Coaching practices for What Are the Stages of Grief After Losing a Loved One

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What Are the Stages of Grief After Losing a Loved One, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

  • I know in my head that they’re gone, but it still hasn’t landed
  • 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
  • Since they died, the whole ground I stood on is gone
  • They handled the money, or the cooking, or were just the person I leaned on

Practices that may help

  1. Task 1: Accept the full reality of the loss
    Move from intellectual acknowledgement to full emotional acceptance that the person is gone.
    Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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

Related concerns

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.

Practice this with IX Coach

Try this practice