We’ve all heard of “the five stages of grief;” problem is, they’re not based on solid science. Lucy Hone, director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why grieving looks different than what we’ve been taught previously and strategies for finding your way back to hope and normalcy. Her book is “Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss (Finding Strength and Embracing Life After a Loss that Changes Everything).”
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Transcript
Resilient Grieving Podcast full.wav
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] In previous generations, mourning rituals were non-negotiable. Depending on your culture, loved ones might be expected to cover mirrors, cut their hair, wear or avoid certain clothing, or create shrines. Often, there were strict rules around how long mourning was supposed to last and when it was officially over. Today, people grieving the death of a loved one are told to take all the time they need and that anything goes in their time of deep sorrow. From KERA in Dallas. This is think I’m Kris Boyd. That advice is surely motivated by compassion, but it does imply that bereavement is a passive process, that there is nothing that can be done to help people function while they process an enormous loss. Except most grieving people have no choice but to function. They have other people still depending on them. They have work and household responsibilities. That was the story for Lucy Hone. When her 12 year old daughter Abbie was killed in an accident. Hone was as devastated as any parent would be. Her life was forever divided into two eras before Abby’s death and after it. But she had other children and a spouse who needed her more than ever, and together they managed to survive that loss and find meaning in the new era of their lives. Stories like Lucy Hones are often told as if her family’s response was extraordinary. But what she wants Saul to understand is that it wasn’t. Most grieving people are able to find their way back to the sense that their own lives are still worth living. Lucy Hone. Is co-director of coping with loss and the Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience, adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Canterbury, and a columnist for Psychology Today. She’s also author of the book Resilient Grieving How to Find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss, finding strength and embracing life after a loss That Changes everything. Lucy, welcome to think.
Lucy Hone [00:01:53] Hello there. Thank you so much for inviting me along today, Chris. I’m delighted to be here with you.
Krys Boyd [00:02:00] I want to make sure we all understand this. When your daughter died, you didn’t know whether your marriage would survive it or your family could ever feel normal again. You didn’t necessarily have this understanding of resilient grieving in the beginning, making you believe it would all be okay.
Lucy Hone [00:02:18] So that’s such a good question to start with, because while I didn’t necessarily know whether we would survive Abby’s loss, I was already doing research in the field of resilience. And so what I did know was that most the most common response to all kinds of potentially traumatic events is resilience. So I had this hopeful prescription, but I truly didn’t know whether that would apply to parental bereavement, which, you know, I was told pretty quickly was made us at higher risk for divorce, family estrangement and mental illness.
Krys Boyd [00:03:06] How do mental health professionals define resilience?
Lucy Hone [00:03:11] So I don’t know how mental health professionals define it, but I know that as an academic, we would say that resilience is not about bouncing back. I really don’t like that definition because I don’t know about you or your listeners. But personally, when I have gone through really tough times and struggled with adversity, I have felt anything like bouncy. So I don’t like the bounce because, you know, it’s tough. And I also don’t believe you go back because we learn from these things. They shape us and change us. So instead of talking about bounce back, I like to think that resilience is more about steering through and learning from all kinds of adversity.
Krys Boyd [00:04:04] And what do we know about the things that broadly contribute to our resilience? Is this a matter of our genetics or our social position, relationships or life experience?
Lucy Hone [00:04:16] I think this is another much misunderstood aspect of resilience is that people sometimes think it’s this elusive trait that some people have and others don’t. Whereas actually we know firstly, that it’s very common and that is a capacity that resides within us all and that it is built using very ordinary processes, ways of thinking, acting and being that most of us can access things like leaning on your friends, being able to ask for support, you know, not pushing people away when you really need help. Most being able to keep a sense of hope. You said it yourself at the beginning. There’s that sense of compassion. You know, being kind to yourself, pacing yourself, knowing when it’s better to say no thank you to an invitation and just stay home and have that evening on the couch. So it involves a whole load of different processes of ways of thinking and acting and being. And I like to think that everybody has their own resilience recipe. And that, Chris, is really the point, is that you, all of us, have to find what works for us, and it’s different for everybody.
Krys Boyd [00:05:46] You got interested in resilience when you were studying for your master’s degree, and by coincidence, there were a series of large earthquakes and then aftershocks around your home town of Christchurch. What did you learn from living through that experience and watching your neighbors and many other people do the same?
Lucy Hone [00:06:04] Yes, I think this is what sets my work apart from particularly so many academics, is that I have this bizarre, unique lived experience which, as you rightly say, began with, I just finished my master’s degree at UPenn and I just left Philadelphia, come relocated back to Christchurch, which is my adopted hometown in New Zealand. And in February 2011, that city was rocked by this devastating earthquake that killed 195 people. And it pretty much shut down all downtown for two years. I think it is. 70% of our city buildings had to be rebuilt. So, you know, clearly we were all flung into this completely unknown territory. And that was my first experience of looking at all of this, science that I had learned at the University of Pennsylvania and asking myself, you know, which of these ways of thinking, acting and being might be useful to my community as we endeavor to get back on our feet in that post-quake environment. And so I worked with, you know, government agencies, search and rescue with the Heart Foundation and community groups. And it did give me a really, a unique, I think, firsthand insight into watching resilience in action. And just to give you a kind of, you know, minuscule example, Chris, one of the things I so remember noticing was that because so many of our schools had been absolutely devastated and, you know, rocked off their foundations. And I mean that quite literally, we didn’t have many schools left in the city. And so the schools that were still able to function started site sharing with other schools. So if you think about your, you know, high school environment, one school would go into this building, one school community from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then at 1 p.m., they would all those students would go home and a whole nother student body from a school that had lost their buildings would enter those school grounds at 130, and then they would study through to 6:00 or whatever it was. And I remember one sitting at a, traffic lights in, you know, on the edge of town and watching one of these student bodies, you know, 1500 students go to my left. And then of effectively 1500 other students in different school uniforms going to the right and just thinking, wow, this really is resilience in real time. You know, I’m watching it unfold in front of my very eyes. This speaks to the kind of physical agility, the mental agility, the tolerance that is all part of our capacity for resilience. You know, just getting on with it, knowing that things aren’t going to be the same, but knowing that somehow we will find a way to get through this.
Krys Boyd [00:09:28] You know, when you talk about that agility required, for people to be resilient, it occurs to me, Lucy, that it takes a lot of energy to get through this thing that is much harder than it ordinarily would be. There’s not as much room left to sweat the small stuff as it were. And I’m interested in how this might relate to the fact that people mourning a great loss, or having dealt with a really significant trauma, often talk about their priorities being realigned.
Lucy Hone [00:09:58] Absolutely. That’s such great insight from you, because that is absolutely backed up by the scientific literature. And we often hear people say, wow, I am you know, it’s this has changed me, this loss, this significant transition that I have gone through, this death or other kind of, you know, cancer has really made me, as you say, not sweat the small stuff, look at life in a completely different way to realize that actually, I am much stronger than I ever thought I would be. You know, I didn’t think I could get through something like this, but I’m amazed to think and to realize that actually, you know, it’s not been easy. It’s not what I asked for. But within me, the internal strength and the external supports to somehow get through. And we hear that time and time again in our clients, in our coping with loss program, in the people that I interviewed. For the book Resilient Grieving. And in the scientific literature. And essentially, this is backed up by all of that research around post-traumatic growth that shows that actually, most people I think it’s 51%. A recent meta analysis reported that 51% of this population, over a lot of different studies, showed that they had responded with either moderate to high levels of growth in the aftermath of their traumatic event. And I just think that is such a fascinating story, Chris. And and one that isn’t necessarily always told, you know, this incredible human capacity to get through whatever is facing us come what may. And that is that’s the admiration I have for people, and the work that I love reading and investigating.
Krys Boyd [00:12:09] So to focus again, specifically on resilient grieving, most people grieving a significant loss do turn out to be pretty resilient. Most of us know folks who have managed to function reasonably well during their grieving, but some of us have have done it ourselves. Why do we assume these people represent the exception rather than the rule?
Lucy Hone [00:12:32] Isn’t that fascinating? Because we do. And in, research and in my practice with clients, we often have people coming to us who have actually been made to feel bad because they are coping, because there is this societal expectation that we need help with grief. We do need help. Don’t get me wrong, but we don’t necessarily need clinical intervention. We don’t necessarily need to see a counselor. And if you just view it that the estimates around complicated grief, the amount of people who get what is now known as prolonged grief disorder, then we know that approximately 15% of people who are bereaved might develop post, prolonged grief disorder. So that means that 85% of people are managing their grief without needing any form of medical or clinical intervention. And again, I think this is, you know, the untold story of resilient grieving that most people manage to muddle through and somehow cope using pretty ordinary processes. And I think we need to focus the light on that.
Krys Boyd [00:13:57] Lucy, I have to say, your book got me thinking. You know, you mentioned the 15% of people who might struggle with prolonged grief. They may need and indeed deserve professional help. But, that 15%, they’re the only ones represented in movies and TV shows about grief, right? I mean, I guess it doesn’t make a very compelling story. If somebody handles a loss without completely falling apart. But then all the rest of us get primed to think that’s the only way grief can look.
Lucy Hone [00:14:26] But hold on a minute, because actually, I perhaps haven’t represented the 85% completely accurately, Chris. Because for the 85%, they’re still falling apart and crying. Yeah, they there’s, no amount of I don’t know, you can grieve what you can grieve without crying. There are times when people grieve without crying, maybe because it’s a relief because they’ve been nursing some of them for a long time. But, you know, for most of us, grief involves incredible, terrible emotional turmoil, but they manage to still function. You know, and this is the difference, that they are still managing to oscillate between the ebb and flow, between really feeling completely consumed by their loss and crying and hiding under the duvet and lying on the couch and actually being forced to get back to work to get the kids off to school, to take on and resume those household responsibilities. So I think, in my hands, you know, please don’t anybody listening ever think that I’m saying that resilient grieving doesn’t involve negative emotions, hard emotions, because of course it does. You know, grief is tough. And the other thing I quite like to say quickly now is that it isn’t an emotion in grief. Very often people say grief is an emotion, and it involves so many different emotions. And it also has a physical aspect. It can have a spiritual aspect, a cognitive, you know, it can give us brain mush, and it can also affect, social world, you know, our connections, the way we work. So it is really important to understand that grief is multi-dimensional and looks different for everyone.
Krys Boyd [00:16:27] The five stages model of grief has been thrown around so often over the past few decades that I’m not sure it always occurs to us to ever question it. Is there actually any science to demonstrate that it works the way Elizabeth Kubler Ross said it did?
Lucy Hone [00:16:44] So the truth is, the answer to that question is no. There is very little scientific evidence that supports that. People go through these set stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross made so famous. And so we know nowadays, instead that grief is as individual as your fingerprint. We all do it differently. And I think it is very interesting to note that when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross first did, when she created this model and went public with this model in her book, you know, so many years ago now, she actually had created it from conversations that she’d had with people who were dying. So this original model of acceptance and denial and bargaining and, you know, depression, whatever they are, the five of them all actually was conceived for people who were anticipating grief, not for those that were left behind. But since then, that has been done lots of subsequent research that demonstrates we don’t go through set stages. There are so many different emotions involved in grief. You know, you talk to anyone who’s grieving and they will tell you that they can feel devastated and crying one moment, and then something will happen and they’ll be laughing the next moment. They might feel guilty. They might feel proud of how one of their children has coped. They might feel dread, and they might also feel inspired by something. So there is incredible mis mix. You know, a mismatch, a mix, a multitude of emotions are felt in grief. So I, I know how tempting it is for people to think that they will go through five stages, but the reality is grief is just not that simplistic. It’s much more messy. We’re just not prepared for the emotional intensity that comes with this unknown and unfamiliar and unwanted landscape. You know, it really is a tumultuous time.
Krys Boyd [00:19:08] So as I mentioned in the introduction, we have moved from very strict cultural rules around bereavement to this kind of anything goes ethos which tells people there is no wrong way to do grief. I wonder, though, if that also implies there is no right way to do grief, that we have to just kind of passively endure this, and there aren’t things we can do to take care of ourselves.
Lucy Hone [00:19:34] Yes, this makes such an important point because for me as a resilience researcher, when Abby died, this was the aspects of the five stages of grief that I found most frustrating. This is your life now. Somebody told us to write off five years of our life to Abby’s loss. And I remember thinking, I just don’t have that time frame. You know, I I’ve got two beautiful sons who need me right here and right now, you know, I need to get back to work. And I’m not saying that I wanted to rush through my grief, but I knew instinctively that I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process. You know, I really wanted to know that I was doing everything I possibly could to enable us to have the highest chances of surviving this loss and staying together as a family and keeping my marriage together. So I went on this quest, really to see, to discover if there are certain ways of thinking, acting and being that enable us to manage that rollercoaster just a little bit better and to maintain our friendships that are so important in grief. And yet we often feel isolated and misunderstood. And so the story of my work is that I looked at all of this resilience literature and all these scientific findings that I was so immersed in and started to be my own experiment and write this book, Resilient Grieving. So the first edition of it was written in 2015, a year after Abby died. And really, it was an exploration of taking the best of findings from my field of resilience research and really examining them and putting them under the microscope, putting them to the test to see. Are any of these helpful? You know, all the ways of thinking, acting and being. Are there things we can do to help us as we navigate that grief journey? And it turned out that there really are ways we can help people. And time and again, when we run our online programs, we have people say to us, I had tried everything, Lucy. And yet the work they’ve done with us has really made them experience a completely different approach to grief, where they suddenly feel empowered, they feel less helpless, and they are working their way back to discovering what works for them. Because that is absolutely the truth crisis that we all have to find what works for us in grief. And that is different for everybody.
Krys Boyd [00:22:40] You had this revelation that to the extent that it was within your power at all, you did not want to allow yourself to lose what you had to what you had lost. Can you explain what that phrase means?
Lucy Hone [00:22:54] Yeah. And it’s incredible to think that I still remember standing, in our kitchen at home, and I literally had this voice in my head saying to me, choose life, not death. Don’t lose what you have to, what you have lost. And what I have lost was Abby. And she actually died with one of her best friends. Little Ella, who was 12 years old as well, and Ella’s mum, Sally, who was a really good friend of mine. So what I had lost was really obvious, these three really important people in my life. And no doubt I was devastated. You know, don’t get me wrong, this was truly, most awful moment. Days, weeks and months that I will ever live through, I hope. But what I had with my beautiful boys, my fabulous, supportive husband. And I’m not saying it was all perfect. You know, it’s tough grieving together. But I had a strong, supportive relationship. And I also I’m really lucky that I have a supportive community. And I think for us, it was interesting that we had only two, 3 to 4 years earlier, lived through two years of seismic events, you know, two years of ongoing aftershocks from that really big earthquake. And without a doubt, that had boosted our community resilience. And we had learned that we are all better together. You know, that it is okay to ask for help and to keep offering help long after the initial event. And so really, you know, I’m blessed. I am definitely lucky. I’m privileged. I have, strong connections, a really engaged, caring community, and I wanted to continue to do my work too. That is the other element of what I have. I am I value my contribution to the scientific world, and I wanted to keep on being a contributor to this really important field.
Krys Boyd [00:25:12] When there were decisions to be made in the aftermath of Abby’s death. You leaned into this essential question from resilience research, and that was, is this thing likely to help us get through this, or is it likely to make things work? What were some of the things you applied that question to?
Lucy Hone [00:25:31] Yeah. So my question, which is so interesting because this is. So the question is, yeah, is what I’m doing right now, the way I’m choosing to act or think, helping or harming me in my quest to get through, you know, another day or so in my case, in that post, Abby Dying world, that question, for instance, I remember asking it to myself about, shall we go to the court case to watch the case of the driver who drove through a stop sign at 100km an hour and crashed into the car, killing all three of all my friends and family. And so I asked myself, Will going to the court case? Will that help me or harm me? And I remember thinking, I don’t blame the driver. We always, as a family, forgave the driver. But did I need to actually be confronted with seeing him, listening to him, watching his face move when my daughter’s face couldn’t? So I decided no, that would harm me. But then to continue this example, a few years after the cook, a few weeks after the court case, we were asked if we wanted to meet the driver in a restorative justice meeting. And both my husband and I asked ourselves this question. You know, will meeting up with him help or harm us in our quest to get through this? And again, I remember thinking, for me, I want to keep him a bit part in this story. I don’t want his image to loom large in my head. I’ve got enough going on in my head already, so I decided not to go and meet with him. But my husband asking exactly the same question will that help me or will it harm me? Decided that actually it would really help him to meet with the driver. It really helped him. So I use that as an example, because I think that’s fascinating that we’ve got two people using the same question to provide them with diametrically opposite answers. But I can also tell you, Chris, I use that question day in, day out then, and I still do now. So on a kind of everyday level, I would say to myself, you know, is getting out of the house right now. I know I ought to get out, but I just want to stay here stuck in front of the TV. Sometimes late at night, I would be scrolling through social media looking at pictures of Abby, and then I’d think again, come on, Lucy, is this helping our home? And you put your phone away and go to bed. But you can use this question. You don’t need to be grieving to use this question. Anyone can use this question any time. Is the way I am thinking and behaving helping a harming me in my question. My quest to nail that presentation tomorrow morning. And so I think it is the flexibility of this question that makes it so effective. And people tell me that what they really love about it is that it puts them back in the driver’s seat of their mental health, you know, it gives them some agency, it empowers them and returns a sense, a modicum of control at a time, particularly when we’re grieving, when it’s easy to feel so out of control and so helpless.
Krys Boyd [00:29:14] That control that helped you deal was not about avoiding the pain with it. You you realized you had to walk straight into that and live with it.
Lucy Hone [00:29:25] Yeah. Thank you for adopting my language there, because I think walk straight in to it has always been. The way I describe this in my head, that we know that as tempting as it is to avoid the negative emotions, which I would prefer to call hard emotions, you know, we don’t want to feel those awful hard emotions. What my research has taught me, and then I have experienced in my own life and I have seen really work effectively with our clients, is that if you are able to actually succumb to these hard emotions, they don’t seem to take a grip on you, a hold on you in the same way that they do. If you avoid them somehow. By avoiding these negative emotions, we actually make things harder. Absolutely. Walk right through all of your emotions because the longer I live, the longer I teach, the more I realize that all emotions are there for a purpose.
Krys Boyd [00:30:39] Lucy, you mentioned these grief ambushes when you know you’re having a normal day and then something triggers this kind of overwhelming experience of grief. I wonder if surviving a few of those, as awful as they are, sort of helps with the ones that will come later in that you know that they are absolutely awful, but that you’ll get through them.
Lucy Hone [00:31:01] I think that’s really true. I think, people are so scared of succumbing to these tough emotions that they can. Sometimes our clients would realize to everything they possibly can to avoid them. And when we managed to coach them into giving them a go to, you know, opening the door, maybe just a crack, they realize that very often they don’t last nearly as long as they thought they were going to, you know, emotions. They come, they rise and they fall away again. And so I think there is a case for building what we would call your self-efficacy, your confidence here that actually you can survive these tough, tough emotional moments. You can ride them light waves. People often find that metaphor useful. And of course, as time passes, they do tend to crop up less often. I think people find it very interesting to understand that they can be linked to what we call secondary losses. Chris. So the person who died or the thing that you have lost is your primary loss. But of course, sadly, we don’t just have one loss. We experience all of these secondary losses. So, you know, if you lose your partner, for instance, you will lose maybe the income you might have to sell your home. You might watch your relationships suffer and find some of their friends. You don’t get to see so much any longer. And then all those multitude of secondary losses, like they might be the person who picked out the movies, who took out the bins, you know, to do all of these different things, who had a different relationship with one of your children. So secondary losses can absolutely drive that emotional grief ambush in that we didn’t see them coming. So, you know, you’re filling out your tax return, which you wouldn’t think would be a really emotional moment in your life, that because maybe your partner always took care of it or they helped you with it, you suddenly find yourself weeping into the computer. And that is just such a classic example of a secondary loss. But I just quickly want to say we have these outside bereavement too. And if you think of people with job loss, the secondary loss is around redundancy. One of the reasons that redundancy is such a tough grief to cope with, because you lose your routines, you lose your pay package, you lose your identity and maybe your meaning and purpose. You can lose work colleagues who you’ve had really strong, supportive relationships with and spent hours and hours of your life with, and suddenly you are severed from all of these. So working with our clients, helping them understand, identify and understand their secondary losses enables them to feel a little better prepared and a little less overwhelmed and helpless. And it gives them this sense that they understand the triggers for their grief and where it’s coming from. Much more so in my book Resilient Grieving. We there is, you know, there’s a whole chapter there on secondary losses. And readers tell me that they find that really helpful, having that opportunity to identify them, which enables them just to prepare a little bit more for when they might come calling and really spur them into one of those emotional grief ambushes.
Krys Boyd [00:35:08] I’m glad you mentioned routines, because so often we assume that anybody who is grieving maybe will do better if they are relieved of any obligations. What, then, is the value of reestablishing normal routines, getting dinner on the table at a certain time, getting the kids into the shower, going into the office, that kind of thing? What does it do for our brains?
Lucy Hone [00:35:31] Routines are so important because, the earthquake taught me this. Actually, living through a two years, we had 10,000 aftershocks. So you really are, you know, going to bed every night thinking, oh, please don’t happen tonight. It’s pouring with rain outside. But what they really taught me was I started working with disaster management, you know, post trauma recovery agencies. And they always talk about the importance of routines because when you have experienced a traumatic event and that could be any type of traumatic event, including a bereavement, particularly if it’s a sudden bereavement, it sends your brain into fight or flight, whereas the routine, the actual visual and going through the motions, getting up in the morning, having the cup of coffee, you know, sorting out the kids lunch boxes, getting ready to go to work, caring for your partner, whatever is going on, and then going through the daily routine as much and as well as you can, particularly in those very first early days or weeks where your routine might have been thrown off kilter. But keeping it going as much as you can visually has this way of telling your brain that actually the moment of threat is over and that it is okay to dial back that stress response now. So over time, as you just build up your routine, our brains really like predictable routine events that just keep playing out in front of them. So the more you can do that, the more you are able to dial back this really high intensity of emotions and maybe some of the hyper sensitivity and hyper vigilance, particularly that is associated with post trauma.
Krys Boyd [00:37:36] People who use routines as a way to help them cope might be warned about delayed grief, right? Like if they don’t put in a certain kind of work to grieve the way others expect immediately that there will be some crisis at a future date? Is is delayed grief a real thing?
Lucy Hone [00:37:57] Well, my research shows that it isn’t really a real thing. Because we all grieve differently, and most people listening will be able to think of a time, of a person, of a circumstances where somebody hasn’t really demonstrated that typical outward manifestation of grief that we imagine is absolutely characteristic of grieving. So you’ll be able to think of someone who wasn’t a complete mess, who didn’t cry all the time. That doesn’t mean they’re not. Grieving is the first point to make here, but also that over time, you might have noticed that they do continue to pretty much function pretty well. They might be crying at times when you aren’t present, so it’s really hard to actually say, you know, how people are grieving, who is grieving because we’re so judgmental about these things, too, aren’t we? And I remember just in my own life, going away with some girlfriends for a long weekend, I guess it was sort of 3 or 4 months after Abby died, and two of them said to me, well, we’re really amazed at how much you cry. We didn’t realized you cry this much. And I said, well, that’s because you just bump into me, you know, at irregular intervals, and I might be in the supermarket or, you know, I might be dropping the kids off at school and I might be crying, but I might not be. If you spend three days with me, you will see how much I cry. And so I do think that people outside, if we can be supporters, we can be very judgmental about opinionated, about how people are grieving. And I just want to emphasize once more that we all grieve differently. We know from the research that some people are what we call more instrumental grievers than emotional grievers, and that might mean that they do their grieving out on a run. They might be, I don’t know, chopping up firewood or going to kickboxing or just, you know, working hard and doing it in a completely different way to the people who are more emotional grievers who tend to wear their hearts on their sleeve in a more visible fashion. Neither is right. Neither is wrong. The only thing that is not advisable is completely avoiding it and suppressing those emotions all the time. And I would say if anybody’s listening, and they do find that they tend to avoid their emotions and suppress them, maybe because they’re at work and it’s, you know, just not expected to cry at work, which is a whole nother story, because it should be. Then I would suggest to them that they make sure that they allocate some time, maybe when they come home from work in the evening. And a really acknowledged, effective practice is to create yourself maybe a little grieving place at home that you go to regularly. Maybe you light a candle, maybe you put on some certain music, maybe you have something of your loved one, and you give yourself a timed moment to really immerse yourself in that grief so that you know you’re not completely avoiding it. But you know that is not for everyone. And I think we need to be respectful of those instrumental grievers who do that grieving by actions and not by expressing their emotions.
Krys Boyd [00:41:37] Lucy, why is it helpful to find meaning in a loss that we will always wish had never happened?
Lucy Hone [00:41:46] It’s such an interesting aspect of my work, this meaning making aspect. I think the best way to describe it to people is so often when we lose someone or some thing that we care so deeply about, that we grieve often our first question is, how did this happen? How can this have happened? And why me? And at the heart of all of those questions is this human tendency towards sense making and meaning making. You know, we want to understand why these things happen in life and when we are going through bereavement very often, what is happening? Thing is that this death has come into our lives and completely shaken up the way we think the world should work. We call this our assumptive world. Basically, death and other traumatic incidents can really shake up your core beliefs the way you think the world should work, the way you think you should work and behave, and the way you think others should behave. And so as this world, as you know, it smashes apart and you feel like, well, I don’t know who I am any longer. I don’t know how I’m going to go on in this foreign landscape knowing that such awful things can happen over time. We gradually. Bring the threads of our lives back together by making sense and integrating what has happened, this terrible thing, into our life story so that we can rebuild our core beliefs are assumptive world in a way that does make more sense, that we can move forward understanding that, wow, we live in a world where such awful things can happen and this is my way of dealing with this. So meaning making looks different for everybody. But we know from all of the literature that it is an absolutely key part of the grieving process. And those who are able to integrate this loss into their bigger life schema, their life story tends to adapt to the loss in a more healthy way. Does that make sense?
Krys Boyd [00:44:32] Yes it does. Before I let you go, you suggest trying to identify our strengths in the face of loss. What might some of those strengths be?
Lucy Hone [00:44:42] So in all of my research, we tend to do a lot of strength work, in the field of resilience psychology. And by that, I mean, you know, the ways of thinking and acting that enable you to be who you are and to get through trying times. So that’s bravery. There’s forgiveness. There’s a sense of gratitude. People often talk to us about, you know, they’re not thankful that this thing has happened, but they can really notice all that they’ve still got in their world.
Krys Boyd [00:45:14] Lucy Hone is co-director of coping with loss and the Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience, adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Canterbury, and a columnist for Psychology Today. Her book is Resilient Grieving How to Find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss. Lucy, thank you for making time to talk.
Lucy Hone [00:45:32] Thank you so much for giving me this time today.
Krys Boyd [00:45:36] Again, I’m Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
