Psychedelic-Assisted Coaching, Part I ($)

Therapy looks in, coaching looks out, and psychedelics look beyond.

“Beyond the power of psychedelics to be used for healing, fixing, and treatment...
there is a space for coaching, but nobody is talking about it.” ― Yannick Jacob

In Part I of this series we distinguish therapy from coaching. The two are related and both are in a constant state of change. Like fraternal twins, therapy and coaching come from the same egg fertilized by different ideas. Their differences exist more in practice than in theory. In the next part, we’ll consider how each applies to the use of psychedelics.

In the current legal environment, where psychedelics remain largely illegal, only the therapeutic approach has the authority to claim psychedelic substances as a child of its own. Historically, it has no right to.

The 20th Century

Psychedelics are being appropriated for psychotherapy. They’re effective for helping people deal with PTSD, addiction, and depression. Limiting psychedelics to therapy is like using Formula One race cars as farm tractors. Beyond returning 1% of the population to the work-a-day grind, psychedelics have the power to transform everyone into something better.

The attitude of clinical psychologists is that psychedelics are drugs that help diagnosed conditions. They should be scientifically tested, understood, and made available. We have several generations of patients trained to “follow the science” and take whatever “the doctors” order. Although the covid-19 crisis has made it clear that few understand science and, ironically, it’s administrators and corporations who give the orders, not doctors.

Clinical psychology has a limited understanding of the mind, and psychedelics were not developed or traditionally used in the context of psychology. These substances may or may not be effective in addressing the issues of which psychology is concerned. Given psychology’s immaturity, poor methods, and short sightedness I feel the most important uses of psychedelics are being overlooked.

“The potential of the psychedelic drugs to provide access to the interior universe, is, I believe, their most valuable property.” — Shasa Shulgin, psychopharmacologist