Spiritual Recovery Counseling

A Spiritual Counseling and Mental Health Coaching Ministry Specializing in Grief and Loss

Spiritual Recovery Counseling is a heart focused nonprofit ministry that serves those with significant loss and an are experiencing grief. Help is available for the bereaved who deal with painful thoughts and feelings. The goal is to move past the pain to acceptance and new life. The bereaved also may have companion issues of trauma and addiction that need to be resolved in their grief process in order to move on.

Rev. Michael Joseph Gerace, Ph.D, M. Div., BCMHC, is a professional Chaplain, Spiritual Counselor, and Mental Health Coach who has worked at helping the suffering at four hospitals, two Hospices, a jail and a Behavioral Health Service. He is ordained, denominational endorsed as a Chaplain and holds a seminary Master of Divinity Degree. He has completed four units of Clinical Pastoral Education in certified hospital programs and is Board Certified as a Mental Health Coach through the American Association of Christian Counselors.

Our Areas of Specialty

Grief

Grief is not an illness or mistake but is a natural and sacred response to life’s inevitable losses. Grief is a normal but a confusing cluster of emotions such as guilt, shame, loneliness, anxiety, depression, anger, terror, bewilderment, emptiness, sadness, despair, and helplessness. Grief is also a crucible for transformation. One’s inner relational landscape of thoughts, memories, emotions, and spirituality need to adjust to accommodate and come into harmony with the outside life that no longer holds that which was lost. An emotional road map can used as a guide to navigate the stages of grief as the client moves through the grief process into a new normal life.

Associated Trauma Issues

Trauma can be tied to grief and sudden loss of different kinds. It is the change made in the body-mind-spirit that result from traumatic events or violent episodes. Those suffering from trauma need to first see that nothing is wrong with them, rather something happened to them. Symptoms of trauma and traumatic grief are caused by normal coping mechanisms of the body-mind but they may persist, be uncomfortable, inappropriate and prevent the traumatized from functioning normally. Trauma fragments the body-mind-spirit in order to help us survive. Healing can occur by gently reuniting those fragments through caring human relationships and mindfulness techniques. Although our healing sources are first and foremost spiritual, psychology can be used as an internal map to guide and pinpoint places in our psyche that are out of right relationship and blocked from healing.

Associated Addiction Issues

Substance addiction can be related to grief and is a chronic progressive disease that involves preoccupation with drugs/alcohol despite adverse consequences and continuous periodic impaired control. Substance use can begin as a coping mechanism to deal with unaddressed grief. Unchecked, continued substance use can lead to dependency and addition. Its development and manifestation have genetic, psycho-social and environmental factors. Barriers to treatment involve distortions in thinking and denial. Grief can occur during recovery from addiction as the addict mourns the lost relationship with the substance. Spiritual approaches coupled with meditation and resolution of underlying grief and trauma blocks can lead to healing and resolution.

Why Use Spiritual Recovery Counseling?

  • Relief is available if you are experiencing painful grief from a loss or trauma. The loss may involve a close person (death, divorce), a substance (alcohol, drugs, food), one’s physical health, or a thing (job, finances, place of residence, etc.).

  • We can help you to cognitively and emotionally get “unstuck”, appropriately grieve and eventually accept the loss so that you can move on to new life.

  • This may involve dealing with related issues like trauma and addiction.

  • You can move past painful thoughts and feelings (like denial, shock, anger, numbness, and confusion) that are keeping you stuck and prevent you from moving ahead to a healthy and happier place in life.

  • Our clients receive relief and release from confused thinking, painful feelings and antiquated attachments so that discernment of clear paths forward to new life situations may ensue. They gain the ability to move past confusion and make informed healthy life choices going forward.

  • The process involves compassionate and empathetic listening and heart focused meditative practices. We process thoughts, feelings and behaviors to make new meaning and move into a new future.

Book an appointment

Welcome to Spiritual Recovery Counseling. Our Mission is to Bring God’s healing love to the grieving and those with related issues of trauma and addiction. I would love you to set up some time for us to speak. Please do so by using the appointment scheduler to the right. -Michael

More about Spiritual Recovery Counseling

Our Approach is to Engage Grief as a Spiritual Process

In the Native Lakota tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most awake and most holy. When someone is struck by sudden loss, he or she stands on the threshold of the spirit world. For the Lakota, the prayers of those who grieve are considered especially strong, and it is even proper to ask them for their help. They believe, a grieving person has no layer of protection and nothing left to defend. There is a holy mystery looking out through that person's eyes. For a certain time he or she moves towards the acceptance of the reality of their loss and has stopped clinging to the past or grasping at the future. In the groundless openness of sorrow, there is a wholeness of presence and a deep natural wisdom.

We believe human healing proceeds by recovering a right relationship with a dynamic and ever changing impermanent and spiritually driven universe. Healing is about Spiritual Recovery! Loss, grief and brokenness are inextricable parts of the Universal pattern of order, disorder and reorder. Healing and restoration to right order can be seen in a revelation of new meaning gained through grieving life’s losses through an internal reorganization of one’s thoughts, memories, feelings, emotions, and spirit.

No doubt, psychological principles can point us toward healing by helping us to remove blocks in thinking, feeling and behavior that keep us stuck. For us, the psychological modalities of Carl Rogers, Bowen Family Systems and Internal Family Systems are are valuable resources with this regard. However, spirituality brings us to complete our grief journey to healing by drawing on the “Wisdom Tradition” common to all Major Religions. Therein is the common themes of mercy, compassion, surrender and radical acceptance which access the “Higher Self”, the ultimate source of love, guidance, truth, goodness, and beauty.

Furthermore, we believe that Love can seen as the power of attraction of everything toward everything else, as the Creation moves towards greater wholeness and goodness. Examples of love are the law of gravity; atomic and molecular attractive forces; elector-magnetic fields; human procreation; physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual healing and curing. For our ministry and clients, love is the reordering of brokenness due to loss into a new higher state of wholeness, which affords the individual greater life meaning they had prior to the loss. This is what happens in a healthy and healing grief process.

Partner with Spiritual Recovery Counseling

On-Line Donation Link

https://spiritual-recovery-counseling-llc.myhelcim.com/hosted/?token=ad6e2d8cfafc397666a7a4


Our Mission: Bring God’s healing love to the grieving.

Our Vision: Our core belief is ultimately we cannot handle and heal our deep pain and suffering without spiritual support. Our vision is to build Spiritual Recovery Counseling, a nonprofit ministry devoted to heal the pain of grief and the related maladies of trauma, and addiction by bringing God’s presence, love and transformation to the hurting.

Spiritual Recovery Counseling is a New Mexico nonprofit that does not charge fees for our services. We are a nonprofit ministry not a business. We are dedicated to helping those who are suffering from grief and related issues of trauma and addiction. However, we do have expenses, and request financial support from partners who are led to help us through pledged and direct donations. Whether client or outside donor, we appreciate support that may fall in line with your desire to be a financial part of what we do in a way that is consistent with what you can afford.

Contact Us

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