Invisible Grief: How Hidden Loss Holds You Back (and how to release it) | Dr. Lucy Hone

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it. Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This? https://amzn.to/4v13dkQ In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go. What you will explore: Why grief is not an emotion but a full-body experience that explains the exhaustion, brain fog, and 3 am waking you may have been blaming on other thingsWhat "living losses" are, the griefs that come without a funeral, and why they may be driving far more of our suffering than we recognizeThe difference between acceptance and coming to terms with, and why one word changes everything about how you move through lossWhat the research actually shows about post-traumatic growth, including the statistic that will surprise you about how common it actually isWhy resilience is not about bouncing back, and what Dr. Hone means when she says you do not bounce back from anything that mattersThe one question she asks herself in the hardest moments, and why it is a more useful starting point than any technique If you have ever minimized something you were going through because it did not feel like it counted as real loss, this conversation is for you. You can find Lucy at: Website https://www.drlucyhone.com/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drlucyhone/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/resilient-grieving-midlife-lucy-hone Next week, I am going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are quietly carrying, the conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this: we consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes! Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be. And so, you know, when you think of it like that, it is so validating for people because they start to realize that that awful feeling that they are experiencing, that exhaustion, that confusion, those acute emotions, those different difficulties with friendships and relationships, all come down to the fact that actually there's undiagnosed grieving going on here.

• 0:32Jonathan Fields?

  So there's a moment many of us know, usually around 3am, when something you thought you had processed comes back like it never left. The exhaustion, you can't explain, the fog that makes even simple things feel kind of impossible. We tend to blame all of this on stress or on not sleeping. What the science actually suggests is that a lot of it may be grief and that most of us have been walking around carrying losses we never fully named. Here's the part that stopped me. Grief is not just what happens when someone passes or dies. Grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be. The relationship that slowly came apart, the career that stopped feeling like yours. Dr.

• 1:17Jonathan Fields?

  Lucy Hohn has spent her career studying resilient. She's also lived through a loss that would break most people, the death of her 12-year-old daughter in a car accident. And she will be the first to tell you that everything she thought she knew had to be completely rebuilt. Her new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This? It's the distillation of that rebuilding, both the science and the lived truth of it. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. And the place I want to start with Lucy is the thing almost nobody in her field was willing to say when she started saying it. We'll jump in right there after this short break.

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• 3:33Jonathan Fields?

  Your work begins with an interesting and probably you could argue confronting truth, that suffering, in particular loss, is a part of being human. Why is this such an important place to start this conversation?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  As you say, I think it is absolutely critical to know this in your bones that everybody struggles and suffers. And I think it's particularly important to know this in the era that we live in now, Jonathan, because we live in an era of perfectionism and happyology. And neither, neither actually reflect the reality of our lived experience because I don't know if you've seen my TED Talk, but at the beginning of it, I ask people to stand up if, and I go through a series of questions. Have you ever lost someone you truly love, ever had

• 4:31Speaker 00

  your heart broken, been through a divorce, a victim of infidelity? Have you struggled with fertility, had a miscarriage and abortion, been through, lived through a natural disaster, had to migrate? You know, that's before we get into mental illness and physical impairment or unwanted diagnosis. And obviously, as you can imagine, as your listeners will be able to imagine, within 90 seconds, the whole room is standing. And so there's your lived proof that everybody struggles and suffers. And what worries me and why I have really focused on this area in my research in the past few years is that we are living in a world where

• 5:15Speaker 00

  we're pretending that that's not true. So then that adds a whole layer of harm and struggle and imposter syndrome to our already challenged lived experience.

• 5:26Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, that that last part is so salient, you know, because we do, you look at social media and, you know, I actually feel like this may be changing, probably not for good reason, just because it's so, so much harder to deny the fact that somebody is suffering. But we do have a pretty considerable history of people sharing their shiny happy selves. And even when they're struggling, keeping that very private and then just like the public dialogue is the, you know, like, the way to live is to aspire towards always happy all the time. And when you're not there, which nobody truly is, shame enters the equation.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And we had a, we've had a pretty hard couple of years in our house. My husband has adjusted out of running a really big building company to starting in a software startup that would, is related to building. But it's been tough. And in that time, I've really noticed how, I've reminded myself that, boy, happiness is a continual work on, isn't it? And the harder I work, the less time I have to do all of the things that truly make me happy. So you just have to keep working on it. But one of my other

• 6:41Speaker 00

  lived truths is that I've also learnt, like, literally, viscerally, I've learnt that it is possible to live and grieve at the same time, and to be, have moments, glimmers of happiness, even when we are going through our hardest days. And those experiences of positive emotions, we mustn't quash. You know, you've got to hang on to those like a lifeline.

• 7:10Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. Are you open to exploring that more? I know for you, you know, like you, this is not just your work. It's deeply personal.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So some of your listeners might know, but some might not, that I was already studying, I'm a researcher in resilience psychology, and I was finishing a series of studies for my doctoral thesis in resilience psychology and wellbeing science. Firstly, when I began that PhD, the city I live in, Christchurch, was hit by a series of devastating quakes. So that really shook me up, literally, and taught me an awful lot more than I'd ever learnt in the classrooms at the University of Pennsylvania where I'd first studied.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  But at the end of my PhD, huh, on a terrible, unsuspecting Saturday afternoon in June, we lost our 12-year-old daughter in a tragic car accident alongside her best friend and her best friend's mum, who was a really good friend of mine. So we, you know, I kind of thought I knew a lot about my field and...

• 8:32Speaker 00

  That day and the days, the weeks, the months and the years of integrating Abby's loss into our life story have really changed everything I understand and made my work change and shift as well, which is why I do so much on loss now. Boy, has that little girl taught me so much, you know, as much, I might have taught her a few things in her very short life, but she has taught me so much more in the subsequent years.

• 9:09Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm. I mean, it's, when things come home to you in that way, you know, it's, especially when you've been studying something academically for a while and then it becomes deeply personal and lived. Oftentimes, I've had many conversations with friends, with colleagues, with guests on this podcast over the years, where they have experienced just deep, profound, personal loss in that way. And people who have studied how to handle moments like that. And to the one, they responded in some way of sharing, look, everything I thought I knew went out the window when I was dropped to my knees. That didn't mean that it wasn't all there

• 9:53Jonathan Fields?

  for them, or it wasn't right. It just meant like they were really struggling to access it when it became theirs to own.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  It's funny though, because equally, I know in the moment that the policeman came to tell us, you know, that moment that every parent dreads, that there's a policeman on the phone and he wants to speak to you. And it took him 20 minutes from the phone call to get to us. So we were. Oh, doing a bit of very fast anticipatory dread and grief. But once he said it, I do think in some ways my learning or my resilience instincts kicked in because I had this sense of my life path splitting.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  And when I'm speaking, I do lots of keynote speaking. I have a slide with a, you know, a life path splits because that is what it does, doesn't it? And suddenly we were forced to go down some completely unexpected road. And I remember thinking, and I looked back on it and I was almost embarrassed with myself in the months afterwards. Because in that second, I remember thinking, well, that is your life path, Lucy. Now, time, you know, you time to choose, time to sink or swim was the good old cliche that went through my head. And I also know that within that first hour, the word mission had come to me, which is so prevalent in resilience psychology

• 11:29Speaker 00

  research that people have this survivor's mission. So I don't know whether it was my training or whether in some ways these skills are so deeply hardwired into us, this determination to survive, come what may. You know, it's not pretty and it's not what you wanted. It's downright awful. But actually, there is this incredible human determination to somehow adapt and get through all of the awfulness we are faced in our lives.

• 12:08Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm. So when you shared that in in this moment, you had been studying resilience before and this shifted the way that you were focusing your energies. Was that, are you describing a move towards the the interaction or the relationship between resilience and loss or grief? Or was there a different shift?

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that was the the biggest shift for me is that I had conceptualizes conceptualized resilience.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Really thinking about our response to all kinds of potentially traumatic events. And I'd lived through the earthquakes and my parents had separated. And, and I had lost my mum very young and, you know, when she was sixty three. So I'd been through grief before, but not this kind of earth life shattering grief that really does make you question everything, that smashes apart what we call your assumptive world. All these deeply held core beliefs, the assumptions we make about how our lives are going to unfold,

• 13:20Speaker 00

  how we should behave and how others should behave. And so it sent me in a search for, to really understand the processes of coping with substantial loss. And at that point where everything I had to learn from scratch was I had to learn about bereavement. But when I started reading the bereavement journals, all of the peer reviewed scientific literature at the time, in the field of thanatology, as it's called, I was really appalled to realise how little my field of resilience psychology had overlapped, had made it to thanatology,

• 14:05Speaker 00

  and how costly that is for peoples. So when I, I ended up writing a book, Resilient Grieving, in the year after Abby died. And I wrote it because there was nothing I could find to read. And the truth is, when I wrote it, I was nervous that I would get slammed for putting more pressure on those who were grieving. Because I wanted to be, you know, what I now realise is an agentic griever or, you know, an active participant in my grieving process. But no one was talking that language back then. And so I was really worried, Jonathan, that I would be slammed at the time.

• 14:44Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, not surprisingly, because there is this, there's a risk of sort of being the, hey, let's bring toxic positivity to the experience of profound loss, which people don't feel good about. And to a certain extent, rightly so, depending on how it's framed. And because it can, layer of expectation that leads to impossibility, and then shame, it just deepens the feeling. So I understand that hesitance. And at the same time, you're coming at it, saying, I'm a scientist, I'm a researcher, I, there are tools, there are skills that I know can help this process. So why aren't we talking about it in this context? I also want to broaden this out a little bit, because when we talk about grief or

• 15:29Jonathan Fields?

  loss, oftentimes, you know, the first thing that we think about is, is a person in our lives. But this isn't only about that. Like, we can experience loss and grief in many different domains.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  That's so true. So are you aware that I've just written a new book?

• 15:49Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  On what I call living losses. Because people kept coming to me, saying that they'd read Resilient Grieving, but no one had died. And what kind of resources did I have for them, given that their partner had walked out their door, given that their brother had dementia, which was true in my case. And all of these other, I remember a woman who was estranged from her three children, and she came to me and did one of my grief courses, online courses, and I just was staggered that I really hadn't paid attention to the fact that so many people had these living losses.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And so that really did change how I approached this work and made me, encouraged me to go and do some new research, looking into what is the grief, what does the grief look like when it's associated with living losses? So by that, I mean all of those things. Let's just get clear. What do I mean by a living loss? So any kind of relationship breakdown, any time a natural disaster forces you to rethink your world, whether you stay in your home or not, down to, you had that conversation with Gretchen Rubin recently about empty nesting. Well, you know, there's real grief associated with that, as you two highlighted. And then there is the grief

• 17:19Speaker 00

  of struggling with fertility and abortion and miscarriage, all those things I listed at the beginning. So, but once I started digging into the research, it became really apparent that people only associate grief when there's a funeral. As you say, you know, we only think of grieving the death of someone, not something. And my favourite definition of grief is that grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be. And so,

• 17:58Speaker 00

  you know, when you think of it like that, it is so validating for people because they start to realise that that awful feeling that they are experiencing, that exhaustion, that, that confusion, those acute emotions, those different difficulties with friendships and relationships, all come down to the fact that actually there's undiagnosed grieving going on here. And if you just understand grieving a bit more, then it helps us get through all of those tough events. So I don't want to make everybody feel worse by the fact that they're grieving, but actually I want to make them feel better just to say, this is all quite normal and natural, what you're

• 18:42Speaker 00

  feeling. But actually, it is grief. And if you know it's grief, and you know that there aren't five stages of grief, and that it, there isn't a timeframe around it, and we can bust some of those myths, then actually you're going to feel a whole lot better about your lived experience right now.

• 18:59Jonathan Fields?

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• 20:27Jonathan Fields?

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• 21:09Jonathan Fields?

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• 21:29Jonathan Fields?

  Good Life Project is supported by Kachava. So I used to think being salty was reserved for bad moods and pretzels. But lately, I have come to realize that a little salty edge actually makes life, and especially dessert, way more interesting. Any pastry chef will tell you that a pinch of salt isn't there to ruin the party. It's there to make the sweet parts just really shine, which is exactly what Kachava pulled off with their new salted caramel. First sip, I actually laughed. It's that good, rich caramel, a little salty edge, and none of the sugary drawbacks. And it's still the Kachava that I count on. Two scoops for complete nutrition with plant-based protein, fiber, greens, and so much more. No artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners, no fillers, no nonsense.

• 22:13Jonathan Fields?

  Which if you're feeling a little salty yourself is kind of the point. Embrace your salty side. Go to kachava.com and use the code GOODLIFE for 15% off your order. That's Kachava, K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code GOODLIFE. I love the invitation that you're offering, which is, can we just normalize this? And say like, we're all going through this on some level, and we're going to weave in and out of it, like big and small, throughout our lives. So let's, let's, let's not even call this like a disorder. This is just, this is an essential experience in life. So how do we move through it?

• 22:52Jonathan Fields?

  With as much understanding and compassion and skills and ease as we can?

• 22:56Speaker 00

  You know, one of my absolute favorite lines is that we're real, not perfect. So, and it is that's, it is this, oh, is the word dance? I think Jonathan, sometimes it's this ongoing tension, duality, dance between focusing on what we can control, and noticing and leaning into the good stuff in life, and hoping for the best. And at the same time, keeping that realism and pragmatism, that even in the best of times, there are awful days. And in the worst of times, there can be good moments.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  And that life is so much more complex, but doable, than we have given it credit.

• 23:47Jonathan Fields?

  You're right. You say that in moments like these, there's a bit of a universal question that so many people ask. How will I ever get through this? What's underneath this question?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Doubt. So first, let me address the question that,

• 24:07Speaker 00

  as I said, that I wrote this new book, which is called that. How will I ever get through this? Because first of all, I wanted to deliver some kind of useful information, a guide, a validation of that living loss experience. But I became curious to know, what are the questions that people ask themselves that are whirling around in their head when they are going through some awful stressful life experience? And I had a kind of hunch of what they might be, because people are always asking them when they come to work with me. But so Ruben Ruska and I did some research now 18 months ago, where we asked people, yeah, what are the questions? And we came from that.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  They, the participants, came up with the top 10 questions that people typically ask themselves when they're going through some awful life event. And the number one question was, how will I ever get through this? And in, and so then in each of the first 10 chapters of the book, I go through the first, those 10 questions and respond to them. And in that first chapter, it's really, my response is to your question. You know, why do we ask this? Because we have this huge doubt and reticence that, oh, we just, firstly, we know it's going to require so much energy

• 25:37Speaker 00

  to go through this awful thing and reinvent ourselves. And understandably, none of us want to do that. So I think there is a bit of a, oh, please tell me I don't have to do that. In fact, as I say this, it reminds me a bit of childbirth at the beginning, when you're like, oh, surely I don't have to go and do that again. But I think also there is huge doubt. And we see this in the literature, that people doubt that they have the capacity to get through calamitous change. But really, we also see in all of the science that humans are incredibly adaptable.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  And that's my job is to tell the untold story of human resilience, that actually most people get through all kinds of awful, potentially traumatic events using very ordinary processes. We're hardwired to cope, you know, adapting to change is part of our inherited DNA. So we don't like it, it's awful, but it is truly possible. It takes a lot of hard work. And people report that they, these experiences change them, that they come out the other side, realizing they are so much stronger than they ever imagined.

• 27:03Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, that also brings in, brings into the conversation a phrase that you used a bit earlier when we were talking, assumptive world, you know, we, we all navigate our worlds, assuming a lot of the things are and aren't true, are and aren't one, you know, possible, or people who will or won't be there, that we just, you know, in whatever world we live in, we tend to assume this is the world we will continue to live in, including all the beings that populate that world.

• 27:33Jonathan Fields?

  Take me more into the concept of the assumptive world, because, you know, I think part of what we're talking about here is the complete explosion of that world, and how do you reassemble the pieces?

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Well put, that's exactly it, really. And when I wrote Resilient Grieving, I remember writing, so this is in 2015, the year after Abby died, and I remember writing that some, it felt like someone had put a wrecking ball into our lives and just smashed the whole thing apart. And so that's exactly psychologically what is going on, that as humans, we have unwittingly built these assumptions about how our lives will be and how they will unfold and how we will behave and the grandchildren we will have or the children we will have and the

• 28:28Speaker 00

  husband-wife we will be and the incredible career we will have and the pets at our side and all of these things. But of course, it's kind of absurd that we do this, isn't it? Because I'm sure we do it because it keeps hope alive and it keeps us going, it keeps us motivated to keep trying. But of course, it's so not true and all of us experience unwanted change in our lives. And the bigger the smashing apart of your assumptive world, the harder you have to work to rebuild it. And in Resilient Grieving, I ended up describing this as a jigsaw puzzle because it really

• 29:12Speaker 00

  did feel like someone had come in and thrown the jigsaw puzzle of our lives onto the floor. And what we were doing as a family in the aftermath of Abby's death was relearning to live in the world and rebuilding a world without her, maybe with a piece of the jigsaw always missing. But it was our heavy lifting, our job to really start to rebuild a world, not completely from scratch because some things were still true. And for anyone who's listening, I would encourage that question. You know, if you feel like your assumptive

• 29:53Speaker 00

  world has been smashed apart, hold on to what is still true, double down on those things.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  And then in time, I used to think of every little insight, little aha moment, something I would learn or some practice I would bring into my life that helped me navigate that appalling process. I would think of them as those little pieces of jigsaw that were slowly coming into my world and rebuilding it, rebuilding the coherence and the fuller picture and some kind of new world order. And in many ways, I think what we are doing when we are grieving is cobbling back, cobbling together a new operating system that is now

• 30:45Speaker 00

  fit for purpose, that can withstand these things that we now know to be true, that people can get an unwanted diagnosis, that your partner can suddenly discover that, you know, actually that's dementia, not forgetfulness, that someone can walk out the door, that even your child can die or be diagnosed with some awful, terrible thing. And it is that integration of these terrible truths into our life schema, we call it in psychology,

• 31:27Speaker 00

  you know, your longer life story, that is the heavy lifting of what all of this processing and questioning and grappling is all about. And it's, you know, I just want to say to anyone who's in it right now, oh, it's exhausting, you know, and I just see so many people who are in the trenches grappling to rebuild their lives. And my heart goes out to you, but I also see so many people who have come out the other side and say, well, I wouldn't have chosen that for anything, but boy, have I learnt some important life lessons.

• 32:14Jonathan Fields?

  I want to touch back on something that you shared also. You were describing this feeling. There were so many people experiencing grief or loss. They have feelings that are embodied. You use the word exhausted. This can show up as physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, brain fatigue, cognitive fatigue, all these different things. And we don't always realize that this may be directly connected to the loss that we've experienced. What's happening here?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  It's so interesting, isn't it? So when I did that research, asking people, what were the questions that went whirling around in their head when they were experiencing some big stressful life event? The number one question was, question they asked was, how will I ever get through this? The number two was, why do I feel so physically exhausted? And I wasn't that surprised. I was surprised it came in at number two. But I hear that from my clients all the time. People come to me on my courses saying, I just, I just hadn't, like, thank you for saying exhaustion is part of it, because I hadn't understood that, and yet I can barely get out of bed.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And so I think we intuitively get that going through some big event is emotionally draining. But we're not so good, competent at connecting the emotional drain with the physical embodied drain. And of course, we're all slowly starting to understand our nervous systems a bit better. So I think it is helpful if people, if you just think of your nervous system and understand that when you are going through a stressful life event, your stressed response is dialed up all the time. Something awful has happened, so your brain is in survival mode, saying, I've got to watch out here. I've got to be on red alert. Something awful's happened.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  More awful things might happen. Watch out. Like, literally, you can hear the siren going off. And when the siren is going off, your entire body is focused on dealing with that threat. And so all of the other, there's no rest, you know, no rest and relaxation, no rest and reset.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  So we're just exhausted because we are permanently on. And once you're permanently on, it's really hard to sleep, which is why we all wake up at two thirteen AM or can't get to sleep. And then layer on top of that, of course, the fact that we are so digitally connected now, we're always staring at our phones and our laptops and our tablets. So that just makes the sleep harder. So I think there's a cocktail of bad things going on here that contribute to that exhaustion. But mainly with the people I work with, they're just relieved to know that it's not just them, that actually grieving is an exhausting process.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  I get very cross when people say grief is an emotion. Because grief isn't. A, it's not just one emotion, it's a whole multitude of emotions. Very often, you know, you can experience so many of them in a minute. But more than that, it isn't just about emotions, you know, we grief really hits us. It challenges our relationships. It challenges our view of the world. So we've got that cognitive overload, as you say.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  And it, yeah, it depletes us physically. So there's a lot going on.

• 36:00Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, and it, and it shows up, you know, in a very somatic way in so many people. You know, one of the other things that you also explore is the role of acceptance. And, and that word can be a very loaded word in the context of loss. It can sound almost, you know, offensive to someone who is in deep grief. So how do, how do we, or how do you define acceptance in a way that actually supports healing?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well said. I think that is so true that nobody wants to be told that they just have to accept it and move on. That's not helpful at all, is it? So, in my world, in my work, I like to distinguish between acceptance and coming to terms with. And it's funny, language is so important, isn't it? People, people get that coming to terms with sounds like a process that's going to take longer, whereas acceptance feels like one word that is just too abrupt and needs to be done right now. But I often challenge people in my courses and in this new book, I have said, you know, if you feel like you can't, you haven't accepted it, then I would question why you've bought

• 37:16Speaker 00

  the book, you know, and that is kind of a signal, or if you're on one of my grief courses, that is kind of, yeah, a manifestation of the fact that you clearly have accepted this thing has happened. So acceptance is very different to coming to terms with, which takes longer. And also, I think it's helpful to get people to understand that acceptance isn't condoning. It's not saying that I'm okay with this. It's actually saying, I'm going to accept that this awful thing has happened because once I accept that it has happened, I can actually address the process of coming to terms with.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  So I think if you think of it as the opposite of denial, so you're either in denial, this has not happened, or we're in acceptance, well, just let's, let's lowercase acceptance too and just go, you're just accepting that this awful thing has happened. You're not accepting that it's good, you're not saying yee-haw, and you're not condoning any aspect of it. You're just taking a big, deep breath and accepting and acknowledging the brutal reality and the truth so that you can focus all of your limited energy and attention and resources on working out what you need to get through the next hour, day, week, a month, to enable

• 38:45Speaker 00

  you to find your way to better days ahead.

• 38:52Jonathan Fields?

  And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 38:56Jonathan Fields?

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• 39:41Jonathan Fields?

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• 40:22Jonathan Fields?

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• 41:32Jonathan Fields?

  I'm somebody who, I have tinnitus. There's a sound that is perpetually in my head. But it was diagnosed over the first 15 years ago, and I struggled fiercely, fiercely, fiercely for a long time until I retrained my brain to be completely, more or less, okay with it. But before it could hit that point, I woke up every day and I was fighting, and I was fighting with my brain, and fighting against something that nobody else could hear or see or connect with in any meaningful way. And one of the things that I realized I was fighting with was the loss of this assumptive world, the loss of this idea that I would never again in my life hear silence, this

• 42:16Jonathan Fields?

  feeling that this thing would, telling myself the story that this would stop me from doing all the things I would joyfully do, would disconnect me from people. That assumptive world, it blew up from simply my brain generating a tone that wasn't native to my past experience. The moment that I basically said, "Okay, this is here. I've done all the obvious things and the unobvious things and the weird shamanic things, and it's still sticking around." And I literally said to myself, "If this is me for life, then what?" That was when I stepped into a mode that started to really facilitate me changing

• 43:00Jonathan Fields?

  the way that I related to this thing that would walk with me for the rest of my life. And I feel like that was my version in that moment of acceptance. And another sort of like off-brand example of a loss.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's just fascinating, isn't it? And then the process of coming to terms with, does that resonate with you as well?

• 43:23Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, 100%. And then like, what skills can I build? How can I think about this differently? And it's this process of integration that you've described, that you write about. You know, and we've, you know, it's been a part of this conversation. You know, it's this whole idea of I'm not getting, I'm not getting over this. I'm not getting past it. So how do I walk with it? Knowing that it may well mean that I am differently in the world for the rest of my life. You know, and it's interesting also because I repressed a lot of the emotion around this. I didn't share it with anyone because then it would be too real. And I didn't know how people would respond to it because nobody knows how to. And this is, I mean, this is such a minor thing in the context of some of the things that we're talking about.

• 44:08Jonathan Fields?

  But for me, it was at the, in the moment fairly existential. And this is one of the other things that you explore is this notion of emotional processing during times like this and emotional sharing and doing this in community. And how oftentimes, community doesn't know how to respond to us in a way that's helpful. And we don't actually, we pull back, whether it's part of our family culture, our local culture, you know, like, or, you know, like maybe just you live in an area where it's repression and constraint of emotion is sort of like rewarded. This is the way to be stoic.

• 44:46Jonathan Fields?

  Not helpful.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  No, not helpful. And so fascinating that you literally disenfranchised your own grief there. So you diminished. Yeah, so let me explain for listeners. So disenfranchised grief is essentially the fact that society has put a hierarchy around grief. There are some griefs, somebody dying, a child dying being right up there at the top is this is. And I'm talking about this less from a personal perspective and more from a kind of research perspective. So. We unwittingly, again, have this kind of hierarchy around, well, that's the worst grief. And then your tinnitus is definitely the the most tiniest grief ever.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Well, I reckon that noise in your head is a pretty massive process and adjustment that you have to come to terms with. And what I hear in my work is it's just not helpful to do this hierarchical thing. And particularly is it what happens is one of its side effects is that it disenfranchises people's right to emotionally process what they're going through and ask for help. So so many of these living losses particularly are disenfranchised. Pet loss being one of them, dementia, any kind of ambiguous loss where someone's still there

• 46:14Speaker 00

  or not there, there and not there, I should say. So family estrangement, which is growing fast. I think about a quarter of families in America currently experience estrangement with one family member or more. So those people are still alive, physically absent, mentally present. And any kind of degenerative disease like dementia is the opposite, where they are physically present but emotionally and cognitively changed or absent. And so, of course, there's grief associated with those things.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  But because these people are still around, it's just much harder. Society hasn't worked out how to deal with this, which is why we call it disenfranchised grief. And I do hear this in my work all the time. I was staying with a friend the other night and she is potentially about to lose her job. And she, I said, so you should read my new book. I literally wrote it for those kind of circumstances. And she said, oh, but, you know, I'm not grieving, that's not grief. I I don't I don't feel I have the right to grieve. And I said, I'm standing in front of you, holding my new book, saying, I wrote it for that circumstance. And

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Your grief is your grief. You're allowed to feel sad and confused and anxious and all of these difficult emotions when your life is different to how you thought it would be. So if we go back to that definition again, Jonathan, that's exactly what was going on for you, isn't it? There was a yawning gap between how you thought your life would be and this new threatened reality. And so it's not helpful to disenfranchise and not acknowledge people's grief. And my real secret wondering is how much of the mental

• 48:20Speaker 00

  health burden at the population level is this kind of unacknowledged grief where people just don't understand that they are experiencing all of these difficult emotions because their life is different. As you said, different between expectation and reality. And that worries me.

• 48:41Jonathan Fields?

  You know, one of the things that is woven through your work and through this book is this notion of post-traumatic growth. How do we tip the scales in favor of that?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  So the first response I have to that is that actually, people do it unwittingly. So my Stressful Life event study showed that eighty-one percent of people said that their experience, the thing that they had lived through, had changed their beliefs completely. So this smashing apart of your assumptive world to a point that you have to do the really hard work to rethink everything that you thought you knew to be true about the world. It is that really hard work, the struggle to come to terms with, that actually

• 49:37Speaker 00

  delivers the growth. So isn't that a funny thing that we are so tentative and afraid and we push back against struggle? And yet is the struggle that is the great revealer of who and what matters most, an inner strength we never really imagined we had of...

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is, what matters to us in life and our incredible ability to adapt. So I, I, I, I'm very tentative when I say struggle is your friend because I hate that friend struggle. You know, it's, it's a, what is, it's kind of your worst friend, um, but your greatest teacher. And what I've seen through my conversations with clients and through poring over the hours of the, you know, research and reading their stories is that people change their worldview. And, and they really do.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  In the nature of the struggle, it forces them to work out who and what matters most to them. But I also think there is another answer to this question, which is that people just are so much more familiar with post-traumatic stress than post-traumatic growth. So when I'm doing one of my keynotes and I'm standing in front of a really huge audience, I'll say to them, you know, put your hand up if you've heard of post-traumatic stress. And everyone puts their hands up. And then when I ask them, put your hand up if you've heard of post-traumatic growth, only a smattering of people put their hand up.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And that is, um, either, it's not really academic negligence, but it's a failure in science communication. Because if we take the military personnel out of these figures I'm about to give you, and we just look at the general population, then the approximate levels of post-traumatic stress are around eight percent compared to around sixty percent for post-traumatic growth. And when I'm doing a keynote, I get people to kind of guess. They cannot believe, nobody imagines that the levels of post-traumatic growth would be that high. And so.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  The facts are there, the science has shown that most people in their efforts and struggle to relearn how to live in the world after one of these really awful events has occurred, that most people actually go on to say, yeah, I am a different person. You know, when you go through these things, you don't bounce back. I really hate that that phrase for um or description of resilience, because I definitely didn't feel like Tigger. You know, I wasn't very bouncy for a long time after Abby died. And you never go back because these big events of our lives, these death losses, these living losses, they absolutely

• 52:48Speaker 00

  change us. They leave an imprint on us and we are never the same. We know new things. We've seen how people respond. We've lost friends, we've made friends, and we've learnt so much about ourselves that of course, we are completely different people. And very often, people will say to me, I am so much stronger than I ever thought I would be.

• 53:15Jonathan Fields?

  Someone's been joining us for this conversation. They have either just experienced a profound loss, or maybe they're in it right now. They're barely holding it together. What does resilience actually look like for them when they wake up tomorrow morning?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  Such a good question. So my first thing I would say to people is, you do you. It is the most important thing to understand that resilience, we all have different recipes. So what works for me, the ways of thinking, acting and being that work for me, Jonathan, are likely to be different to the ways of thinking, acting and being that work for you. So the most important thing for anybody who is in that acute moment right now where something has just happened in the past days, weeks or months, is to understand that you just have to survive this acute bit. So do what helps you and not what harms you.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Do your way of getting through the day. Don't compare yourself to others because one of the most important scientific findings in the most, in the recent years about grief is that grief is as individual as your fingerprint. Everybody responds to these big events of our lives differently. So don't compare yourself to your brother, your sister, your best friend, your work colleagues, the people in your village, if it's just been hit by a natural disaster, your partner, your parents. You have to find your way through this and you do so by paying attention to what helps

• 54:55Speaker 00

  you instead of what harms you in the micro moments of your day. But I'd also say right at the beginning, be kind to yourself, lower the bar, you know, your old world has gone. Understand that this is all absolutely exhausting, but never give hope, never give up hope that you will somehow get through this because humans are incredibly adaptable. This might not be what you wanted, but truly you can find your way through this.

• 55:30Jonathan Fields?

  Feels a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

• 55:39Speaker 00

  To live a whole life, to accept it all, to accept the good and the bad, that there will be all of it. For me personally, to remember to balance work, which I get so much satisfaction and meaning from with the things that give me joy, which is being out in those wild landscapes, to get out of the city and back really into deep nature. And to nurture and look after and always stay close with those I love, wherever they are in the world.

• 56:20Jonathan Fields?

  Thank you. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing I keep sitting with from the conversation is it's the definition. Grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That is it. That one sentence, it just opens a door that most of us have never been through because we've spent years disenfranchising our own experience, telling ourselves that what we're carrying does not really count because nobody passed or died. Three things I want you to hold from what Lucy shared. First, grief is not an emotion. It is a full body experience. And the exhaustion, the fog, the sleep disruption

• 57:05Jonathan Fields?

  are not separate problems. They are the same thing. Second, the people who come through loss with something gained are not special. The research shows it actually happens to roughly 60% of us, not because those people had more resilience, but because the struggle itself, when you stay in it rather than running from it, is what does the work. And third, acceptance is not condoning. It is not saying you are okay with what happened. It is lowering the barrier to reality so you can focus your energy on what actually comes next. And if you're in something hard right now, the question Lucy kept returning to, the

• 57:46Jonathan Fields?

  simplest compass she found is, is this helping me or harming me? Not is it comfortable? Not is it the right thing to feel? Just is it helping or harming? That one question, in the micro moments of an ordinary day, is ordinary magic. And hey, before you go, next week, I'm going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are kind of carrying without telling anyone. The conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this. We consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. That one's coming next week, so be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you

• 58:31Jonathan Fields?

  get your podcasts, so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. And do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor. Share this conversation with one person who might need it right now. Then use it as a reason to actually talk about what you discovered, what landed, what it brought up, because that is how we all come alive together. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

• 59:21Speaker 06

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