Pod Insights All In The Mind From death to divorce: getting through the worst losses of your life About this episode At some point in our lives, we all face the question, "how will I ever get through this?". You know the moments — a sudden loss, a messy break up, an unexpected diagnosis or a career halted…
These questions are close to Lucy Hone's heart, not just because of her work as a resilience researcher, but also because of her own experiences of life-altering grief.
So today, Dr Lucy Hone shares her tips for navigating the world when it feels like everything is falling apart.
Guest:
Dr Lucy HoneResilience researcherAdjunct Senior Fellow, University of Canterbury in New Zealand Co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and ResilienceAuthor, How Will I Ever Get Through This https://www.drlucyhone.com/how-will-i-ever-get-through-this and Resilient Grieving
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanMore information:
The three secrets of resilient people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWH8N-BvhAw, Dr Lucy Hone and TEDxChristchurch
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07 Speaker 01 From an Ipswich fish and chip shop to the epicentre of Australian politics.
0:12 Speaker 02 Please explain.
0:13 Speaker 03 Pauline Hazard is making it's One Nation.
0:15 Speaker 01 This is the unlikely story of One Nation. Well, I'm back. Is it a passing protest vote or a permanent realignment of Australian politics?
0:24 Speaker 04 Whether you love her or hate her, truth is stranger than fiction.
0:29 Speaker 01 The Making of One Nation. To hear the full series, search for The Making of One Nation on ABC Listen.
0:37 Speaker 05 Until about 2011, resilience researcher Lucy Hone didn't realise that grief was something you could experience in scenarios that didn't involve the death of a loved one. She thought that was a prerequisite for the emotion. But then the Christchurch earthquake happened.
0:56 Speaker 06 I was in my kitchen, which is where I am speaking to you from today, and it was terrifying. I'd never lived through anything like it. And many of our friends never went back to their family homes again. They literally left for work that morning and never went back.
1:12 Speaker 05 185 people were killed, more than 10,000 buildings and homes were destroyed and for two years, the city was plagued by thousands of aftershocks.
1:23 Speaker 06 Every single night, we went to bed as a family. I just would worry about what would happen that night. And when it was raining outside in particular, I'd think, please not tonight. I think, you know, we had our fight, flight and freeze response dialled up, fully activated for a couple of years.
1:41 Speaker 05 But the good news was Lucy's family, her two sons, her daughter, her husband and her friends were alive. And yet.
1:50 Speaker 06 I couldn't fathom why I felt so sad when we hadn't lost anyone, you know, for our family, and we hadn't lost anything. Our house had cracks, but we were still living in it. And I remember talking to one of the emergency management team one day, and it was her who said to me, well, you can grieve for things other than the death of a person. And that was such a lightbulb moment for me. I didn't know that. And that did explain why I felt so desperately sad for our city. Because we had lost so much, we'd lost that sense of innocence, that we lived in a safe, predictable place.
2:33 Speaker 05 Grief comes in many forms. And often, unless society recognizes it as something you should grieve for, it can go unacknowledged.
2:42 Speaker 06 Fertility challenges, divorce, job loss, migration.
2:48 Speaker 05 Which can make dealing with the complex emotions after a loss, whether that's a death, or a disaster, or a divorce, deeply challenging. And as you'll hear in this episode, Dr Lucy Hone has been through more than her fair share of loss. Because in 2014, just a few years after the Christchurch earthquake, she lost her 12-year-old daughter in a car accident. So, if you've ever been devastated by a loss, whether that involved the death of a loved one or not, and found yourself asking, how will I ever get through this? This episode is for you. Lucy's researched the questions people most often ask themselves
3:31 Speaker 05 in the throes of grief, and she's funneled strategies for arriving at answers and building resilience into her latest book, appropriately titled, How Will I Ever Get Through This? I'm Sana Qadar, and from ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind.
4:03 Speaker 05 I wanted to kick off by clarifying something about resilience because resilience is a word that can have a lot of edge for some people and depending on the context, it can be taken as a kind of chin up, cheer up kind of thing, just move on, get over it. Do you think people have a misunderstanding about the concept of resilience?
4:23 Speaker 06 Yes, I most certainly do. And I think what you've described, Sana, is just spot on, that in some ways it's been almost like weaponized or something like, you're not resilient enough, what's wrong with you, toughen up, get on with it. Whereas actually, resilience is quite different to that. And the other, I think, really unknown and underappreciated two other aspects of it. One is, as much as we don't like change, as humans, actually, we are incredibly adaptable. We really can find our way to reinvent ourselves and struggle through change. And the other is that, I hate that phrase, bounce back, because you
5:05 Speaker 06 don't feel bouncy and you don't go back. So that, I think, is the other really misunderstood aspect that we have learned from resilience psychology, is that these big events of our lives change us. We learn from them. They leave their mark on us. And so it's a kind of always iterating evolutionary capacity to be able to face whatever we're facing today, largely based on previous life experiences.
5:34 Speaker 05 And as you heard a moment ago, this understanding isn't just academic for Lucy. She did her PhD on psychological wellbeing and resilience between 2011 and 2015, a period of time that tested her resilience intensely. First, during that Christchurch earthquake, and then again, a few years later.
5:57 Speaker 05 In 2014, you suffered a really, really devastating loss in your family. You lost your 12-year-old daughter. If you're comfortable talking about it, can you tell me what happened?
6:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, so our gorgeous 12-year-old daughter, Abby, little blonde, emergent, almost teenager that she was, died in a terrible car accident on Queen's Birthday 2014. And our plan was to go mountain biking down south in the beautiful alpine areas of New Zealand with three families. And as we were packing up the car, the phone rang and Abby's best friend Ella was on the phone and wanted to know if Abby could ride down in her car with her, with her parents. And of course, we said yes. We thought nothing of it.
6:54 Speaker 06 And so we dropped her off at the netball courts and we barely even said goodbye to her. We shoved her out the car, as you do in real-life families. You know? And later that night, you just never expect such an awful thing to have happened. So we just assumed they were late for some reason. And then eventually, the owners of the lodge came over to see us and said, "We've got a policeman on the phone and he would like to speak to you, Lucy, or your husband." And it was just absolutely devastated. It was unbelievable to find yourself
7:38 Speaker 06 knowing that a policeman was on his way to talk to us.
7:43 Speaker 06 He came and said to us, "Yeah, okay. Well, I can confirm there's been an accident. And yeah, your daughter and Ella and Ella's mum Sally were all killed as a driver sped through a stop sign at 100 kilometres an hour and crashed into them and killed all three of them on the spot."
8:04 Speaker 05 I'm so sorry.
8:06 Speaker 06 Thank you.
8:08 Speaker 05 I also want to ask, you know, you talk about what happened a lot in your work now. What is it like for you to talk about it again and again, all these years later? Like, is it okay for you?
8:20 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's really not traumatizing. I mean, I think it is just the most brutal, awful facts of our lives.
8:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:27 Speaker 06 Grieving essentially is a meaning-making exercise, meaning that over time, we are... The heavy lifting of grieving is about managing to think about what has happened and find ways somehow to integrate it into your life's story. And I think for me, the retelling of the story to help people understand that when I share what I see helps people cope, that I... If I don't retell the story, then you'd be like, well, what do I know?
9:05 Speaker 05 Right.
9:05 Speaker 06 But the reality is, by telling the story and people knowing that I have literally lived through every parent's worst nightmare.
9:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:13 Speaker 06 And I've done all of the research, both the looking over other people's research, but also my own empirical research. So I think I can't avoid it.
9:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:24 Speaker 06 And I guess what I'm trying to say is that it makes sense to me why I'm doing it. So it makes it okay.
9:31 Speaker 05 One thing I wondered with that experience, coming not too long after Christchurch. And Christchurch was like, we talked about how it was this collective experience of loss. And then the loss of your daughter, it strikes me as a more individual loss, individual to your family. Did that make the quality of the grief different? I'm sure it was different in many ways, but yeah, can you talk about how that, the grief following the loss of your daughter differed to the grief you experienced after Christchurch?
10:02 Speaker 06 It is such a good question, and I've never really thought about it this before, but in many ways, it was collective grief when we lost the girls because for two reasons. One, we lost Ella and Sally as well in our little seaside village. Right. You know, that impact of losing two girls who were at the primary school and two families being so heavily impacted. But I also, you're making me wonder, Sana, about would it have been different if we hadn't lived through the earthquakes? Because we were such a, we are such a tight knit community. And I wonder about that, that people was already so mobilized to help other people through tough times.
10:45 Speaker 06 And I've seen all the research that says that community resilience is really a thing. We are so much stronger as a collective than we are our individual parts. And we live here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, where the common practice is to open your doors and invite the community in when someone's died. And we even had Abby's body home for five days, which will probably shock lots of your listeners. And it shocked me the first time anybody ever suggested that, which was when my mum died a long time ago. Uh huh.
11:27 Speaker 06 But because I live here, because we live here, it makes complete sense. You know, it is part of the cultural practices of Maori, of the people of this land. And, and oh my word, it made so much difference. Yeah. Yeah, I would just honestly give a plug. If you can, if you lose someone and you can get to allowed to bring their body home, then it gives you time with them, time to start the adjustment. Right. The brutal acceptance, you know, you can't deny.
12:02 Speaker 06 The truth of it.
12:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:04 Speaker 06 When you are staring at your loved person. And then with Abby, it, you know, it sounds so morbid to talk about it. And I don't want people to think it was morbid because we seriously, she was a twelve year old girl. And we had all of her friends in her bedroom, the coffin, open coffin in her bedroom. Open sided and they were just everywhere, talking to her. You know, writing things, putting notes in her coffin, lying. One of the boys was lying next to her on the bed. I mean, it just, it's kind of hard to imagine, but it was so healing. And I think particularly when you're experiencing a traumatic bereavement.
12:44 Speaker 05 Um.
12:45 Speaker 06 Then you're, you're waiting for your brain to catch up. It's so hard for your brain to catch up. And seeing her there really definitely gave me, my brain, the opportunity to start that awful processing of acceptance.
13:01 Speaker 05 Gosh, you're painting such a beautiful picture, like it's, you know, I'm tearing up just thinking about that scene. But it's so beautiful to hear how much comfort it brought to you and your family and the community.
13:12 Speaker 06 And I hope so, because I'm also in the other side of my brain going, everyone doesn't want to know this. But I hope so that it was absolute game changer for us with Abby. But it was with my mum too, where I remember being so scared of death. And then because we had that experience, when I stood at my mum's funeral in the year two thousand, looking at the coffin and smiling and thinking, why am I doing that? And I'm thinking, I know why I'm doing that because I am no longer scared of that. It's no longer unknown and it's taken away much of the fear and anxiety and catastrophizing and mystery and taboo. And that really is so much about what my work is about is like, come on, people.
13:56 Speaker 06 If we can talk about birth, why can't we talk about death?
14:05 Speaker 05 From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sarah Qadar. Today, resilience researcher Dr Lucy Hohn on coping with all kinds of loss.
14:17 Speaker 06 About two and a half years ago, I just kept hearing from readers that they were reading one of my other books, the book I wrote in response to Abby dying that's called Resilient Grieving. And that is firmly about how do we take the best of resilience psychology and apply it to the context of losing someone you love. And then people were writing to me saying, I've read Resilient Grieving, but actually no one has died. I am experiencing some other awful unwanted transition or change in my life. And that eventually got me thinking, okay, let's do some research to discover how similar the grief that is
15:00 Speaker 06 associated with death loss and non-death loss is. And as an academic researcher, I was also really aware that at the time, this was back in 2024, I'd been to a conference and I became aware that there is a new fledgling seam of research into non-death losses, NDLs, they're called in psychology and in thanatology, which is the study of death and dying. And discovering that there were researchers looking into NDLs made me think, okay, so actually, this is definitely a topic worth researching. And so I thought
15:42 Speaker 06 we probably needed a better name for them. So I called them living losses.
15:46 Speaker 05 That's a better name, good branding.
15:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, like, you know, NDLs, it's quite handy to have the acronym, but not that much of a kind of quippy thing. So I did this piece of research, the study was called the Stressful Life Event Study. And we invited people to share their experiences of non-death losses. It confirmed all sorts of things, mainly that the grief that is associated with living losses is disenfranchised largely. People don't even know they're grieving.
16:20 Speaker 05 And give an example of what living losses are.
16:23 Speaker 06 Good point. So things like fertility challenges, divorce, job loss, migration, aging, family estrangement, any kind of significant change, I mean, let alone physical impairment, chronic illness, mental illness, you know, so many of these losses that we experience in lives are disenfranchised by society. So people just don't typically know how to talk about them. So, once I got interested in them, the research that we did specifically for this book was, I wanted to know what were the questions that people typically
17:04 Speaker 06 asked themselves when they were going through one of these stressful life events that doesn't involve someone dying. And the number one question that people asked themselves was, how will I ever get through this?
17:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, I want to ask you a bit more in detail about some of these questions. So maybe let's actually start with the first one, how will I ever get through this? Like, that is such a big one. And you give some really practical kind of exercises in the book for people to start to answer this question for themselves. One is to sort of map out a timeline of your losses and the big changes you've had in your life and how you coped with those moments, to kind of, I guess, give you a sense of how you've done this before. Can you talk about how you go about answering this first very big question?
17:51 Speaker 06 Yes, I think it is, I think at one point I write that, you know, it's totally understandable to have doubts. But actually, the research shows that while doubt is understandable, most people do manage to find their way through these awful big events. So the research should give you hope in the first instance, that you will somehow find your way through it. But in terms of actual dynamic processes, what can you actually do in the moment? I think it is really helpful to look back and notice that you've already got through all kinds of other things. They might not be as monumental and devastating as this
18:33 Speaker 06 One thing, but it does mean that you've actually got what I call loss efficacy built in. I mean, basically, you've already got resilience capabilities. And it just enables people to, it teases them out, you know, for the reader, saying, who were the people that you leaned on? What were the ways of thinking, acting and being that worked for you then? Because if you notice what worked for you then, then that gives you some idea, a bit of a blueprint for what might work for you now. And then, of course, the next step is to try and find ways to actually reach out and get the help you need.
19:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, and when it comes to this question, for your own experience after the loss of your daughter. What were the things you did to move through that loss in the, in the months and years after?
19:23 Speaker 06 So we were, are very lucky to live in a small, tight-knit community. And I'm almost embarrassed to say that two friends of ours put a cooking roster together.
19:34 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
19:34 Speaker 06 And I think we were cooked for, for nearly six months. Like, honestly, I think we had a couple of meals still coming, four and five and six months later. Cause that's how much, you know, we were just written off. I look back at it now and think I'm almost embarrassed, like surely we should have stopped in months.
19:53 Speaker 06 Surely I was taking advantage of the situation by then. But we leaned on our friends, we walked the dogs, we got out. And right at the beginning, we put any semblance of routine that we possibly could into our days. Which was very much based on what we'd learned from the earthquakes. So having lived through the earthquakes, I had seen the way the kind of standard policy was to get the schools back up and running as soon as possible, to enable people to put some kind of semblance of normality back into their lives.
20:30 Speaker 06 Because when something awful has happened and you are operating out of your fight, flight, freeze stress response, one of the ways to tell your brain. That actually it's safe and okay and you can dial out of that again is by seeing these routines and going through kind of regular things. So I talk about islands of certainty, the people, the places, the practices and the possessions that enable us to feel a little bit more steady when we are in very rocky waters and uncertain times.
21:15 Speaker 05 Another question you found people often ask is, how did this happen to me? I want to talk about this one because in your TED Talk, which has been watched millions of times now, you said that one of the key things resilient people do or understand is that bad shit happens. Can you explain this? Why is that key to being resilient? And when it comes to answering, how did this happen to me?
21:41 Speaker 06 It is so important to understand that suffering and struggle happen to us all, that adversity doesn't discriminate. Because when something awful happens, if you know that in your bones, then it stops the why me question. So effectively, it stops you from feeling singled out or discriminated against, which then also has that knock-on effect of preventing you from feeling like a helpless victim. It actually attaches you to the wider historic human experience that sadly, bad things do happen.
22:21 Speaker 05 And one of the other questions, how am I supposed to accept this? Talk me through this one. Like, what was your own journey towards acceptance? I wonder if it was, you know, different to other people's, given your background in sort of grief and resilience. Um. Talk about this question.
22:37 Speaker 06 Well, people who read my books and people who come on my grief courses will say to me, I haven't accepted it yet. I always gently challenge them and say, well, the fact that you are reading this book, the fact that you have enrolled in this grief course tells me that you have. But I want you to understand there is a difference between acceptance and coming to terms with.
23:01 Speaker 05 Hmm.
23:02 Speaker 06 And really what they're talking about is I haven't come to terms with it yet, which of course they haven't because that sadly takes time and a lot of mental wrangling because that when something awful happens. And that awful event smashes apart your assumptive world, we call it, your assumptions about how the world will behave and how your life will be and institutions should behave and all of that, when one of these big events happens, gets smashed apart. And so what we are doing with all of these questioning is just finally, slowly, step by step,
23:43 Speaker 06 pulling a new look assumptive world back together.
23:51 Speaker 05 And that's a really good segue to sort of part two of the book where you pose questions back at the reader. And these questions are based on research about resilience and coping with loss. Let me just highlight a couple of the questions. So there's, do you know your strengths? Who and what do you want to live for? Who are your three AM people? And also asking, is something helping or harming you?
24:15 Speaker 06 So those questions, the the power of them is that they are strengths-based constructive questions to enable anybody who's going through a tough time to personalize the best of the science. And the question that I get most feedback on is, is what I'm doing right now, the way I'm choosing to think, act or be, helping or harming me in my quest to get through this? And it's such a good example of a question that can help you get back in the driver's seat of your experience.
24:52 Speaker 05 Can I ask what were some points along your journey where you had to ask this, if you're happy to share?
24:57 Speaker 06 Yes, so I would ask it, I mean, I'd find myself poring over photos of Abby late at night or looking on Instagram and getting cross with some of the ridiculous comments that people had put and, you know, forgive me, but you can imagine there were a lot of twelve year old girl comments saying, she's in a better place now and things like that, which I forgive them for because of course they're twelve.
25:21 Speaker 05 They're children, yeah.
25:22 Speaker 06 They're children. But I'd find myself getting waddled and I think really Lucy, you know, is doing this helping or harming you? Put the phone down, go to bed. But equally, I remember asking myself, will going to the trial of the driver, will that help me or will it harm me? And we never blamed the driver. We instantly knew, all four of us in our family, that forgiveness was the only route forward.
25:47 Speaker 05 Even the children.
25:48 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:49 Speaker 05 Even your boys.
25:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, all four of us. But knowing, did I want to go to the trial? Would that help me or would it harm me? We chose not to go. I didn't want him to loom large in my head. Equally, another time we were offered a restorative justice session with him and I thought, will that help me or will it harm me? I don't think it's going to help me.
26:11 Speaker 05 Okay.
26:12 Speaker 06 But my husband, asking exactly the same question, said, yeah, that will help me. So off he went and they spent two hours together.
26:18 Speaker 05 Wow.
26:19 Speaker 06 So I think it really demonstrates, doesn't it? You know, same question, same people, but diametrically opposite responses. And I do think that speaks to the power of it.
26:33 Speaker 05 You mentioned how, you know, the book covers not just death losses, but living losses as well. And one thing I wanted to ask about was, you know, people can sometimes feel inclined to think of a hierarchy of grief. You know, you sort of explained why you included such a broad range of losses. But what do you think about this kind of hierarchy of grief that people can sometimes assume in their head?
26:56 Speaker 06 So when we were running um one of our online grief courses a while back, we only ever had people who were experiencing death loss. And somebody approached me who had lost their dog.
27:10 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
27:11 Speaker 06 And the more I dug, the more I realised that this lady had never had children. She'd not been able to have children. And I think this dog was fourteen years old. And we had Abby for twelve years. And it just really made me think. And so I introduced her to the group and gave my reasonings why I felt like she should be allowed to come and learn about grief. I mean, who are we to say who can and can't grieve? And I think that is an important stance for people to have, to not compare griefs. And yes, some people do that. But the reality is, if what you are going through is making you feel really miserable,
27:52 Speaker 06 then I would love you to read this book and understand more about why you feel so miserable. And without doubt, I've had very good friends myself who have said, well, I haven't lost anyone. My husband's still alive, but we are no longer living together. I have sold the family home. I've had to go out and get a job.
28:11 Speaker 05 Hmm.
28:11 Speaker 06 And now my husband is living out his best life on Instagram with another woman.
28:16 Speaker 05 Right.
28:18 Speaker 06 That's a lot, isn't it? That's a real living loss. And I will go as far to say, I can put Abby in a bottle and go, perfect child, she wasn't the perfect child, she was a pain in the butt. But you know what I mean? I can kind of glorify her.
28:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
28:35 Speaker 06 And my dear friend cannot glorify her husband.
28:37 Speaker 05 Right.
28:38 Speaker 06 She said to me, I have lost my past, my present and my future.
28:41 Speaker 05 Hmm, gosh.
28:43 Speaker 06 So I know, I just want to say there are on this, there are no rights and wrongs. But wouldn't it be better if we were all just less judgmental and more empathetic?
28:51 Speaker 05 That's a good, that's a good message. And then finally, how are you these days? And how's your family these days, um this many years after the loss of Abby?
29:00 Speaker 06 So right now is a big time for us because we're on the cusp of her being dead longer than she has was alive. And that is kind of a baffling, you know, I honestly don't know what I think about that. I'm I'm exploring that in my head.
29:17 Speaker 05 Hmm.
29:18 Speaker 06 I feel really lucky to have had her. I'm obviously I miss her. I miss all the girliness in our lives and what that would have the different dimensions and love and silliness that would have brought. But essentially, I think people are always surprised. We live happy, full, loving, connected, purposeful lives. And our boys are happy and healthy. And I feel so grateful to have them.
29:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's beautiful. That's really lovely to know that, you know, you can be resilient, you can learn to live with the loss and life can be good.
29:53 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, I think really, Sana, my biggest clarion cry to people is that it is possible to live and grieve at the same time. And that doesn't mean that you forget the person. It is possible to integrate them into your life, even though they're not physically here, and to continue to honour and love them and live in a certain way because of them forever. And that is how we approach it.
30:28 Speaker 05 That is resilience researcher Dr Lucy Hohn. Lucy is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and co-director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience. She's also the author of the book, How Will I Ever Get Through This? A Practical Guide to Navigating Life's Toughest Times. That is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Roi Huberman.
30:59 Speaker 05 I'm Sana Qadar and a quick favour to ask before I go. If you like what you've been hearing, would you consider leaving us a review on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts? It really helps with searchability and finding new audiences for the show, and it's also really lovely to hear what you think. And if you have any feedback you want to write to us, you can also get in touch on [email protected] . All right, that's it for this week. I will catch you next time.
31:40 Speaker 00 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC Podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
Previous Fame, isolation and terror: inside the mind of a lone mass killer Next ‘Should have been my birthright’ - the journey to reclaim a lost language Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated