This is my sixth piece in a series of articles for Coaching at Work Magazine.
Trigger warning: This article references suicide, grief and loss
Grief is often described as transformative. The notion appears in memoirs, TED talks, therapy conversations and condolence cards. Loss, we are told, reshapes us. It will deepen us, clarifying what matters.
Sometimes that is true. Grief can re-order priorities, strip away illusion and open new ways of seeing and living. But there is a shadow side to this narrative. When transformation leaves no spaciousness for being with grief as it is, it can feel oppressive. What starts as possibility can harden into expectation: that suffering should lead somewhere meaningful, that pain should yield insight, that loss should, in time, bear gifts.
When living with deep grief, such expectation – whether one’s own or that of others – is rarely benign. Many people recognise the pressure: the implicit message that something should be learned, that growth will follow, that eventually it will all ‘make sense’. Sometimes the suggestion goes further – that the gifts of transformation might somehow make the loss ‘worth it’.
We even have the term post-traumatic growth. In research literature, it describes growth that can emerge after core assumptions about safety, fairness, or identity have been shattered. It is not a prescription. Yet culturally, the phrase can harden into expectation, as if growth were the natural endpoint of trauma.
These ideas may arise from a heartfelt wish to believe devastation is not meaningless, but they place another burden on those already carrying too much.
Grief does not unfold on a schedule, nor does it follow a single trajectory. Some people find ways to adapt. Others remain caught in fear, particularly after a sudden or violent loss. That range alone should caution us against universal stories of transformation. Some losses are so shattering that they cannot be resolved into clarity or strength. When transformation becomes the dominant narrative, grief that does not integrate or yield brilliant insights can begin to feel like failure – another loss layered on top of the first.
I know this not only professionally, but personally.
My daughter Julia did not transform through her suffering. She took her life at 15, two years after her father’s death. I have seen the same outcome in widows decades older than her, choosing to take their lives, or failing to come back to society. All people who were well-loved and resourced, yet who found their pain unbearable. There was no arc of redemption waiting. No growth that emerged over time. Simply painful loss.
This reality sits uneasily alongside the ‘promise’ that grief will make us better versions of ourselves.
The tension is particularly visible in leadership cultures shaped by progress and development. Coaching conversations often orient towards insight and forward movement. When grief enters the room, those questions can feel misplaced. Asked too soon, they bypass lived experience. They may reflect the coach’s discomfort more than the client’s needs.
Over time, life may reorganise around a loved one’s absence. That does not mean the absence loses force. When further losses arrive, earlier ones do not stay settled. They resurface, shift, press against one another. Grief changes grief.
I am living this now. The recent death of my eldest brother James, by suicide, has shaken what I assumed was steadier ground after many years of what I call ‘good grief work’. His death does not sit neatly alongside earlier losses. It unsettles them. It reminds me how fragile any sense of integration can be.
The appeal of transformation relies on a before-and-after story. It suggests arrival and completion. The Hero’s Journey comes to mind. Yet most people living with significant loss know there is no final state of resolution. There is continuation, adaptation, survival, exhaustion and sometimes beauty. Insight may come, but it is partial. The self is altered, sometimes profoundly, but not necessarily improved. Trauma and sudden loss can shatter our assumptions about safety and identity. Any rebuilding is not a return to what was, but an attempt to construct something that can hold what has happened.
Framed as a pathway to becoming ‘better’, grief is distorted. Loss is not a leadership development opportunity to refine into purpose or outcomes. Treated as such, it risks becoming about performance, where lived pain is sidelined in service of a redeeming narrative.
This is not an argument against finding meaning. Many people do find meaning over time, and it can sustain them. The difficulty arises when meaning is positioned as destination rather than possibility. When meaning is expected, grief becomes instrumentalised – there is something to deliver on it.
Where growth does emerge, it is not forged in isolation. It is scaffolded by safety, by at least one steady relationship, by spaces where fear can settle. Growth, when it happens, is relational before it is competency.
Some people do describe changes they experience as growth. They may feel more discerning, more attuned to what matters. Growth can co-exist with ongoing distress, but it does not cancel pain or imply gratitude. Most would still choose to have their person back.
A different frame may serve us better: regeneration.
Regeneration does not promise improvement. It recognises that life continues even when damaged, that systems adapt around what has been lost, and that renewal is uneven and incomplete. In ecological terms, regeneration includes decay. Applied to grief, it acknowledges that some losses permanently alter the terrain.
Regeneration shifts focus from outcome to capacity – from what grief yields to how life carries on in its presence. It makes room for adjustment rather than resolution, evolution rather than achievement. Something can be broken and still belong within a living system.
For coaches and leaders, this reframing asks us to notice when we reach for stories of growth because we are uncomfortable with what cannot be fixed. It invites us to consider whether our questions open up space or steer pain towards coherence too quickly. It challenges the assumption that something ‘good’ must emerge from suffering.
Grief-wise coaching lies less in extracting lessons and more in staying present when there is nothing to extract. Allowing grief to remain messy and unresolved, and still worthy of attention.
Grief changes us. How could it not? It may widen compassion or re-order priorities. But not always. Sometimes it just hurts, always and forever, without evolving into growth. Both realities deserve respect. If we release grief from the obligation to transform, what becomes possible is not transcendence but honesty. Not an upgraded self, but a more authentic one.
This may not be an uplifting message. It is, however, faithful to grief as it is lived, to leadership as it is practised, and to those who carry losses that will never redeem themselves.
About the author
- Emma Pearson is an executive and systemic team coach, OD consultant, and business psychologist. She supports leaders and teams in navigating complexity, strengthening connections, and fostering cultures where both people and organisations can thrive. Loss has shaped her as much as her work. In the space of a few years, she lost one of her best friends, her youngest brother, her husband, her teenage daughter and, recently, her oldest brother. That depth of grief has sharpened her awareness of life’s impermanence, the urgency of living fully, and the kind of leadership we need in these times – one that is courageous, deeply human, and awake to what truly matters.
