Why the Five Stages of Grief Are a Myth | Dr. Lucy Hone

Key Takeaway

When a loss or major transition knocks you off course, lower the bar and focus on the next manageable hour. Start by accepting that the event happened—not approving of it, just stopping the fight with reality—then ask, “What do I need to do to be kind to myself right now?” Make one small stabilizing move: text a trusted person, take a walk, eat something, or replace 3 a.m. rumination with a hot drink and a change of scene.

Episode Overview

Dr. Lucy Hone explains why grief is not a predictable five-stage process and why we grieve both deaths and “living losses” such as divorce, illness, job loss, and estrangement. Drawing on resilience science and her own experience after the death of her daughter, she offers practical ways to accept reality, practice self-compassion, challenge unhelpful thinking, and rebuild a life that incorporates loss rather than “bouncing back.”

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why the Five Stages of Grief Are a Myth | Dr. Lucy Hone from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. When I think back at the times in my life when I have experienced the most uh anxiety and the deepest uh depression, they're really during times of either transition or setback. So, transitions like going to college or graduating from college or in enduring a breakup with a girlfriend and setbacks like uh problems at work or the health decline of my parents. I really get thrown off in these periods. So, I'm very interested to speak to my guest today uh Dr.

Lucy Hone about the science and skill of resilience. Dr. Hone has written a book called How Will I Ever Get Through This? evidence-based tools to help you heal from hardship, grief, and loss. Dr. Hone, welcome to the show. Hello, Dan, and hello all to all of your listeners. It's a complete privilege to be with you here today. I do want to acknowledge that you come to this work uh uh the hard way um due to some extremely uh painful personal experience. Are you comfortable talking about that?

Yes. Um I am. I in truth I was already studying psychological flourishing. I was actually in the last throws of my PhD research when our beautiful 12-year-old daughter Abby was killed in a car accident one unsuspecting Saturday afternoon along with her best friend Ella and Ella's mom Sally who was a really good friend of mine. So I went from that kind of academic understanding of resilience thrown into the well buckle up honey cuz here it is at your doorstep. I'm so sorry. When when was this?

So a long time ago now. Um 2014. So we've just actually passed that milestone of 12 years that you know she's been she was alive 12 years and now dear thing she's been dead for 12 years. So yeah two lives. Was this your only child? No fortunately for us we have two beautiful boys who as I speak to you today are 28 and 26. two brothers who are on a twomonlong surf trip in Mexico together at the moment which is uh you know as a mom this is kind of my peak life moment.

My our boys chose to go away together. That's beautiful. Well, my my younger brother is is still uh my best friend to this day. A wrenching loss, no question about it. And and you were, as you said, you were studying um human flourishing. Did this provoke you to take a deeper dive into resilience itself? I love the fact that so many of your listeners will be so familiar with many of the concepts that I was studying at the time and obviously you too Dan and the biggest I think challenge for me was that so my PhD was in conceptualizing measuring flourishing you know working out what do we actually mean by flourishing and from an academic point of view what do you have to have to be able to be categorized as flourishing.

And so back in 2014 and still today, you pretty much have to be experiencing high levels of positive emotion and high levels of life satisfaction as well as meaning, purpose, resilience, optimism, strong supportive relationships, accomplishment, engagement, all of those things. And my biggest beef after the girls died and my biggest realization and reckoning was how absurd it was to expect people to have high levels of positive affect and life satisfaction. Given how many of us are going through some major life transition or event which as you said at the beginning, you know, has a huge impact on how we feel.

I think you call them BFTs. I do call them BFTs. Do you swear on your show? I think you do, don't you, Dan? I know. I've heard you swear. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hell yeah. Um, so it's a family saying that came from many years ago where we call a big life event or just something that is most vexing a BFT, which stands for bloody effing thing. In my professional career nowadays, I try not to swear, but because I'm British, that's quite hard. I want to just repeat that this is a safe place for you to do so, but if you comport yourself however makes you most comfortable.

If I understand the thrust of your work correctly, it's not I mean you you went through what what in my opinion would be the the hardest of all possible BFTs, but it's a spectrum that would include the things I was listing before like graduating from college and not knowing what you're going to do next or going through a breakup, etc., etc. Garden variety BFTs. Yes. and kind of trajectory of my work was that after Abby died, I wrapped up my PhD and then thought, okay, I need to find some kind of resources to help [clears throat] me process this unfathomable loss.

and I went to the bookstore and just couldn't find anything that that suited my kind of I wanted to be an active participant in my grieving process. I knew that I couldn't do anything to change the outcome, but I desperately wanted to feel like I was doing everything I possibly could to keep the show on the road as much as I could. you know, I wasn't I didn't have kind of lofty ambitions or unrealistic ambitions, but I just I remember at the time I was looking for mainly functioning was my goal.

[snorts] And when I got to the booktore, there was just nothing really. So back in 2014, I wrote a book called Resilient Grieving, which really was me being my own experiment, testing what and if all of my research in resilience psychology and well-being science, like how useful would it be? Now, it was pitted against this unfathomable loss. So I wrote that book and after the pandemic people kept coming to me saying I'm reading resilient grieving but no one has died. What have you got for all of those other awful life experiences?

And that is what encouraged me and prompted me to write How will I ever get through this? Because it became plainly apparent that we actually grieve so many of these other losses in life. And I then bumped into the research about nondeath losses which is a a small fledgling field but essentially bereavement research bereavement psychology is starting to recognize that actually we don't just grieve death loss we grieve these non-death losses too. And I I thought we needed a slightly better quippier name for them. So I've called them living losses.

I come at everything from a Buddhist perspective. And one of the foundational insights of the dharma aka Buddhism is everything's changing all the time. And you know if you really understand that you realize that life is a series of both gains and losses. Given our negativity bias um we tend to focus on the losses. Um, and so yeah, you are going to be of course losing loved ones, but you're going to lose jobs and friends and uh the abs you had in your 20s and uh your hair and your status and in various contexts.

It's just we're constantly enduring these, you know, profound losses of love loved ones and then the what you're calling um uh living losses. And so I I as I understand it, what we're going to talk about today and the thrust of your new book really is the full spectrum of BFTs. That's right. Because I think sometimes, well, my research shows that living losses can actually hit us harder. And I, you know, none of us when we're talking grief want to get into that kind of, you know, grief hierarchy.

Not helpful. But I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that we all grieve all sorts of things throughout our lives. That loss is universal. And I like to think of grief as the gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. Yeah. just bring to mind a memory of I used to work in television news and uh it's a very uh it's a pyramid in the top of the pyramid is very small these these big anchor jobs come up or I guess in in the UK where you grew up and and New Zealand where you live now they they would call them presenter jobs where you're the the face of the show instead of just a contributor or a correspondent or something like that.

These big anchor jobs only come up once in a while. Somebody would retire or die and there would be a big reshuffleling of the deck. A friend of mine was passed over for a job and I was talking to our mutual boss and she was commiserating like, "Yeah, this is her life is not turning out the way she thought it was going to go. She had this kind of plan and it just didn't work out that way." And those can be really destabilizing moments. That's right.

And in doing the research for this book when I started to realize that actually Darcy Harris who is now a retired Canadian psychologist um and her team were looking into non-death losses. So when I started looking at that research and spent some time with her, I realized I came to realize that what happens in that moment when you have a BFT, some kind of massive life event happens or you just get the news that you can't do that whatever that was that you were hoping to do.

What happens is that that smashes apart your deeply held core beliefs which we call your assumptive world. You know all of these assumptions that we have unconsciously and unwittingly made about how our lives are going to pan out, how we should behave, how others should behave. All of this comes tumbling down and the process of relearning to live in the world to rebuilding your life is reconstructing an assumptive world that can integrate what you now know to be true into your ongoing life schema we call it in psychology.

So it's that process of integration that means that it takes time and is so painful because you are literally rebuilding your life from the ground up. And when I did the research for the stressful life event study that informed this book, I asked people, you know, about that and they just told me time and time again. In fact, one of the questions they wanted to write about most in the qualitative research was who am I now? Because these losses bring this absolute Yeah. fork in the road of our identities.

They really smash our thoughts, our beliefs, and our deeply held core beliefs apart. How do you recommend we answer that question? It's such a big question, isn't it? I went into writing this book thinking it seems to me that people always ask me the same questions and I thought I got together with Ruben Rusk, one of my colleagues and we thought we would go out and ask people what are the questions that you are asking yourself when you are going through some awful life change. And the number one question that our participants reported was how will I ever get through this?

But the other questions too will no doubt be really familiar to your listeners. The second most frequently asked question is why do I feel so physically exhausted? Why do I feel so lonely? Will I ever be happy again? Who am I now? How did this happen to me? and how will I ever get through this? So the first 10 chapters in the book are me responding to those very typical questions and your question was you know what is the answer to that? So the answer to that really is firstly that you will get through this.

That the research indicates that most people do get through these awful things using very ordinary processes, ways of thinking, acting and being that they have to choose to do in the micro moments of their days. So, it's about all the things that you talk about on your podcast really, you know, remembering to stay connected to your friends, managing to stay connected to your support network when frankly they can be quite frustrating when you're going through a big thing. and just finding all of those resources and supports and the healthy coping mechanisms that work for you in those testing times.

So the answer to the question, how will I ever get through this is that there are evidence-based practices like having a support network, taking care of your nervous system in whatever way works for you, etc., etc. that there are many questions to be answered here, but what if we're going to go right at the big one, it's kind of like a little bit eat your vegetables. Eat your vegetables, but find your vegetables that you like and find your ways to make you eat your vegetables. Do you know what I mean?

So, so firstly I think it's very important that when people are grieving any kind of loss whether it's a living loss or a death loss they come to it very often believing that there is set ways to do this that there's a right or wrong way to do it and very often they come to grieving believing that there are five set stages of grief that they have to go through. So my the first thing I do in this book is bust the myths and misunderstandings about resilience and grief.

And the big one in grief is that we all go through those five set stages of grief. And I know you've covered that before on this podcast that Elizabeth Kubler Ross's work, she came up with these five stages and she did a great really important thing [clears throat] for grieving in that she kind of put it on the map and enabled us to start having these conversations. But the um downside of this five-stage model that she introduced and then got picked up by everybody it seems you know health and helping professionals.

The downside of that is that it has left people thinking there is a right or wrong way to grieve and that's not true. So the most important thing, the first thing you have to understand is that grief is as individual as your fingerprint. You have to find what works for you. And you and I know that is also true for psychological well-being. That in all of this, we have to find the ways of thinking, acting, and being that work for us. And and that's the work.

That's the hard bit, isn't it? A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I don't know if you know this, but I've been writing a newsletter for the last couple of years. I would love for you to come check it out. It's free. You can sign up at danharris.com. Every Monday, I drop into your inbox a little nugget of wisdom and sanity that you can operationalize in your life immediately. This is an actionable practice that I'm dropping into your data stream that really can color the rest of your day.

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Visit rosettaone.com/happier to redeem your 20% off. That's rosetta.com/happier. As we've established, there are many flavors here of of BFTs. It could be a job loss, a breakup, um you know, just any piece of bad news that makes you reconsider your life trajectory. When you're going through something like this, you as you referenced, a lot of people feel physically exhausted because the nervous system is just frayed and frazzled. Um so to then say, "Hey, well, one of the secrets of resilience is to do the things that you know will keep you strong, like meditate, exercise, go out and see your friends." you don't [ __ ] feel like doing any of that [ __ ] because you are exhausted.

True. Um, so I think to be more explicit and maybe more helpful, my recipe would involve the first step is that you have to accept that the loss has occurred. It doesn't mean that you like it. It doesn't mean that you condone whatever caused it. But for us to really be able to get out of that hole, the first step is acceptance. And then from that comes a big dose of self-compassion and understanding that suffering as as you know so well and talk about on this podcast and have already alluded to that suffering is part of life.

It happens to us all and that connects us to other people and stops us from feeling discriminated against. So in this book I write about the fact that at the start of my TED talk I ask people to stand up if they've ever lost someone they truly love. If they've ever had their heart broken. If you've been through a divorce. If you struggled with infertility, been through a natural disaster, a global pandemic. And you know within 30 40 seconds there's 1500 people in that room all standing up and watching that moment of reckoning where people really do look around them and realize the universal nature of suffering was quite a moment for me and for them.

I think people we tend to think that we're the only person suffering. So it's so important to remember that frankly [ __ ] happens to us all that nobody gets, you know, out of this because that prevents that kind of passive stuckness of going the why me wallowing and it enables you to think, okay, so I'm not alone here. Everybody struggles and suffers. What do I need to do to be kind to myself right now? And the self-compassion part to grieving is really important. Enabling yourself to lower the bar, shift your expectations, and work out what it is that it's going to enable you to just get through that hour and that day.

So, just to put a fine point on this, earlier when we were talking about the big question, how am I going to get through this? You gave an accurate answer, but um was missing something crucial. Um you you said that the the way to get through it is to do this the kind of vegetably vegetable stuff around, you know, taking care of yourself through getting enough sleep and exercise and accessing your support system, etc., etc. But actually there was an upstream move that you've just now talked about which is if my [clears throat] if I'm hearing you correctly kind of consists of two beats at least.

One is acceptance which is not resignation or liking the fact that this this bloody [ __ ] thing has happened to you but um just not being at war with reality. Seeing things clearly would be I think a less provocative way to put it. The second step is to then have self-compassion, which is essentially treating yourself the way you would treat a friend who is going through what you're going through. And once you've got those two mind states uh operative, you might be more willing and able to do some of the vegetable eating we've discussed.

Yes. And then the big layer is understanding grief. Because if you don't understand that you're grieving and what's going on, then you just feel completely overwhelmed, untethered, helpless, hopeless, and completely discombobulated cuz you're like, why is this a whole body experience? What's going on here? So really the answer each chapter in this book what I'm doing is explaining firstly that your assumptive world has been smashed apart and that's why you feel so um hugely affected in so many different ways by this loss. But also the second chapter is all about why do you feel so physically exhausted?

People don't understand that the the absolute um huge aspect that grief really hits us in so many different ways. I continually hear people talk about grief is an emotion. Well, that's complete rubbish. Grief isn't an emotion. Grief is a torrent of so many different emotions. And nothing prepares us in life for the intensity and the diversity of the emotional spectrum that we encounter in grief. But on top of that, grief is more than just an emotion. It also is a full body, full life experience. You know, it hits your social network.

It hits you physically. After Abby died, I had my hair fell out. Not all of it, but you know, lots of my hair fell out. Had really sweaty armpits for so long. I felt sick in my stomach. And then of course all of those it often creates an existential crisis for people or even a religious reckoning. So I think without understanding grieving, it's really hard to navigate these BFTs. acceptance, self-compassion, and understanding of the reality of what you're in. Um that you're you're not in an emotion, you're in a process that's unpredictable.

And um buckle up. And that's what this book does is then so the first 10 chapters are me responding to those questions that people ask me, the how will I ever get through this? Why do I feel so lonely? Why do I feel physically exhausted? Will I ever be happy again? And in each of those, I am using the science to explain and build their understanding and tools. Like each chapter has a resource builder to help them do the work and find their own particular recipe.

And then the second 10 chapters of the book are the questions that I've developed over the last 15 years of doing this work that I have found help people find their way. So they are things like are you reading this situation accurately? Is that helping or harming you? Uh do you you know do you know your 3:00 a.m. people? all of those people who are going to be there for you. And if you know them still, let me help you get the help you need. Because of course, asking for help is so difficult for us at the best of times.

But when we're grieving, our friends can disappoint us and frustrate us and let us down. So there's a chapter in the first 10 about why do I feel so isolated explaining that that frankly when you're grieving even your nearest and dearest can be hugely disappointing and not actually deliver in the ways you thought they would and I explain why that is and essentially that boils down to the fact that we all grieve differently and we all expect everyone to grieve in the same way and then in the second half there is the chapter saying who are your 3:00 a.m.

people? So, who are the people who are going to be there to help you? But beyond that, you're going to need extra help. So, who might be the people who give youformational support, emotional support, practical support, memory support, ongoing support? So it really drills down and instead of kind of leaving them untethered saying off you go Dan, you go and find your way to eat your vegetables. Each chapter is really leading people readers through um a self discovery journey so that they can find how to do this stuff and what is going to work for them.

You said it's hard for people to ask for help in both good times and bad. How can we learn how to do it effectively? So firstly, it's it's so amazing. I saw some research recently that said that in fact, I'm going to ask you a question, Dan. Who do you think provides the best support for grievers? I want to say your spouse pet are pets. Our pets. Interesting. And it doesn't matter whether they're marmicetses, dogs, uh chickens, whatever. I guess mammals probably do the best work.

The research just asked about pets and counselors and family members and friends and community support and colleagues. And the number one source of good solid support for people when they're grieving were pets. And I know that will make sense to many of your listeners and certainly does for me. We're lucky enough to have two barking mad. And they are a well-being intervention in and of themselves, aren't they? You know, they make you get out of bed in the morning. They make us get out and walk them to sometimes three times a day.

The little little things. Um, so I thought that was really staggering. So in terms of support, I think it's really important for people to realize that we get support from different places. And on top of that, one of my jobs I've come to realize over the last decade is to validate people's frustrations with their support when they are grieving. I know myself the first time I ever really grieved was when my mom died in the year 2000 and I you know happily married well supported I'd never felt so lonely in my life and that is because however close you are to people however well supported you are we all grieve differently we all process these losses differently we all had different relationships with that person and all that job.

And so ultimately it is up to us to find our way through it. But this feels so lonely and we can feel so judged by other people when we look at them getting on with their lives and we're still struggling to get out of bed in the morning or we find ourselves crying all the time where they're out there, you know, on their road bike pounding the pavement or whatever it is to get through their grief. So understanding that we all do grieving differently is a huge helping hand to us along the way.

But on top of that, what can we actually do to get the support we need? One of the most helpful things I think I can say on that is to understand firstly that you need more than just emotional support. And some people don't even really want emotional support. They might be more instrumental than emotional grievers, more practical grievers. So you've got to find the support that you need. And that might be practical. It might be information. You might need someone to come with you to see the lawyer, to talk to the real estate agent, to go to the your children's school with you, to have that kind of parent teacher meeting, whatever it is.

And then there are some friends, colleagues, people in our lives who might be useless at all of that, but also might just be the person who will send you a picture of your person or tell you a story or use their name. So they're better on the memory support aspect than maybe the other things. So one of the things I say to my clients is don't be a mind readader. tell them what you need. But of course, first you've got to work out what you need.

So, one of the resource builders in the book is literally about that. You know, where are you strong in support? Where are you lacking in support? And how to people those holes. That all makes a ton of sense. I want to go back to one of the questions that was raised earlier. I actually want to go back to many of the questions you raised earlier, but the identity question because you you argued that and I this makes complete sense based on you know interpolating back through my own experiences that when we endure any kind of loss it it can raise questions about like as you said before who am I now?

What do you recommend for people in terms of wrestling with that? Firstly to be patient and tolerant with yourself and to accept that this BFT this awful life event has had a significant impact on your personal and existing identity. So to you give yourself that moment to go this yeah this is huge. I remember saying to one of Aby's school teachers. It was actually, you know, just who am I now? Last week I was a academic researcher, finishing my PhD studies, mother of three, wife, you know, knew who I was.

Now I like who am I now? I just don't know how to answer that question. And she said to me, "Lucy, you will always be a mother of three." And honestly, firstly, that has been an understanding that I've held on to through every Mother's Day since and every Christmas and all of those, you know, big milestones. But on top of that, she gave me a hint of a tool that I always recommend, which is to sit yourself down. if this is you and you are going through this at the moment to sit yourself down, get out a pen and paper and write a list of what is still true.

Even though all this awfulness is happening and you feel like your entire world is falling apart, what is still true? And I remember in the awfulness, in the immediate aftermath of the girls dying, just having this voice in my head that said, "Don't lose what you have to what you have lost. You know, you're still lucky enough to be a mother to those two boys. You still have your husband. Yes, you're grieving differently, but essentially, you know, you're finding your ways through this together and apart.

You still have important research to do. You still have your friends. Yes, some of your friends and family, you know, you need to do some reccalibration with some of them. It's okay to press pause on some relationships for a bit. But what is still true? Who are you? What can you count on? What hasn't changed? In other words, you can figure out like what is there still to live for? What is not only like who am I now, but like what's the point of me now and what what can get me out of bed?

Yeah. So, one of the chapters in the second half of the book is exactly that, you know, who and what still matters, what is still true. Um, and I'll read them to you actually. So this the chapters in the second half of the book are do you know your strengths? Who and what do you want to live for? Who and what is still good in your world? Where and when could you be kinder to yourself? Who are your 3:00 a.m. people? Are you reading this situation accurately?

What gets you out of your head and back into your body? Is this helping or harming you? What is your resilience recipe? and how has your loss changed you? So you can see there's a incremental learning curve there of building the tools and the understandings to equip people to be able to rebuild the parts of their new assumptive world. For all the parents out there with teenagers, we know you're already trying to keep a million different things under control. Cash App is here to help make sure your teenager's money and their spending isn't adding to the craziness.

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The assumption in Buddhism is given that everything's changing all the time you're going to lose everything ultimately you're going to die and so you will lose everyone and everything you hold dear. There's a great story of this um legendary Thai teacher Ajan Cha who um holds up uh his favorite glass that he drinks out of and says to me it's already broken. One of the things I like about the Dharma and I'm I don't I'm still the guy who gets thrown off course by minor losses.

Um so I'm not saying I I can do this but as a north star it is pointing to a very different kind of assumptive world. Yes, it's such a fascinating topic this isn't it because actually as humans we are hardwired for attachment and love and yet we live in a world of impermanence. I mean this is our deep flaw of humanity isn't it that you've just pointed to and and I agree but I personally would choose love and attachment. I think this is my my bug bear with Buddhism is that I will choose love and attachment any time because that's what makes life worth living.

And I'm laughing because I realize that as I'm talking to you. I'm sitting here with my big love necklace around my neck. I'm pretty pretty explicitly making my choices. What do you think about that? Like am I reading that wrong from Buddhism? Well, I've definitely struggled that with that myself. Buddhism talks a lot about love. It doesn't use the word love so much, although loving kindness is a phrase you hear in in the dharma frequently. But there there's a huge focus on what I would consider to be the constituent parts of love, generosity, compassion, basic friendliness.

And so how do you square that with its its foundational argument of non-attachment being the only way to survive in a world of relentless non-negotiable impermanence? And so I actually think it it's it's about uh where I've come down on this and please Buddhist scholars, you know, don't at me. Um I I this is just one person's evolving understanding is that it's it really is like how how do you understand love and attachment with wisdom? How can you infuse your love, you know, I have a child, my love for my pets, I've got three cats, my my wife, my friends.

How can I infuse that with the the wisdom which is inarguable of the fact that, you know, everything's changing all the time? And and I think it it um in moments when I can come close to um operationalizing this, it just infus it it it it amplifies my love and infuses it with a sense of poignency because I know it's not going to last. And um so it's there's a I would call a healthy attachment. I've often heard it described and I I'll shut up soon, but I've often heard it described and this is with a visual so people watching on YouTube can see it and and I'll describe it for people listening.

Uh if you hold your hand out and the person you love is, you know, in your palm, a clenched fist would be an unhealthy um attachment and an open fist would be, you know, love in the Buddhist sense. Does any of this make sense? Yes, makes complete sense. As a resilience researcher, I think this is the aspect of resilience that fascinates me most is that when I'm running resilience training and we're running a workshop or a master class or something, what we're trying to do is to get people to focus all of their attention on the things that they can change and somehow accept the things they can't change.

And it's all about, you know, attention, focus, is it helping or harming you? The emotional agility and the psychological flexibility. But the really big challenge for all of us, the big philosophical existential crisis that is at the core of humanity is that we have no control over anything. Well, that's not true. We do have control over some things, but we live in this world there where, you know, I can say goodbye to my daughter one Saturday morning and drop her off at the net courts and 7 hours later there's a policeman standing in front of me telling me she's dead.

And I live in I call Christ Church, New Zealand my home. And on February the 22nd, 2011 at 1:20 p.m. it was we were rocked by a massive earthquake that killed 195 people. And so I've learned that, and I think you're right, Dan, that it gives you, if you really know this in your bones, that suffering and struggle happens to us all. that the world that your life your assumptive world can be flipped in a nancond then it does change how you live your life and that is what I mean about the fact that the process of rebuilding and relearning to live in this new unfamiliar terrain is about rebuilding an assumptive world that can and does acknowledge the fact that these things can change in a second that the worst can happen to you, to your friend, your sister, your brother.

My brother had frontal temporal dementia when he was 50 and died 3 years ago. You know, I've had no shortage of examples that life is wild and precious, to borrow Mary Oliver's phrase, and it has changed the way I live. And in my research and my conversations with so many people who are going through a death loss or a living loss, these things change us. While we're here, I'd say that's why I hate that definition or summary of resilience as bouncing back because a you don't feel bouncy and b you never go back.

You know, these big life events morph us, they shape us, they leave their imprint on us. And what we're all doing in life is learning and relearning, particularly in the world that we're living in right now. you know, we're literally having to learn about AI, learn about so many new things so fast. And that is what it means to be human. And fortunately, history would teach us that humans are incredibly adaptive. And even though we don't like these changes, and I certainly, boy, do I wish Abby was sitting next to me now instead of two books that are filled with her But somehow my lived experience, the evidence from all of the studies that I look at, all of the people I talk to, you know, thousands of people all over the world, somehow we do get through this.

It's um it's amazing to see, you know, I'm in this privileged position where I get to have these conversations with people who are going through their hardest life moments. It's amazing to see that process of adaptation, you know, in real time and to experience and witness the suffering and the struggle that go alongside it. You know, I never want to sugarcoat it. At no point am I saying this is easy. But we are incredibly adaptable. Today's executives are more threatened, more exposed, and more vulnerable than ever before.

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That's ironwall.com/danharris. Stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link is in the show notes. I think you're arguing we're built to adapt. And I think the phrase you use is ordinary magic. I borrowed that from Anne Maren who was one of the earliest resilience researchers and it's her phrase and I I love it because it speaks to the fact that what we are what we have to do when we're rebuilding our lives is very ordinary processes. You know, the making yourself pick up the phone and respond to that text of that kind friend who's offering to take you, you know, out for a coffee when you least want to go, but responding and saying, "Yes, yes, please." The ability to sometimes find yourself doing something and think, "Actually, this isn't helping me.

I'm going to stop doing that right now. I'm going to, you know, get up, get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. and turn on the lights and make myself a hot drink instead of just lying there and ruminating and, you know, getting stuck in that culde-sac thinking. It is the hope for better days ahead than doing whatever it is that enables you to keep hope alive. And and I realize much of my work is being a hope monger for people like literally just giving them the hope and the belief that they can get through this.

But I also love Ann's phrase that the magic part because you have to do this stuff but if you do it it is kind of magical like there is a potency um and yeah of expediency that actually does occur. I part of the hope you offer is not just through your words, it's through just who you are given everything you've gone through, which kind of puts me in mind of one of the questions in the first part of your book that I want to hear the answer from in your experience.

Uh I want to hear from the answer I want to hear the answer from you based on your own experience. Will I ever be happy again? G given what you've been through with your mom, with your brother, and of course with Abby. Yeah. How do you answer that question? It's such a um I'm I'm pausing because when people ask me this question, um it often makes it I feel kind of tearful, which is ironic, isn't it? because I think I feel tearful because I am happy and doesn't that speak to the complexity of our emotional landscape that you've asked me about happiness and in my response about happiness um that is almost kind of tears of appreciation, amazement and joy or something underlaying that but essentially um yes so let me talk about happiness in in from my own perspective.

It took some time and I'd be the first to acknowledge that happiness is a big catch all phrase for a lot of emotions, isn't it? So when I say it took some time, it took some time for me to reexperience joy. I [clears throat] think it's a really hard emotion to tap into. What I did experience immediately, very soon after, was um being able to tune into what I still got I still had and hope for the future. I guess the body of research that I was steeped in, I hadn't long come home from the University of Pennsylvania and I've been working with Martin Seligman and Shane Lopez and Barb Frederickson, you know, all these big researchers.

So, I had this body of knowledge that gave me hope. I was really fortunate to have that because boy did none of the grief experts who came to talk to me, none of the helping professionals gave me hope. We were told in the first kind of couple of weeks after the girls died that we were somebody a professional told recommended that we write five years of our life off to her loss. And then the messaging kind of filtered through that we were now prime candidates for divorce, mental illness, and family estrangement.

I remember thinking, "Wow, thanks for that." I thought my life was already completely [ __ ] And I can laugh about it now, but I was ropable at the time. I was really I just remember thinking interesting that you say that because [clears throat] my body of science tells me differently, you know, it tells me otherwise. and that is that while it's hard work adapting to these big life losses actually um most people do get through it. I mean, I now know that science that shows that around 10 to 15% of people will develop prolonged grief disorder, which demonstrates, and you know, that's that's in the book to give people hope that most people get through this um in very kind of natural ways.

But going back to the me and happiness question, I do remember the moment where I was at a Bruce Springsteen concert three years after the girls died and I was with Patty, our middle boy and a bunch of friends and standing there outside in the sunshine in the evening, you know, drink in hand. And I had this moment of thinking [gasps] and I literally caught myself and thought, "Oh, what's that you're feeling?" And I remember thinking, "Hello, Joy, my old friend." You know, that was the moment.

But before that happened, I had to rely on I'm a runner, so I would put my headphones on, put some pumping house music in my ears, and go for a run. And that was my only really way of being able to sort of tap into that um slightly kind of more euphoric emotions. But otherwise it was more about um having hope being having moments of pride of noticing that we were getting through this. You know, I was managing to be there for the boys that we were still together as a family.

So happiness is elusive. It's a big word, isn't it? It's a catch all phrase. I my recommendation to people would be that you break it down. And then that's what I do in that chapter in this book is say, you know, what are the things sources of inspiration, sources of hope? What are the moments, the glimmers of serenity, of pride, of what are you curious about? Who do you love? What's good in your world? I don't really like the word gratitude. I don't like telling people to be grateful cuz that's really hard when you're going through awful awful times.

But I can still tune into the good. I think as it makes it sound exceptional and actually when you're doing it as many times as I felt proud and inspired by something and I was full of love I was also full of misery and tears and jealousy and you know it was hard. I don't want to sugarcoat it but I do think it's important for people to realize that you can live and grieve at the same time. There's so much duality involved in relearning to live in the world doing both.

I want to cover before we run out of time. I want to cover a couple of other questions that you in the second half of your book that you ask people to ask themselves. Um where and when could you be kind to your self? I think a lot of people hear the idea of like being kind to yourself like we live in a world where people say as a goodbye message they say take care or take care of yourself. But like it's it it can come off as empty.

Like what do I do? What is what does being kind to myself even mean? So what do you mean when you say when you recommend self-kindness? So my catchphrase is that it's better to be real than perfect. And so this real not perfect has become a horistic for me that kind of wraps up all of that Christine Nef self-compassion recipe. So basically when I find myself let's say I'm you know I'm going through something and everything's gone wrong then I will say to my I used to say to myself this is a moment of suffering everybody suffers.

Um you know what do you need to do to be kind to yourself in that moment which is Kristen Nef's self-compassion break. But nowadays, because I've done it so much, I've got that neural pathway that just goes, "You're real not perfect, Lucy. Everyone stuffs up. So, what do you need to do right now?" And I find it really helpful because we live in an era of perfectionism. And so, it's really it's a kind of catchall phrase for me to just bring me back to the fact that everyone stuffs up and suffers.

um to bring me back to what I need to do. But I I think you're right. It's it is funny, isn't it? We talk so much about self-compassion and yet people still find it really hard to do. We all need to know that it's okay to lower the bar, particularly when you're grieving. And again, I guess that's why I pushed back on your it's impressive comment because that's not the impression I want to leave at all because one of my main pieces of advice to people particularly in the early days of grief like if you're grieving right now on my website there is a um you know a download resource that pretty much says in the first few days of grief lower the bar do what you need just park everything else.

You know, don't answer to everyone else. Don't feel you need to be thanking everyone. You are actually in the driver's seat of your experience. Now, you are up against something massive. You are going to need to conserve all your energy as best you can just to get through every hour of every day. Stop trying to people please everyone else and do what you need. So, I think so much of my work is incredibly pragmatic and raw and real. I think that's why people are drawn to my work because I because I don't sugarcoat it.

You know, I'm might sit here with a smile, but I'm equally happy to tell you it was bloody awful for a long long time. You raised this question earlier. What you're pointing at, and again, this is a question from the second half of your book that you're asking the reader to consider for themselves. Are you reading this situation accurately? So what what is what does that refer to? As humans, we have this propensity to be mind readers and we fall into thinking traps so readily, so frequently and so commonly.

And you know in that chapter I would say to the read I do say to the readers um you know give yourself a break. Everybody falls into thinking traps. We know in psychology there are a number of them. And so that's things like catastrophizing or being a mind readader or that kind of magnifying and minimizing where you magnify all of the awful like say I'm giving a keynote speech and I magnify the two people in the room I can see who are on their phones and I minimize the fact that everybody else is staring up at me.

So basically that chapter is about explaining to readers that humans have this tendency to fall into what we call thinking traps, inaccurate thinking. And we particularly do so when we're stressed or when the stakes are high. And there are ways to pull yourself out of those thinking traps. And I mean very basically for the benefit of your listeners, one of those ways is to say to yourself that's not completely true because finish this sentence or another way of thinking of this is finish this sentence. or just as you alluded to earlier on actually how would a friend if you said this crazy thing that you're thinking in your head out loud to a friend how would they dispute the way you are reading this situation.

So it is about increasing the mental agility of my readers so that they are better able to check their own thinking for accuracy and push back on um those overly pessimistic interpretations of events that aren't necessarily accurate. I always finish or I usually finish interviews with two questions. one is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't get to? I think it's really important for people not to disenfranchise grief. Um, that's the kind of technical term for all of these different types of losses that we're not so good at talking about.

Um, whether that's family arrangement, the the rates of family arrangement in America are, you know, growing. There's one in four families have a member who is aranged. So my you know my what I would like people to do is to believe that they can talk about these things to feel the weird and do it anyway. There's no right or wrong way to do it. And every conversation we have, literally by conversation, one at a time, we are dismantling that disenfranchisement, that inability for us as people to be able to talk about grief.

You know, there is no right or wrong way to do it. You're always going to get it wrong, but if you do it with an open and heart and humility, then I think it's so important to try. Can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and uh your prior book and anything else that we should know about from you? Your website. Plug everything please. Got them both here. These are the North American covers of so this is resilient grieving. This is the book I wrote um for death loss when Abby died.

And and this is how Will I ever get through this? Um which is the new book which is about living losses. So if you're going through divorce, dementia, um estrangement, infertility, job loss, this is the book for you. But anyone can find my work. I'm, you know, I'm Dr. Lucy Hone, H O N E. You can go to my website. You can follow me on socials. There are courses, free downloads. There's so much information. My TED talk is my TED talks. Um yeah, I mean any of them you can find it.

I'm not hard to find. Dan, we'll put links to everything in the show notes. Uh, and in the meantime, Dr. Hone, thank you so much for your work, your time. Appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. And to all your listeners, you know, all of my work is about building well-being, grief, and resilience literacy, and you do that on this show every single week. So, massive kudos to you. Thank you. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili.

Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go. Remember to sign up for my new app which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers. Adree access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads.

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