Unleashing Anger in the Coaching Container

Judith and Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1620

How do we masterfully engage with anger during the coaching encounter? How do we encourage clients to tap into the power of their anger while at the same time holding a safe container for the work...and the unknown?

How do we help our clients navigate the rage and frustration that can feel so consuming when they allow themselves to unleash it? What are our own feelings and fears about anger and rage that color our work with clients who are in the throes of it?

Its about the container. The proper coaching container helps the client attune to the rage, gather the rage, and express it. As the coach, your job is to hold the space in an incredibly powerful way. More so than a layperson, you must get this right. You must wait. You must be silent. You must not rush to fix or hush or soothe or placate or calm or mollify.

Your job here as coach and guide and facilitator is to stand toe-to-toe with your client and powerfully, with all your might--hold the space open, contained, and safe. You must allow plenty of space for your client to expand (open). You must keep strong boundaries around the space to keep out what is not needed and in what is (contained). You must know how to slay the dragons if they try to get in or out (safe).

In the Authentic Wholeness Coach Training Program, I teach coaches the powerful skills and techniques related to holding the space. As well as what to do when the need for holding space has passed. When the time for holding space has ended (and insure that it truly has), you must acknowledge the pain that lies beneath the client's anger. You must sit with the pain for a good while. You must, within the coaching container, feel the sorrow and the grief and the loss and help your client connect to those feelings in the body. You must raise your client's awareness about where the pain lives in the body. You must guide your client to integrate the learning through active processes that help to externalize the feelings.

Song, from Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, 1971

You’re wondering if I’m lonely: OK then, yes, I’m lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns’ first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning