Coaching practices for Narrative Grief Therapy

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

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

  • 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
  • The day they died still plays in my head in jagged pieces
  • I’ll have a breakthrough where I really feel the better version of my story, and then a few days later the old defeating account has quietly taken back over as if it never happened
  • I keep reading my grief and my anger as proof there’s something broken in me
  • The story I carry about my own life is fragmented and full of shame, and I want it written down properly somewhere outside my head

Practices that may help

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Narrative Therapy: Rewriting the Stories That Define You
    Narrative therapy, developed by Michael White and David Epston, holds that people live by stories — about who they are, what they’re capable of, and what their experiences mean. By separating the person from the problem ("the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem") and finding "unique outcomes" that contradict a limiting story, therapy opens space to author a more empowering alternative. The evidence base is growing but smaller and less methodologically uniform than CBT.
  4. Therapeutic Letters
    A therapist’s written letter to a client between sessions — documenting alternative-story gains before they fade.
    Narrative Therapy: Rewriting the Stories That Define You
  5. The Absent But Implicit: What Problems Reveal About What We Value
    Every problem story implies a violated value — surfacing that value reveals the person’s strengths, not just their struggles.
    Narrative Therapy: Rewriting the Stories That Define You
  6. Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET): Weaving Trauma Into a Coherent Life Story
    Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), developed by Schauer, Neuner, and Elbert, is a structured short-term treatment for PTSD that works by having the client construct a detailed narrative of their entire life — placing traumatic events within a larger biographical context, rather than isolating them. Multiple randomized trials in refugee and war-affected populations show significant, durable reductions in PTSD symptoms. NET is particularly suited to complex and repeated trauma where individual events cannot easily be isolated.
  7. Create a testimony document
    NET produces a written testimony of the person’s life — a document that the person and therapist co-author and that the person keeps.
    Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET): Weaving Trauma Into a Coherent Life Story
  8. Landscape of Identity and Action Questions
    Use two question types to map both what the person DID (action) and what that reveals about who they ARE (identity).
    Narrative Therapy: Rewriting the Stories That Define You
  9. Narrate the trauma in chronological order within its life context
    Tell the story of a traumatic event — before, during, and after — in the context of the surrounding life.
    Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET): Weaving Trauma Into a Coherent Life Story
  10. Name it to tame it: tell the story of the big feeling
    Help the child narrate what happened and how it felt — storytelling is brain integration.
    The Whole-Brain Child (Siegel & Bryson)

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