On Suppression as a Structural Feature of Mainstream Coaching Practice
There is a particular kind of question that circulates widely in coaching training programmes, coaching skills demonstrations, and mentor coaching. It is taught as good practice. It is modelled by trainers. It appears in textbooks. It is rewarded in assessments. And it is, in a psychologically meaningful sense, an invitation to set aside what is real.
The question sounds reasonable. It even sounds compassionate. It moves things forward. It signals to the client that the practitioner is not interested in dwelling, not interested in problem-focus, but instead interested in possibility and direction. The question sounds something like this:
‘I hear that you feel angry in that environment. How would you like to feel instead?‘
Or, more subtly:
‘So when you’re not focused on your manager’s behaviour, what is working well for you?’
These are not the ill-considered fumbling of a novice coach. They are embedded in some of the most widely practised coaching modalities in the world, and they share a common function: they blind the client from what is real. They invite the client toward what is assumed to be better by the coach, or what is more comfortable for the coach, instead of what is real for the client has been adequately acknowledged.
The aphorism ‘the client is creative, resourceful, and whole’ is often employed in defence of this type of questioning. This, however, is a featured myth in coaching culture, here taking the form of a compound logical fallacy.
When ‘the client is creative, resourceful, and whole’ is used as a defence of forward moving questions as opposed to leaning into distressing experience, this is an appeal to common belief (argumentum ad populum), a type of logical fallacy. The aphorism derives its authority not from evidence or reasoned argument, but from its widespread cultural acceptance within coaching circles. It is a heuristic (a mental shortcut, a rule of thumb). Because it is repeated often enough, and by figures of authority on a topic, it acquires the feeling of established truth.
This is compounded by a misuse of heuristic as axiom. The phrase ‘creative, resourceful, and whole’ began as a useful orientation: a client-centred stance, an unstated invitation for the client to embody their own capacities, an implicit reminder not to pathologise or diagnose. These are all key relational principles. As a heuristic, it has genuine value. But it has since been reified: treated as a self-evident axiom that requires no interrogation and admits no exception. Even worse, in coach training the axiom does the heavy lifting, absolving the trainer of responsibility to think or explain their thinking, and dissuading the trainee from challenging ‘law’.
To question whether a particular client, in a particular moment, might not yet be resourceful, who might in fact be depleted, dissociated, or overwhelmed, is to risk being heard as violating a professional creed rather than making a professional and ethical observation.
The result is what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a thought-terminating cliché: coaching’s culturally-sanctioned phrase that forecloses inquiry rather than advancing it. It is the master’s tool for ending the trainee’s inquiry, not a principle that does any real explanatory work. It is rhetoric wearing the clothes of principle.
To determine if an argument commits a logical fallacy, the key is to look at how premises support the conclusion. Aphorisms are generally heuristics- rules of thumb, mental shortcuts, or generalised life advice. They represent subjective or limited observations, not universal laws. When someone treats an aphorism as law, they commit an error in reasoning because:
- Lack of evidence: the aphorism replaces verifiable data, statistics, or logical deduction.
- Context-dependence: a heuristic might be useful as a general rule but fails when applied to the nuances of a specific situation or statistical outliers.
- No burden of proof: it unfairly shifts the burden to the listener to disprove a culturally accepted saying, rather than the speaker having to prove their point. This does significant damage in coach training due to anchor bias. (When faced with complex decisions, the brain seeks shortcuts, latching onto the first impression or ‘fact’ encountered and using it as a baseline. Even when the anchor is arbitrary or irrelevant, it heavily influences subsequent thinking).
This is not a matter of technique. It is about the functional impact of popular coaching frameworks. It is about what these questions, and the modalities that generate them, are doing psychologically, both to the client and, in many cases, in collusion with something the client is already doing themselves and which has stimulated them to seek help.
A Spectrum of Not Knowing- and What Coaching Is Most Likely Doing
To understand what mainstream coaching questions are actually doing psychologically, it helps to orient briefly within a spectrum of mechanisms people use unconsciously to manage difficult experiences.
At the most primitive end sits denial. With denial, the threatening experience never registers consciously at all. It is intercepted before awareness has a chance to form. The person is not hiding something they know; they are genuinely unable to see it. A step less extreme is repression, in which the material registers at some level before being excluded from awareness, unconsciously, without deliberate intention. The person cannot access it, but it is operating beneath the surface, influencing behaviour, mood, and relationship in ways they cannot account for. Denied, repressed, and suppressed experiences will always find a way to ‘leak out’, even if the person/client directs their attention towards appropriately pragmatic actions. In a coaching context, where such experiences are not acknowledged and worked with, the client would find reduced or arbitrary meaning in any planned actions, where the ‘pushed down experience’ is not acknowledged and processed, or find it hard or impossible to act on their plans, or find themselves self-sabotaging.
At the more functional end, and this is the territory most directly relevant to coaching, sits suppression. Suppression is conscious and deliberate. The person has felt something, recognised it, and made a choice, however implicit, to set it aside in the current context. Whether suppression is adaptive or problematic is not determined by the act itself, but by what surrounds it. Setting aside a feeling in order to function in an acute situation, and returning to that feeling when conditions allow, can be entirely healthy. Repeatedly setting aside feelings in order to keep moving, without ever returning to them, without exploring what they are signalling or what keeps producing them, is a different matter, and the question of whether it is circumstantial or something the person has, consciously or not, organised their life around, is itself a significant one. Context, pattern, and integration are what matter.
Suppression, unlike denial and repression, involves material that is already in awareness. The client has felt something and named it. They are in contact, at least partially, with their own experience. The coaching question that immediately redirects them away from that named experience, actively discounts it, despite the client signalling its existence and significance to the overall themes being explored.
It is worth a brief acknowledgement that not every such redirection involves the coach consciously registering and setting aside what the client has expressed. Aside from instances where the coach misses this signal, which is a different matter, questions which distract from the client’s experience stem from the coach imposing a template of coaching questions onto the client, or because the coach is uncomfortable to sit with the client’s difficult experiences because of the coach’s undeveloped emotional capacity. This highlights the importance of both adequate training in relational skills in a professional capacity, as well as therapy and ongoing supervision. Whether this is suppression, repression, or something else on the coach’s part is less important than recognising its functional effect: the client’s experience is not acknowledged.
This highlights the contradiction of the aphorisms of believing the client is ‘creative, resourceful, and whole’ and ‘meet the client where they are’. One cannot meet the client where they are by asking questions which avoid their difficult experiences.
Why the Framework Suppresses: Euhemerism and the Sacred Axiom
The question of why this is a feature/bug in coaching culture is a matter of organisational psychology, and specifically of what happens to a field’s capacity for critical thinking when its founding ideas become untouchable.
In transactional analysis (TA), Eric Berne introduced the concept of euhemerism to describe the unconscious psychological process by which a group’s founding or primal leader is elevated to mythological, larger-than-life status. Drawing on his 1963 work The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, Berne observed that the impact of a primal leader is often measured by the degree of their euhemerisation, the mythical qualities attributed to them, typically after their death. The euhemerus, as Berne named this figure, functions as a kind of psychic cement for the group, their legacy providing continuity and lending unquestioned authority to the group’s canon, rules, and traditions.
The TA scholar William F. Cornell has noted the limiting consequences of this process when it takes hold: groups loyal to the idealised euhemerus lose their self-reflective capacity. The canon becomes sacred, which stifles innovation and prevents the group from acknowledging or exploring beyond its own limitations (Cornell, 2026).
Coaching, as a field, is not immune to this dynamic. The founding and extant authority figures of the major coaching modalities have in many cases undergone precisely this process of idealisation. The GROW model, solutions-focused approaches, the client-centred framework with its axiom of creativity, resourcefulness, and wholeness: these have been transmitted not as working hypotheses to be interrogated and revised, but as established doctrine to be defended and delivered. The trainer who teaches them rarely asks what presumptions underlie these doctrines, or under what conditions they do not apply. The trainee who questions them risks being heard, as noted above, as violating professional orthodoxy.
The consequence for the coaching question is structural and systemic. The redirection away from difficult affect is not an accident or an individual failing. It is the predictable output of a training culture that has organised itself around axioms it will not examine, axioms that happen, by their nature, to be oriented away from difficulty, depth, and the relational phenomena that make human experience complex. The framework suppresses not because its designers intended harm, but because to some degree the field has not developed the critical culture required to notice what the framework consistently bypasses. Critical approaches and thinking are misconstrued as misaligned with coaching culturally, despite coaching functioning as a critical tool in its pragmatic exploration of thoughts, beliefs, and alternatives.
What Suppression Does in a Coaching Conversation
Transactional analysis offers a psychological model called discounting: the minimising or ignoring of aspects reality relevant to the solution of a problem. These can be aspects of a situation, of the other person, or of oneself. Discounting happens whenever we unwittingly omit something, maintaining our existing (erroneous) map of the world by filtering out information that does not fit it.
Discounting operates on a spectrum of depth. At its most superficial level, the situation itself is not noticed, the client’s distress is simply not observed. More commonly in coaching settings, the situation is noticed but its significance is set aside: the coach hears the difficulty but treats it as background rather than foreground. At a deeper level still, available solutions are discounted, the possibility that recognising the difficulty and leaning into the subjective experience of it, might itself be generative is not considered. And at the deepest level, the client’s own capacity to work with what is present is discounted, the implicit assumption being that the client cannot afford to feel what they are feeling, and needs to be moved elsewhere. In the case of the latter, it is the coach’s projection of their own lack of capacity to feel uncomfortable experiences.
This last level is particularly significant. When a coach asks ‘How would you like to feel instead?’, the implicit assumption is that the client is not resourced to remain in contact with what they are currently feeling. The client’s present experience is being discounted not merely as insignificant, but as something the client cannot usefully work with. This is, as noted earlier, a direct inversion of the axiom the technique is supposed to embody. A client who is genuinely creative, resourceful, and whole is presumably capable of staying with their emotions or thoughts long enough to understand what it is communicating. Of course, there will be specific scenarios in which this kind of work would be outside the scope of a coach’s professional and ethical scope, in which case it would be obligatory to refer to another professional.
Hay’s Steps to Success model, a reframe of the TA discounting framework, is entirely compatible with coaching as a developmental, as opposed to diagnostic, practice. The model describes a sequence through which a client moves from awareness of what is present in their situation, through recognition of its significance, consideration of what options exist, to the skills and strategies available, and finally to meaningful action. The movement through these steps is not assumed; it is worked through. The client is met where they are, and the work proceeds from there.
The critical implication for coaching is this: a client who has just named a painful experience is not necessarily stuck. They may be, without knowing it, already on the first step. They have brought something into awareness. The coaching question that meets them there, that stays with what has been named, that explores its significance (in relation to the stated outcomes o of the work) rather than redirecting away from it, is not dwelling unproductively. It is doing exactly what coaching describes: building awareness before assuming the client is ready for solutions.
The questions that redirect, ‘What would you like to feel instead?’, and ‘What is working well when you are not focused on this?’, moves the client from step one directly to step three or beyond. It assumes (inherently discounting) the existence has been adequately acknowledged, the significance has been assessed, the options have been considered, and what is needed now is forward motion. This is not meeting the client where they are. It is meeting the coach where the coach is. It reflects the coach’s discount, not the client’s lack of capacity or readiness.
Process-Oriented Modalities and the Architecture of Redirection
The most widely practised coaching modalities in the world are process-oriented. They are structured around frameworks, steps, and questions. Their direction of travel is pre-determined: from problem to goal, from present state to desired state, from difficulty to action. Understanding how each might invite or reinforce suppression is useful in determining pitfalls that coaches can avoid.
Approaches to Coaching Focused on Solutions
Solutions-focused approaches are, of all coaching modalities, perhaps the most explicitly constructed around the positive. The foundational premise is that analysis of problems is less useful than construction of solutions, and that the client’s attention is better directed toward exceptions, moments when the problem is less present, or absent, than toward the problem itself.
The ‘miracle question’, ‘Suppose that tonight, while you slept, a miracle happened and your problem was solved. How would you know? What would be different?’, is a rhetorical structure explicitly designed to transport the client from the present difficulty to an imagined future in which it no longer exists. As an occasional intervention, thoughtfully deployed, it can be genuinely generative. As a routine technique applied without discrimination to whatever a client is experiencing, especially when that comes to emotional experiences, it teaches the client something more troubling: that what they are currently experiencing is to be disavowed, and that the solution comes from suppressing or otherwise ignoring it.
The exceptions-based questioning characteristic of solutions-focused work carries the same implicit message. The question ‘Tell me about a time when this wasn’t a problem’ does not ask what the problem is, how it originated, what it means, or accept that at times problems are an unavoidable aspect of life. It positions the problem as noise, and the exception as signal. The client’s present reality, the thing they came in carrying, is being systematically discounted at the level of significance. It is noticed but immediately reframed as peripheral.
The Implicit Contract Suppression Creates
The impact of these interventions does not remain at the level of the individual question. Over the course of a coaching relationship, they establish a relational field; an implicit agreement about what is permitted, what is welcomed, and what is not.
A client who is consistently redirected away from difficult affect will learn, without being told, that the coaching is not a place where that affect is welcome. They will not necessarily think this consciously. They will begin to curate what they bring. They will arrive at sessions with the edited version of themselves, the version that is working toward goals, identifying strengths, engaging with possibilities. The version that is angry, frightened, lost, or exhausted will remain outside the room.
This is not the client being uncooperative. It is the client being perceptive. They have read the implicit contract and adapted to it.
The practitioner, meanwhile, may experience the work as going well. The client is engaged, productive, forward-focused. Progress is being made. What is not visible is the accumulating cost: that the client is only ever being met in a portion of their experience, and that the portion being systematically excluded is often the portion most in need of attention.
In TA terms, this dynamic can be understood as the coach and client co-creating a relationship in which both parties maintain a surface script that avoids genuine contact. The coaching becomes a performance of development rather than its substance. The client is developing a more polished version of the self they arrived with, rather than being supported to understand and transform the conditions that produced the difficulty in the first place.
The Coach Who Cannot Afford to Feel It Either
The modality critique above accounts for a significant part of the problem. But frameworks do not redirect on their own. A practitioner with sufficient relational capacity and self-awareness can work against the grain of their framework, noticing what the questions are bypassing, staying with what the client has expressed rather than moving it along. The framework creates a current. The practitioner’s own psychological material determines how much they swim against it.
Some practitioners redirect because they were taught to, and have not yet had cause to question it. Others redirect because they personally manage difficult affect by moving through it quickly, by reframing, by finding the positive, by locating the opportunity in the problem. These are not character flaws. They are, in many professional and personal contexts, entirely functional orientations.
The difficulty arises when a practitioner who personally manages difficulty through rapid redirection is sitting with a client who in reality, needs something slower, more spacious, and more willing to stay. In that scenario, the coaching intervention does not merely bypass the client’s experience. It erroneously models, at a relational level, that difficult affect is something to be briefly acknowledged and then superseded. The client learns this not from the words but from the consistent pattern of what happens in the relationship, and they integrate this subsequently.
What is important to note here is that whether the redirection originates in what the coach was taught, or in the coach’s own personal orientation toward difficult affect, or in both, as is frequently the case, the functional effect on the client is the same. The client’s experience is not met. The coach’s own discounting, whatever its origin, becomes the client’s suppression, reinforced and normalised through the medium of professional practice.
What a Relationally-Oriented Approach Can Do Differently
The distinction between process-oriented and relationally-oriented coaching is not only a matter of technique. It is a matter of paradigm. And the paradigm determines what is possible.
A relationally-oriented practitioner does not arrive at the session with a framework that must be completed. The content and direction emerge from what is present, in the client, in the relationship, and in the practitioner’s own experience of being with this particular client in this particular moment. What emerges in the moment-to-moment relationship is understood not as incidental material to be managed, but as primary data about how the client relates to themselves, to others, and to their world.
When a client names anger, or when anger is detectable, whether or not they name it, whether or not they are consciously aware of its full weight, a relationally-oriented practitioner is not looking for somewhere to move it. They are curious about it. What is this anger stimulated by? What is it signalling? How does the client relate to the anger itself, with acceptance, with shame, with the habitual urge to set it aside and keep moving?
This last question is significant. The relationally-oriented practitioner is not merely staying with the content of the client’s experience. They are attending to the client’s relationship with that experience, including the ways in which the client suppresses, redirects, or bypasses their own material. This is not diagnostic work; it is developmental work. It asks not ‘what is wrong with this person?’ but ‘how does this person relate to what is difficult, and what does that pattern cost them?’
The relationally-oriented coach works with the client through genuine awareness of the situation, toward recognition of its significance, before any movement toward solutions is either appropriate or generative. The framework is not driving the session; the client’s actual experience is. As the client’s experience is being genuinely met rather than redirected, the work that emerges has a fundamentally different nature and directional potential.
The Continuum of Capacity and the Question of Referral
Coaching modalities and practitioners exist on a continuum with respect to their capacity to work with what is present when a client brings difficulty into the room. At one end are process-oriented approaches, structurally limited in this capacity, because they were not designed for it. At the other end are relationally-oriented approaches which, by their nature, have the capacity to lean into difficulty, stay with it, and work with what emerges.
This is not a binary. There are practitioners trained in process-oriented frameworks who have done sufficient personal and professional development to be genuinely present with a client’s difficult material, even when their modality does not explicitly account for it. There are relationally-oriented practitioners who, despite their modality’s capacity, lack the personal development to use it.
But the continuum has an edge, and that edge is important.
There is a point at which what is present in a client exceeds the scope of coaching as a discipline, not merely the scope of a particular modality. This is the point at which the difficulty is of sufficient intensity or frequency that it is either disrupting the coaching itself, or manifesting in the client’s life in ways that are potentially destructive. Signs that this threshold may be approaching include: no progress across sessions despite genuine engagement; the client’s presenting difficulties having serious consequences for their relationships, professional functioning, or wellbeing; or the client describing experiences, extreme and dysregulated emotional states, significant withdrawal from life, intrusive material they cannot contain, experiences which are fundamentally different in nature.
At this threshold, the practitioner’s ethical and professional obligation is clear: refer to another professional (i.e., a psychologist). This is not a failure of the coaching, it is the modality’s limitation having been reached. It is the expression of an integrated ethical mindset, a practitioner who knows the scope of their discipline, monitors continuously for when a client’s needs exceed that scope, and acts in the client’s interests rather than in the interests of the coach or anything else.
What is not appropriate is for a practitioner to recognise, consciously or not, that they are out of their depth, and continue regardless. Whether because they lack the training to identify the threshold, because they are reluctant to disrupt the working relationship, or because they have attributed the difficulty to the client’s lack of readiness rather than their own limitation, the effect is the same: the client is left in a coaching relationship that cannot meet their actual need.
Referral to a psychologist does not necessarily end the professional relationship. A coach may continue to work alongside a psychologist in an appropriately boundaried capacity, provided all parties are clear on the distinct scope of each relationship, and the client has given their explicit consent.
The Ethics of Not Noticing
There is a temptation, in a field still establishing its professional identity, to treat the psychologically sophisticated dimensions of practice as optional enhancements, things more analytically minded practitioners explore, but which are not fundamental requirements. This temptation should be resisted.
The client’s experience of being redirected away from what they have named does not require the practitioner’s awareness in order to occur. The implicit contract, the unspoken agreement about what this coaching relationship is for, is established through an emergent pattern, not intention or presumption. The practitioner who does not notice is not therefore neutral. They are participating in a dynamic without awareness, which means they are unable to make choices about how to respond to it.
This is what it means to say that ethics is not a consideration reserved for when something goes wrong. The practitioner doing good work is continuously noticing, continuously reflecting, continuously asking whether what is happening in the room is genuinely serving the client. The practitioner who has deferred this level of attention has already allowed something to accumulate, the cost to the client of being met only in the part of their experience the coaching finds comfortable.
Supervision, genuine, regular, reflective supervision, not a brief check-in on client progress, is indispensable to this level of practice. It is in supervision that a practitioner can reflect on what they have noticed, what they have redirected away from, what their own orientation has brought to the work. It is where the discount that has been operating beneath awareness has the chance to become visible. And it is where the practitioner can develop the capacity to recognise, sit with, and work skillfully with the full range of what clients bring and what is implicitly emerging outside of their conscious awareness, rather than the portion that the modality, and the practitioner, find most manageable.
Closing Thoughts
The questions coaches ask are not neutral. They carry assumptions about what matters, what is worth attending to, and what is best moved past. When those questions are consistently oriented away from what the client has named, away from the painful, the difficult, the unresolved, they do not simply create a less analytical coaching space. They create a coaching space that is structurally organised around suppression: the conscious setting aside of real experience before it has been genuinely met.
The client who brings their anger, their exhaustion, their grief into a coaching relationship, and encounters a practitioner whose framework and questions move those experiences along before they have been adequately explored, will not be transformed by the coaching.
Coaching at its best is a developmental practice. It meets people in their experience, builds genuine awareness of what is present, and supports movement from that awareness toward meaningful change. A relational paradigm and an integrated ethical mindset all point in the same direction: stay with what is real before moving to what is preferred.
The aphorism tells us the client is creative, resourceful, and whole. If that is true, they do not need to be rescued from their own experience. They need a practitioner willing to be in it with them.
References: Berne, E. (1963). The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups. Grove Press. Cornell, W. F. (2026). Eric Berne, Euhemerus: His Transgenerational Heritage for Transactional Analysis and the Tasks Ahead. Transactional Analysis Journal, 56. Hay, J. (2007). Reflective Practice and Supervision for Coaches. Open University Press. Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Norton. McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Puder, D. (2025). Episode 265: Primitive Defense Mechanisms Explained. Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast.
