This is not a critique of coaching as a profession. Executive coaching, skills-based work, and performance coaching serve a genuinely different purpose and are not what I am writing about. What I am describing is more specific: the transformation and somatic coaching that has become widespread in wellness communities, particularly in places like Bali where I live. This version is usually built around the coach's own story of change - a breakdown, a plant medicine experience, a moment of clarity that reorganised their life. Their path becomes the programme. That is the model I want to look at more carefully.
Direction and Momentum: The Appeal of Transformation Coaching
Most of the coaches I encounter here have built their practice around their own transformation. Something broke - a relationship, a career, a sense of self. They found their way through it. And now they offer others the same path.
There is something genuinely useful in this. Having someone say: I came through this, and here is what helped - that creates hope. It reduces the isolation that comes with struggling alone. Research on goal-setting consistently shows that clear, structured pathways increase the likelihood of follow-through, and transformation coaching tends to offer exactly that.
Someone who has lived through a version of your difficulty and come out the other side becomes both guide and evidence. The message is: this is possible. That matters.
The limit of the model is also in the narrative. It assumes that what opened things up for one person will open things up for another - that enough similarity exists in the factors driving the difficulty that the same path will lead somewhere useful. That assumption does not always hold.
Psychological Practice and the Logic of Formulation
Clinical psychology starts from a different place. The training is not in what has worked for the practitioner - it is in variability. In how differently the same difficulty can develop across different histories, nervous systems, attachment patterns, and life contexts.
What the research on therapy outcomes consistently shows is that broad interventions are often effective - but that outcomes are heavily shaped by what the individual brings. Their readiness for change, the quality of the therapeutic relationship, what they have already tried and why it did not shift things. The method matters less than many people expect. The context around the method matters more.
Formulation is how psychology tries to account for this. It means: before deciding what someone needs, try to understand what is actually happening with this specific person. Not just the symptom, but what is maintaining it - what early experiences shaped the pattern, what the nervous system learned, and what has kept the difficulty in place. That understanding changes what the work looks like.
Attachment History and Emotional Regulation
Attachment research makes this concrete. Early caregiving environments shape how the nervous system responds to intimacy and threat - and those patterns travel into adult life. An approach that genuinely helps one person - encouraging direct confrontation, or pushing toward emotional expression - can overwhelm someone whose system still associates that kind of exposure with danger.
The same is true of high-activation work. Breathwork, somatic intensives, plant medicine integration - these can be powerful for people whose systems have the capacity to process what opens. For someone whose nervous system has been dysregulated for a long time, the same activation without the capacity to settle it is not therapeutic. It is more material added to a system that is already overwhelmed. Timing matters. Pacing matters. Neither can be determined from a shared narrative of change.
The Risk of Overgeneralisation
When a programme is built around one person's transformation, it can carry assumptions about the people entering it - comparable nervous system capacity, similar relational histories, equivalent access to support. Not because anyone intends to overlook these differences, but because the model was designed from inside one experience.
The people drawn to transformation coaching in wellness communities are often there precisely because they are carrying something complex. The model may not have been built with their specific history in mind. Psychology tries to address this by drawing on patterns observed across many people while still tailoring the work to the individual. It acknowledges uncertainty. It resists the idea that change follows a predictable arc - because for many people, it does not.
The Complexity of Contemporary Modalities
Clinical psychology now works across a broad range of approaches. Cognitive behavioural work targets thought patterns and habits. Acceptance-based therapies build psychological flexibility. Schema therapy works with deep relational expectations formed early in life. Trauma-focused approaches like EMDR address the integration of difficult memories. Somatic and attachment-informed work focuses on bodily regulation and the felt sense of safety in relationship.
This range is not a menu from which practitioners choose their preference. It reflects the recognition that people present differently - and that overlapping difficulties often require different layers of attention. Anxiety shaped by relational trauma is not the same clinical picture as anxiety driven by chronic stress. A person navigating identity loss in midlife needs something different from someone in acute crisis.
Formulation is what makes those distinctions possible. And it is what changes as the work unfolds - interventions shift when new information emerges, because the person is not a fixed presentation but an evolving one.
Certainty, Ambiguity, and the Discipline of Practice
Both transformation coaching and clinical psychology have to contend with the same human pull toward certainty. A clear narrative is reassuring. It says: do this, and that will follow. The research on how people actually change is less accommodating - variability is consistent, and what works for one person often does not work for the next.
What activates one person may overwhelm another. What creates structure for some feels constraining to others. This is not a problem psychology has solved. It is simply a reality the discipline tries to remain honest about.
The difference in orientation is this: narrative coaching tends to offer a path. Psychology tends to ask first whether this path is suited to this person - and to stay with the uncertainty of that question long enough for something more accurate to emerge. That is a less tidy offer. It is also, for many people, a more useful one.
Human change rarely follows a single map. Sometimes the work is to understand the terrain itself.