Episode 19: When Emotion Shows Up in a Cycle Coaching Session
In this solo episode, Claire opens up an important and often under-discussed conversation about what it really means to hold emotional depth in cycle coaching spaces. She explores the nuanced space between coaching and therapy, and offers a grounded, honest perspective on how to meet emotion when it arises in sessions—without rushing to fix, shift, or move away from it.
Claire shares why emotional intensity is not something going wrong in a session, but often a sign that something is going very right. As clients begin to connect more deeply with their bodies, their cycles, and their lived experiences, emotions like grief, anger, shame, or tenderness can naturally surface. Rather than seeing this as a disruption, Claire invites coaches to understand it as a deepening of the work.
At the heart of this episode is a simple yet powerful framework to support practitioners in these moments. Claire introduces four embodied anchors—hold, attune, name, and gut—which offer a way to stay present, grounded, and responsive when emotions arise. She explores how to witness without fixing, how to track what’s happening beneath the surface, how to bring gentle language to what is being felt, and how to trust the body as a source of information within the coaching relationship.
If you’ve ever felt unsure about what to do when a client becomes emotional, or noticed the urge to move away from intensity in a session, this episode will offer a steady and reassuring guide. It’s a reminder that you don’t need to have the perfect response—you simply need the capacity to stay.
Click play to learn how to hold emotional depth with more confidence, presence, and trust in your coaching practice.
Resources and Links:
Greer, L. (2025). Coaching in the Grey Space: Exploring Boundaries, Ethics and Complexity when Coaching and Therapy Intersect
Hullinger, A. M. and DiGirolamo, J. A. (2018). Referring a client to therapy: A set of guidelines. The International Coaching Federation (ICF).
Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
Vaughan Smith, J. (2019). Coaching and trauma: From surviving to thriving: Moving beyond the survival self (Coaching in practice series). Routledge.
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Lauren's Website: www.findingjulian.com
Claire :
So as a cycle coach, you're not there to just simply facilitate a conversation.
You are in a relational field with your client. is collaborative. And this means that your nervous system is responding the entire time and that responsiveness, you know, when we're able to really work with it consciously, it can become an instrument, a tool for the coaching.
Claire & Lauren:
Welcome to the Cycle Coach Show Empowering conversations on menstrual cycle coaching. We're your hosts Claire Baker and Lauren Olivia Hughes.
Claire:
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the cycle coach show Claire here today. And I am really glad you're here for this one. Thank you for being here. We are going into territory today that I think matters enormously. And I think this is a topic that does not get talked about enough, with enough nuance and enough honesty in coaching spaces, especially when we're talking about the differences between therapy and coaching and that gray space.
between them. So today let's get into what we're talking about emotional regulation and safety in cycle coaching. What it actually looks like when emotion shows up in a session, what to do with it and maybe more importantly what not to do with it. So let me lay it out for you. Here's what we're going to go today. I want to talk about why I think emotional intensity
is a completely natural and expected part of this work, working with the menstrual cycle and the female body, what it can actually look like in real sessions. And then I'm going to share four anchors, four very practical and embodied anchors that you can come back to whenever emotional depth arises with a client or in a group workshop or circle setting.
Now I've been sitting with this material for a little while. I've actually just recorded a brand new lesson on this in our cycle coach school training. And I think it's one of the most important things that we can get clear on as cycle coaches. It's very alive in me at the moment. So I'm excited to discuss it with you. Let's get going.
So let me start with a question. Has a client ever cried in front of you in a session or maybe in a group workshop, perhaps in a circle that you were holding? And if the answer is yes, then did you feel that immediate urge to do something about it, to fix it for them to move on?
or maybe to give them a hug, reach for a tissue, change the subject, ⁓ maybe to bring in humor or to ask a bright question that lifts the energy back up again and dispels that emotion for them. So that moment, that subtle internal discomfort with staying still inside someone else's emotion, this is what we're talking about and what we're working with today.
So if your answer was yes, ⁓ you have been with someone when they've become, found themselves in an emotional activation or they've started to cry and your answer is yes, you felt that pull to ⁓ move on, then you're not alone. think it's very human and I'm right there with you. But here's the truth, in this work, emotions will arise.
And this is okay. This is not necessarily at all because something has gone wrong, but often because something has actually gone very right.
Cycle coaching invites women into their bodies. That is the whole premise. And so when someone genuinely drops into their body, things surface. Feelings that have been held in the body, memories, patterns, grief, that's been living somewhere. This is not a detour from the work at all. This is actually the work deepening.
And I want to say something here about why this is particularly true in menstrual cycle coaching specifically as opposed to other kinds of coaching.
The cycle isn't just physical. We know this. Our menstrual cycles hold memory and stories. They hold identity, relationship, culture, history. So when someone is talking with you about their body and their cycle, their symptoms, their energy, then often they're also talking about their creativity, their fertility, maybe...
their relationship with their mother or their maternal line. Very quickly, they might start talking about the ways that they've been dismissed or misunderstood, the sense of worth that they've tied to their productivity and their output. All of this is there and often quite quickly, the body becomes this doorway into this woman's story. so emotional depth doesn't arrive as an interruption.
It's not something for us to just have to move through and get on with and get past. Actually, it's a natural consequence of the coaching relationship, the cycle coaching relationship and the conversation that you're already having with this person.
So before I get into the four anchors, I want to speak briefly to something that comes up a lot in the training questions that I get, which is the relationship between coaching and therapy and where that line is now, because I know some of you listening might also feel a kind of anxiety, am I going too far in a session? Am I out of my depth?
Should I be redirecting this or referring this person on? And I think these are really good instincts to have. Discernment matters a lot in this work and in the training, we talk a lot about when to refer somebody on to therapy, what those signs are and what that process is. But I also want to offer a way of holding this emotional depth that is a little more nuanced than just emotions equal.
clinical therapy territory. One of the key distinctions between coaching and therapy is that coaching is not a diagnostic or treatment space. ⁓ Coaching assumes that the client has sufficient internal resources to engage in a collaborative container in reflection, insight and forward movement. Whereas therapy is designed
for more clinical intervention for processing of trauma for diagnosis and treatment. But the reality is humans don't arrive neatly to our sessions divided into coachable or clinical. in fact, emotional life doesn't tend to stay contained in these neat categories. It's not really how it works. So
The goal isn't to avoid emotion in our sessions. There will always be circumstances when actually it is more relevant to refer somebody on to a therapist if you were a coach. But the goal actually, I think as a coach is to have enough grounding and skill that when emotional depth arises in a session that we're not just stabilized by it.
which is exactly what the four anchors are for. Before we get to them, and we will get to them soon, I promise, I want to get really specific about what it is that we're actually talking about. How to look for it, how to know and recognize what it is when it's happening, because it doesn't always announce itself as big, dramatic crying. Sometimes it does, of course, but often it's more subtle.
So you might notice a client's voice break slightly when they're talking about their mother. Maybe a really long pause after you've asked a question about their first period, a silence that's actually longer than comfortable. You get a sense that they're actually maybe withdrawing. It could be a flatness that drops into the conversation or a change in your client's breathing patterns.
definitely be crying. Yes. ⁓ But it could also be when someone goes very quiet. When you ask about their fertility or their early experiences with their body, shame language creeping in as she talks about her weight, about her age, the kind of language that's so normalized. She doesn't even notice that she's using it.
could be grief around the passage of time. Rage is a big one, very common, especially in the premenstrual phase. And it could be rage that actually surprises her or maybe even frightens her a little bit. So here's something that I want you to hold.
Often the body will show you something before the client actually has words for it. So we're not just listening to the story. We're not just listening to the content. We're tracking what is actually happening as the two of you are in presence together. Remember coaching is a collaborative relationship. So we're, we're of course listening to the story and the words that are being said, but there's so much more that we're paying attention to.
think it's time to get into the framework. I think this is where we need to go next. Now, what I've noticed is that when...
Emotional depth of rises in a workshop or a circle or a coaching container. Time does a funny thing. It can suddenly start speeding up or slowing down. And I think that especially when we feel that impulse to move on or to alleviate the discomfort for somebody else, that rescuer archetype shows up. It can be sometimes a little bit difficult to remember what it is that our role is. So I've distilled these anchors into an acronym, hang.
H-A-N-G and you can think of this as hanging with your client while they're experiencing this emotional depth. And I've distilled these for working with emotional intensity in coaching sessions. So H-A-N-G. I think it really captures something about what we're actually doing, which is hanging with our clients rather than rushing away from the discomfort.
So the four anchors are hold, attune, name, and gut. They can work in a linear fashion, but they aren't necessarily linear as in you don't necessarily need to work through them in a sequence, although you can. They're more like four ongoing orientations, qualities that you are cultivating simultaneously throughout a session.
Now some of this is grounded in coaching psychology frameworks and I want to give special mention to Dr. Loretta Grier's work on coaching in the gray space between coaching and therapy. A lot of her ideas have really helped me to ground and understand a lot of what we already teach at Cycle Coach School, but to bring them into practice in a really clear way. So let's take them one at a time.
The first anchor is H for hold. H for hold, Hold the space. Don't fix it. Presence over problem solving. Now your job in these moments is not to make the emotion go away. It is not to resolve what your client is feeling. You are there to witness it.
Now, if we think about the coach and client relationship as a collaborative container, your role then when that emotion arises is really to stay steady while it moves through. So your feet are on the ground, you're breathing, you're staying engaged. You're not absorbing what's coming up. You're not making it about you.
And you're not taking responsibility for trying to resolve it. Now this doesn't mean that we can't have an emotional response ourselves. Often when I'm with a client and they begin to cry, I notice emotion, ⁓ well up in me, you know, in response and that's perfectly okay. think that's really healthy, really natural and human, but I'm not going into that emotion. I'm not making this about me. We're not merging.
with the client's experience. And it's really important to have those boundaries. We're there to bear witness. And this is actually how those boundaries stay intact. We're not trying to redirect the emotion somewhere else. We're not making it about us. We're staying present with it without actually becoming it. And equally, the client is not being shut down. She's not being rushed onto the next thing.
or redirected away from herself, you're simply staying with what is here without needing to change it. It sounds really simple, but it's actually incredibly huge and sometimes can be difficult. I want to offer ⁓ a little pause here for you to have a think and feel into what I'm saying. So if you're somewhere where you were you able to just take a breath and close your eyes.
that feels possible and comfortable. And I want you to think about a time when someone was able to do this for you to just stay with you when you were feeling an emotional depth or emotional activation or a sudden swarm of feelings. Someone was just able to be really present. They weren't trying to fix anything for you. They weren't trying to cheer you up or move you on. They were just there, just bearing witness to where you were.
Can you remember what that felt like in your body?
That is what you are offering your clients when you hold.
Let's move on to the second anchor. The second anchor is A for attune and this is about their state. So if holding is about your presence, your steadiness, then attunement is about their state. We're focusing outward. We're tracking what's actually happening in the session. And again, this is not just the content of what is being said, but the state of the other person saying it.
So you're gently orienting yourself towards your client. What is happening in this person's body, in their nervous system right now? Do you sense more connection, more presence, more engagement, even as that emotion arises, ⁓ that can actually lead to increased connection and presence for them? Or are things starting to speed up a little?
to become more agitated, disconnected, or maybe even shut down. Now there are some signs to look for when you're in a tune and these are signs that can indicate to you whether your client is actually able to continue processing. If they are, you'll often notice that they can easily respond to your questions and reflect back. Their breathing is relatively steady.
There's a sense of contact between the two of you. There's a quality of someone actually being genuinely there with you, even through difficulty. Signs that you might need to slow things down or take a pause will look different. You may notice them moving into overwhelm. So that emotional wave is becoming overwhelming for them and they're no longer able to engage with you.
in the same way. This could be speech patterns changing, perhaps becoming very rapid or going very quiet. There's a kind of disassociative quality to their communication, kind of like a dimming in their presence. So, achievement is the skill of noticing the difference between someone moving through the emotion and someone being completely swept away by it.
So again, here's a small reflection to sit with. I want you to think of a recent conversation, and this could be in your coaching practice or out in your own life, where someone became very emotional. There was an emotional depth that became very present for them. Can you remember what it was that changed and not in what they said, but in how they actually were? Did things slow down? Did they speed up?
Did they become more present and engaged with you or more distant and withdrawn? So that's the attunement muscle. You're already using it. We're using it all the time. It's noticing, it's paying attention. We're just making it more conscious here in this framework.
Okay, moving on, we are going to talk about anchor three, which is name and for name. Now this is about bringing simple human language into the coaching space and this language reflects what is actually happening in the moment between you.
So we've held, we've attuned, and now we're going to name. So I want to be really clear about what naming is and what it isn't. And I think this can also help when we're thinking about the differences between coaching and therapy. So naming is not analysis. It is not diagnosis. It is not interpretation. It is not you as the coach positioning yourself as the authority on your clients in a world.
Right. We know that our clients are the experts in their life. It's closer to gently mirroring what it is that you're observing in very simple language so that your client feels met. We have spoken so much at Cycle Coach School about the importance of affirming our clients of using reflective.
uh, listening practices of ensuring that we're creating spaces where, where women can come and feel heard, seen, listened to when, uh, you know, in most, uh, in most spaces, they may not have had that experience of actually having, especially a health practitioner sit across from them and really listen to what they have to say. Now there's some research here that's worth mentioning. Um, affect labeling.
which is essentially the practice of putting feelings into words, affect labeling, has been shown to reduce the charge of an emotion and to calm the nervous system, even when the labeling isn't precise, right? So putting our feelings into words can really help and support emotional safety and regulation. And it's the act of putting language close enough to the feeling that matters.
We all know how it can feel sometimes when we're feeling an emotion. It's not always so easy to name exactly what's happening for us, especially while we're in it. But having some language that gets close enough to the experience has been shown to really support that emotional regulation. And having an experience named or having it reflected back in words by another person can also help. And this
can help a client to feel less alone in what they're carrying, right? So in practice, what does this actually look and sound like? I'll give you some examples. So naming when an emotion is visibly rising for your client, you could say something like, something's moving in you right now. Or there's a lot coming up here. Hey,
So we're acknowledging, naming. There's a lot here. There's something that's moving.
When something very tender surfaces, somebody shares with you something that could be painful, you get a real sense that this is a vulnerable moment for them that they're sharing with you. We can say something like, that sounds really tender or simply, yeah, there's grief in that.
When a client seems overwhelmed, we could say something like, this feels like a big moment, doesn't it? Or we can just stay with this. So recognizing what is happening for the client. And we don't need, especially if it's an overwhelming emotion, we don't need to move on. We don't even need to go deeper into it or explore it. can just simply stay with this.
When a client minimizes or tries to rush past something, perhaps a big emotion comes up and then they're trying to dust themselves off and brush it away or apologize and move on. We could say something like, Hey, I want to slow down there. Something's just shifted. Or Hey, there was something in that. Can we stay with it?
When you're not sure what the feeling is, which often happens, you could say something like, Hey, I noticed something changed just then. So in this way, you're staying close to what is observable, what you've noticed as you've been holding and attuning. And you're not defining their experience at all. The approach is always curious and collaborative, which is really the heart of coaching. But you are doing something really important.
You're not leaving your client alone in their experience and in cycle coaching, particularly where again, so many clients have had their experience dismissed or minimized both by the medical system, ⁓ and often by the people in their lives, people who might be closest to them. Then this kind of reflection is really, really powerful. So again, I want you to take a moment with this one. I want you to think about a time when
⁓ you were feeling a big emotion when you were feeling something move through you and someone named your experience or validated it in a really simple way. Maybe they told you that what you were feeling made sense. Maybe they closely reflected the emotion that you were carrying without trying to fix it or without analyzing it. They just simply named it. What changed in your body when you felt understood by
this person.
That's what naming makes possible. All right. We're going to move into the fourth anchor and the fourth anchor is gut. And this is about learning to trust your body as a source of information inside the session, inside the coaching relationship. So as a cycle coach, you're not there to just simply facilitate a conversation.
You are in a relational field with your client. is collaborative. And this means that your nervous system is responding the entire time and that responsiveness, you know, when we're able to really work with it consciously, it can become an instrument, a tool for the coaching. So you might have already noticed this in your practice. Sometimes something really lands with you.
something a client says or shares, there's a resonance. ⁓ could be a word or a moment, but just seems to carry a little bit more weight. And this doesn't necessarily mean that you resonate with it on a personal level. You don't need to have had the same experience as someone, but you just get a sense that there's something, there's something, there's something weighty in what they've said. That would be a resonance.
You might notice a contraction or a tightening again, that urge to kind of move away from something ⁓ that's really human and really normal. Sometimes what we want to move away from those actually where something really important lives. So it's worth paying attention to when you feel that contraction in your body. Intuition is a sense that again, something matters and it might not be a thought.
or even fully formed, but you have a feeling that something else is there, an intuitive nudge about something that someone is sharing with you. Energy shifts is another one. So with our bodies, we can often notice changes in pace or in breath or in tone or in presence. Now, you won't always know what these signals mean and that's genuinely okay. Your job actually isn't to interpret them.
or to even arrive at any conclusions about what they mean. In fact, would encourage you to avoid doing that rather it's actually to use them as an invitation. So when you feel like that intuitive sense that there's something more for somebody, something shifted in the conversation, you could say something like, Hey, I noticed something shift just then. Is there anything there for you? Or.
I'm sensing there might be more underneath that. Does that feel true? And so in this way, you're not telling the client what's happening. You're offering them a door and you're letting them decide whether they want to open it or let alone walk through it. We're giving them the agency here. Now discernment is really important with the gut anchor.
Your body is a source of information, but it is not, I repeat, is not the final authority in the session. So sometimes what you notice and what you reflect back to your client is going to land with them. And that's great. That can take you on. Yeah. It can take you on all sorts of paths, but sometimes it won't somebody. Sometimes someone will say to you, no, no, there's nothing else there or no.
No, no, and that's okay. That's actually totally okay. We can all make meaning where there isn't any. We're quite good at that as humans. And we all filter through what we're sensing through our own experiences and our own biases. And so it's really important to remember that. So the practice, the anchor of gut is not to treat your gut instincts as absolute truth. It is to treat them as information.
and to be curious rather than certain. And this is why we offer them as invitations rather than conclusions. the client remains the authority on her own experience and her own knowing. And there's something I found really beautiful about this anchor in the context of cycle coaching specifically. So much of our work is about
reconnecting women to the intelligence of their own bodies. And there's just something I think very powerful about a coach who models that same kind of trust and who demonstrates, Hey, I listen to what my body, ⁓ to what my body knows. And I take it seriously.
So another short reflection for you here, want you to have a think about a recent interaction. Again, it could be in coaching, in your practice or in everyday life where you had a strong internal sense about something. You might not have had any words for it, but a real sense, an intuitive hit you could say. What did you notice in your body? Was it a sort of pull or a tightening or a flutter?
perhaps just a sense of something being off or a sense that there was more there. And if you stayed with it, did it become clearer for you? Did it pass? What did it lead to?
All right. So they are our four anchors, H-A-N-G, hold a tune, name and gut. But I do want to spend a few minutes on something important before we close. Because sometimes, not often, but sometimes what is emerging in a session requires more support.
then coaching alone can provide. And I do think it's important for us to talk about this in this conversation. And I want to say, you know, this is not a failure. This is totally normal and it, it really is discernment. So examples of this might include noticing that you are starting to feel responsible for your client's emotional wellbeing or that you're leaving sessions with them consistently stressed.
Right? That's a sign that this goes beyond this hang framework. It could be a client who is repeatedly stuck in past experiences without any movement or resolution over time. And that's a sign that that may require some clinical intervention, processing with a therapist. Perhaps the client discloses with you.
Um, while they're experiencing this emotional activation or as you explore it more, that they have some really active mental health concerns that have been unaddressed like anxiety or depression, eating disorders, PTSD. So the International Coaching Federation has really great guidance on referral that's worth familiarizing yourself with. It's available on their website and we include it in our training for all of our trainees because it is important to understand.
where our professional parameters lie. ⁓ But I want to offer a reframe here as well, something in addition to this, because in many cases, it's not actually required to simply hand someone off. Often we can actually simply widen the support around our clients so they're not holding everything alone. And we as the coach aren't holding everything.
alone, where also not being asked to hold more than coaching really can. ⁓ I find this is a holistic approach that can work really well. And so some language that you could bring into a session. If you get the sense that your client could do with a widening of their support network is, Hey, what you're sharing, feels really significant. And
I wonder what it might be like to have some additional support alongside our work together. And then you can move into a collaborative conversation around what that could look like. This helps to keep that relational thread intact. ⁓ We're not saying, Hey, this is beyond my scope and I'm going to pass you on to somebody else. It opens the door to more support, which is a great thing without the client experiencing it as
they've been too much or as if we're stepping away. So if you're having that conversation, I recommend choosing a calm and, you know, in private space and time, always living with concern and with care and sharing specific observations around what you've noticed. As always asking open-ended questions and taking the time to really listen fully to what your client is sharing with you and explore how they're
feeling about the idea of additional support, whether this is something they've thought about or already implemented. And of course you can offer relevant resources or referrals where appropriate.
Before I close, I want to leave you with something practical to carry into your sessions.
So after any session that's held a lot of emotional depth, give yourself a few minutes of reflection to sit with these questions.
What can I celebrate about the way I held space for my client in this session?
Did I feel the urge to move away? And why?
What did I do then in that moment and what might I try differently next time?
What was I noticing or tuning to in their body and what was happening in mine? And of course, where am I in my own cycle right now? And if you know where was your client in hers? That last pair of questions really matters, right? We're cycle coaches and we bringing that awareness of where we are in our own menstrual cycles and also where our clients are in theirs is really at the heart of this work.
The phase of the cycle is always a part of the context for both of us.
So let's bring it back to the hang framework just to really anchor it in. We have H for hold, staying present. We're not there to fix. We're witnessing what is unfolding. A for attune. We're noticing what's actually happening for the client and in the space.
Naming, N for name, reflecting what is present in simple human language, getting close to the emotion, not diagnosing, not interpreting, and then gut, G for gut, using our body as information, noticing resonance, noticing intuition or energy shifts, and always staying grounded in our discernment. Remember, we don't have to have
perfect responses to do this well. We don't need to have the exact right words in the exact right moment.
At end of the day, this is really about simply having the capacity to stay. Staying means that we don't collapse, we don't rush in and rescue, and we don't vanish. And Working as a cycle coach means that you are going to sit with complexity, with bodies and stories and cycles and histories and
contradictions and emotions that don't always resolve themselves into neat storylines. And that's okay. That's not what we're here for. Our role is to be with it. Yeah. To be with it with steadiness, with self-awareness and with care. And that is what creates safety. And that is what supports emotional regulation for our clients. And also
for ourselves.
I've really enjoyed sharing these ideas with you and I would love to hear how it lands with you. Please come and leave a comment on social media or send me an email. I always love hearing from you. We will see you next time.
Thank you so much for listening!
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