Am I scared of heights or falling to my death?

I would disagree that most are trying to control you (although a few are).

They seriously want to help. The question is do they have the skills necessary for a specific situation and do their personalities match up well enough to be able to effectively work together.

Long term well experienced counselors/life coaches most likely have good knowledge and skills in at least several areas. That does not mean that there is the required personality match.

I was so turned off by the ones that focus on money and long term contracts that I ran my life coaching business completely different (until covid messed my up so bad I had to fold that business).

In my case I typically met with a person 2-3 times at no charge and see if we match personality wise and if the person is serious about working on resolving things and building a better future (I have found a real effective test for that).

My experience is that a lot of people are not willing to actually change, and just want someone to complain too and to be able to tell their family and friends that "see - I tried it, and it didn't work" even though they actually put no effort into it. These people never progressed to a paid client status with me and most are flushed at the second meeting.

I also never did long term contracts that so many life coaches live off of. Just pay me for each appointment we actually do, and there is no penalty to stop working with me.

Only people who can actually produce results can make money from what I was doing (before Covid messed me up with major long hauler issues).

Edited to add: The reason why I developed my system of pre-meetings was that I felt that it was personally unethical for me to take money from someone if I could not actually do anything for them.

I also worked with people who could not pay me (or could only pay me a fraction of my normal billing rate). My background on getting into life coaching is actually decades of charity counseling and mentoring so I had honed my skills on many hundreds of people before I started my life coaching business (there came a day when I realized that people paid good money for what I was doing - and there was nothing wrong with earning money that way - from those that could afford to pay).

I actually had basic counseling training as a teenage in Boy Scouts in the early 1970's as I was one of the better troop leaders; and I've learned a lot of other counseling stuff over the years from various books and seminars.

I took Life Coaching training once I decided to start that business.