Coaching practices for Healthy Grief Processing
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Healthy Grief Processing, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep my head down and stay busy so I never actually feel the loss, and now it ambushes me at random and won’t metabolize
- I’ve been keeping it together by staying busy and not letting myself fall apart, but the grief I keep shoving down isn’t shrinking
- I deal with my grief by doing and fixing rather than weeping, and everyone keeps treating that as cold or in denial
- Everyone keeps telling me to move on and get over the loss, but the grief is huge and it won’t go
- The grief ambushes me at the worst times
Practices that may help
- Deliberately engage loss-oriented work
Set aside dedicated time to directly face the grief — the emotions, the absence, the meaning of the loss.
The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical - Task 2: Work through the pain of grief
Allow and process the emotional and physical pain of loss rather than bypassing it.
Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical - Identify your natural grieving style and adjust for it
Know whether you tend toward more loss or more restoration orientation — and compensate accordingly.
The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical - Treating grief as a form of gratitude
When something ends and you feel grief, recognise that the grief is proportional to the love — and let it be both.
Mono no Aware: The Pathos of Things - Create a deliberate grief window
Schedule bounded time to grieve, protecting both the grief process and the rest of life.
Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical - Identify how cultural norms shape your grief
Examine whether cultural scripts about how long and how much to grieve are shaping your experience.
The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical - The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical
The Dual Process Model (DPM), developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, describes healthy grief as oscillation between two orientations: loss-oriented (engaging with the pain of losing the person) and restoration-oriented (attending to the practical and identity challenges of life without them). The model is well-regarded in grief research and provides a framework for understanding why taking breaks from grief is healthy, not avoidant. - Deliberately take time off from grief
Give yourself genuine permission to engage with ordinary life — this is restoration orientation, not avoidance.
The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical - Havening to soften acute grief activation
Use gentle touch and brief distraction to lower the physiological intensity of grief surges.
Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch - Oscillate between grief and sense-making
Allow periods of pure grief alongside periods of meaning construction — both are necessary.
Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
Related concerns
- Oscillation In Grief
If you are spending too long in one orientation, deliberately shift to the other.
Regulate the oscillation consciously
- Calming Grief Surge
Use gentle touch and brief distraction to lower the physiological intensity of grief surges.
Havening to soften acute grief activation
- Cognitive Grief Processing
Set aside dedicated time to directly face the grief — the emotions, the absence, the meaning of the loss.
Deliberately engage loss-oriented work
- Dpm Grieving Styles
Know whether you tend toward more loss or more restoration orientation — and compensate accordingly.
Identify your natural grieving style and adjust for it
- Dual Process Model Grief
The Dual Process Model (DPM), developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, describes healthy grief as oscillation between two orientations: loss-oriented (engaging with the pain of losing the person) and restoration-oriented (attending to the practical and identity challenges of life without them). The model is well-regarded in grief research and provides a framework for understanding why taking breaks from grief is healthy, not avoidant.
- Emotional Grief Processing
Set aside dedicated time to directly face the grief — the emotions, the absence, the meaning of the loss.
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