# Working with Life Transitions: Using Metaphorical Cards in Coaching How coaches and therapists can use metaphorical cards to support clients through change — naming where they are in a transition, working with endings, and opening space for what's next. Much of the work coaches and therapists do lives in the space between chapters. A client arrives not because everything has fallen apart, but because something is ending, shifting, or about to begin — a career change, a divorce, an empty nest, a move, a diagnosis, a retirement. They can describe the facts of the change easily enough. What's harder is putting words to the strange in-between they're standing in: no longer who they were, not yet who they're becoming. This is exactly where metaphorical cards earn their place. An image can hold ambiguity that language struggles with, and give a client something to point at when they can't quite explain how they feel. This guide looks at how to use cards through the arc of a transition — and how a deck built specifically for change can make that work more concrete. ## Why Transitions Are So Hard to Talk About Change and transition aren't the same thing. Change is the external event — the new job, the signed papers, the packed boxes. Transition is the internal, slower process of catching up to that change emotionally. It's why someone can get everything they wanted and still feel unmoored. Transitions are also _liminal_: they happen on a threshold, in a space that is neither the old life nor the new one. That in-between is genuinely hard to describe, because our usual language is built for solid ground — for being somewhere, not for crossing. Clients often circle the feeling without landing on it, or default to problem-solving the logistics because the emotional part has no words. Images meet people in precisely that wordless place. Asked to choose a picture for "where you are right now," a client bypasses the tidy explanation and lands on something truer. A half-open door, a bridge in fog, a room with the furniture gone — these give shape to a state that resists sentences. ## A Note on What These Cards Are It's worth being clear, because change-and-threshold imagery can feel loaded: metaphorical cards are not tarot. They carry no fixed meanings, no divination, and no booklet of interpretations. A closed door is not a bad omen and an open one is not a promise. The card is simply a mirror — whatever a client sees in it is coming from them, which is exactly what makes it useful. Your job isn't to interpret the card for them; it's to help them notice what they project onto it. ## Working Across the Arc of a Transition One helpful way to structure transition work is to think in three movements: what is ending, the in-between, and what is beginning. Cards can support each. ### 1\. Naming Where the Client Is Before anything else, help the client locate themselves. Lay out a spread face-up and ask them to choose the card for **where they are right now** in this change. Are they still inside the old room? On the threshold, hand on the doorframe? Halfway down a long corridor? The choice often surfaces something they hadn't admitted — that they've already left, or that they're clinging to a door that's actually closed. Useful prompts: - _What part of this image feels most like your situation?_ - _What's on the other side, as far as you can tell — and how clearly can you see it?_ - _What's keeping you on this side of it?_ ### 2\. Honoring the Ending Transitions involve loss, even the welcome ones. A promotion can mean grieving a team; a longed-for move still leaves a home behind. Clients often skip this part, and it quietly stalls them. Invite the client to pick one card for **what is closing**, and give it room. Let them speak to the image — what they're leaving, what it gave them, what they want to carry forward and what they're ready to set down. This is gentle but not small work. Naming an ending is often what finally frees someone to move. ### 3\. Sitting With the In-Between The neutral zone — the foggy middle — is uncomfortable, and the instinct is to rush through it. Cards can help a client tolerate it rather than flee it. Ask them to choose an image for **the in-between itself**, and explore it without solving it: what it's like to be here, what it might be asking of them, what small thing could make the waiting more bearable. Legitimizing the middle is often a relief in itself. ### 4\. Opening What's Next Only when there's room for it, turn toward the beginning. Have the client choose a card for **what wants to open**. Keep it exploratory rather than prescriptive — this isn't goal-setting, it's letting a felt sense of the next chapter come into view. What draws them toward this image? What would a first, ordinary step in its direction look like? ## A Simple Four-Card Spread for Transitions When you want more structure, this layout works well in a single session: - **Card 1 — What's ending.** The chapter, role, or identity that's closing. - **Card 2 — Where I am now.** The client's honest current position in the crossing. - **Card 3 — What I need for the passage.** A resource, support, or quality to draw on. - **Card 4 — What's opening.** The first shape of what's next. Let the client lay the cards out themselves and speak to each in turn. The relationships _between_ the cards — the distance from ending to beginning, what sits in the middle — often say as much as any single image. ## Going at the Client's Pace Transitions can sit close to grief, identity, and fear, so a light touch matters. Let the client choose which cards to explore and how far to go; a card they'd rather set aside is information, not resistance to push through. Stay with what the image opens, and follow their lead on depth. The goal is to give the transition a shape they can look at — not to force a resolution before they're ready. ## Doing This Work Online Much transition coaching now happens over video, and image work translates well to the screen — often better than people expect, since a shared visual gives two people on a call something to focus on together. With MindTrays, cards can be spread, chosen, and arranged live in the browser, so a remote client can place the images themselves rather than watching you do it. That small act of choosing and moving a card keeps the work active and embodied, even at a distance. ## A Deck Built for the Threshold Any deck can support transition work, but some are made for it. [**Doors & Thresholds**](https://mindtrays.com/decks/mindtrays-doors-thresholds) is a deck of doorways, gates, corridors, and openings — images that give change a visual language, from the heavy door that won't budge to the bright passage just ahead. For coaches and therapists who regularly walk clients from one chapter to the next, it's a natural companion to the work above. [**Explore the Doors & Thresholds deck on MindTrays**](https://mindtrays.com/decks/mindtrays-doors-thresholds) _— MindTrays Team_ --- [View on MindTrays](https://mindtrays.com/blog/working-with-life-transitions)