Coaching practices for Meaning Making and Grief Emotions

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Meaning Making and Grief Emotions, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I keep swinging between drowning in the raw grief and trying to make sense of it, and I think I lean too hard on the sense-making because feeling it is unbearable
  • Everyone keeps telling me to move on and get over the loss, but the grief is huge and it won’t go
  • My memories of them and of how it happened come at me in scattered, jagged pieces with no order to them, and I keep replaying the end on a loop
  • My body can’t do what it used to, so I keep grieving everything I can no longer go and accomplish
  • The day they died still plays in my head in jagged pieces

Practices that may help

  1. 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
  2. Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
    Robert Neimeyer’s meaning reconstruction model holds that significant loss shatters the assumptive world — the implicit beliefs about self, others, and the future on which daily life depends — and that healthy grief requires rebuilding a coherent, meaningful life narrative that can integrate the loss. This framework is supported by observational research on grief outcomes and underpins narrative grief therapies with growing trial evidence.
  3. 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
  4. Construct a coherent narrative of the loss
    Tell the full story of the loss — who the person was, what happened, and what life is now.
    Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical
  5. Meaning-Making Coping, Made Practical
    Crystal Park’s meaning-making model holds that psychological distress after stressful events often reflects a gap between global meaning (the person’s general beliefs and goals) and situational meaning (what this specific event seems to say about the world). Coping involves either reappraising the event’s meaning or updating global beliefs to accommodate it. Research supports meaning-making as a predictor of better psychological adjustment following major stressors.
  6. Receive meaning through beauty, love, and nature
    Meaning flows not only from what you do but from what you allow yourself to fully receive.
    Meaning-Centered Therapy, Made Practical
  7. Retell the story of the death and its aftermath
    Construct a coherent, detailed narrative of the loss — including your experience before, during, and after.
    Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
  8. 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
  9. Carry forward the person’s legacy in your own life
    Identify values, projects, or commitments the person cared about and carry them forward yourself.
    Continuing Bonds in Grief, Made Practical
  10. Use specific memories as resources for meaning
    Identify particular memories that distil what mattered most about the relationship.
    Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical

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