Grief Coaching
Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing
Grief, Childhood Trauma, the Eleventh ACE, Burnout, and Re-Collection: A Visionary Healing Through the Four Doors of The Map Room
Grief Coaching: This Page is All About My Grief Coaching and Also My New Book:
'Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing' is available today as a 407-page illustrated PDF ebook:
View the book and buy the first edition for £15.
What Do We Grieve When Someone Dies?
Are you suffering or do you know someone who is? Then please read on...
Today I’m publishing Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing.
On the cover of my new book, an elderly woman holds open a car door. Her late husband’s belongings are on the passenger seat. There are toys in the back. A little girl has one hand on the wheel and one foot on the ground.
The girl is the woman’s own inner child. What matters to me about the picture is who takes that step. The woman opens the door. The girl decides when she is ready to come out.
I came to this book through the deaths of my stepfather of thirty years, my father, and then my mother. The word acceptance can sound like a particularly cruel demand when you miss someone. One of the sentences I wrote for the woman on the cover came closer to what I meant: ‘My husband died, but I’m going to be OK.’ She can say that and still want him beside her. She can have a good afternoon and miss him all over again on the way home.
There is another grief in the picture. It took me longer to see it because I was looking at the empty passenger seat. Then I looked at the toys. What happens when a child spends the years in which she might have played learning how to keep everyone else all right? Who gets to mourn the life she might have lived? I call this the second grief. Sometimes a bereavement brings it within reach for the first time.
I follow that question through the Four Doors of 'The Map Room'. Through Development, I ask what a child learns when affection feels most certain on the days she does well. Through the Human Condition, I ask what becomes of that bargain when someone she loves dies and there is nothing she can do well enough to bring them back. Through Burnout, I recognise a figure familiar to me from my years as a surgeon: the professional everyone trusts to carry on. Through Re-Collection, I return to the girl. What might she choose to do with an afternoon that belongs to her?
The book brings my own experiential journey into conversation with deep, trans-paradigmatic research across bereavement studies, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, metaphysics and the contemplative traditions. One question runs through it all. When I surrender the effort to change what has already happened, what am I free to do now?
That moment is what I call the Pivot. Agency returns in an ordinary gesture. The woman can open the door. She can also give the girl time. Some of the tenderness her husband gave her is alive in the way she waits. She still loves him, and somebody else can feel the warmth of having been loved by him. That is what I mean by BEing love. It is the ‘little sun’ in this book, and the sense in which the Will to Love radiates healing.
Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing is available today as a 407-page illustrated PDF ebook:
View the book and buy the first edition for £15.
Let's Dive In Deeper Into The Book
Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing: My New Book Is Published Today
Today, Three Words Became a Book
Today, 11 November 2026, my new book is published. It is called Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing, and its subtitle names the country it walks through: Grief, Childhood Trauma, the Eleventh ACE, Burnout, and Re-Collection: A Visionary Healing Through the Four Doors of The Map Room.
Grief Is Acceptance and ‘The Will to Love’ Radiates Healing is available today as a 407-page illustrated PDF ebook:
View the book and buy the first edition for £15.
I have recorded an audio version of this announcement and made a film to go with it, and you will find both on my webpage below. But I wanted to write it down as well, slowly, because a book about grief deserves to be introduced at the pace of grief, which is the pace of a person walking, not the pace of a person selling.
It began as three words scribbled at the end of a coaching session: "Grief is acceptance." I wrote them down because they arrived with the feeling I have learned to trust more than any argument, the felt signature of Truth, which in my grammar is love, joy, peace, and alignment. Truth is a feeling, and those are how it feels. Then the three words refused to stay small. They became a report, and the report asked whether grief and acceptance might be two names for one movement of the soul. And then the report became a book, because the question would not stay at the graveside. It kept walking, back through the whole of a human life, and it kept asking the same thing in a larger voice: if grief is acceptance, then what exactly have most of us been refusing to accept, and for how long?
My answer, which the evidence in the book approaches from one side and the contemplative witnesses approach from the other, is that many of us have been refusing to accept a loss we did not know we had suffered: the loss of an unconditional welcome in childhood, and with it the loss of the life we might have lived if fear had not been driving the car.
That is the whole book in a sentence, and I know it is a strange sentence to put at the top of a publication day. It is not a promise that grief will stop hurting. Grief that has stopped hurting is usually grief that has stopped moving, and the book has a great deal to say about that. It is a proposal about why grief hurts the way it does, about why some people accept a loss almost at once while others are held in it for years, and about what becomes possible, quietly, without heroics, when we stop fighting a reality that has already happened.
I want to say plainly where the book comes from, because it matters more than anything else I will tell you. It comes from my life. I have been a doctor and a surgeon; I learned the discipline of evidence in the operating theatre and again in the long defence of a doctorate; and I have spent many years since then as a coach, sitting with people at the moment their lives stopped making sense to them. I have also known grief and loss in my own life, not only read about them, and I have come through them into a life I did not know was possible. The Map Room is what I built out of that passage: a living sanctuary, an ecosystem of healing and wholeness, of agency and the possibility of action, and of a new life, all of which became possible as a result of what I call the ‘Will to Love’, which I have come to believe is what governs recovery. I built it so that others may come through too.
Everything in the book, the evidence, the witnesses, the research I directed, the sessions with the people I have coached, has been gathered and ordered by someone who has stood where a grieving reader may be standing now. The books are in it because I love them, and because a reader deserves to be able to check what I say. But the map was drawn by walking.
So this is not a press release. It is a letter, from one person who has sat in a stopped car to anyone who is sitting in one now, about a door that was never locked.
Grief Coaching
You Do Not Have to Stop Loving Them in Order to Start Living Again
Someone has died, and the world has not had the decency to stop. Or perhaps nobody has died at all, and you are grieving anyway: for a marriage, a career, a body that used to keep up, or a childhood you have only now realised you spent earning a love you were owed at the start. Either way, you are in the right room.
I offer grief coaching shaped by my new book, Grief Is Acceptance and 'The Will to Love' Radiates Healing, and by a working life spent among other people's losses: as a doctor, then a surgeon, then a doctor of philosophy, then a coach, and, in my own life, as a grieving son. I hold your grief with two hands: one in the soil of the evidence, one in the sky of the vision. You will always know which hand is speaking. You can start in a number of ways:
Begin With a Conversation
Read the Book: First Edition, £15
Enter The Map Room
"Grief is not an interruption of love: it is love continuing to conjugate itself in the absence of its object."
Grief Is Not a Problem to Be Solved
Most help for grief, however kind, carries a quiet agenda: to get you through it, over it, and back to normal, preferably by Tuesday. It hands you a staircase of five stages and a curve that dips and climbs, and it implies that somewhere near the top there is a landing called 'moving on'. I do not think grief is a staircase. I think grief is acceptance in motion.
That needs saying carefully, because 'acceptance' has been used as a cudgel on a great many grieving people. Acceptance is not approval. It is not 'it's OK that my husband died'. It is 'my husband died, and I am going to be OK'. That single rearrangement of the sentence is the whole difference between approving of reality and consenting to it. Acceptance does not require the end of love. It requires a different relationship with what love cannot change.
Here is the distinction at the heart of my work. There is the pain of loss, which is love meeting absence: it is clean, it is honest, and it is yours. And there is the suffering we add on top of it: the argument with what has already happened, the 'if only', the 'it should never have been', the exhausting effort to make the past come out differently. The ego is a barrister who has never once won a case against reality, yet continues to bill by the hour. Grief, rightly met, is the moment the client finally stops paying.
What you want, when you arrive, may be for the pain to stop. What you need may be for the fight to stop. Those are not the same thing, and the second is far kinder. Acceptance is not the end of grief. It is the end of demanding that grief must end before life may continue.
"Death is not the end of the journey. It defines only the moment when a different journey becomes possible..."
The Grief Beneath the Grief
When someone we love dies, we grieve them. And very often, if we are honest and the room is safe enough, we find ourselves grieving something older that has no name, no date and no grave. I call it the 'second grief': the mourning of a childhood lived in adaptation rather than freedom, and of a life that has quietly been driven by fear.
Every child arrives at what I call the 'First Fork in the Road'. Down one road lies authenticity: her own feelings, her own voice, her own gut. Down the other lies attachment: doing whatever it takes to keep the love of the people on whom her survival depends. It is a 'Choiceless Choice', because a child who must choose between being herself and being loved will always choose being loved. Her nervous system will not let her do otherwise. So she becomes good, or clever, or useful, or pleasant, or invisible, and she sets off on what I call the 'Quest for Love': a lifelong attempt to earn, by performance, the unconditional welcome she was owed at the start.
Sometimes this is the work of overt adversity, the ten classic Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) of abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. But very often it is something warmer, and much harder to see. I call it the 'warm face', or the 'Eleventh ACE': the parent who smiles, praises and hugs, but whose warmth rises and falls with the child's performance. Nobody shouts. Nobody is cruel. Mother is simply much warmer than usual when the report card is good, and the child notices, and goes on noticing for the rest of her life, long after mother has stopped watching, long after mother has died. The question underneath is simple and devastating: were you loved, or were you 'loved if'?
The Eleventh ACE is my own term. It is not on any validated questionnaire, and I will never pretend that it is. But the developmental mechanism behind it, which researchers call 'parental conditional regard', has been measured carefully for twenty years, and it is linked with exactly what you would expect: a self-worth that is only ever as good as its last result. The evidence is set out further down this page.
Here is why it matters for grief. If your sense of being all right was quietly hung on another person, then when that person dies you lose two things at once: the person, and the system by which you knew you were all right. You are not only grieving a death. You are grieving the collapse of the scaffolding on which your worth was hung. "Part of me has died" is not melodrama. It is an accurate report. The adult loss pulls the trigger; the childhood wound loaded the gun.
The second grief is so hard to recognise because it has no funeral. There is no date to mark, no grave to visit, no casserole on the doorstep. So it waits. A person whose adult grief has opened a childhood grief is grieving two losses on two timetables, and the second timetable started forty years ago and has never been allowed to run. Most grief support works on the first timetable. I work on both.
"Acceptance is not approval. Acceptance is not the disappearance of grief. It is the end of the additional struggle against the reality of loss."
My Approach: One House, Four Doors
My approach is built around what I call 'The Map Room': a living sanctuary of healing and wholeness that I built out of my own passage through grief, so that others need not make the journey alone. It has four doors, because in all my years as a doctor, a surgeon and a coach I have found that people enter their healing from four directions. Each door is a question.
Door One: Childhood Development and Attachment
How did I become who I am? Was I loved, or 'loved if'?
This is the door of the First Fork, the ten ACEs, the warm face, and the five mortal fears of childhood: "I am not loved", "I am not lovable", "I am not worthy", "I will be abandoned", "I will die". Every one of those fears is a fear of loss, which is to say a fear of grief. Through this door, grief is the mourning of a childhood lived in adaptation, and the death of an attachment figure reopening the oldest wound.
Door Two: The Human Condition
Why do we suffer, and what are we really looking for? What happens to love when what we love is lost?
This is the door of impermanence and mortality: of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages, Francis Weller's gates of grief, and the regrets of the dying that Bronnie Ware heard at the bedside, the first of which was the wish to have lived a life true to oneself rather than the life others expected. Through this door, grief is the price of having loved anything finite, and sometimes the unmasking of a life unlived.
Door Three: Burnout
Why can't I stop? Will I still matter when I can no longer perform?
This is the door of the insecure overachiever, and of workaholism, the one addiction for which the world gives prizes. A great deal of professional burnout is, in the end, grief for an unlived life in a work suit. Through this door, grief is an exhaustion that has finally run out of anaesthetic.
Door Four: Re-Collection as Healing
What becomes possible now? Can I return to myself, love without bargaining, and live without needing to control what love cannot control?
This is the door of acceptance, surrender, 'The Pivot' and 'The Crossing'. 'Re-Collection' means two things at once: remembering who you were before conditioning got to you, and collecting the scattered pieces of the self back into one whole. Through this door, grief becomes agency.
You Do Not Have to Know Which Door Is Yours
A woman comes in through the second door because her husband has died. Within weeks she finds she is also grieving something older: a childhood in which love arrived with a clause, and a marriage, she now sees, built on the same clause. She is grieving the man, and the self she abandoned to keep him, and the self she abandoned long before she met him.
A man comes in through the third door because his body has stopped him. He thinks he has a problem with work. He discovers he has a problem with grief: the work was the anaesthetic, and when it stops, the grief of a boy who was praised for his results and never simply held arrives, years late, all at once.
A young woman comes in through the first door. She scored zero on the ACE questionnaire. She was never hit, never neglected, never left. And yet she cannot rest, cannot fail, cannot be loved without waiting for the love to be withdrawn the moment she disappoints. When she meets the warm face, she begins to grieve for the first time: not a death, but a childhood.
Grief can be entered through any door, and whichever door you come in by, you arrive in the same house and are met at the same hearth. Sooner or later everyone reaches the fourth door, because grief rightly met is Re-Collection: to grieve is to accept a reality that has already happened; to accept it is to stop defending against it; and to stop defending is to let the exiled parts of the self come home.
Between our sessions, The Map Room stays open: a curated journey of films, audio, long-form writing and the research papers on which the whole work rests, organised around the same four doors, so that you can move between reading, listening and watching as your grief allows. Its founding equation is short: Knowledge + Journey = Wisdom. You cannot find wisdom in a library. You can only find the door.
"Acceptance means to accept reality. Surrender means to let go of the ego which is the part of us that refuses to accept reality."
How I Am Changing Grief Coaching
I want to be fair to the field before I depart from it. There are wonderful grief counsellors, therapists and coaches in every tradition, and the best of them already work in the spirit I am about to describe. What follows are tendencies, not caricatures. But they are real tendencies, and grieving people pay for them.
From a Staircase to a River
The familiar picture of grief is a curve: down through denial, anger, bargaining and depression, then up towards acceptance, with a new plan and renewed productivity waiting at the top. Kübler-Ross never drew that management curve, and grief has never once followed it. In my book I have replaced it with the 'River of Grief'. A river bends, circles, deepens, and sometimes floods years after a long calm, and it follows no compulsory sequence. Read this way, the familiar responses become five postures towards reality. Denial is acceptance postponed. Anger is acceptance arguing. Bargaining is acceptance negotiating. Sorrow may be acceptance arriving in the body before the mind has found words for it. And acceptance itself is not feeling all right: it is laying down the argument with what has happened. So when the pain returns on an anniversary, it does not mean you have failed. It means the river is still moving.
From One Grief to Two
Most grief support brackets out your childhood, as though you were born on the day of the death. I do not. Nor do I drag you into it. We go where your grief goes, and if the present loss has opened an older one, we follow it, gently, through whichever door it uses.
From Fixing to Radiating
You cannot fix anyone, and nobody can fix you. To try to fix a grieving person is, beneath any words, to tell them that their present state is unacceptable, which reproduces the very conditional regard that may have wounded them in the first place. It is also, very often, the helper soothing their own discomfort: resistance wearing the uniform of compassion. I do not fix. I stay. The sun does not fix the garden. It shines, and the garden does the rest.
From Surveillance to the Reverse Panopticon
Grieving people hide their grief because they fear being judged: weak, self-indulgent, 'not over it yet'. Jeremy Bentham's panopticon was a prison in which the inmates learned to police themselves because they might always be watched. A conditional childhood installs one inside us, and I call its warden the 'Internal Robespierre'. My sessions are built as its opposite, a 'Reverse Panopticon': a space in which you are fully seen and, being fully seen, are not judged. It is where grief can finally be seen without being sentenced.
From Moving On to Moving Forward
I will never ask you to let go of the person who has died. Love does not fill the empty chair. Love makes it possible for the empty chair to remain. Healthy grief keeps a continuing bond, flexible rather than captive, and lets its expression change. We do not move on from love. We move forward with it.
From Coping to Agency
Much well-meaning help optimises you for a quicker return to the treadmill: a little more resilience, a better routine, a sticking plaster over the architecture that exhausted you in the first place. The conditioned life runs on the sequence HAVE → DO → BE: once I have enough, I can do what matters, and then I will finally be all right. My work restores the order BE → DO → HAVE, so that action follows from who you are rather than from what you fear. Surrender, in this work, is not defeat. It is a change in the source of action. Real surrender is not about being a doormat. It is about becoming the doorway.
From Evidence or Vision to Evidence and Vision
Grief support tends to fall off one of two cliffs. On one side, the clipboard: stages, scales and worksheets, true as far as they go and as cold as a waiting room. On the other, the cloud: beautiful spiritual language that cannot be checked and sometimes cannot be trusted. I refuse both cliffs, and the next section shows how.
“Acceptance is not ‘It’s OK my husband died’, that will never be OK, but ‘My husband died, but I’m going to be OK.’ That single rearrangement of the sentence is the whole difference between approving of reality and consenting to it. Acceptance happens prior to like or dislike. One does not have to like a death to accept that it has happened. Liking is a preference. Acceptance is the acknowledgement of fact that comes before preference has its say.”
Evidence-Based and Visionary: The Earth Hand and the Sky Hand
The governing image of all my work is a hot air balloon. The balloon is vision: the felt sense of a Truth larger than anything yet measured, and the testimony of every contemplative tradition that has looked at suffering and seen love underneath it. The ballast is evidence: the trial, the meta-analysis, the population study, the careful sentence in which a researcher says exactly how much a finding can bear and not a gram more. A balloon without ballast drifts into a field of nonsense. Ballast without a balloon is simply a sandbag.
I learned the 'Earth Hand' in the operating theatre, where a surgeon does not get to be poetic about anatomy: the vessel is where it is, and the patient bleeds if you are wrong. I learned it again in the long discipline of a doctorate, where every sentence has to be defended. I learned the 'Sky Hand' more slowly and more painfully: in burnout and recovery, in grief, in twice-daily prayer and meditation, and in the coaching room, watching human beings remember who they were before conditioning got to them. Held together, the two hands make what I call 'visionary healing': healing that is grounded enough to be safe and free enough to be transformative.
So that you always know which hand is speaking, I grade every important claim on a ladder of five rungs: Established, Supported, Emerging, Hypothesis and Vision. A claim on the lowest rung is not a lesser claim. 'Grief is acceptance' is a vision, and I will defend it as one. But no claim is ever promoted up the ladder by enthusiasm. Here is some of what the work stands on.
"Surrender is not defeat. It is giving up the part of you that cannot accept that reality. Surrender is not passivity. It is a change in the source of action."
The Earth Hand sometimes lags, and it is worth knowing why. Prolonged grief disorder entered the International Classification of Diseases only in 2018, and the American diagnostic manual only in 2022. For decades, people whose grief had frozen were told they were depressed, or weak, or simply not trying. The Sky Hand of every grieving widow already knew what the measurements had not yet named: that something had stopped moving, and that it was not her fault.
I also draw the boundary the other way. Love does not cure cancer, infection or psychiatric illness, and I will never tell you that it does. But secure connection matters for health more than most of us were taught: across 148 studies and more than 300,000 people, stronger social relationships went with about a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival (Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review, Layton, PLoS Medicine, 2010). Love does not cure. It creates the conditions in which a person can heal themselves. That is what I mean by radiate.
“Real surrender is not about being a doormat. It’s about becoming the doorway. What you are surrendering is your inability to handle it. What you are accepting is what came in.”
What Happens in Our Work Together
Each session begins where you are, not where a model says you ought to be. You do not need to know which door you came in by. You do not need to be 'ready'. You need only be willing to stop driving for an hour. What follows are the elements I draw on most in grief, chosen from the twenty-nine tools of 'The Crossing' and from the best of the wider field, and always paced to what you can hold.
Prefigurative Re-Collection
This is my core method. From our first meeting I see the highest and the whole in you, and I hold that vision steadily, without insisting, until you can see it yourself. It does not fix you. It refuses to see you as broken, which is a very different thing. Gabor Maté calls the highest level of compassion 'the compassion of possibility'; this is its daily practice.
Listening as Love
Love and listening, I have come to believe, are the same thing. Buried feeling surfaces when it is truly heard, and it is only when it resurfaces that it finally passes through us. Sometimes the most powerful thing in a session is ten uninterrupted minutes in which nobody tries to make your grief smaller for their own sake. I also teach this to the people around the bereaved, so that they can become what I call a 'little sun': present, warm, and not fixing anything at all.
The Empty Chair, Held in Two Registers
This is one of the oldest techniques in psychotherapy, and one of the few that reaches the adult loss and the childhood wound at once. The chair can hold the person who has died, so that the unsaid, the angry, the grateful and the relieved can finally be spoken. And, when you are ready and steady enough, the same chair can hold the parent whose warm face cooled, so that the child inside the adult can say, perhaps for the first time, what it was like to be loved conditionally, and what she needed instead.
Tracing the Grief to Its Root
Through gentle, compassionate questioning in the spirit of Gabor Maté's work, we trace a present reaction back to the early experience that shaped it, so that the second grief can be found beneath the first and witnessed at last. His central insight is that trauma is not only what happens to us but what happens inside us in the absence of an empathic witness. A grief that is witnessed is a grief that is no longer happening alone.
Answering the Five Mortal Fears
Grief wakes the five fears of childhood, and they speak in a child's voice. They cannot be argued away, because they are not arguments. But they can be answered, gently and repeatedly, by the adult you have become: "I am lovable because I am, not because of what I do; my worth is freehold, not leasehold." The note I give people to keep in a pocket says it more simply: "Dear me, I know you are scared, but you can handle this. Love, me."
The Paradoxical Query
At every fork in a grieving life, I invite one question: "Who would I need to BE to know the answer to the question 'What would love do now?'" It changes not only which road you take, but who is driving when you choose. In grief, the True Self's answer is usually beautifully simple: rest, weep, reach out, go and sit with the parents, love what remains.
The Internal Satnav
A loss is a road closure. Resistance is the driver who keeps steering into the closed road, shouting at the satnav. Acceptance is the moment the driver lets it recalculate. Grief is the recalculating itself. The road has changed. The destination, which has only ever been HOME, has not.
The Pivot
This is the hinge of the whole work: the moment the frightened child who has been driving your life since about the age of seven is offered, at last, the chance to stop. It requires no strength. Nobody seizes the wheel and nobody is thrown out of the car. A door is opened, and the step through it is always, and only, yours. Everything else in this list works better after it, because the tools come after the chooser.
Between Sessions
You leave with handrails rather than homework: a few short sentences for the hardest moments ("This too shall pass", "All is well, and all shall be well", "I can handle anything"), and The Map Room, with its films, audio and research, for the days when grief comes back in waves, as it will.
Practical Details
Session length · 90 mins
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“Authentic Grief ≡ Acceptance in Motion. Radical Acceptance ≡ Grief Completed.”
Who This Is For
You may be here because someone has died: a partner, a parent, a child, a friend. And the grief is not behaving the way you were told it would.
You may be here because the grief is behaving in a way nobody warned you about. You feel relief, or a strange liberation, or nothing at all, and you feel guilty for it. Sometimes a death reveals that the love was more conditional than anyone admitted, and something in you is set free. That is not a crime. Love can remain while obedience ends.
You may be here because a death has opened something much older, and you have begun to suspect that you are grieving your childhood as well as the person.
You may be here because you have burned out, and you are beginning to recognise the exhaustion as grief in a work suit.
You may be the one everyone leans on: the doctor, the lawyer, the leader, the eldest daughter, the person who has never once been allowed to fall apart, and who is quietly terrified of what will happen if you stop.
You may be sitting beside someone who is grieving, and you want to know how to help without fixing.
Or you may simply be tired of hearing that you should be over it by now. You do not have to stop grieving in order to begin living. Nor must you stop loving the person who died in order to discover the life that remains possible.
Why Come to Me
Every map is drawn by someone who was once lost. I did not draw mine from books alone, though it rests on a great many of them.
I first met what I now call 'The Pivot' not in a book but in a hospital car park at two in the morning, in my dark suit, with my hands on the steering wheel and no idea why I could not turn the key. I had climbed every rung that a frightened, gifted child is taught to climb: the examinations, the qualifications, the operating lists, the name on the door. I had just lost my stepfather of thirty years, my real father, and then my mother died too. They all came at once. I had given everything, and I felt desolate and empty. Nothing in the car park changed. The ceiling did. Those four seconds were not the end of my working life. They were the hinge of my life.
So I know grief from three sides. I know it as a medically trained doctor and former surgeon who has stood with families at the worst moments of their lives. I know it as a scholar, with a PhD from UCL and a Master's in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge, who reads the research with a surgeon's suspicion and a philosopher's patience. And I know it as a man who has grieved, and come through into a life I did not know was possible. The book, the 407-page illustrated Grief Is Acceptance and 'The Will to Love' Radiates Healing, and The Map Room are what I built out of that passage, so that others may come through too.
Carl Jung wrote that the doctor is effective only when he himself is affected, and he quoted the ancient saying: "Only the wounded physician heals." The psychoanalyst Alice Miller gave me the companion term I use throughout my work: the 'Enlightened Witness', the person who, by seeing and believing a wounded child's experience, makes healing possible. I try to be both. I am not above you as an expert, nor beneath you as a servant. I sit beside you.
One client, whose story I tell in the book, came back to coaching after the sudden death of a close friend. She told me that this approach had worked where employer-funded coaching had not, and she put the difference down to two things: my own lived journey through burnout and recovery, and my willingness to go beyond conventional boundaries into philosophy, spirituality and honest personal disclosure. By the end of that session she had decided to visit her friend's elderly parents: not to say anything clever, but to listen, to be present, and to radiate love. That is the work, in one afternoon.
I am also humble enough to tell you when I am not the right person, which brings me to the next question.
“The ‘Will to Love’ is not the will to feel better, but the emergence of a different relationship to what cannot be changed. The Will to Love asks a different question: can I remain present to what hurts without making that hurt’s disappearance a condition of my existence? The Will to Love does not abolish the Will. It changes what the Will is for. The Will to Live kept the car moving. The Will to Power taught the child how to drive magnificently, whatever the cost. The Will to Love asks whether the journey might now be undertaken differently, and whether the driver might finally be allowed to rest.”
Is Grief Coaching Right for You?
Grief is not an illness. Most bereaved people adapt without any clinical treatment, and resilience, not prolonged distress, is the commonest response to loss of all. Grief coaching is for the many people whose grief is real, heavy and human, and who want a companion, a framework and a way forward that honours both their love and their life. It is especially suited to those whose grief has opened older questions about who they are and how they learned to love.
Coaching is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for medical, psychological or psychiatric care. Some grief does get stuck: a yearning that stays intense and disabling for many months, a sense that part of you has died, an inability to re-enter your own life. That is prolonged grief disorder, a recognised and treatable condition, and the best-tested treatments for it are delivered by trained clinicians. Because I trained as a doctor, I know the signs. If I think you need more than coaching, I will say so plainly and help you find it, and where it is right for you we can keep working together alongside that care. Love radiates healing, but love is also humble enough to make a referral.
Safety comes first in every session. Some of the deeper work, such as speaking to a childhood figure in the empty chair, needs a steady footing, so I pace it carefully, and we never open an old wound faster than you can hold it. My practical ethic for anyone accompanying a grieving person is one I hold myself to: presence without pressure, curiosity without interrogation, offers without control, and boundaries without abandonment.
If you need help now. If your grief carries thoughts of not wanting to live, or of harming yourself, please do not wait for a coaching session. In the UK you can call NHS 111 and choose the mental health option, call Samaritans free at any time on 116 123, or call 999 if you or anyone else is in immediate danger. Outside the UK, please contact your local emergency services.
Questions People Ask
Do I Have to Talk About My Childhood?
No. We go where your grief goes. For many people the work stays with the person who has died, and that is complete in itself. If an older grief rises, we will notice it together, and you decide whether and when we follow it.
Is This Religious?
No belief is required. I draw on the contemplative witnesses, from Julian of Norwich to Michael Singer, and on philosophy, because they describe the inner life with a precision of their own. But whatever your metaphysics, their teachings do recognisable psychological work, and the language of spirit is always offered, never imposed. You are free to translate it into whatever language is true for you.
How Soon After a Death Can I Come?
Whenever you wish, and you do not have to feel ready. In the early weeks the work is mostly presence: listening, steadiness, and help with getting through the days. Numbness and disbelief are not failures. Kübler-Ross and David Kessler wrote that there is a grace in denial: it lets reality in at a pace a person can bear. The deeper doors will wait for you.
What If I Feel Relieved, or Nothing at All?
You are not a monster, and you are not alone. Relief, numbness and even liberation are common, especially where the love was tangled with control or conditions. Grief is not one feeling. It is the whole weather of a relationship ending, and we can make room for all of it.
I Scored Zero on the ACE Questionnaire. Can Any of This Apply to Me?
Very possibly. The questionnaire measures overt adversity. It does not measure the warm face: the love that smiled more brightly when you performed. Many of the high achievers I work with were never hit, never neglected, never left, and still cannot rest. They were loved, but loved if.
Will You Ask Me to Let Go of Them?
Never. Healthy grief keeps the bond and lets its expression change. You are not leaving them behind. You are bringing your Self forward.
Some People Seem to Accept Loss Almost at Once. Why Can't I?
Some people do. My stepmother accepted her husband's sudden death immediately, and afterwards grew in love and connection. I share that as evidence that the possibility exists, never as a standard by which your grief should be measured; that would be cruel. Your river has its own course, and it will not be hurried by comparison.
How Is This Different From Bereavement Counselling or Therapy?
Coaching does not diagnose or treat. It works with where you are, who you are becoming, and what becomes possible now, and it can sit alongside counselling or therapy rather than replacing them. What makes my coaching unusual is that it holds the evidence and the vision together, works with the childhood beneath the grief as well as the loss itself, and points always towards agency: the moment you become the author of your next act.
Do I Need to Read the Book First?
No. The book is there for those who want the full evidence and the full vision, and The Map Room is there for those who want films, audio and essays. Neither is homework. Many people read the book after we have begun, and find themselves in it.
Can You Help Me Support Someone Else Who Is Grieving?
Yes, and it is some of my favourite work. You cannot fix their grief, but you can become a little sun: go to them rather than waiting for them to come to you, ask how they are feeling, and then listen, for ten uninterrupted minutes if you can. Nothing clever needs to be said. The listening is the love.
The Door Is Open
On the cover of my book, an elderly woman opens the door of an old car. Her late husband's belongings are still on the passenger seat. At the wheel is a little girl, the child the woman once was, with one hand still resting on it. The woman does not tap her on the shoulder, and she does not seize the wheel. There is no accusation in her face and no programme of improvement in her welcome. She simply holds the door open, smiling, palm turned up, and if the child stays where she is, the woman will still be smiling. The woman can open the door. The child chooses when to step through.
That is the whole of my approach in a single picture. I cannot walk through the door for you. Nobody can. But I can open it, and I can wait on the other side without going cool if you take your time.
Grief is the stopping of the car. Acceptance is the opening of the door. The Will to Love is the smile. The step through the door is agency, and it is yours.
The child does not have to drive any more. The door was never locked. Come in.
Begin With a Conversation
Read the Book: First Edition, £15
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