I knew her as a friend long before I knew her as a life coach…read more
She was the kind of person who always had an answer. Whatever you were going through, she had been through something similar, read something about it, or knew exactly what you needed to do. She spoke with such certainty that it was easy to mistake her confidence for wisdom.
And when you're struggling, certainty can be enormously comforting.
My child was going through a difficult time at school. What had started as ordinary social friction had become something more painful. There were friendships falling apart, growing anxiety about going to class, and evenings spent trying to untangle what had happened during the day. As a parent, I was exhausted. I wanted to support my child without making things worse, and I was increasingly unsure how to do that.
That's when my friend offered to help.
She had recently started calling herself a life coach. I knew she didn't have formal training in psychology or counseling, but I didn't think much about it. She talked about emotional intelligence, trauma, boundaries, and healing with the vocabulary of someone who had spent years studying them.
More importantly, she was my friend.
At first, our conversations were reassuring. She listened, asked questions, and suggested ways to approach the school situation. She made me feel like someone finally understood what we were going through.
Then, gradually, things changed.
A conversation about school became a conversation about my parenting. A discussion about my child's friendships became an exploration of emotional wounds. Every problem seemed to reveal another problem, and every answer led to another question that only she seemed qualified to help us unpack.
She started using words like dysregulation, trauma response, and unresolved attachment. These weren't observations she offered tentatively. They were conclusions, delivered with the authority of a diagnosis.
I began to notice something else.
Her own emotional state was remarkably unpredictable.
Some days she was warm, generous, and encouraging. Other days, the smallest disagreement would send her into a spiral of anger or indignation. If I questioned one of her interpretations, she sometimes treated it as evidence that I was resistant to growth. If I hesitated to follow her advice, she suggested I was allowing my own emotional baggage to interfere with my child's well-being.
It became difficult to know whether I was talking to my friend, my coach, or someone who needed me to validate her.
I started choosing my words carefully around her. I found myself managing her reactions while supposedly receiving help managing my own.
Looking back, that should have told me everything.
But by then, the relationship had become complicated. She knew intimate details about my family, my fears, and my child's struggles. Things I had shared because I believed I was speaking with someone who cared about us.
The turning point came during a conversation I expected would be about helping my child regain confidence at school.
Instead, she told me that the situation was far more serious than I understood.
We weren't dealing with a school problem anymore, she explained. We were dealing with deep emotional issues that required extensive work. Both my child and I needed hours of talk therapy to address what was really happening beneath the surface.
And, conveniently, she could provide it.
I remember staring at her, waiting for some acknowledgment of the obvious.
She wasn't a licensed therapist.
She had no clinical training. She wasn't qualified to assess a child's mental health, diagnose psychological conditions, or provide psychotherapy. Yet here she was, telling a frightened parent that her child needed intensive therapeutic intervention and presenting herself as the person equipped to deliver it.
When I asked about her qualifications, her demeanor changed.
She seemed offended that I would question her after everything she had done for us. She reminded me of the time she had invested, how much she cared, and how much progress she believed we had made.
Then came the familiar suggestion that my skepticism was itself part of the problem.
I left that conversation feeling worse than I had when I entered it.
Not because I had learned something difficult about my child, but because someone I trusted had managed to make me doubt my own judgment.
For days afterward, I replayed our conversations.
I thought about how often she had escalated ordinary concerns into psychological crises. How frequently she had positioned herself as the only person who truly understood us. How quickly her compassion disappeared when I questioned her authority.
And I began to wonder how much of the distress I had been experiencing was caused by the school situation, and how much had been amplified by the person who was supposedly helping me navigate it.
That's a difficult realization to sit with.
