Call +61 403 600 248

International Coach Academy

Coach Training School

  • Regions
    • USA & Latin America
    • Canada
    • Asia
    • Australia & NZ
    • Europe
    • Africa
    • India
    • Middle East
  • Language
    • English
    • Italiano
    • 课程选择
  • Contact
  • OUR SCHOOL
    • Training Methodology
    • Our Story
    • Faculty
  • PROGRAMS
    • Short Courses (FlipIt)
    • Professional Coach Certification
      • Advanced (150hrs)
      • Professional (125 hrs)
      • Vocational (76 hrs)
    • Bridging Programs (BYO prior training)
  • STUDENT LIFE
    • Study Schedule
    • Classes & Theory
    • ICA Power Tools
    • Labs & Practicum
    • Your Coaching Model
    • Your Coaching Niche
    • Your Coaching Business
    • Student Support
  • COMMUNITY
    • ICA Alumni
    • Graduate Yearbooks
  • RESOURCES
    • FlipIt Framework
    • Certification & Credential Pathways
    • Coaching Models
    • Coaching Power Tools
    • Coaching Research
    • Library
    • ICA Blog
  • Join Login

Articles, Case Studies & Interviews

You are here: Home » COACH PORTFOLIOS » Coaching Models » Coaching Model: Personal Grief Coaching

Coaching Model: Personal Grief Coaching

2013/12/10

A Coaching Model created by Franklin Cook
(Grief Coaching and Recovery Coaching, UNITED STATES)

Personal Grief Coaching is a model for Life Coaching[1] developed by Franklin Cook, a survivor of traumatic loss with 14 years of experience as a peer helper for grief support.[2] Franklin offers one-on-one helping sessions by telephone to people who have experienced the tragic death of a loved one. He works with all kinds of bereaved people but specializes in helping those who have experienced a traumatic death (a death caused by a person, misfortune, catastrophe, or acute affliction, such as suicide, homicide, accidental injury, medical emergency, or natural disaster). The sessions he facilitates are not “counseling” or “treatment,” and he is not a mental health clinician. The Personal Grief Coaching approach to helping traumatically bereaved people is described below, and source documents are cited that further explain the principles on which it is founded:

Personal Grief Coaching was created from the idea that many people who have suffered a traumatic death can benefit from focused one-on-one helping sessions facilitated by a skilled and compassionate caregiver who assists the bereaved person by employing peer support, heartfelt dialogue, and exploration of the unique meaning of the loss for the individual. The straightforward practices applied in this approach to helping people cope with grief are based on principles related to the following:

  • Each person’s uniqueness
  • Compassion
  • Peer support
  • Dialogue
  • Meaning making

An essential, overarching feature of Personal Grief Coaching is the degree to which the interactions between the caregiver and the bereaved person are “customized” according to eachunique person’s experiences, needs, capabilities, and intentions.

The approach is based on the practice of “bearing witness,” which re-quires that caregivers “understand that they themselves are the ‘student’ and the client is the ‘teacher’ about the client’s own experience.”

Because every person is unique and the relationship between the helper and client develops dynamically and naturally through the course of their interactions, each individual garners different benefits from Personal Grief Coaching. Examples include a person being better able to:

  • Deal with life in the face of loss and pain
  • Cope with intense emotions
  • Handle family and social relations
  • Understand what roles the deceased played in his or her life
  • Find meaning in what has happened
  • Define his or her ongoing relationship with the person who died
  • Memorialize the loved one
  • Look toward the future[4]

Compassion is practiced in helping sessions through the caregiver ...

  • genuinely sympathizing with the bereaved person’s situation;
  • empathically embracing the person’s sorrow;
  • identifying with the sense of tragedy inherent in the loss; and
  • being hopeful about the transformation of the person’s suffering.

Peer support “is a system of giving and receiving help founded on ... respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful.”[6] The caregiver engages constructively with the bereaved person by relying on characteristics of peer support that have been proven to be effective, including:

  • Experiential knowledge, which comes from the helper’s own grief journey
  • Trust, which is built through honesty, unselfishness, and reliability
  • Confidentiality, which creates a safe space for the bereaved person to share his or her thoughts and feelings
  • Individual connectedness, which strengthens a person’s social ties and can help decrease stress, increase psychological health, and improve coping behavior
  • Empowerment, which aids “self-efficacy, self-esteem, and the belief that positive personal change can come about through one’s own efforts”

True dialogue is a powerful type of conversation that involves:[10]

  • Listening, which requires that the helper hear the bereaved person com-pletely and whole-heartedly
  • Respecting, which requires that the helper accept the person’s story of his or her experience as entirely valid and authentic
  • Suspending, which requires the helper to be open-minded and nonjudg-mental about the person’s behavior, ideas, feelings, and beliefs (and which “involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a person, with permission for him to have his own feelings and experiences, and to find his own meanings in them”)
  • Voicing, which requires that both the helper and the bereaved person speak in their “own voice” and from their “own authority”
  • Listening, which requires that the helper hear the bereaved person com-pletely and whole-heartedly
  • Respecting, which requires that the helper accept the person’s story of his or her experience as entirely valid and authentic

Meaning making is the process through which a bereaved person recon-structs “a world that again ‘makes sense,’ that restores a semblance of meaning, direction, and interpretability to a life that is forever transformed.”[12] Meanings can be explored when a bereaved person tells his or her story of loss and touches upon the changes in his or her life that are related to the loved one's death, including changes in:

  • Physical surroundings (objects, places, physical health)
  • Relationships with others still living (family, personal, work, social)
  • Places in time (sense of past, present, future) and space (subjective “closeness to” or “distance from” people, events, ideas)
  • Spiritual “grounding” in the world (beliefs, purpose)
  • Relationship with the deceased (love, connection)
  • Identity (who a person is fundamentally, as an individual)

[1] An excellent definition of Life Coaching states, “a life coach’s primary role is to help clients … discover for themselves, through relationship with the coach, what lies uniquely within them-selves” (see bit.ly/coachdefined).
[2] A brief biography for Franklin is available at bit.ly/fcookbio.
[3] Jordan, J.R. (2011). Principles of grief counseling with adult survivors. In J.R. Jordan & J.L. McIntosh (Eds.), Grief after suicide: Understanding the consequences and caring for the survivors (pp. 179–223). New York: Routledge, p. 203.
[4] Adapted from: Ibid., pp. 195–201.
[5] Personal Grief Coaching is a client-centered or person-centered service (an idea first developed in: Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
[6] Mead, S., Hilton, D., & Curtis, L. (2001). Peer support: A theoretical perspective. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 25(2): 134-141. Retrieved from www.mhrecovery.org/var/library/file/18-peersupport.pdf (see p. 6); PubMed entry at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11769979
[7] Experiential knowledge, trust, and confidentiality are among the “key ingredients” of peer sup-port identified in: Money, N., Moore, M., Brown, D., Kasper, K., Roeder, J., Bartone, P., & Bates, M. (2011). Best practices identified for peer support programs: White paper. Arlington, VA: Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.
[8] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2011). Connectedness as a strategic direction for the prevention of suicidal behavior. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/connectednesscdc
[9] Campbell, J., & Leaver, J. (2003). Emerging new practices in organized peer support. Alexan-dria, VA: National Technical Assistance Center for State Mental Health Planning (NTAC) and National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD), p. 14.
[10] This formulation of listening, respecting, suspending, and voicing is adapted from: Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York, NY: Doubleday.
[11] Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 283. [Rogers popularized the term unconditional positive regard to describe this point of view toward a client.]
[12] Neimeyer, R.A. (2006). Lessons of loss: A guide to coping. Memphis, TN: Center for the Study of Loss and Transition, p. 92.
[13] Adapted from: Attig, T. (1996). How we grieve: Relearning the world. New York: Oxford University Press.
[14] Rynearson, E.K. (2001). Retelling violent death. New York: Routledge, p. 10.

Filed Under: Coaching Models Tagged With: franklin cook, grief coach, grief coaching, health, personal grief coaching, recovery coaching USA, transition coach

Search

Categories

International Office

PO Box 3190 Mentone East,
Melbourne AUSTRALIA, 3194ABN: 83 094 039 577

Contact Us Online

Ask Us A Question

Click HERE

Terms

Terms and condition
Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 · International Coach Academy ·

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT