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

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!”