Coaching practices for The Body Keeps the Score Honestly Explained After a Loss

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

  • I’m so cut off from my own body that I never notice I’m wound tight until I suddenly boil over or crash
  • I keep trying to think and talk my way out of being upset, but once I’m flooded my mind just won’t work
  • Every time something doesn’t land I turn it into "I’m failing at this" instead of just noticing what actually happened
  • Everyone keeps telling me to move on and get over the loss, but the grief is huge and it won’t go
  • It’s been long enough that I can quietly admit something in me has shifted since they died

Practices that may help

  1. The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
    Bessel van der Kolk’s core claim is that overwhelming experience is registered in the body and nervous system — not just as a memory but as ongoing physiological dysregulation — so calming the body ("bottom-up") can be as important as talking ("top-down"). The broad insight that trauma shows up physiologically is well supported; some of the book’s specific claims and favored therapies are more debated than the book’s certainty suggests. These are self-regulation skills, not a substitute for trauma treatment.
  2. Practice noticing what your body is doing
    Build the skill of sensing internal signals — tension, heart rate, breath — without being hijacked by them.
    The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
  3. Regulate the body before you process the story
    When you are activated, settle the body first — insight cannot land on a flooded nervous system.
    The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
  4. Use the performance-feedback loop without Self 1
    Treat every outcome as information, not a verdict — adjust without judging.
    The Inner Game: Quieting Self 1
  5. 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
  6. Look honestly for what has grown or changed for the better
    Without minimising the loss, notice any growth, change, or perspective that has emerged from it.
    Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
  7. Ground in the present when the past intrudes
    Use the senses and the room to signal "that was then, this is now" when memory floods the body.
    The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
  8. Review process goal execution separately from outcomes after each performance
    Evaluate how well you executed your process goals independently of whether you won or lost.
    Process Goals, Made Practical
  9. Keep a mastery evidence log
    Record specific instances of successful performance so your brain has concrete data to draw on under future doubt.
    Mastery Experiences
  10. Choose when to combine and when to separate outcomes
    How you bundle gains and losses changes how they feel — and how you act on them.
    Mental Accounting, Made Practical

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