My Journey With Grief Through Meta-Coaching - The Coaching Conversations (Part 3 of 4)

The Moments That Changed My Internal Picture

Dear Reader,

In Parts One and Two, we met the nightmares, then we unpacked the word grief and found despair, regret, over-responsibility, loneliness, frustration, longing and fear.

Now we come to the coaching.

‍I had approximately six sessions relating to my parents and their deaths. I cannot reconstruct every question or identify the exact moment at which each internal change occurred. Memory has preserved the yellow dress my mother was wearing at that birthday party with perfect clarity but apparently regarded complete coaching sessions unimportant information.

‍What I remember are five pivotal moments.

‍None brought my parents back or changed the historical facts. Together, however, they changed the position from which I related to those facts.

‍ “I Miss My Parents”

‍During the first coaching session I ever received, I finally said:

‍I miss my parents.

‍It was not a complex sentence. There were no technical terms, no dazzling insight.

It was also the first time I had said it out loud.

The words opened something. I began crying and discovered that beneath the functional adult who is decisive, professional and keeps moving forward, there was a childlike part of me who was desperate for her parents.

‍That first session did not make everything better. In some ways, it initially made the experience worse because what had been contained now had a voice and an identity.

‍But it gave the grief an honest starting point.

Beneath the nightmares, the analysis and the questions was a very simple truth: my inner child desperately missed her mother and father.

‍ “Is What You Are Doing Helpful and Useful?”

‍ Another pivotal moment occurred at the gym in-between coaching sessions.

I was attending a week-long meta-coaching bootcamp (more precisely a conference to train participants towards the meta-coaching certification held in Bali in April 2026, with Dr. Michael Hall) where I had spent the last few days being coached about my grief. I went to the gym one morning in an attempt to exercise the ‘grief’ out of my body but ended up crying while thinking about my parents. A coach trainer who happened to be there asked me:

Is what you are doing to yourself helpful and useful? How long do you want to stay like that?

‍This is perhaps not a sentence I would recommend printing inside a sympathy card. Outside its context, it can sound blunt or even unkind.

But it was the right question for me at the right time.

One of my highest purposes in life is to be useful and to do things that are useful. The question did not ask whether my parents were worth grieving. It asked whether the way I was interpreting their deaths repeatedly inside my mind was helping me, honouring them or serving any valuable purpose.

‍For the first time, I distinguished between feeling pain and doing something to myself with the pain.

I could not choose whether my parents had died. I could not prevent sadness from arising. But I could begin examining whether repeatedly intensifying the despair was useful and how long I wanted to continue relating to their deaths in that way.

‍That question became the hinge I needed.

‍Moving the Giants

‍In the following coaching session, we explored my social panorama—the way my mind internally represented my relationships with other people.

‍When I mentally represented my parents, I saw myself as a small child while my parents appeared as giants.

‍From that position, their deaths meant that a small child had lost the enormous figures responsible for protecting, guiding and orienting her. Naturally, she felt abandoned and was desperate for them to return. She did not yet recognise that the adult version of me had survived, grown, built a family and developed her own resources.

‍During the coaching session, we changed the representation.

I became my present adult self. My parents became human-sized adults rather than giants. We stood on equal footing.

‍This did not make them less important. It did not shrink my love or reduce their place in my life. It changed my position in relation to them.

‍I was no longer a helpless child waiting for her giants to return. I was an adult who had been raised and shaped by her parents and could now stand beside them.

‍That exercise changed my perspective from feeling powerless to feeling empowered.

‍Giving Resources to the Participants of the Conversations Playing Inside my Mind

Another important coaching insight concerned the unhelpful conversations that I kept replaying in my mind.

‍When we represent someone internally, we often reproduce not only the person but also their limitations. I often imagined, and still do, having conversations with my parents. Those with my father were coloured by his illness, defensiveness and eventually lead to conflict. Those with my mother were limited to the final moment where she was slipping away.

Coaching taught me that I could give my internal representations of my parents the resources needed for healthier, more useful conversations.

To be clear, this was not a séance with candles or a Ouija board.

‍This was an internal imaginative process.

I learnt that I could imagine what my parents might say if they instead had greater calmness, perspective, emotional capacity or understanding. I could bring my present adult resources into the conversation rather than appearing only as the frightened and frustrated daughter I had once been.

The process did not alter history. It changed the relationship I continued to carry.

Running After the WHYs

‍Another important intervention began when I said that I needed to speak with my dead parents because there were so many things for which I did not have answers.

‍The coach asked something to the effect of:

‍So what if you never have the answers? ‍I paused and said:

‍ Then I know there is no answer.

‍The coach gave me that approving look coaches sometimes give when you have finally arrived at the insight they have been patiently hinting at for the last ten minutes.

I took the question away with me and continued reflecting on it. Eventually, I realised that I did not need to understand every reason before I could live peacefully. I can move on knowing there is no answer.

‍Chasing the WHYs had become another way of torturing myself.

‍I then began moving from WHY questions to HOW questions.

No more: Why did this happen? Why did my mom not go to a doctor? Why is my father unable to see he is unwell?

Instead: How do I live with what happened? How do I carry what mattered? How do I relate to my parents now?

Knowing that there might never be a complete answer was not another loss. It became permission to stop searching and move on.

What the Conversations Changed

Taken together, these coaching conversations did several things.

They gave me permission to say that I missed my parents. They exposed the small child who was still looking up at them as giants. They used my value of usefulness to restore choice. They taught me to add resources the internal conversations I could still have. And they showed me that peace did not require every WHY to be answered.

The conversations did not erase the seven emotions inside my grief. They changed the meanings I gave them and the responses available to me.

In Part Four, I return to each of those seven areas to show the reframes that allowed me to move forward without leaving my parents behind.

‍ ‍