a successful executive, he may have some minor heart disease, he drinks a little too much, gambles a little too much, has marital problems, and he is extremely motivated to develop the next stage of his career. Only a coach with a clinical background could easily navigate all aspects of this complex client. Increasingly, many people are dealing with similarly complex issues.

Unfortunately, most clinicians today have no coaching training, and most coaches have little clinical training. As much as I respect traditional therapists and have faith in their training and dedication, I’m concerned about their ability to provide normal clients with positive alternatives beyond their training in disease models and methods to implement these alternatives. In the years I have run psychiatric health care systems, I have grown increasingly concerned that the current modalities in all behavioral-health clinical fields are not sufficiently outcome oriented—they historically have paid little attention to outcomes (besides a few recent schools of therapy such as solution focused psychotherapy and some practitioners of cognitive behavioral approaches). Therefore, the title of this book is also a call to clinicians to evolve and incorporate coaching modalities.

At the same time, coaches need clinical training. They are dealing with all aspects of a client’s life, and they need the training to handle severe or minor addictions or bad habits, symptoms of medical or psychiatric illness, or even issues of self development.

Predecessors of Coaching: Solution— Focused Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and 12-Step Programs

Right from the start, I want to make it clear that coaching didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. Instead, it is the natural evolution of a variety of therapies and methods that came before it. Twelve step programs began in the 1930s to help people manage alcohol and then other addictions. These were spiritual and behavioral programs that offered people an approach not available in health care services at the time. They were anonymous groups open to the public that provided support to attendees and a sponsor to work on the 12 steps of recovery. Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed to help patients change behaviors by becoming aware of how their thoughts affect their feelings. The development of solution focused therapy (SFT) attempted to ask questions in special ways that fostered problem solution on the part of the client. Questions were still mostly dealing with problems and exceptions to them, but at least SFT valued client solutions and client goals. SFT was pioneering in the way it was client focused as well as goal oriented, as coaching is today. In a sense, SFT was the beginning of coaching, but still was mainly concerned with the medical model—it acknowledged that there was something wrong to be fixed and didn’t deal much with peak performance. It also emphasized how specifically worded questions uncovered client wishes in the same way that coaching does today. However, coaching is not limited to solving problems; often its main accomplishment is enhancement through life planning and optimization.

Coaching as a Response to What People Need

More so now than ever before, the public is questioning the value of traditional methods of therapy. People no longer take it on faith that expressing their feelings and exploring the roots of these emotions will get them unstuck as well as cure them of sadness, anxiety, loneliness, career dissatisfaction, midlife crisis, or whatever ails them.

Whether using therapists or other professionals, people often have a mismatch between what they really need and what they’re receiving. Too often, one size is meant to fit all. Professionals have a standard approach and use it no matter what an individual’s specific concerns and issues are. This is the old paradigm. The new paradigm involves tailoring a coaching regimen to a client’s prioritized issues.

Sometimes you know exactly what you need, but in other instances you may have a more general goal, such as life optimization, or a more general complaint, such as low grade anxiety or depression.

You can then identify who is in the best position to help you. It may be an individual therapist, a coach, or both. You may choose some mix of therapist, life coach, career coach, dating coach, personal stylist, yoga teacher, masseuse, personal trainer, or physician. In all cases, people need to realize that who they choose to help them should flow directly from what their issues are and what they hope to achieve.

People need new methods that assist them in the proactive design of their optimal life, a concept that does not exist in the medical model of therapy, where all issues are viewed as forms of mental illness. They long for approaches that follow the needs of clients, rather than the older traditional models that dictate the plan to patients. They want methods that are positive, empowering, and affirming, not judging, top down in style, and controlling.

Now, with the proliferation of therapeutic and coaching alternatives—life coaching, cognitive and behavioral methods, solution focused therapy, 12 step groups, employment coaching, dating coaching, men’s and women’s groups, meditation, and the like—the public has become aware that they don’t have to rely on traditional therapy alone. The buzz about wellness and peak performance opens up a new market to life optimization, drawing in people who often are unconcerned with the problems that brought patients to therapists. People are aware of a new potential, an awesome empowerment of self that is attainable with life-enhancement work.

If you’re in therapy now, however, it’s not always easy to say off the top of your head that coaching is a better option. Too often, people don’t know whether their treatment is working. They may feel better one day and worse the next. They set vague goals (or no goals at all), then wonder why they’re not making any progress. They may understand their past, but they’re unable to alter the present and the future.

As this book’s deliberately provocative title suggests, a new therapeutic paradigm has emerged, and I will explain the elements of this approach and how to use it to live a fuller, more meaningful life. I will draw on my experiences as a psychiatrist and as head of the Chicago based Full Life Centers, where I have pioneered a multidimensional therapeutic model employing the Spheres of Life Coaching Outcomes System (SOLCOS), which produces desired client outcomes in coaching. There are eleven spheres representing all aspects of life. (See chapter 8 for more information on the Spheres of Life.)

A huge audience exists for coaching—anyone who currently is or has been in therapy, or someone who has never looked at therapy as a possible solution to achieving his or her objectives. Many people are ready to break away from traditional approaches, but they’re not sure what to do next. They’re wary of quack alternatives. They’re often fearful of cutting ties with a therapist on whom they’ve become close or dependent, even if they don’t seem to be making much progress or achieving all their goals. Or they want their therapist to facilitate their life-optimization work, but the therapist is stuck in the old mental illness paradigm and doesn’t seem to get it. Or they don’t know who to turn to for coaching.

All too often, traditional therapy fails to facilitate change. As good as therapy is at offering people insights about why they should change, it doesn’t help people overcome their fear of change and the inertia that accompanies it. And it almost never gets involved in the dirty hands on implementation of the client’s goals and wishes, as coaching does.

Unfortunately, many times, growth is possible only after people have fired their therapists and found a more involved, more action oriented approach to their personal work. A big part of the problem is that therapists are convinced that their treatment approach is successful, and within a limited context, it is effective. It’s only when people want more than therapy can give them—when they want plans that deliver measurable results—that they turn to coaches.

The Center of the Coaching Universe: Lessons Learned and Shared

In 2002, I opened the first (that we know of) coaching center in the world that was designed specifically for coaching—a place to offer people a uniquely designed, affirming, sensory, and physical space to work on the active design of their lives. With small business loans, using all my savings and credit cards over the years, and the encouragement and support of many important people in my life, this coaching center was born. It was called Full Life Centers and was located in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Bright colors, curved walls, specially selected coaching and business related retail products, refreshments, abstract paintings, and photography depicting the journeys of our clients are just some of the details that communicate to visitors that they’re not in a traditional therapist’s or doctor’s office. Today, it is truly a place for individuals and organizational leaders to work toward goals and greatness.

Spheres of Life Coaching includes exercises that help clients in their life-optimization process and measure their progress toward goals. I developed these coaching methods so clients could move beyond talk. I’ll discuss the spheres in detail in the coming chapters, but for now, understand that they provide clients with the opportunity to address challenges and opportunity in all aspects of their lives—not just in the sphere of Self, which is the main domain of traditional therapy. I’ll share stories from some of the thousands of clients who have used our coaching approach, demonstrating the impact of our coaching system on a diverse group of people with an equally diverse set of life optimizing goals.

These stories, combined with the book’s tips and tools, should help you take advantage of all the possibilities coaching holds. Whether you want to transition from therapy to coaching or understand how to find a coach, this book will provide what you need.

If any client stories in this book appear to be a real person, that is simply because each is a composite of many different people. The names are fictitious, and they are not representative of any single client—instead they are a blend of thousands of clients over the past twenty five years.

In addition, just about everyone wants to learn how to be less frustrated and more satisfied with life. You probably notice that when you are dissatisfied, you often become insecure, judgmental, and sometimes even irritable with others. This book’s mission and solution to this common syndrome of dissatisfaction is to help you find your truth and work toward greatness—thereby decreasing frustrations and regrets, fostering greater happiness in your life, and enhancing the lives of those around you as well.

Good luck with your unique and empowering coaching journey! Enjoy the following Inspiration, one of which is in every chapter along with exercises and blogging opportunities. I trust that the former will give you a burst of energy to accomplish the possible, and that the latter will offer you practical ways to reach your goals.

DR. JOE’S INSPIRATION

Only a courageous person dares to inquire whether they are actually reaching their goals and dreams.

PART I

DECIDING WHETHER TO FIRE YOUR THERAPIST

CHAPTER 1

Why Therapy Might Not Be Working

It’s really not that complicated. Most people want a better and more meaningful life. And they want results. Wherever I go, I hear something along the lines of the following when I’m introduced: Wow, you’re a doctor and a coach! I’ve been looking for a coach but never knew where to turn. More than ever before, people are seeking alternative forms of help. They’re not seeking it because they’re abnormal or because they have any type of clinical mental malady. Instead, they want fresh and effective guidance about everything from relationships to careers to spiritual issues.

Just about every day, I encounter someone who confirms my belief about this universal and wide ranging need for practical life guidance. For instance, I’m in a cab and the driver reveals he is an unemployed Ph.D. in chemistry wishing he had a great career; I’m on an airplane speaking to an executive who is frustrated that he is getting mediocre results in both his marriage and at work; I’m buying a shirt and the salesperson expresses frustration not only because she is not using her master’s degree but also because she longs for a spiritual connection to give her life more meaning.

In short, you, like most people, want something more. You don’t want someone to tell you what to do per se, but someone to facilitate the design of your master plan and then help you make choices and implement changes. As much as you might like to do all this on your own, you can benefit from a coach, mentor, teacher, or adviser who both motivates you and serves as an accountability figure. This relationship helps you maintain your progress.

We are entering a groundbreaking era of coaching and other change modalities. In the past, coaching tended to be defined narrowly. It was primarily a vehicle for people having trouble with jobs or hoping to enhance sports performance. In recent years, however, the concept of a life coach or an executive coach has emerged and become something of a trend. We’re seeing more and more people turn to coaches to help them with a wide range of issues. Coaching methods are expanding and becoming more sophisticated in response. Coaches are learning how to help people achieve peak performance, raise confidence, define the next phase of their career, manage money better, improve their relationships, make more friends, manage their weight and achieve wellness, date more effectively, manage bad habits and even addictions, develop their religious or spiritual sides, design retirement, or search for a more meaningful existence.

Kayla is a good example of someone who probably would have gone it alone in the past, but today recognizes the value of coaching. A junior at an excellent midwestern college, Kayla was feeling pressure from both her school adviser and her parents to choose a major. Kayla was open to this, but had no idea what she truly