My girlfriend is addicted to getting coached. She spends a fortune on life coaching. She's got various mental health issues (Depression, Anxiety, etc) but she truly believes she'd be much worse off without life coaching. In her mind, Life Coaches >> Psychiatrists, Psychologists, other licensed professionals that are covered by health insurance.
The problem is she's in a lot of debt. She has negative thoughts about debt which compels her to get more coaching. It's to the point she's spending between 500 to 1000 per month on life coaching. Last year, she spent at least $12K on coaching services. Thankfully, she scaled back this year, but this all feels like a cycle that has put her in a hole financially.
Spend on life coach -> Increased Debt -> Negative thoughts on debt -> Spend more on life coach -> Increased Debt ->Feel worse about debt ->More coaching
When I overhear some of the coaching calls where life coaches boast about making 100s of thousands per year it makes me sick to the stomach. Anyway, maybe part of this is a rant. Are there any life coaches out there that truly believe she should continue investing money in getting coached? Anyone, in general, who supports life coaching think that I'm missing something here?
Because of what you said about the coaches boasting about their salary and that they're not referring her to real counseling, I agree with the others that this sounds like an MLM. I like @MrThatsDifferent 's suggestion to contact the International Coach Federation for help since you say she thinks coaches are better than trained and licensed professionals. I would imagine that just pushing for legitimate therapy is going to make her defensive.
If you're looking to try to help her, I wonder if she's feeling lonely. $1000 of coaching sounds like a ton-that's twice what we paid out of pocket for the head of psychiatry at our hospital. Is there anything you can do to encourage her to seek out time and advice from her friends more? It might be a healthier replacement behavior.
I imagine she's paying $1000/mo because she's frequently talking to them.
In terms of "healthy replacement behaviours", if she has a mental illness, none of her replacement behaviours will ever be healthy because she is not healthy.
As long as she remains untreated, her behaviours will continue to be unhealthy, she will seek out and generate opportunities to engage in unhealthy activities.
A mentally healthy person getting sucked into a scammy business model is very different from a mentally unhealthy person getting sucked into a scammy business model. The mentally healthy person is likely to come around to seeing reason, and will avoid such scams in the future. A mentally unhealthy person may or may not come around to seeing reason, but will just go and replace it with a new unhealthy thing.
What's scary with mental health issues is that there's always a possibility that the coaching is actually helping her to some degree, and removing it without introducing proper therapy might actually make her worse.
A lot of addictions that people with mental illness have are clumsy attempts at managing and self medicating their own illness. You can't remove that management and expect their condition to improve. The addiction isn't the source of the problem, it's a response to the problem.
She obviously knows she needs to talk to someone, and she obviously feels soothed by talking regularly to these coaches, but the only healthy substitution is proper therapy.
The problem is that no one can force her to choose the healthy option. OP can know what she needs all they want and that won't make a lick of difference unless she wants to change her approach.
OP needs to decide how much of a deal breaker untreated mental illness is and how firm they want to be with making that dealbreaker known. OP can only control their own behaviour. The worst thing they can do is start down a super codependent path of trying to solve this for her.
