Coaching practices for Secure Functioning Relationships After a Loss

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Secure Functioning Relationships After a Loss, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• Even after we patch things up, every new conflict still feels like it could be the one that ends us
• So much of who I was lived in being their wife, their caregiver, the one they called
• After we fight we just let it sit for days with neither of us reaching out, and the hurt quietly piles up until I start reading even neutral things they do as another little jab
• I still feel deeply tied to them, but I honestly can’t tell anymore whether that closeness is what’s keeping me steady or what’s keeping me from actually living
• When my partner is upset my instinct is to pull back or get defensive, especially when it’s about me

Practices that may help

1. Let repeated repair build earned security
   Each successful repair teaches "we can break and come back" — which is what makes a relationship feel safe.
   Rupture and Repair
2. Secure-Functioning Relationships
   Secure functioning, as defined by Stan Tatkin’s PACT model, means both partners operate as a team that actively manages each other’s safety and security — rather than each person managing their own needs separately. The model has a strong mechanistic basis in attachment neuroscience; formal RCT evidence for PACT specifically is limited but growing.
3. Reconstruct your identity post-loss
   Actively develop the new self that emerges when a core relationship or role is gone.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
4. Repair quickly and thoroughly
   Don’t let injuries accumulate — repair within hours or days, not weeks.
   Secure-Functioning Relationships
5. Distinguish adaptive from complicated continuing bonds
   Notice whether your bond with the person supports life re-engagement or prevents it.
   Continuing Bonds in Grief, Made Practical
6. Practice being a secure base for your partner
   A secure base means: be accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged -- especially when it is hard.
   Emotionally Focused Therapy: Sue Johnson's Framework for Lasting Bond Repair
7. Find a community that recognises your specific loss
   Seek out people who have experienced the same type of loss — online or in person.
   Disenfranchised Grief, Made Practical
8. Map the assumptive world the loss disrupted
   Identify which of your core beliefs about life, self, and the future the loss has challenged.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
9. Task 3: Adjust to a world without the person
   Actively develop new skills, roles, and identity elements to navigate the changed life.
   Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical
10. Choose and co-create secure relationships
    Move toward partners and dynamics that reward openness, and build security together.
    Attachment Theory, Made Usable

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