You Can Get Through It: How to Handle the Hardest Things That Will Ever Happen to You | Dr. Lucy Hone

Why the five stages of grief are a myth, a go-to phrase for when everything's falling apart, and three steps for getting through loss. Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury and a sought-after professional speaker, a bestselling author, and an award-winning internationally published science educator. She is regularly featured in international media, including in The Guardian, Hidden Brain, and The Washington Post. Dr. Hone is a columnist for Psychology Today. In this episode we talk about: A three-step recipe for getting through any major loss Why the five stages of grief are a myth The surprising research on who supports grievers best (hint: pets) Living losses vs. death losses — and why ranking grief doesn't help What it means to have your "assumptive world" shattered Rebuilding identity after loss: answering "who am I now?" Finding self-compassion through "real, not perfect," not perfectionism Related Episodes: Cody Delistraty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL-RerPUqfo Sloane Crosley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCG9xpoo4eE Sam Sanders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUos3YjFY64 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: This episode is sponsored by: Rosetta Stone: Visit rosettastone.com/happier http://rosettastone.com/happier to redeem your 20% off Rosetta Stone Sapphire. CashApp: Download CashApp Today: click.cash.app/ui6m/oh9jnxlq https://click.cash.app/ui6m/oh9jnxlq #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Savings provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. BetterHelp: See the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit Betterhelp.com/HAPPIER http://betterhelp.com/HAPPIER. Ironwall: Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Request your free risk assessment at ironwall.com/danharris http://ironwall.com/danharris. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dan Harris?

  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 anxiety and the deepest depression, they're really during times of either transition or setbacks. So transitions like going to college, or graduating from college, or enduring a breakup with a girlfriend, and setbacks like 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, Dr. Lucy Hohn, about the science and skill of resilience. Dr. Hohn has written a book called, How Will I Ever Get Through This?

• 0:49Dan Harris?

  Evidence-Based Tools to Help You Heal from Hardship, Grief, and Loss. Dr. Hohn, welcome to the show.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Hello, Dan, and hello to all of your listeners. It's a complete privilege to be with you here today.

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  I do want to acknowledge that you come to this work the hard way, due to some extremely painful personal experience. Are you comfortable talking about that?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I am. In truth, I was already studying psychological flourishing. I was actually in the last throes 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, because here it is at your doorstep.

• 1:54Dan Harris?

  I'm so sorry. When was this?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So a long time ago now, 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.

• 2:17Dan Harris?

  Was this your only child?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  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 two-month-long surf trip in Mexico together at the moment, which is, you know, as a mom, this is kind of my peak life moment. My, our boys chose to go away together.

• 2:42Dan Harris?

  That's beautiful. Well, my, my younger brother is still my best friend to this day. A wrenching loss, no question about it. And, and you were, as you said, you were studying human flourishing. Did this provoke you to take a deeper dive into resilience itself?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  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

• 3:39Speaker 01

  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

• 4:20Speaker 01

  or event, which, as you said at the beginning, you know, has a huge impact on how we feel.

• 4:25Dan Harris?

  I think you call them BFTs?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:34Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. 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.

• 4:59Dan Harris?

  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, et cetera, et cetera. Garden variety BFTs.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  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 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

• 6:05Speaker 01

  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. And when I got to the bookstore, 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 wellbeing science,

• 6:47Speaker 01

  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

• 7:31Speaker 01

  about non-death 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 thought we needed a slightly better, quipier name for them, so I've called them living losses.

• 7:57Dan Harris?

  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, we tend to focus on the losses. And so, yeah, you are going to be, of course, losing loved ones, but you're going to lose jobs, and friends, and the abs you had in your 20s, and your hair, and your status, and in various contexts. It's just, we're constantly enduring these, you know, profound losses of loved ones,

• 8:39Dan Harris?

  and then what you're calling living losses. And so, as I understand it, what we're going to talk about today in the thrust of your new book really is the full spectrum of BFTs.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  That's right, because I think sometimes, well, my research shows that living losses can actually hit us harder. And I'd, 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...

• 9:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:36Dan Harris?

  Yeah, this is bringing to mind and memory of, I used to work in television news and it's a very, it's a pyramid and 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 reshuffling 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.

• 10:20Dan Harris?

  And those can be really destabilizing moments.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  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, and, 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,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  which we call your assumptive worlds, 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.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  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, that 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.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  They really smash our thoughts, our beliefs and our deeply held core beliefs apart.

• 12:34Dan Harris?

  How do you recommend we answer that question?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  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

• 13:57Speaker 01

  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

• 14:35Speaker 01

  and the healthy coping mechanisms that work for you in those testing times.

• 14:43Dan Harris?

  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, et cetera, et cetera. There are many questions to be answered here, but if we're going to go right at the big one, it's kind of like a little bit, eat your vegetables?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  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

• 15:51Speaker 01

  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 for grieving in that she kind of put it on the map and enabled us to start having these conversations. But the downside of this five-stage model that she introduced

• 16:29Speaker 01

  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 wellbeing.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  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?

• 17:18Dan Harris?

  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. I put a lot of time and effort into it and I'd love for you to benefit from it. It's also, by the way, the place where you can get updates on the broader 10% happier cinematic universe, including upcoming programming on my app, 10% with Dan Harris, and upcoming IRL events.

• 18:02Dan Harris?

  Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. I'd love to have you reading the newsletter and we will be right back after this. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible, or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year. I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.

• 18:45Dan Harris?

  Eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small, everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago. What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain? Or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.

• 19:34Dan Harris?

  As we've established, there are many flavors here of BFTs. It could be a job loss, a breakup, you know, just any piece of bad news that makes you reconsider your life trajectory. When you're going through something like this, as you referenced, a lot of people feel physically exhausted because the nervous system is just frayed and frazzled. 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 fucking feel like doing any of that shit because you are exhausted.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  True. And 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 you know so well and talk about on this podcast and have already alluded to, that suffering is

• 20:53Speaker 01

  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 struggle with infertility, been through a natural disaster, a global pandemic. And, you know, within 30, 40 seconds, there's 1,500 people in that room all standing up and watching that moment of reckoning where people really do look around them and realize

• 21:38Speaker 01

  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 shit 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?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:40Dan Harris?

  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 was missing something crucial. You said that the way to get through it is to do this, the kind of vegetable-y, vegetable-esque stuff around, you know, taking care of yourself through getting enough sleep and exercise and accessing your support system, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, there was an upstream move that you've just now talked about, which is, 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 bloody fucking

• 23:21Dan Harris?

  thing has happened to you, but 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 operative, you might be more willing and able to do some of the vegetable eating we've discussed.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  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, completely discombobulated because 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 hugely affected in so many different ways by this loss.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  But also, the second chapter is all about, why do you feel so physically exhausted? People don't understand that the absolute 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.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 26:01Dan Harris?

  Acceptance, self-compassion and understanding of the reality of what you're in, that you're not in an emotion, you're in a process that's unpredictable and buckle up.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  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

• 26:53Speaker 01

  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? Do you, you know, do you know your 3:00 AM 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.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  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 a chapter saying, who are your 3:00 AM people? So who are the people who are going to be there to help you?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  But beyond that, you're going to need extra help. So who might be the people who give you informational 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 a self-discovery journey so that they can find how to do this stuff and what is going to work for them.

• 28:55Dan Harris?

  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?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  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?

• 29:16Dan Harris?

  I want to say your spouse?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Pet or pets?

• 29:21Dan Harris?

  Or pets. Interesting. And it doesn't matter whether they're marmosets, dogs, chickens, whatever. I guess mammals probably do the best work.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  The research just asked about pets and counsellors 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 wellbeing 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 two, sometimes three times a day, the little, little things. So I thought that was really staggering. So

• 30:14Speaker 01

  in terms of support, I think it's really important for people to realise that we get support from different places. And on top of that, one of my jobs, I've come to realise 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 mum 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

• 30:54Speaker 01

  you are, we all grieve differently. We all process these losses differently. We all had different relationships with that person or 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

• 31:39Speaker 01

  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

• 32:19Speaker 01

  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 reader. Tell them what you need. But of course, first, you've got to work out what you need. So one of the resource

• 33:04Speaker 01

  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?

• 33:14Dan Harris?

  That all makes a ton of sense. I want to go back to one of the questions that was raised earlier. Actually, I want to go back to many of the questions you raised earlier. But the identity question, because you argued that, and this makes complete sense, based on, you know, interpolating back through my own experiences, that when we endure any kind of loss, 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?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  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 know, give yourself that moment to go, this, yeah, this is huge. I remember saying to one of Abby'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,

• 34:21Speaker 01

  wife, you know, knew who I was. Now, 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,

• 35:04Speaker 01

  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

• 35:46Speaker 01

  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 recalibration 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?

• 36:14Dan Harris?

  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?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  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. And I'll read them to you, actually. So there's 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 3am 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

• 37:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:29Dan Harris?

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• 39:05Dan Harris?

  I had the thought earlier, the assumption in Buddhism, and again, this is easy to say, and in my experience, almost impossible to actually inhabit. But the assumption in Buddhism is completely different. The assumption of 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 legendary Thai teacher, Ajahn Chah, who holds up 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 still the guy who gets thrown off course by minor losses.

• 39:49Dan Harris?

  So I'm not saying I can do this. But as a North Star, it is pointing to a very different kind of assumptive world.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  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 I agree. But I personally would choose love and attachment. I think this is my bugbear with Buddhism is that I will choose love and attachment anytime 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 explicitly making my choices. What do you think about that?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Like, am I reading that wrong from Buddhism?

• 40:43Dan Harris?

  Well, I've definitely struggled 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 the Dharma frequently. But 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 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's about where I've come down on this, and please Buddhist scholars, you know, don't at me.

• 41:29Dan Harris?

  This is just one person's evolving understanding, is that it really is like, 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 child, my love for my pets. I've got three cats, my wife, my friends. How can I infuse that with the wisdom, which is inarguable, of the fact that, you know, everything's changing all the time? And I think it, in moments when I can come close to

• 42:06Dan Harris?

  operationalizing this, it just infuses, it amplifies my love and infuses it with a sense of poignancy. Because I know it's not going to last. And so it's, there's a, I would call a healthy attachment. I've often heard it described, and 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 I'll describe it for people listening. If you hold your hand out and the person you love is, you know, in your palm, a clenched fist would be an unhealthy attachment, and an open fist would be, you know, love in the Buddhist sense. Does any of this make sense?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yes, it 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 masterclass 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,

• 43:33Speaker 01

  the big philosophical existential crisis that is at the core of humanity, is that we have no control over anything.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Well, that's not true. We do have control over some things, but we live in this world where, you know, I can say goodbye to my daughter one Saturday morning and drop her off at the netball courts. And seven hours later, there's a policeman standing in front of me telling me she's dead. And I live in, I call Christchurch, New Zealand, my home. And on February the 22nd, 2011, at 1:20 PM it was, we were rocked by a massive earthquake that killed 195 people.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  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 nanosecond, 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

• 45:07Speaker 01

  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 three 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,

• 45:53Speaker 01

  these things change us. While we're here, I'll 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.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  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 amazing to see, you know, I'm in this privileged position where I get to have these conversations with people

• 47:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:51Dan Harris?

  I think your argument, we're built to adapt. And I think the phrase you use is ordinary magic.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I borrowed that from Anne Marston, who was one of the earliest resilience researchers. And it's her phrase, and I love it because it speaks to the fact that

• 48:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I'm going to, you know, get up, get out of bed at 3:00 AM 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 cul-de-sac thinking. It is the hope for better days ahead than doing whatever it is that enables you to keep hope alive. 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 Anne's phrase that the magic part, because you have to do this stuff.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  But if you do it, it is kind of magical, like there is a potency and yeah, of expediency that actually does occur.

• 49:47Dan Harris?

  And 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. 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? Given what you've been through with your mom, with your brother, and of course with Abby. Yeah. How do you answer that question?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It's such a, I'm, I'm pausing because when people ask me this question, it often makes, 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 asked me about happiness and in my response about happiness. That is almost kind of tears of appreciation, amazement and joy or something underlying that. But essentially, um, yes, so let me talk about happiness in, from my own perspective. It took some time and I'd be the first to acknowledge that.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Happiness is a big catchall phrase for a lot of emotions, isn't it? So when I say it took some time, it took some time for me to re-experience joy. I think it's a really hard emotion to tap into. What I did experience immediately, very soon after was 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'd been working with Martin Seligman and Shane Lopez and Barb Frederiksen, you know, all these big researchers. So I had this body of knowledge that gave me hope.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  I was really fortunate to have that because boy, didn't 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 shit. And I can laugh about it now, but I was ropeable at the time.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I was really, I just remember thinking, interesting that you say that because 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 the 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

• 53:08Speaker 01

  in very kind of natural ways. But going back to the me and happiness question,

• 53:15Speaker 01

  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, oh, 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.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  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 slightly kind of more euphoric emotions. But otherwise it was more about 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 catchall phrase. My recommendation to people would be that you break it down.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  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 because 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

• 55:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:44Dan Harris?

  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. Where and when could you be kinder to yourself? 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 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?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  So my catchphrase is that it's better to be real than perfect. And so this real not perfect has become a heuristic for me that kind of wraps up all of that Kristin Neff self-compassion recipe. So basically, when I find myself, let's say, 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. You know, what do you need to do to be kind to yourself in that moment? Which is Kristin Neff's self-compassion break.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  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, you know, a download

• 58:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  I think that's why people are drawn to my work because I, because I don't sugarcoat it, you know, I might sit here with a smile, but I'm equally happy to tell you it was bloody awful for a long, long time.

• 59:06Dan Harris?

  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 is, what does that refer to?

• 59:22Speaker 01

  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 reader, I do say to the readers, 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 reader, or that kind of magnifying and minimizing, where you magnify all of the awful, like say, I'm giving a keynote

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  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

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  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

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  to check their own thinking for accuracy and push back on those overly pessimistic interpretations of events that aren't necessarily accurate.

• 1:01:32Dan Harris?

  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?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  I think it's really important for people not to disenfranchise grief. That's the kind of technical term for all of these different types of losses that we're not so good at talking about, whether that's family estrangement, the rates of family estrangement in America are, you know, growing. There's one in four families have a member who is estranged. 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

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:44Dan Harris?

  Can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and your prior book and anything else that we should know about from you, your website, plug everything, please?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Got them both there. These are the North American covers of, so this is Resilient Grieving. This is the book I wrote for death loss when Abby died. And, and this is How Will I Ever Get Through This?, which is the new book, which is about living losses. So if you're going through divorce, dementia, 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, yeah, I mean, any of them, you can find it. I'm not hard to find, Dan.

• 1:03:37Dan Harris?

  We'll put links to everything in the show notes. And in the meantime, Dr. Hone, thank you so much for your work, your time. Appreciate it.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan, and to all your listeners, you know, all of my work is about building wellbeing, grief and resilience literacy. And you do that on this show every single week. So massive kudos to you. Thank you.

• 1:04:00Dan Harris?

  Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. 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 will find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week,

• 1:04:45Dan Harris?

  robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.