Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
Somewhere in most coaching engagements, the work hits something that isn’t a skills gap, isn’t a strategy problem, and doesn’t respond to accountability. The client keeps not doing a thing they’re fully capable of doing, and the pattern survives every framework applied to it. In HTC terms, the coaching work hits a wound.
What it looks like when coaching work hits a wound
Wounds don’t announce themselves as childhood material. They surface as business problems, performance problems, relationship problems, and they’re usually misread as personality: disorganisation, procrastination, resistance to feedback, “not being ready”.
Two documented examples from my own client work show the shape.
A wellness practitioner came for business coaching. His business ran entirely off his Facebook page, with an individually created PayPal link for each buyer. The goal was foundations: a website, pre-built packages, processes; in his words, putting things in place. In the head-trash phase of the programme, his chaotic workspace surfaced, and behind it a childhood in a chaotic home where nothing was ever put in its place; the only ordered space in his world had been his own bedroom. The wound sat exactly on the capability his business needed: every attempt to plan or structure hit it and bounced off. Once the wound was healed, the blocked capacity returned. Website, packages, a mapped product and services hierarchy, longer programmes: the foundations went in.
A CEO came with visibility challenges. Underneath them sat a glass child background: a sibling who absorbed the family’s attention while she learned to disappear. The visibility work couldn’t land until that earlier material was healed, because the pattern being asked to change was the one her system had built for protection.
The common structure: the wound is invisible until the goal collides with it, and the collision is only readable by someone who understands the goal’s domain. It recurs in every coaching context, because financial coaching, relationship coaching, performance and business coaching all run into the wounds attached to money, intimacy, being seen and being judged.
The limits of referring out
The conventional protocol when wound material appears is to refer the client to a therapist and pause that thread of the coaching. The protocol has a structural weakness: the wound was only findable in context. A therapist working without the business context has no reason to dig where the coach was digging, because the signal (a capable adult repeatedly unable to build a product page, or a leader whose marketing stalls every time it requires being seen) lives in the work, not in the history. Splitting the client between a coach who holds the context and a therapist who holds the healing tools loses the connection between the two, and progress slows on both sides.
There’s also a pace mismatch. A coaching engagement runs in weeks; a referral loop runs in months. By the time the material has been worked through elsewhere, the engagement that surfaced it has often ended.
The capability that closes the gap
HTC’s position is that the practitioner who found the wound is the right person to clear it, provided they have the capability. That capability is what the Absolute Healing training teaches: recognising that the coaching work hits a wound, testing for it, clearing it, and returning to the coaching plan, typically within the same engagement and often within the same session arc.
Two properties of the Absolute Healing Process make this workable inside a coaching container. It doesn’t require the client to retell or relive the story, so the session doesn’t turn into something neither party contracted for. And it’s fast enough that wound work becomes a segment of the engagement rather than a separate undertaking: identify, clear, and get back to the goal. The assumption that wound work is inherently long, delicate and complex is an artefact of the tools that made it so; it isn’t a property of the wounds themselves.
This is not a proposal that coaches become therapists, and it takes nothing from therapy. It’s a narrower claim: the specific wounds that surface inside a coaching engagement, in the domain the coach already understands, are best handled by the person who can see both the wound and the goal it’s blocking, with a method built for exactly that job.
What this means for a coaching practice
When coaching hits a wound, coaches trained in HTC handle the pattern-level material (the fears, conflicts and resistance around goals) with the clearance work, and the wound-level material with Absolute Healing when the clearance work reveals it. The practical effect on an engagement is that the thing which used to stall it for a month becomes a working session, and the client’s capacity to act returns while the original goal is still on the table.
Where to go next
- The Absolute Healing Process
- What coaching training can’t give you
- The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework
- HTC for coaches
- The training pathway
If your coaching work keeps hitting material your training doesn’t cover, book a fit conversation.
About the author
Alexia Leachman trained as a coach before she built any of this, which is why the Head Trash Clearance Method is structurally goal-oriented rather than adapted from a therapeutic tradition. Refined over 16 years and more than 1,000 clearance sessions, it gives coaches an operation for the layer that frameworks cannot reach. Author of four books, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (2M+ downloads), and founder of Ladder of Growth. Her work begins where accountability runs out: clearing what was always going to stop the client.