  Ribet's method provides a strategy for constructing a nontrivial extension of
a $p$-adic Galois representation $\rho_1$ by another such representation
$\rho_2$. Suppose we are working over a local ring. An important assumption
that occurs throughout literature is that the representations $\rho_i$ are
residually distinguishable i.e. are residually non-isomorphic. The main theorem
of this paper is a general version of Ribet's Lemma for $\rm{GL}_2$ where we do
not impose the assumption that the associated characters are residually
distinguished.
