Coaching offers a chance to develop solid relationship with a person who can help you to develop new strategies for changing what you do so you can achieve things you have previously found hard to achieve. This involves exploring your emotions, your behaviour and your connections with others.

Coaching is often necessarily a slow process. It leaves the responsibility for change with you – unlike medicine we cannot see the precise effect of our intervention. Whilst coaching can help you to find new ways to negotiate with others, it is you who will have to do the negotiation, so it can sometimes feel as though it adds to your burdens.

Coaching aims to help you to find the best way to live in existing circumstances. This can be disappointing and sometimes difficult, but it offers a real way forward, sometimes the only way. Psychiatry or residential services are sometimes necessary. Coaching cannot be much help to some, though for many others it can help avoid the other, more dramatic options.