Since I received my initial training as a Grief Recovery Method® Specialist in 2017 (under the tutelage of the the dynamic coach and instructor Laura Jack ) I have often reflected upon the similarities between the steps we take people through in the Grief Recovery Method® and the path to emotional healing that I see in the christian Bible.
To be clear, the Grief Recovery Method® is intentionally not faith-based; it is not at all a religious program. Specialists are trained never to blend any aspects of any type of spiritual faith or any other healing modality into the Method® for several reasons: first, the Method® is evidence-based and proven to provide relief to grievers, provided it is delivered as intended and retains its integrity as originally taught; second, the desire to do no harm in helping as many grievers as possible in the shortest possible amount of time. In my experience working through grief recovery with hundreds of devoted believers in God and Jesus Christ and the Bible, I have found that many of these good people come to grief recovery having had Scriptures quoted to them out of context and inappropriately by well-meaning family and friends. Many also come with a somewhat skewed lens through which they have viewed God for many years. If we were to try to unpack all those things at the same time as we invite these grief recovery participants to embark on the very difficult task of facing emotional pain that many have prided themselves on avoiding and stuffing away, undoubtedly we would get sidetracked. We very likely would lose the ability we now cherish as Specialists: to confidently affirm to participants, “The action steps in this Method® actually work.” And, as should be obvious, we want the program to be perfectly accessible to people of diverse faiths and backgrounds, and to those with no religious inclinations as well.
My particular vocation as an ordained Christian women’s minister (three decades) and devoted student of the Bible (four decades) allows me to see great similarities between the action steps in the Grief Recovery Method® and the path we see in the Bible to connect to God’s healing. To me, the Method® is an excellent tool for spiritual formation. Believers in the Creator God can be assured that his spiritual laws and principles, though they remain perfectly invisible to the average non-religious grief recovery participant, are the power and wisdom that make this program work.
Following is my take on a comparison between the actions in the Grief Recovery Method® and the path to emotional healing I see in the Scriptures.
I outlined the Biblical path in a talk in Tallinn, Estonia, in September 2023, entitled Grief and Lament.
You can view the entire clip of that event here.
In the Grief Recovery Method®, we learn that the path to emotional healing involves a series of small and correct choices made by the griever, and that grief is the normal and natural response to any significant loss (James and Friedman, The Grief Recovery Handbook). Grief is by far not limited to bereavement. Events like moving house, career change, financial loss, loss of mobility, becoming an empty-nester, the breakup of a romantic relationship, infertility, miscarriage, loss of trust or loss of faith or loss of childhood — and so much more — are all grief events.
The “small and correct choices” or action steps in the Grief Recovery Method® involve, first of all, a commitment to honesty and truth, as participants take time alone to still themselves and dare to reflect upon the history of pain, disappointment, and regret in life to date. Then we zero in on one specific relationship. Again, in silence and personal reflection, we delve into a 360 degree look at that one relationship, reviewing and making notes on paper of all the fond memories, all the good, as well as all the sadness, regret and pain, from the beginning of that relationship up to the present day. After each of these exercises, participants give voice to their personal discoveries, leaving nothing out of what bubbled up out of their hearts during the private time they invested in their personal homework.
Then comes a deep and demanding exercise where participants take personal responsibility for their response and reactions to the events they wrote down on their paper. Again, this is a time of private reflection with direction to “complete” whatever feels incomplete emotionally. This is done by taking responsibility for what we can control — our responses to the pain — by identifying a need to apologise or a need to acknowledge pain caused by the other person, or a need to release resentment and forgive them. We take time to give voice to this exercise as well, which allows even more discoveries to surface. The final action is to synthesize all of this hard personal work into the Grief Recovery Method® Completion Letter®, which is trademarked in the USA in recognition of the fact that, though many other programs may recommend writing a letter or journalling to process painful emotions or trauma, the GRM Completion Letter® is unique, as it is irrevocably connected to the hugely difficult and significant body of personal work done in preparation, before participants engage in the writing of the letter. When participants have given voice to this final Completion Letter — which always ends with, “Goodbye” — we destroy the letter, essentially saying goodbye to all the unfinished business in that relationship, but not to the relationship itself, necessarily.
It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the teaching we do along the way about feelings of guilt, honing our understanding of what it means to take responsibility for our own emotions, and dealing with all the many misconceptions of what forgiveness is. This is all a very important part of the grief recovery journey.
The path that I see in the Scriptures to connect to God’s healing seems remarkable similar, in my mind, to what we do with people in Grief Recovery. If I were to map it out, I would suggest first of all that it is self-evident that emotional healing doesn’t happen on its own or just as a function of time passing – although many of us have heard, I’m sure, that time is what heals. Time is necessary for healing, but without right action, on its own, time merely distances us from the source of the pain and actually reduces our ability to effectively deal with it.
I would say that to heal emotionally, we must be willing to humbly embark on a path of discovery, seeking greater self-awareness. We see in the Bible that growing in self-awareness is a good thing: Matthew 7:4-5; Proverbs 5:6; Ecclesiastes 3:4.
We say in grief recovery that fear is the greatest obstacle to people doing this hard and very necessary personal work. Quite often when my grief recovery clients are contemplating engaging in this process, I hear them express that they are afraid that they might drown in the waves of emotion and become overwhelmed and unable to function. I think of Isaiah 43, especially verse two, where God promises at such times that he will be with us and will support us. I think of Psalm 139 which reassures us that there is no dark place we could ever go where God will not be present; to him, “darkness is as light…”
I hear sometimes a fear that going back into the past, digging up old hurts, might not be pleasing to God. I think of Deuteronomy 4:3; Joshua 22:17, Hosea 9:10 and Psalm 106:28 as proof that God intends for us to remember hard things and, I believe, harvest very important life lessons from these experiences. My own great fear which kept me from processing a lot of pain in my own life was the conviction that if I were to go back there into the past and attempt to face whatever might be left unfinished for me emotionally, I would come up empty and be worse off. I was certain I would find no answers there, no relief — and in fact, without a qualified spiritual coach for this particular journey or an educational tool like the Grief Recovery Method® I remained ignorant and somewhat emotionally impaired for decades. For this fear I think of Psalm 139:11-12.
We call people in Grief Recovery to a commitment to speaking truth. This is a Bible principle as seen in John 8:32, John 4:24, Psalm 44:21 and John 3:19-21.
The practice in Grief Recovery of discovering what we felt “then” or what we feel now with regard to painful events over the course of our lives, assigning emotion words to these events, and giving voice to them, we see in the Bible practices of lament and confession: Matt 26:38; Matt 23:37; Psalm 62:8, James 5:16. Some examples from the psalms are Psalm 4: 1-3; 5:1-3; 13:1-3, and there are many more.
Finally, in Grief Recovery, we “complete” whatever is unfinished in significant relationships and take responsibility for our responses and reactions in the final action of forgiveness: accepting forgiveness toward ourselves (which in Grief Recovery is categorized as an apology) and offering forgiveness to the other person. This has nothing to do with reconciliation, by the way. We speak of forgiveness merely as my letting go of my own resentment. It is not minimising or trivialising an offense. It is something I do, a step I take, an action and not a feeling. It does not depend whatsoever on the other person or their understanding or response. It is personal, for me, by me, and involves no one else. Reconciliation may or may not be desired or possible in certain relationships (Proverbs 22:3) and that concept is outside the framework of Grief Recovery. It is incredibly freeing and empowering to learn that no other human being can “make me” feel anything.
And finally –- the very clear expectation in Grief Recovery, as in the Bible, is that part of life is the expectation that we will have to keep on walking the path, as we see in Scriptures like Matthew 18:21-22 and Isaiah 30:15-21. We understand, as Jesus taught, “In this world you will have trouble.” (John 16:32) Things that cause grief will always continue to be a normal and natural part of every human life. Once we have discovered and walked the path of taking the actions that lead to recovery, it’s important to understand that this is not a “one and done.” We will have to set out again and face some “emotional heavy lifting,” as Richard Rohr refers to it in his book, Falling Upward. Fortunately, we can trust that our efforts are not in vain. When we learn how to put ourselves on the path of healing as God intended, taking actions in harmony with the way we are created to function, the results are dramatic.
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You may be interested in my YouTube playlist, “Grief Recovery for Christian Believers.” You can find short videos there that deal with some of the working principles of emotional healing in the Scriptures.