Coaching disclaimer & scope of practice

Coaching is not therapy

This is the most important sentence on this page. Coaching and psychotherapy are different disciplines with different training, different regulation and different purposes.

Coaching, as we practise it, is educational and forward-looking. We work on patterns, communication skills, decisions and habits. We help you see what is happening between you and try something different.

Therapy treats diagnosable mental health conditions and works with trauma and psychological history. It requires clinical qualifications, licensing and professional regulation.

Our coaches are not psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, lawyers or financial advisers, and nothing on this website or in a session should be treated as advice from any of those professions.

One clarification, because it would otherwise be misleading in both directions. Pastor Esther Omiunu holds qualifications as an Education Counsellor and a Sex Therapist, and Pastor Lugard Omiunu works as a Life, Grief and Infidelity Coach. Those are real credentials and we are not going to understate them. What they do not make us is a medical or psychiatric service: we do not diagnose, we do not prescribe, and we do not treat physical conditions. Where a difficulty has a possible medical cause, we refer.

Coaching is not a regulated profession

In Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States, “coach” is not a protected title. Anyone may use it, with or without training. We think you should know that, and we think you should ask any coach — including us — what qualifications and professional memberships they actually hold.

Ours are published on our coaches page, along with our approach to supervision. If a coach anywhere will not tell you theirs, that is information in itself.

What we do not diagnose or treat

We do not assess, diagnose, treat or prescribe for anything, including:

• Depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder or psychosis
• Post-traumatic stress or complex trauma
• Eating disorders
• Addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling or pornography
• ADHD, autism or any other neurodevelopmental condition
• Sexual dysfunction or any medical cause of pain or difficulty
• Personality disorders

We can and do work alongside a diagnosis, and alongside your therapist or doctor with your permission. What we will not do is work in place of them.

When we will refer you elsewhere

We will decline or pause coaching, and help you find appropriate support, where:

• There is physical, sexual, emotional or financial abuse in the relationship, or one partner is afraid of the other.
• Someone is having thoughts of suicide, self-harm, or harming another person.
• Untreated addiction is driving the difficulty.
• Someone is in an unmanaged mental health crisis.
• A child or vulnerable adult may be at risk.
• What you need falls outside our competence, whatever the reason.

On the first of these we want to be especially direct, because it is the one people are most likely to try to work around. Couples coaching assumes two people who can both speak freely and both be held to account. Where one person is afraid of the other, that assumption fails and the work can increase the risk to the person who is not safe. Speaking honestly in a session can be punished afterwards. Being encouraged to take responsibility for “your half” of a dynamic can leave you carrying blame for someone else’s behaviour.

This is why we will not take a couples booking where we believe there is fear or coercive control, even if both partners ask us to. See get help now for services that specialise in exactly this and understand risk in a way we do not.

We are not an emergency service

We do not monitor our inbox or phone overnight, at weekends or on public holidays, and we cannot respond to emergencies. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact your national emergency number or a crisis line. Our get help now page lists them by country, and it is not indexed by search engines.

No guaranteed outcome

We will not promise that coaching will save your marriage, change your partner, fix your child’s behaviour, or produce any particular result. Anyone who does promise that is either misleading you or does not understand the work.

What we do commit to: qualified coaches, honest feedback including when it is unwelcome, an early and clear referral when coaching is not the right tool, and a straight answer if you ask whether this is working.

Coaching also depends substantially on what you do between sessions. Two people doing the practice will typically get more from six sessions than two people attending sixteen without it.

Articles and resources on this site

Everything we publish is general information for a general audience. It is not personal advice, it has not been written with your situation in mind, and reading it does not create any professional relationship between us.

Our articles cite established relationship research where relevant, but they are written to be useful rather than academic. Where an article touches on abuse or crisis it carries a safety note pointing to specialist services.

Both partners, equally

In couples work our commitment is to the relationship and to fairness toward both of you. We will not act as an advocate for one partner against the other, and we will not accept a private brief from one of you about the other before a session.

We also do not keep secrets between partners. If one of you tells us something individually that materially affects the work, we will encourage you to bring it into the room and support you in doing so.

Faith

We are faith-friendly and never faith-required. If your faith shapes how you understand marriage and family, we work within it and welcome that. If it does not, nothing in our method depends on it and you will not be preached at. You set that boundary, and you can change it at any point.

Records, confidentiality and its limits

We keep brief session notes and treat them as confidential. The three narrow exceptions — serious risk of harm, a child or vulnerable adult at risk, and a valid court order — are set out in full in our privacy policy, and your coach will explain them in your first session rather than leaving you to find them here.

If we get it wrong

Tell us. Email info@familybonding.org and it will be taken seriously, investigated, and answered honestly. If we have made a mistake we will say so. Where a coach holds a professional membership, you also have the right to complain to that body directly, and we will give you its details if you ask.