Grief Help you can count on: The Grief Recovery Method®  

Learners get help with grief one step at a time, starting with unlearning the conventional-not-helpful "tips" when it comes to grief and loss.

Learners get help with addressing the things they wished had been said or done differently or better or more. You can learn a method that frees you up from the unresolved grief that weighs you down.

Learners get help with addressing the hopes, dreams and expectations of a future that has little or no chance of happening. This too is unresolved grief that you can learn your way out of.

Grief help that goes where you go. Goodbye unresolved grief. Hello lifelong inner compass that helps grief lighten up throughout a life's journey. Learn the method once, apply and repeat as often as necessary.

Grief Help à la Grief Recovery Method® in Learners’ Words

Grief recovery is a constructive series of actions that allows you to work through the emotional pain of grieving, rather than become stuck in an old frame of mind. It’s a gradual change and letting go of old thought patterns or habits related to our grief. It’s about being able to express what’s in our heart and let go of things that could be holding us back from living our life for today.

To me, understanding the ineffective means by which we were taught (usually by example) how to grieve throughout our lifetime as well as how people around us deal (or don't) with our grief was a major aha moment! Well worth the time and effort. One must be ready to ask oneself real questions and give real answers. This process is thorough, real, and tough.

I think it has made me more comfortable dealing with grief, whether it be mine or others. The sharing in small groups has definitely given me much strength in the « just listen » tool. I now even use it on myself … I just listen to the words I have when expressing grief without judgement or intervention in my train of thought.

Grief help that is simple (not easy) and long-lasting looks like:

Private Training for one to three individuals. Occurs as soon as you like at mutually convenient times. 10 weekly sessions 60-90 minutes each via Zoom.

Group Training for 4 or more people. 8-12 weekly sessions at a mutually convenient time. 2 hrs each via Zoom.

Grief Recovery Method® Graduates have an option to review another relationship giving them grief, with personal guidance and accompaniment.

Learning the method requires the completion of a reading and a writing assignment each week of the course.

About CMA

  • I tend to communities of all kinds. I love to focus on personal growth and development, because being the change we wish to see in the world starts from the inside out / insight out. I’ve facilitated peer-supported learning and collaborative knowledge creation groups for multinational companies, non-profits, and municipalities in three continents.
  • I’m into road trips, hiking and Redwoods (especially when these three mix as I meander along California’s Coast). I appreciate the ancestral and herbal healing ways, dance and movement (Gaga and 5Rhythms! YAY!), books and learning circles (yup! even in my spare time), percussion and other creative/crafty pursuits.
  • I am into learning, unlearning, and relearning to grow into my continuously evolving self. I lead by example. As a certified Grief Recovery Specialist I have applied and continue to apply the method on whatever “new” thing gives me grief.

About Grief Recovery / Recovering from Grief means: 

feeling better

claiming your circumstances instead of your circumstances claiming you and your happiness

finding new meaning for living, without the fear of being hurt again

being able to enjoy fond memories without having them precipitate painful feelings of regret or remorse

acknowledging that it is perfectly all right to feel sad from time to time and to talk about those feelings no matter how those around you react

being able to forgive others when they say or do things that you know are based on their lack of knowledge about grief

Grief Recovery is one day realizing that your ability to talk about the loss you’ve experience is indeed normal and healthy.

The skills of Grief Recovery will heal your heart if it gets broken and in turn allow you to participate 100 percect in all your relationships. 

With the knowledge and freedom brought about by completing losses comes the additional benefit of allowing ourselves to love as totally as possible. 

~ The Grief Recovery Handbook

Nearly everyone knows that the first marriage divorce rate hovers somewhere around 50%. The vast majority of those marriages are to someone other than our first love, which means that we may have dragged some of the unfinished emotional baggage from that relationship into our eventual marriage.

We must grieve and complete our relationships to the person who died, or to the marriage or romance that ended. Until and unless we do that, we are doomed to drag the past into our present and thereby sabotage our future.

~Myths of Grief by the Grief Recovery Institute

 

CMA’s Grief Story 

My life’s journey has given me much grief over the years. 

Loss is a change or an end to familiar patterns. I have changed my home address 27 times across four continents. To me, every loss has a gain (this is an appreciation that took a while to blossom). With every move, I lost my comfort zone and sense of belonging while gaining new friends, adventures, and favorites.

I began what seemed like an endless pattern of losing out on meaningful relationships when I lost my first love, which my parents didn’t approve of. I married someone else (I admit it was a rebellious act). I endured years of abuse (emotional, domestic, and gun violence), “pining fir” (teehee – see what I did there?) freedom from it all if I could make it to graduating with a degree, then… I am lucky that dream came true. 

For years I was none the wiser about grief and loss, thinking that if I said “I’m fine” often enough, it would one day become the truth (it doesn’t work!). I hadn’t grieved my first love. Though I got a divorce, I hadn’t grieved the continuous loss of safety and security that living in violence leaked into my day-to-day. I didn’t process coming to terms with everything I wished had been done differently or better. I stuffed the mass of emotions, big and small, high and low, inside –unless I let them out, they don’t have anywhere to go – and I didn’t know how to let them out and who wanted to hear them. Everyone around me seemed to reinforce the notion of not talking about it as if it had never happened. I thought moving on and counting my blessings for being alive was all the healing I needed.

The thing is, I didn’t realize that that unresolved grief was giving me grief! The Grief Recovery Handbook explains it this way:

“Divorce (or a broken romantic relationship) produces grief. This can become a life-limiting reality that negatively affects future relationships. Incomplete grief over a former [partner] will dictate fearful choices. Incomplete grief will create hypervigilant self-protection from further emotional pain. Sadly, this excess of caution limits the ability to be open, trusting, and loving, dooming the next relationship to failure.” 

I went through an assembly line of failed relationships for a long time. I was dragging my past with me in every relationship I had. I ignored the ever-present loss of trust in myself, others, and life. I felt like I was choosing “the same person” repeatedly, which is why I was failing each time, when  I was “the same person,” failing because I hadn’t processed my unresolved grief.  

While I carried loads of unresolved grief, I did much searching for someone or something to make me feel good and feel better. I categorically ignored the inner calling to see, with open-eyed tenderness, the hurts, shame, and sadness for the things I thought I had missed out on. Instead, I bypassed my emotional pain with things (substances, food, sleep, books, movies, learning and and and …) and replaced my losses with new partners and home addresses and jobs and got busy with a brand-new life hoping for brand new outcomes (again pining fir a bottomless mug of dreams come true FINALLY PLEASE!). I pretended to be strong and resilient, acting as if my world ROCKED and anyone catching my party bus wouldn’t regret the trip (strategy: fake it till you make it). My behaviors were an attempt to ignore the need to face the unresolved and accumulated grief weighing me down because I was afraid that if I opened up to it, I’d suffer even more if I opened my Pandora’s box of stuffed feelings and undelivered communications.

My life was altered in a huge way when my Mom died, and it was then that I chose to learn how to live it full and filled instead of meeting each day as a battle. An opportunity to take The Grief Recovery Method appeared before me, and I took it. I had no idea unresolved grief made my life’s journey a total slog. The course guided me step-by-step to shed some light on what’s happening inside me, see my pains of loss, appreciate how I got through it all, and let the past go. I lightened up from the burdens I’d been unnecessarily carrying, and my reclaimed zest for life brings resilience to meet whatever comes around the bend of my continued (and more pleasurable) life’s journey. My life changed for the way better, so I became certified to share this work with you and yours!

I learned that grief offers us a choice in how to handle it. Grief is an unavoidable integral part of life, a testimony to our innate capacity to love and be a teacher. One can choose to relate to grief as something that accumulates and weighs you down, often making you feel tired, alone, never satisfied, and isolated. One can also choose to relate to grief as a path that leads to an appreciation of the great fullness of your life’s experience (the good, bad, and ugly of it all), which enables you to cherish the memories that lift you and carry you through life’s continued challenges, which will indubitably contain [un]/predictable and [in]/evitable loss right through to the end of the road.  This second choice is a chance to “in lighten up from the insight out,” and that’s when “good grief rocks”; I can teach you how to make that choice via The Grief Recovery Method®.

I teach the Grief Recovery Method to individuals and groups both online (so you can be based anywhere!) and in and around Santa Cruz County, California.

CMA as Guide, in Learners’ Words 

 

  • “I thought that CMA mastered the approach with ease, empathy, and knowledge. The atmosphere created allowed for comfort and trust in delivering my individual grief experiences.”
  • “CMA did a great job explaining, introducing the concepts, and fielding the questions and ideas raised.” 
  • “Overall, I think this is a fantastic course/process that anyone going through or struggling with any kind of grief should consider. That’s pretty much everyone on the planet! CMA was professional, caring and truly created a safe and comfortable space for us all to learn, share, and grow.” 
  • “CMA has a special way of communicating and sharing her knowledge. Everything was done with so much respect, love and truth!”

About You, Potential Life Skill Learner of The Grief Recovery Method®

You are wanting to move beyond the discomfort of hanging on to your significant emotional losses and are ready and /or willing to take action.

Taking the actions that lead to recovery will require your attention, open-mindedness, willingness, and courage - and you are good to go with this.

You are curious to work with a well-defined evidence-based process, from beginning to end.

You realize your efforts and commitment relate to the results you’ll gain.

You know that although change may not be easy, it is definitely worth the effort.

“Even when our very core is hollowed out and charred from a significant emotional loss, the Redwood teaches us we can still reach to the stars and be as vital as ever.”

~CMA