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Guiding Through Grief Discussion (Oct 2018)
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25 Replies
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Initial Post:
I am trying out a new strategy where a client pays me a monthly fee and then in addition to regularly scheduled sessions they get a certain number of “on call” coaching hours, which they can use whenever they want (within guidelines). That means, people are more able to call for coaching in the heat of an experience, when they are more emotionally connected to the experience and therefore the neural pathways involved. I’m super curious too see how this experiment plays out.

I just had my first “on call” session yesterday. One of my clients is a young male (early 30s), attempting to explore dynamics of sexuality, relationships, consent and tantra. He has found a woman he believes is mutually interested in creating a non-romantic, practice-partner relationship based in sexual/energetic exploration and learning within safe containers. I am working with him on getting super clear in his intentions and communication as he navigates that learning, as well as processing experiences.
I happened to be on a walk in a new neighborhood and discovered a cemetery. I was just noticing the eerie plastic flowers dotting the graves as a symbol of our cultural discomfort with grief when he texted me asking for a session. I thought to myself, I wonder if this means we will be dealing with unfelt grief during our call? Answer, yes 🙂
He first called in a flurry of fast-paced storytelling, typical for him, about his latest encounter with his practice partner which felt “yucky” somehow. I usually let him talk for a few minutes and then I ask him to distill to the core point of his thoughts, which he can usually find. In this case, he felt his boundaries had been crossed.
In that moment I decided to name the cemetery and my curiosity around if we were working with grief today. He didn’t seem to have the answer but then his association jumped to his ex-girlfriend, who we do indeed know he is still processing his breakup with.
Because of Julie’s teaching, I allowed him to spend more time in story than I would have previously before bringing his experience back into the body. But when we took it into the body he was able to identify sadness in his heart and a closing throat.
I asked him what his throat wanted. He said my throat wants to say that it wasn’t my fault (that things ended with his ex and the things she blamed him for).
We he shared a little more story which helped his brain circuits (previously separate) to integrate into a shared story of these two situations. His ex had blamed him for crossing her boundaries, and he had held onto the story that he was a bad person for that, which feeds his interjects that his actions hurt others and its his fault when they suffer and he is powerless to change that.
We came back to the throat, which had been waxing and waning, and this time it was ready to speak directly to him: I need to let her go. I need to let go so she can have her own experience. I need to let go of fixing her.
I asked him what did that allow space for in his life. To which he realized, it allowed him space to move toward his own goals of self-responsibility, self-care, and self-healing from some recent painful events. He hadn’t been able to truly take care of himself so long as he was trying to fix/change someone else as an attempt at not feeling “like a bad person”. Once he faced the feelings themselves, felt the sadness, and discovered what was underneath them, what had seemed like grief about his breakup transmuted itself into empowerment toward his goals.
After we gave time to grieve and transform some unacknowledged beliefs and feelings so they could integrate in a healthy way, he was able to return to his immediate circumstances and make a healthy plan for exploring his own boundaries in the situation and communicating authentically about them, as an experiment, with his practice person.
I love that there are times before sessions I am drawn to something that seems very appropriate as a metaphor for what arises in the session. Whether I am using my RAC to look for my interpretation or it’s showing up because it’s already going to be there, I’m not sure.
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In other news, I’ve had a few people in my life experience deaths lately. I hosted a “day of the dead” party the first weekend of November and our first guest showed up admitting she had discovered minutes earlier her friend passed away.
Just two days ago, my sister, a medical student, called me crying saying 3 of her patients had died that day, one of whom reminded her of our dad.
So in both of these non-coaching situations I found myself supporting someone’s grief process anyways. Because we hadn’t entered a coaching agreement, I stuck to a civilian approach and offered care, presence, and affirmation of their process.
I watched with awe as the party guest went around to everyone else at our party that night and retold the story of her friend. I would have definitely been annoyed or embarrassed prior to hearing Julie say that retelling the story is the brain’s way of learning that they are truly dead. So I just encouraged her to share and really to keep doing whatever she wanted, whether it was to be with others, to be by herself, etc. I did feel happy that, because of our celebration, we had a flower altar and fire ceremony set up to honor, grieve, and celebrate the dead. She continually came back to the flowers, adjusted them, added more, took them with her, etc. I tracked her through my periphery and it seems she was going back and forth between telling her story/connecting with others, and spending time in solitude on her phone or at the altar. I smiled and thought, while unconventional, this might just be a wonderful way to spend the first night of a friend’s death.

With my sister I also simply held space, asked questions, let her share the stories of each person who died, and reflected what I heard. We are currently spending the weekend with my Grandma where she retold the story of how our grandpa died, and we all discussed death together for the first time. It was really powerful.I think my biggest learning is that while I LOVE jumping right into the body and the “distilled” truth of the situation through gestalt or similar somatic forms, I am growing my appreciation and patience for storytelling as a viable and important part of integration and learning for the clients.
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Rachel, that was such an inspiring post to read from you! And with such great flow of using the different Toolbox Modules around your clients issue, want and deeper need! And even though this whole experience was over the phone with your client, it did not sound like that got in the way of discovering what was underneath the surface for your client. Which sounds like it was a great learning experience for you and your classmates that read this. Transformational growth and change can occur with your client even though you may not be in direct contact with them.
Through allowing space and a container for trust and intimacy it’s incredible what epiphanies and “a-ha” moments our clients can have by sharing their story, sitting with it, and listening to what the underlying emotion and story is that is fueling the struggle and suffering within them. Sounds like your clients are getting some serious growth and healing in their lives from working with you!
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Rachel- Wow, what an interesting way to set up sessions. I am super interested to hear how this has been going for you, Rachel! As a client, I could see having an on-call support network in the heat of the moment being really empowering and clarifying.
I am constantly amazed at how our natural settings speak to and deepen our coaching. The fact that you were in a graveyard to speak with your client’s grief is a total goosebump moment.
It sounds like when you allowed him space to share his story, while gently questioning what was there beneath it, it allowed him to integrate his past a current relationships. Your ability to weave his experience back to his throat and body shows a lot of skill in helping him integrate the two experiences even more.
I love your final note about the RAC and how that interplays with what we see and attract in our lives. I’ve definitely been noticing the same thing lately. For me, it feels like a combination of brain science as well as the fact that our brain’s are just super connected to other realms and mysterious forces that I couldn’t even begin to understand. Either way, it’s pretty powerful!
I had a similar experience where one of my long term clients, literally the day after the intensive ended, came in to our session in tears about her deceased father. I think life has been bringing me what I am ready for. -
Rachel,
What a beautiful post. I’m blown away by your connection to spirit, your intuition, and your use of metaphor in daily life. How your intuition informs your coaching is inspiring. You’ve illustrated, with your client, how important it is to “take the time” with grief. He needed to process and feel some of the grief in order to fully understand and move forward in his current situation. What a great reminder to honor the process and that grief “takes the time is takes if you take the time.”
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Wow, Rachel, these reflections are so powerful! Thank you for sharing all of this. I feel like, for me, two of my biggest take-aways from the grief portion were the power of NOT doing, of holding space and allowing for the feelings that are there to just be there. Sounds like in both your coaching experience and “civilian” experiences this played out to be super powerful and exactly what was needed. The other part that stood out to me from the module is that we are creatures that really need to make sense of traumatic losses and one way we do that is through telling our story. How awesome to see this play out in several instances. Really confirms that less is more, particularly when they are going through grief.
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Mandy,
Yes! Less is more. What a perfect saying when it comes to grief. I think that can be challenging as a coach, because we are trained to help individuals move forward. With grief, there is no movement forward, only movement inward and through. I also appreciate your reminder around telling our story and how that allows us to make sense of our loss or trauma. It shows me that it is equally important to share our stories, feel our bodies, and allow our feelings just exist with no judgement. Easier said than done, but having a coach definitely helps with this.
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Initial post:
Jenny is 30 years old and we have had three sessions prior to the one I will write about today. Some brief backstory: her father died in November about 6 years ago. She had an estranged relationship with her mother that recently was amended after her mothers diagnosis with Leway Body Dementia. She is married and owns a sign business with her husband. Most of our work up to this point has been about boundaries and self-empowerment. Since we’ve worked together before, and have practiced yoga with each other for about 8 months, the coaching relationship was fairly established. We focused the session by doing a grounding and a check in.
She was pretty disregulated for this session. During our check in, she told me the story of how she bought a new dog with her husband yesterday, and then decided that she couldn’t take care of a puppy so she brought the dog back this morning. She didn’t really want the dog, but her husband did so she wanted to get one for him. Once she decided it was a bad idea, she felt all sorts of guilt and frustration around bringing the dog back. Her husband was angry with her and they had a big argument right before she came into our session. In addition, we we’re approaching the anniversary of her father’s death. She shared that this is usually a really hard time of year for her.
As we discussed, we uncovered that she often feels like she is taking care of everyone. Her husband. Her mother. Her step-brother. The act of getting a puppy felt so overwhelming. She couldn’t stand to have another thing to take care of. She said “And, I have no one to take care of me.”
From previous sessions, I knew that Jenny’s dad had been her caretaker and source of support. She came up against enormous grief around his death and losing this figure in her life. She still feels enormously sad and guilty around her dad’s death. Her father died from a heart condition, and it was a sudden death. There wasn’t much time to process or integrate what had happened.
The next unfolding was a lot of anger. She felt extremely angry at her dad for not taking better care of himself. For leaving her to take care of everything after him, which included her mother, their land, and his funeral arrangements. He didn’t have anything lined up or in place for his death. It was a complete shock.
It became clear to me really quickly that her reaction around the puppy was connected to her father, and she realized it as well. We spent the rest of the session in grief work. There was no coaching. No real defined threshold or incorporation, just space to feel. I suppose this space was a threshold for her in itself.
We talked about her dad and she cried. We talked about the trauma of his death. We used the body to feel what was coming up. We worked with soul retrieval and healing the inner child that had been wounded from the death. But mainly, we both just cried. I think that’s what she needed space for, just grief. It felt like a very simple, yet powerful and profound session.
My largest challenge in this session and with grief work is my own fear of loss and death. It definitely brought up feelings in my around my own experience of loss. I noticed this, and journaled about it after our session. I think there is more work to be done within me and within our culture on accepting death as a part of life.
I don’t foresee myself specifically seeking out clients who want to heal grief, but grief does seem to be everywhere. Even beyond physical losses of loved ones, I often see the smaller more subtle grief in my clients around change and transition. This is the grief I currently feel called to working with. Having the language and tools to see grief when it comes up and create space where it’s okay to exist feels like big work in my coaching. I eventually wish to get more comfortable with and around grief for myself, my clients, and my loved ones. That feels extremely important.-
Kaity! Awesome to read your very raw and honest post about your experience with grief as it has come up in your client. I can relate to the experience of seeing that a client’s reaction to a current situation really has roots to a deeper grief that may be lying underneath that has not had the proper time and space.
I really appreciated your sentiment: “We spent the rest of the session in grief work. There was no coaching. No real defined threshold or incorporation, just space to feel. I suppose this space was a threshold for her in itself.” I have also been in that situation where it feels like we put aside “coaching” and just go into grief work. This feels so critical because, as you said, there are not many spaces or places within our culture that allow for grief to be. I love thinking of that kind of session as a threshold in and of itself. Crossing the threshold into allowing the grief the space that it needs to take up!
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Wow Kaity amazing session!
You said “There was no coaching. No real defined threshold or incorporation, just space to feel. I suppose this space was a threshold for her in itself.” and I TOTALLY agree it was a massive threshold, and definitely coaching! For you to be willing to put any plans or “traditional” coaching aside and be with your client in her unfelt grief strikes me as something she needed modeling, permission, and connection to fully do. Sounds like your coaching presence and trust with her finally allowed this to move. I’m feeling very inspired.
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Such an empowering session for me to read and digest what happened there. During moments as such, I can imagine myself not knowing what to do. Maybe, it was truly about dropping everything away – my ideas about what coaching looks like, what my role is, what is my client here to get out from me, etc and simply just be humans. Then, maybe I would know what to do during those moments. So thank you for sharing, for your courage and resiliency to hold spaces as such and to be complete vulnerable and true to yourself and your client.
I appreciate how you bring forth such a holistic way of guiding the space, from verbal, to body, to soul, to just simply process.
“We talked about her dad and she cried. We talked about the trauma of his death. We used the body to feel what was coming up. We worked with soul retrieval and healing the inner child that had been wounded from the death. But mainly, we both just cried. I think that’s what she needed space for, just grief. It felt like a very simple, yet powerful and profound session.”
This sounds simple, but I believe not many people can hold this unless they been through something as intense or similar. I felt hese are words of wisdom that comes from direct experience.
And you are right, Grief is everywhere! What comes to mind for me is maybe it is time that we normalize grief as a natural process and emotion, starting with ourselves and maybe by doing so that gives other people the courage or a non-verbal permission to do the same!
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Kaity,
This was such an immensely touching post to read. I love that you saw right through the story of the puppy and what that truly stood for – the unresolved grief and trauma that was living in your client from the difficult passing of her father. It makes perfect sense that she didn’t feel that she could extend any more care outward for a living thing in that period because she had lost a significant care structure in her life.I also really appreciate how you guided the session right back to the body (where it sounds like just the place she needed to spend some time). You wrote, “We talked about her dad and she cried. We talked about the trauma of his death. We used the body to feel what was coming up. We worked with soul retrieval and healing the inner child that had been wounded from the death. But mainly, we both just cried”. What a beautiful opportunity for both of you honor what was up for her, and to allow both of your humanness’ to just be fully accepted. It sounds to me like she probably felt a ton of support and care coming from you, as well, which is something she was longing for in the first place.
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Kaity,
What a powerful story. This makes me think of something we learned in the trauma module: how important it it to meet the client where they’re at, maintain emotional contact, and not try to “fix” them or rush past their current experience. Even though this is more grief than trauma, the principle remains, and you followed it. This is a good reminder that having a desired outcome for a session could lead to missing the process that needs to happen, and that allowing space for grief, such as you did, can be exactly what needs to happen. Perhaps it was even the deeper need and threshold that the client needed all along.
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Summary post:
When it comes to grief, the greatest gift is to just let our clients FEEL what’s coming up for them. There is no way to change or fix grief. We can’t wish it away or ignore it. Well, we can, but it doesn’t lead to any long term peace or resolution.
What strikes me as important in this module is standing with our own experience of grief. When we come from a death-denying society, death and loss become a programmed fear within our brains. One perspective change I have offered my clients when we’ve broached fear of death, is comparing life to the cycle of the seasons. Each cycle is necessary and beautiful in it’s own way.
When we can accept death as a part of life, it allows us to begin to accept our own losses as not only sad, but beautiful and loving as well. How precious is it to have people/experiences/etc. to miss when they are gone. Grief and joy stand hand in hand.
There is a double bind that grief can often create where we don’t want to accept our loss because we don’t want to forget or move forward in life without our loved one (or whatever it is that we are grieving). At the same time, we are afraid to really experience and feel grief as it is a scary, deep emotion around death and dying (which again, is TOTALLY rejected by our culture and society). This can leave our clients feeling stuck, like there is no where to go. No where they can show up with their grief.
However, as a coach we can make space for grief to breathe and exist. We can share with our clients that there is nothing to change, and that sorrow is just as much of an experience of life as joy is. We can hold space and let our clients bring their grief, which often comes hand in hand with anger, doubt, or fear.
It feels simultaneously simply to show up for grief and so complex at the same time. I am really grateful to have discussed grief in its many forms, and to begin deepening my own relationship with death and dying. -
Initial Post:
My client is a woman I have been seeing regularly online for about 3 months now, with a one-month break. She is a very energetic, highly motivated and positive person. She is an art therapist and has a high level of self awareness. In many ways, it feels like she coaches herself in our sessions and I am just literally a mirror for her and a way for her to be held accountable. It’s pretty ideal.
About a month ago, when she returned from the one-month break, she came to our session very disregulated. She said right off the bat that the divorce from her husband had been finalized a couple days before. Her husband had not been a big topic in our prior sessions as he had not been a big part of her life for nearly a year. She expressed that they had ended the relationship long ago but it took until now to finalize everything in the courts. She came to the session crying, “a mess” as she put it (but generally appearing more disheveled than her norm), and I noticed energetically she felt heavy or weighed down.
She mentioned right off that she was experiencing extreme exhaustion, not wanting to eat, as well as anger at the feeling of being out of control of her emotions. She didn’t like that this experience was upsetting her and that she couldn’t stop it from doing so. I recognized right away that she was experiencing grief from the finalization of her divorce, and that this was a completion of a huge part of her life. As simple as it is, I just named the grief and this set the focus for the session.
The reaction she was having surprised her as the relationship had ended long ago and there was probably already some grieving that had occurred. I remembered from our grief section that grief is a response to loss and, in this case, there was a grief of letting go of the hopes that the relationship might some day work out or be efforted over. I let go of any plan for setting intentions or identifying coaching goals, and just gave time and space for this grief to be there. I noticed quickly after I energetically gave space for the grief to be, that my client’s energy dropped and expanded. It was as if she needed permission to allow herself to just be exactly as she was in that moment. Like my permission gave her permission.
It quickly became apparent to me that there were parallels between the divorce from her husband and the divorce of her parents. The unprocessed grief that she experienced as a young girl was resurfacing with this experience that was in some ways very similar. She was experiencing cumulative grief—losses from the past affecting current losses.
I feel that the entire session flowed very well, as we were not trying to do anything or achieve anything or get anywhere—we were simply acknowledging what was present and honoring it. We spent the majority of the session simply giving space for any and all feelings to be there. My client named feeling ashamed of having this reaction to a divorce that was so ready to happen. There was a brief teaching moment where we talked about this experience bringing up grief from the past and compounding with the grief of this loss. We also talked about grief being a wild and unpredictable creature that can shape-shift from anger, to exhaustion, to shame, to sadness, to giddiness, to emptiness, to obsession, to flatness, to gratitude, giving permission for any and all feelings that surfaced.
Nature connection came in with some imagery that my client and I have been working with during our coaching together. Many years ago, she had a dream of herself on a rickety old bridge trying to cross the Grand Canyon that has stuck with her. In this session she stated that she felt as if she had fallen from the bridge and was now all the way at the bottom of the canyon, treading water. We used this imagery to explore. I asked her from this place what it was that she needed. She said she needed to get to the raft and to set an anchor. Exploring what this meant in her daily life, she identified getting onto the raft represented getting back to journalling every day. We set an attainable goal of writing for 5 minutes a day. She was not yet able to identify what setting an anchor looked like, so we agreed to start with journalling and to hold the question of what an anchor would look like for her until our next session.
Overall, I think honoring the bigness of the life change she was going through and letting her know that I was walking beside her was all the “coaching” that needed to happen in this session.
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Mandy,
so many things struck me in your post. First, I love you (And Kaity) both named how grief ends up being somewhat simple, in that mostly we (and our clients) just need permission to be and feel as they are. and it sounds like when they’re ready to know, they know it’s happening with some reflection.
Also, I love that you tracked her compounding grief from her parents. I can only imagine how that big of a loss in young age would resurface now. So awesome you are holding space for the twists and turns of integrating both. -
From what I have read through this session, I sensed profound skills being developed here not just by ticking off the coaching competencies but profound human-relating skills and immaculate tracking skills to tie in all the different information that you had already have through the many sessions that you have with your clients. It almost felt like the previous sessions had led up to this one and what an opportunity it was for your client to uncover deep unresolved emotional knots.
This whole notion of giving permission is so powerful. I can’t help but to wonder why do we even need permission to express such emotions. One that comes to my mind immediately is the way that we are conditioned and taught in our culture and in our times where people are required to be stoic, shoulder everything and break through every obstacles.
You mentioned, “Overall, I think honoring the bigness of the life change she was going through and letting her know that I was walking beside her was all the “coaching” that needed to happen in this session.”
I think this is huge because our modern society has no place or space for us to honor any life experiences. We don’t have the community, we don’t have the time as well. This could potentially be the sickness of our modern society. And to be able come in a place of honoring with our clients, that would be such a wonderful service and shouldn’t be taken lightly how much healing can be done just by doing so. So, thank you for showing up and doing that work!
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Summary Post:
I feel that learning to work with (or actually just BE with) grief is one of the greatest acts of service we could offer to our clients. It is one of the most natural and universal things we all encounter on our paths. Just looking around in nature, it is a constant. It is imperative. It is winter. It is the north. It is necessary for life to emerge and new growth to occur. It is completely universal. Francis Weller states, “Coming home to grief is sacred work that confirms what the indigenous soul knows and what spiritual traditions teach: we are connected to one another.” Grief teaches us of our humanity.I feel like within the coaching dynamic, my job is to recognize grief when it rears it’s head. To say hello to it and to honor it by giving it space. By doing this, I act as a guide for my client’s to open the door to being with what is present for them. If done in such a way that we create a safe container, clients can inch closer towards their grief realizing that they will not be annihilated by the bigness of it. That actually, there is extreme love and life living in the same place that tremendous grief resides. Francis Weller sums it up well with the following quotes:
“To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
“It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that when left unattended, block our access to the soul.”
p.s. If you have not checked out his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, it is very much worth a read.
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Summary Post:
In some ways, this felt like one of the “less technical” teachings… because Julie so highly emphasized just being with the client as they need it. I am imagining she might give more specific tools to people who are being trained as therapists, but I’m not sure. However, from what I know of the flow and gestalt of life and healing, it’s no surprise to me that grief is in some ways, simply another big energy that has gotten stuck and needs safety, permission, and compassion to sequence. Simply put, our coaching presence, attuned reflection, and acceptance of our clients’ process. I am so grateful (and was so rocked) by going through a grief process of my own during this intensive, and I love getting a chance to write my summary post a few months later, after that grief has passed and the wheel of life has continued to turn. I am proud of myself for fully feeling what I needed to at this time, as well as seeking out embodied support (qi gong grief forms series).
As Julie so aptly stated, “If you take the time it takes, it’ll take less time.” Life. moving. <3
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Initial Post
This module on Grief had brought me into many existential questioning. My human experience tells me that there is a well so deep of unprocessed grief that is brought upon beyond just our present life. And my understanding is, that if we do not take this hero’s journey down this well, we may not understand who we truly are. As much as it triggers lots of fear and uneasiness, who knows what gems or wishing coins are waiting to be uncovered in that well?
I was working with a client of mine who felt that she could not take the next move in her life. There were many to consider and there were many reasons why she could not just decide, breakaway and start anew. There would always be a perfect reason for her that she could not go on and start her own career. She had been a housewife for 30 years, had the best intention and deep desire to have her own vocation but felt inhibited when she needs to take the next step for the fear of losing her family, doing the wrong thing or become an irresponsible person. Looking back at her life, she had experienced many losses which at age 16 her father passed away. She mentioned that she didn’t have time to grief and it was as if the next day she had to go back into her normal life and go on. Growing up she had been the caretaker and the only thing she knew was to give.
After many sessions, I reflected that she had already given so much of her life to the people around her and that it seems like she is in a juncture where she wants to start giving to herself. I then asked a question, “when is the last time you received and became truthfully grateful?” She took a long pause and she said she could not remember. For many reasons, we did not dive deeper than that but here are my thoughts and reflections moving forward from here.
This may be a projection but I still feel the need to test it out. I believe one of the reason why she couldn’t give to herself or be in a place of receiving is because her heart is shutdown from the many tragic experiences of her life and that she did not have a chance to process them. I reason it this way because to truly receive one needs to be vulnerable and be open. The reason why she can give others so willingly is so that she did not have to risk opening her own heart to receive. Consequently, she could never really give herself anything.
I wonder if most of this were cultural interjection where people in her community had to numb themselves as if tragedy and crises were part of everyday life and that they had to go on anyway to survive. In my astrological work, I could pinpoint that she had to go back and retrieve her inner child, working on assimilating unprocessed emotions and recover skipped developmental steps when she was growing up. It looked like the soul’s evolutionary lesson was to learn how to nurture oneself and give oneself their own gifts. From this information, I felt she was at the crossroad of her life and have to take the leap to dive deep into her own well of emotions in order to move forward. Only time will tell as I continue to work with this client.
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Kairon,
Thank you for sharing your beautiful experience with this client! I actually noticed a lot of similarities between what your client was going through, and that which Kaity’s client was experiencing. The tendency for someone to have unresolved grief, then enter into a care-taker role, then not be able to get the care they need later down the road, seems to be a common trajectory. I’m glad that you were able to help your client start to name this dynamic in her process.
You wrote, “After many sessions, I reflected that she had already given so much of her life to the people around her and that it seems like she is in a juncture where she wants to start giving to herself. I then asked a question, “when is the last time you received and became truthfully grateful?” She took a long pause and she said she could not remember”. I agree with your hunch that she feels like she is unable to dive into freeing vulnerability because of the pain and trauma of her father’s passing. While it could very well be conjecture, it sounds like a valid connection that could be explored by you and your client in a safe, supportive space.
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Summary Post
I second what Mandy said in her summary post. Grief teachers our humanity. Like I spoke about in my initial post, grief takes me to a place of existential questioning. Why does grief even exist? Surely Life has a plan in place and grief serves a specific function in our human experience. As odd as it sounds, grief might be a logical response to all the intense human experience especially sudden loss, sudden change of events and even traumatic situations. Also, with the nature of Life that is impermanent, we have to face Death, one way or another. It sounds almost as if, grief is the way out in coping with these rites of passage. If I were to put a definition on grief, it is an emotion that helps us to process the changes of Life. It takes us from one end to the other. Unprocessed, we are stuck in the past, not being able to move forward and assimilate to the changes through time and space.
Secondly, experiences of grief humbles us. It reminds us that as strong as we think we are, we still have a place of weakness and vulnerability. It sobers our narcissistic tendencies of being able to control the elements of nature. In this context, experiences of grief, requires us to rely on another, reminding us again of the true nature of humanity which is about interconnectedness and interdependence. With this humility, we can then reconnect to life – doing what is necessary than only what we want. It helps to come to place of service and be in a place of compassion and love because through grief we are reminded that the very same Life situations can happen to us too.
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Initial post:
In reflecting back on our intensive time with Julie, one major theme that comes up for me off the bat is the aspect of self-care that we discussed when working with clients. Julie mentioned that when working with grief, we need to “secure our masks before assisting others”. Having worked with a few big grief sessions with some of my clients, I can say with certainty that that is so crucial to being able to hold safe space for them. Another piece of addressing grief that I think is so important, which many others have commented on, is simply encouraging our clients to tell their stories, as much and as often as they need to in order to find some compartmentalization.
One of the sessions, where these factors come up the most in my experience, was with my client who had experienced sexual trauma, and was very much dealing with the grief around it. Her experience was with a person she didn’t know, and it resulted in a child. She was actively dealing with the obvious trauma of it all, but there was also a quieter grief component present, which she didn’t start to process until way later. When gently asked about what she was specifically grieving, she said it was her innocence.
We had spent some time talking about and planning how she would get her story down. In previous sessions, she decided that she would tell it verbally to a few friends, and then engage in the process of writing it all down. She was curious if the story would change at all in the retellings, and really wanted to get a consistent line down so that she could feel fully grounded in what she had experienced. I encouraged her that, even though there might be some changes, in any iteration, her experience was valid and important to be telling. She was comforted by the idea that whatever her story may be when she told it, that it would provide her an invaluable resource to simply get it out of her own head. She spent many hours writing it down outside of our session, and got about 75% of the way. During our session, she wanted to read it aloud to me so that she could be witnessed and seen.
I was struck by how calm and transparent she seemed when she first started reciting the events for me. It was difficult for me at first not to have an emotional reaction. I noticed that I wanted to express sympathy, understanding, and love for her. However, something told me that I would best serve her by simply being a quiet and interested audience. As she continued with the story, I could tell that she was very much still putting the puzzle pieces into place. She would pause for a moment and then go back and edit what she had just previously said. This showed me that she was actively creating a strong image in her mind of the story, and that she was beginning to compartmentalize everything she needed to have more clarity around the whole event. She left our session grateful that I had not given any input or advice as others had. She was simply able to be seen and that was all she wanted.
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Summary post:
In putting the whole experience of guiding through grief together, I am feeling alot of resonance with others have summarized. I can see that the absolute best thing we can do as guides (and personally/with our loved ones), is to simply encourage a “being with” our grief, fresh or old. In the practice of allowing our grief to be acknowledged and honored, it has a chance to show us how meaningful the object of loss was in our lives, and what a beautiful thing it was that we were so connected to it. In letting ourselves feel the deep bereavement of its passing, we are able to then start a new chapter in our lives where the lost thing or person is no longer present, but always remembered. By normalizing any reaction that occurs in our bodies and psyches around the loss, we give ourselves and our clients a precious gift of empathy and kindness around the deeply painful event. If the only way out is through, being with our grief and encouraging others to do so is the only way to come out on the other side. Forever changed.
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Initial Post
My most recent shift was a 15-day shift with the women’s group. One of my clients – I’ll call her Jane so as to not disclose her real name – is one of the more intense clients I’ve worked with. For most of her childhood she was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by her biological father. While there’s plenty of material to write about with this particular client, I’ll stick to a short bit. This is a client I have worked with now for 30 days total.
Jane had finally, in her twenties, begun to bring justice to her father. She was in our program for the final hearing of her father’s trial. She had been putting a lot of focus on letting go of her father. She even left the program for a few days to fly for the hearing. This symbolized her “funeral” for him. However, she was trying to rush the process of grief and box it up into simply grieving her father. A lot of her emotions that came up around him would be met by the mentality of “I need to move on,” “he doesn’t get anything else from me,” “if I feel this, I’m giving him more than he deserves.”
While there might have been some truth for her in those statements, I noticed how her language indicated a need to grieve more than her relationship with her father, and to feel all of the feelings of hurt, violation, betrayal, disbelief, rage, and so on, that needed to be felt and expressed.
Working with clients in this setting is incomparable to coaching clients at times. Most of them don’t want to be there; some of them know they have to while others don’t believe they do; and most of them are in pre-contemplation with most things. They are also there for severe trauma, substance abuse, or other mental health struggles. Furthermore, working with clients is mostly in a group setting. Needless to say, progress looks different than with coaching clients. After working an entire week with this client and building relationship/rapport, I began to chip away at the grief she had inside and didn’t know how to move through.
One night, after a group where she shared about her need to let go of him, I left her with an invitation: that not all grief is the loss of a loved one and can include a loss of who we once were, a loss of something we deserved to have, and loss of a past/future. I watched as strong feelings moved through her and something seemed to have clicked. She took space after the group.
We talked the next few days about what she was beginning to see: that there was grief there, beyond the loss of a parent being sentenced to prison; the grief was for a small child who lost her innocence, her feeling of safety in the world, a childhood filled with wonder and awe and wonder, a mind and life that wasn’t governed by trauma, and so on. While those are not easy things to process and feel, especially for someone who gets escalated and aggressive on a daily basis, she became open to some of the work ahead around her life story.
The other part I’d like to share about her is some work we did the last week I worked with her. Jane had a big week. She read aloud in front of the group letters from her mother and step-father about the impact she has had on their lives. In these stories, I noticed how her lability and explosive anger/aggression was minimal in the program compared to her primary attachment figures. Later that week the group had a rough day. We backpacked around a mountain and through a scree field. While this is fairly easy for some, Jane on the other hand, being obese and having broken both knees in the part, struggled. Finally, she has a minor fall and all those stories of her aggression and verbal abuse towards others I experienced toward me. She wouldn’t even allow me to clean her scrapes.
Two days later, once the group dynamics had settled and she was open to feedback, I offered an invitation to look at her anger. In a very direct way, since this was one of my last days working with her, I reflected how all of her anger is taken out on people in her life that are safe. When really, all that anger is meant for someone else who was never safe enough to express it towards. This served as a reminder for her and myself that anger is a part of grief, and that anger is also a secondary emotion. The primary one’s beneath the anger are what need to be felt, expressed, and processed in a safe way in order to move through grief.
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Summary Post
Reflecting on the Grief module, I am struck by how simple the main teachings were, yet how profound they might seem to those experiencing grief. In nature, they follow the principle, “who you are and what you feel is okay.” Grief seems to be its own process of feeling, behaving, story-telling, and so on that we often halt because we’re not taught to feel or honor ourselves and who/where we are. Grief shows up in so many ways and I’m so glad to have the lens to identify it and the skills to honor it and hold space for it when and where there’s a need. In my work, just knowing how to identify grief and educate clients on what it is and how it shows up is a valuable skill. It seems like another dance move in my vocabulary. Knowing when to take steps out of the coaching “format” to dance with grief is a skill I’m grateful for and look forward to continuing to refine.