Is there a place for the expression of pain and negative emotions in your sessions, courses or workshops?

Believe it or not, I’ve heard coaches say that there is little room in coaching for emotion. I almost choke with laughter when I hear that, but I do recognize that some coaches get confused. They were taught that coaching is not therapy, and then they mistakenly equate the arising of pain and negative emotion born of past experiences as a sign of the need for therapy.

In truth, coaching can be highly therapeutic, even if it’s not therapy.

I specialize in a form of transformational coaching called Deep Coaching. One of the coaching practices we work with is to “expand our capacity to be with pain.” The intention of this practice is to enable the coach to hold space for the arising of pain and negative emotion in a coaching conversation without getting triggered by it.

People have a surprising amount of emotional pain within themselves and their energy systems that remains covered up and hidden from view. The pain is there, but it is repressed and denied in order for them to function “normally”; they learn to keep the pain at bay so they can get on with their daily lives. Coaches also take on this mindset—keep the pain or emotions to a minimum so we can “move things forward” (because that’s what coaches do).

However, in transformational work, it is perfectly normal for pain that has been hidden away or denied to bubble up to the surface for attention and releasing. It’s important to understand this: it’s a natural part of human transformation. Emotional or energetic pain is like our personal gravity—if we continue to repress rather than release it, it holds us back from growing into the greater self that is emerging from within.

People who are moving through a transformational period in their lives will naturally express a desire to attend to and heal those aspects of themselves which no longer align to the selfhood emerging within. Although the pain feels dysfunctional (because it’s uncomfortable), it’s not dysfunctional—it is the normal, natural and perfectly functional need to express and attend to unresolved pain. People who come for transformational coaching no longer wish to carry the pain of the past, nor the inauthentic patterns of thought and belief which have long formed their sense of self. But the process of letting it go is rarely, if ever, pain free.

A transformational coach understands this, and leans into it. We explore it and attend to it and learn from it. Not in some Freudian, analytical, ‘figure out who or what is responsible for it’ kind of way, but in a spacious, allowing way. In transformation, pain is going to rise up—that is the perfect functionality of the inner earthquake that transformation is.

And this is why it is necessary to have an expansive capacity to be with pain…so that you are not triggered by it. Here’s how you get triggered:

1. Triggered into thinking, “Oh, this is not coaching, it’s therapy.” You’ll then try to close it down by steering the conversation in an ‘appropriate’ direction.
2. Triggered into seeing it as ‘a problem to be solved.’ You’ll then use intellect-based questions to get the person out of the emotion and into their head.
3. Triggered into your own pain. Notice how the another person’s expression of pain make you feel uncomfortable and out of sorts.

Can you just be with it, allow it, and not be triggered into closing it down or intellectualizing it in some way because it makes you uncomfortable?

Expanding your capacity to be with pain is a vital transformational coaching skill. There is so much more you can do with people to effectively help heal no-longer-serving patterns of thought, behavior and emotion if you are able to hold space for the expression of pain and not be triggered by it. Can you hold space for it? Can you just be with it? It’s not therapy, it’s coaching, and it is highly therapeutic. 

Learning how to expand our capacity to be with pain is a core component of both the Deep Coaching Intensive and Holding Space for Transformation programs.