4. Co-coaching and self-liberation

Dialogue, healing, and the courage to see through another’s eyes

Songs are often dialogues with the emotional side of life.
Cat Stevens’ Father and Son comes to mind — that tender exchange between two generations, where love and misunderstanding live side by side. The son longs for freedom; the father urges caution. Both speak from care, both from fear.

Dialogue is rarely easy — not between father and son, not between lovers or friends, and certainly not between enemies. Yet it is through dialogue that self-coaching becomes something greater: co-coaching — a meeting of inner worlds.

When we speak honestly about our feelings, even when they clash, something sacred happens. My feelings and yours begin to mirror one another; we start to understand what the other sees. This is not always comfortable. It can hurt. Yet it is precisely here, in the discomfort of encounter, that learning begins.

To know yourself is one thing.
To know yourself through another is the beginning of liberation.

The process of self-coaching becomes co-coaching.
It is, among other things, a crucial step toward liberation from an emotional world of hurt.

This act of self-liberation offers an important lesson to all who work with those caught in cycles of extremism or violence. True change cannot be imposed from the outside. No one can be “de-radicalised” by another person. The only one who can achieve that transformation is the individual themselves — or no one at all.

You can accompany the process, but you are not its master. The true coach is always the person in transformation — the one who dares to confront their own motives, to question the beliefs that once justified harm, to rediscover the human face beneath the ideology.

The facilitator, then, stands gently outside the inner process. Their role is that of a benevolent devil’s advocate—someone who adopts the position of those who have suffered from extremism. By doing so, they help the radicalized person see the world through the eyes of another, not to accuse but to awaken empathy.

At the same time, the self-coaching radical—the one seeking to leave extremism behind—also learns to enter this shared space. They confront their own sense of victimhood, perhaps the feeling of being oppressed by an “anti-religious” world, and hold it beside the suffering of those who have been victims of their actions or beliefs.

This comparison reveals something profound:
that victimhood, in extreme contexts, is rarely one-sided.
It is a shared wound, a human condition that traps both sides in cycles of pain and retribution.

When, through self-coaching, we begin to see our own hurt mirrored in another’s eyes, the boundary between me and you softens. The wall begins to dissolve. This is the essence of co-coaching: mutual recognition, shared vulnerability, and the rediscovery of humanity on both sides.

Healing begins when two wounds recognize each other.
And in that recognition, something shifts—the beginning of forgiveness, the spark of freedom.

So ask yourself:
Who is the other in your story?
With whom do you still carry unspoken pain?
What conversation might begin to heal it—not to prove, not to win, but simply to understand?

Each time you dare to see through another’s eyes, you widen the circle of peace.
Each time you listen, you step closer to liberation.

“When we speak honestly about our feelings, even when they clash, something sacred happens. My feelings and yours begin to mirror one another; we start to understand what the other sees. ”