Pain sucks! I didn’t always know this – and to be honest, sometimes I wasn’t very kind to people who were experiencing pain – the physical kind at least. I’ll admit, I thought they should “toughen up and deal with it.
August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day and August 31st is International Overdose Awareness Day. Anyone who has experienced the grief that comes with the loss of a friend or family member who died and/or suffered from an overdose might wonder why there is just one day in the year that has been earmarked as special, when they live with the memories of these experiences
My journey to the Grief Recovery Method began after the death of my three-year-old son, Eddie Ryan, in September of 2010. At the time, I was a Detective with the Sheriff’s Office; he was shot with my backup gun. Four hours later I would hear the words no parent should ever hear, “I’m sorry, but your son is dead.” This tore my heart to pieces.
The ways in which we build and maintain relationships have changed with the passage of time. That might sound like a simplistic statement, but these changes have been monumental in many ways, not the least of which is that many of our relationships today involve little, if any, physical contact.
One of the most frequent questions we are asked at The Grief Recovery Institute, by those who are professionally involved in therapeutic practice, is whether there are any studies that show that The Grief Recovery Method is effective. In the past, all we could do is talk about the anecdotal stories shared with us by those grievers who