Working With Grief and Endings in Coaching

Coaching through grief means giving a client room to acknowledge a loss or an ending at their own pace, without trying to fix it, treat it or hurry it along. A coach can help someone name what has ended, notice what they are still carrying and find one small, real step — and needs to know clearly when the work belongs with a therapist, counsellor or doctor instead.

Sooner or later every coach meets it. A client comes to talk about a career move, a restructure or “feeling stuck”, and twenty minutes in it becomes plain that something has ended and has never been acknowledged. This guide to coaching through grief is for that moment. It covers the kinds of loss that turn up in coaching, what is and is not within a coach’s scope, a gentle five-step approach using picture cards, safe layouts, questions that hold rather than push, and how to look after yourself in this work.

Key takeaways

• Coaching through grief is about acknowledgement and pace — never about fixing, treating or speeding up a loss.
• Grief follows many endings besides death: a job, a relationship, a role, a place, a future that will not happen.
• Know your scope before the session, not during it: what you can hold, the signs that call for referral, and who you would refer to.
• Darker imagery often gives a client permission to say the difficult thing first. The client always chooses the card.
• Never end a session on the heaviest image. Close with a card and a step that leave the client steady.

Not only death: the endings that turn up in coaching

When people hear “grief” they think of bereavement. In a coaching room the losses are usually quieter, and often unnamed:

• Work: redundancy, retirement, a role dissolved in a restructure, a business closed, a team broken up.
• Relationships: separation, divorce, estrangement, a friendship that faded, children leaving home.
• Identity: no longer being the expert, the carer, the athlete, the one who copes.
• Place: emigration, moving house, leaving a community or a country.
• Health and capacity: an illness, an injury, a body that no longer does what it did.
• Futures: the promotion that went elsewhere, the plan that will not happen now.

Many of these are what the grief researcher Kenneth Doka called disenfranchised grief: losses that the people around us do not recognise as real losses. Nobody sends a card when a role disappears. The client may not call it grief either. They say they are unmotivated, flat or “not themselves”, and wonder why a new goal will not stick.

Often the most useful thing in coaching through grief is also the simplest: to say, without drama, “That sounds like a real ending.”

What coaching through grief can and cannot do

Grief is not an illness, and most people move through loss with ordinary support, which is why a coach can have a place in it. But the place has edges, and they should be clear to you before the session starts.

Within coaching	Refer on, or work alongside a specialist
Acknowledging an ending and what it meant	Thoughts of self-harm or suicide, or of not wanting to be here
Naming feelings about a change or transition	Being unable to manage daily life — sleep, food, work, caring for others — for weeks
Exploring identity, values and “who am I now?”	Heavy reliance on alcohol, medication or other substances to cope
Practical next steps after a loss, at the client’s pace	Flashbacks, panic or other signs of trauma
Supporting a return to work or a move into a new role	Intense grief that has not eased over many months and blocks ordinary life
Marking an ending that nobody else has marked	A recent bereavement with acute distress, or a client who asks for therapy

If a client talks about harming themselves or seems to be at immediate risk, this is not a coaching matter: help them contact emergency services or a local crisis line straight away.

For everything else in the right-hand column, say what you see and what you can offer. For example: “What you’re describing matters, and it deserves more specialised support than coaching can give. I’d like to help you find that. We can pause our work, or continue alongside it if that is useful.” The ICF Code of Ethics asks coaches to stay alert to exactly this — whether a client might be better served by a different professional or resource — and to discuss it openly with them.

Referral is not rejection. Said calmly and early, it is one of the most caring things a coach can do.

Why darker imagery gives permission to speak

Light, open imagery is very good at helping a client imagine. It is less good at helping them admit, and coaching through grief starts with admitting.

A grieving client offered sunrises and open roads tends to do what they have been doing everywhere else: manage. They choose the hopeful card, say the hopeful thing, and the real subject stays outside the room. An image on dark ground does something different. A wave caught mid-break. A pier that runs out over the sea and ends in air. Pictures like these say that the heavy thing is allowed here.

This only works because the client is in charge. They choose the card, or pass. They decide what it shows. They can turn it face down at any moment. Picture cards work through projection — the meaning comes from the person, not the image — and if that is new to you, What Are Metaphorical Associative Cards? explains the idea. A dark image does not put anything into a client. It gives what is already there somewhere to land.

A gentle 5-step approach to coaching through grief

This approach is the session structure from How to Use MAC Cards in Coaching, slowed down. Allow more time than you would for any other topic, and plan the ending before you begin.

1. Contract, and ask permission

Say what you have noticed and ask whether the client wants to look at it: “It sounds as if something ended there. Would it be useful to give that some room today?” Then name the tool. The cards have no fixed meaning, you will not interpret them, and the client can pass or stop at any point. If the answer is no, it is no. Come back to it another day, or not at all.

2. Name what has ended

Spread the cards face up and ask the client to choose one image for what has ended, or for what this is like right now. Ask them to describe the picture before anything else: What do you see? What is happening in it? Let the silence run. You are not looking for insight in this step, only acknowledgement — the plain sentence that has not been said yet.

3. Find what is being carried

Ask for a second card: “What are you still carrying from it?” This is usually where the session actually is. What is carried may be guilt, loyalty, anger, an unfinished conversation — or something precious the client does not want to put down. Do not suggest that anything should be let go. Ask instead: What would you want to keep? What is heavy? What is yours, and what is not?

4. Notice what is already turning

Only when the client seems ready, ask whether anything is already moving, however slightly: “Is there anything that has shifted since it happened — even a little?” A third card can help. If the honest answer is “nothing”, accept it and go straight to the close. Movement that is asked for too soon is a form of pushing.

5. Close at a threshold

Never stop where the heaviest card is. Ask the client to choose one last image, face up, for what they want to take with them from today — something steady, not necessarily something bright. Then agree one small step for the week, sized to their energy: a conversation, a walk, a letter that will not be sent. Finish with something ordinary: a few slow breaths, a glass of water, what they will do in the next hour.

The order matters less than the movement between the steps. Grief does not pass through tidy stages in sequence. A well-known model from bereavement research, the dual process model of Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, describes people moving back and forth between facing the loss and attending to ongoing life. Steps two and three face the loss; steps four and five turn towards what continues. When you are coaching through grief, expect a client to move between the two more than once — within one session and across several.

Safe card layouts for coaching through grief

Choose the smallest layout that will do the job. With loss, less is almost always safer.

Layout	Cards	Time	Best for
One card, one sentence	1	5 min	A check-in at the start of a session; clients new to cards
What has ended · What remains · What is ahead	3	20–30 min	A first full conversation about an ending
The five-card arc	5	45–60 min	A dedicated session with a client who is steady enough for depth
The closing card	1	5 min	The end of every session, whatever came before

The five-card arc follows the five clusters of the Undercurrent deck, one card from each: what is happening (Storm), what is underneath it (Depths), what is being held (Holding), what is already turning (Turning) and what is ahead (Threshold). It is a complete session in five images, and it is too much for a first meeting.

Three rules keep any layout safe:

• Never close on a Storm or Depths card — or, with any other deck, on the heaviest image on the table. Always finish with a card chosen for what the client takes with them.
• Choose face up. Blind draws are useful elsewhere. In grief work, let the client see what they are choosing, at least until you know each other well.
• Protect the last ten minutes. If time is short, drop a card from the middle of the layout, never the close.

Questions that hold rather than push

The questions you ask matter more in coaching through grief than in almost any other conversation. A question pushes when it asks the client to be somewhere other than where they are: further along, more positive, more reasonable. A question holds when it stays with what is true now.

Instead of	Try
“What’s the lesson in this?”	“What do you want to remember about it?”
“What’s the silver lining?”	“Is there anything you are glad to have had?”
“Why are you still upset about it?”	“What is it like at the moment?”
“Isn’t it time to move on?”	“Where are you with it today?”
“At least you still have…”	“What do you miss most?”
“So what’s your plan?”	“What would be enough for this week?”

More questions to keep within reach, grouped by where you are in the session:

• To open: What has ended? What did it mean to you? Who else knows about this?
• To stay: What do you see in the card? What is it like to look at it? What is not in the picture?
• To carry: What are you still holding? What would you not want to lose from it? What was left unsaid?
• To turn: What has changed, even slightly? What still matters to you? What is waiting for you?
• To close: What do you want to take from today? What do you need this evening? What is one small thing for this week?

And a short list of what to leave out altogether: “everything happens for a reason”, “time heals”, “I know how you feel”, and any sentence that begins with “at least”.

A worked example

This example is illustrative and does not describe a real client.

A client was made redundant after fourteen years with one company. He has come to coaching for “a job search strategy” and has not completed a single application.

What has ended: He chooses a thread of light going down into dark water. “That’s it. Fourteen years, and it just went under. No noise at all.”

What is being carried: A cage standing open, one feather left inside. “I keep thinking I should feel free. But I left something in there. My team. I never got to say goodbye to them.”

The closing card: A doorway standing alone in a field of snow, lit from within. “I can’t see what’s through there. But I can see that it’s a door.”

Small step: Write to three former colleagues this week — not about jobs, only to say goodbye properly.

Nothing was fixed in this session, and no applications were sent. What changed is that the ending was said aloud, and the first step turned out to belong to the old job, not the new one.

Looking after yourself as a coach

Coaching through grief lands on the person holding it. Looking after yourself is part of doing it responsibly, not an optional extra.

• Know what it touches in you. A client’s loss will sometimes sit close to one of your own. Notice it, and take it to supervision rather than into the session.
• Use supervision. Bring heavy sessions to a supervisor or a trusted peer group, with client details kept confidential.
• Leave space afterwards. Do not book a heavy session back to back with another one. Fifteen minutes and some fresh air is a professional practice.
• Have a closing ritual of your own. Put the cards away deliberately, write your notes, wash your hands, step outside. The session should end for you as well.
• Keep your referral list ready. Know two or three therapists, counsellors or bereavement services you would trust, before you need them.
• Respect your own limits. If you are freshly bereaved yourself, it is reasonable — and ethical — not to take this work on for a while.

Common mistakes when coaching through grief

• Moving to goals too soon. A plan built on an unacknowledged ending rarely holds.
• Interpreting the card. “That looks like loneliness to me” takes the meaning away from the client. Ask what they see.
• Filling the silence. In this work, silence is usually the client doing something important.
• Reaching for comfort phrases. “At least” and “everything happens for a reason” close a conversation that needed to stay open.
• Ending on the heaviest image. Always close with a steadier card and one small step.
• Working beyond your scope. Wanting to help is not the same as being the right help.

Which deck to use

Any deck of open images can be used with the approach above, and the rule about closing applies to all of them. If you are choosing a deck for this work, match it to the conversation:

If the session is about	Deck	Why
Loss, endings, what has not been said	Undercurrent	Fifty images on dark ground in five clusters — Storm, Depths, Holding, Turning, Threshold — with guidance on closing a heavy session safely
Naming the feelings around a change	Inner Weather	Images of states rather than scenes, for when the feeling has no word yet
A word to land on	Words	Fifty plain words to place beside an image when a picture opens more than it closes
What comes next, when the client is ready	Crossroads	Paths, doors and thresholds for the decisions that follow an ending

When the difficulty is finding any words for the feeling at all, the exercises in How to Help Clients Name a Feeling are a gentler place to start.

Ethics and safety note

Picture cards are a reflective tool, not a psychological assessment, a diagnostic instrument or a substitute for therapy or medical care. Coaching through grief does not treat grief; it offers acknowledgement and support to a client who is otherwise coping. Work within your own scope of practice and your professional code — for ICF coaches, the ICF Code of Ethics — and refer on when a client needs more than coaching can give. If someone is at immediate risk, help them reach emergency services or a crisis line.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

• How to Use MAC Cards in Coaching: A Complete 5-Step Session Guide — the full session structure, six layouts and a question bank.
• How to Help Clients Name a Feeling (With Picture Cards) — seven exercises for when the feeling has no word yet.
• What Are Metaphorical Associative Cards? The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide — how open-image cards work, and why they have no fixed meanings.

Closing

Coaching through grief asks less of you than you might fear and more than you might expect: less fixing, more patience. An ending that has been acknowledged aloud is already lighter to carry than one that has only been managed.

Start small. The next time a client describes something that sounds like an ending, say so, and ask whether they would like to give it some room. One card, one honest sentence and a careful close are enough for a first conversation.