Carrie Riley, LMT, LMSW

My Experience

The Grief Recovery Method taught me more about grief and the many ways it shows up. It helped me move beyond avoidance strategies that were not helpful. I felt stuck when I started, and I feel lighter now that I've completed my sessions. I focused on the death of a parent, and there are other losses I may work through in the future. I would advise anyone who is drawn to this work to explore it. It's okay if you have not recently experienced a death or feel like you "should be over" whatever you're grieving. It's okay to ask for support and there are lots of resources and great people in the GRM community to help you.

My Experience

This kept me focused on my own healing because of the weekly time commitment. Though I also use therapy, I appreciated this method's structure kept me on task to move forward vs. deviate into other areas. I like having the book and process so I can use it for other losses.

My Experience

I would rate the program as an excellent program but my experience wasn't typical and, therefore, I don't think my response can be used as a metric. While no one's grief is "typical", my situation involves a lot of abuse, both from my mother and my husband who was a clinical, covert narcissist who led a double life. I did not find this out until after he died, nor the extent to which he harmed and manipulated my children and used them to perpetuate his abuse of me and to triangulate them and me with various other people. I have done extensive therapy and grief work both on this aspect of that relationship as well as his death and loss and the betrayals. Now I work to reconcile the loss of the family I thought had. In coming to the Grief Recovery Method, I found there was a lot of unprocessed grief for my mother's death that was a precursor to my husband's and definitely a relationship between her abuse of me and my being a partner with a narcissist. It was like dealing with the Great Oz behind the curtain. And while I have also done decades of family of origin work in therapy, it was therapeutic to codify my feelings and memories of my mother according to the Grief Recovery Method and actually classify what I was willing to forgive and what I wasn't at this time. I also found that sorting through and classifying Significant Emotional Events and addressing them was helpful and brought clarity. Also, sorting through the whole mess according to a timeline was clarifying; I think it showed where things got worse or where my memories are most dense and it begs the question why---or maybe not. Maybe it's not important at all and that's the point of the whole exercise. Just grieve, acknowledge, complete, move on with life. All in all, it is an excellent program, I just am not the typical person/griever.

My Experience

I never felt comfortable or safe talking about my grief before this class. Carrie and my entire group made me feel very safe when I shared, and being able to share some of my thoughts and my experiences and feelings are a huge part of why this class really works. Other people in my class talked about feeling the same way. We all felt nervous at first but her class took the worry away and made you feel safe and comfortable. She says that when you feel heard you can heal and it is very true.

My Experience

I tend to think a lot while also needing structure and this was a great platform to organize the swirling thoughts and emotions. I was also guided with kindness and love by my facilitator which made a world of difference in motivating me to completer the process. I have to admit, I had been avoiding a lot of the feelings that were brought up but the way my facilitator guided me and supported me kept me trudging through, I also very much appreciated having an anonymous ear to listen to my words I wrote down. Getting them out vs just writing them down over and over in a journal helped a millions. I was also happy to be a heart with ears for others.