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

33:37So to give yourself that moment to go, 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 an academic researcher, finishing my PhD studies, mother of three, 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 big milestones. But on top of that, she gave me a hint of a tool that I always recommend, which is to sit yourself down, if this is you and you are going through this at the moment, to sit yourself down, get out a pen and paper and write a list of what is still true.

34:50Even 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'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're finding your ways through this together and apart. You still have important research to do. You still have your friends. Yes, some of your friends and family, you know, you need to do some recalibration with.

35:42Some of them, it's okay to press pause on some relationships for a bit. But what is still true? Who are you? What can you count on? What hasn't changed? In other words, you can figure out like what is there still to live for? Not only who am I now, but what's the point of me now and what can get me out of bed? Yeah. So, one of the chapters in the second half of the book is exactly that, who and what still matters, what is still true. And I'll read them to you, actually. So, 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?

36:31Where 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 And how has your loss changed you? So you can see there's an 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. Today's executives are more threatened, more exposed and more vulnerable than ever before. Corporations spend billions on workplace security. But what happens when a threat finds your executives outside of the office?

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41:53I 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, so I'm not saying I can do this.

42:40But as a North Star, it is pointing to a very different kind of assumptive world. Yes, it's such a fascinating topic, this, isn't it? Because actually, as humans, we are hardwired for attachment and love, and yet we live in a world of impermanence. I mean, this is our deep flaw of humanity, isn't it, that you've just pointed to? And 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.

43:23I'm pretty, pretty explicitly making my choices. What do you think about that? Am I reading that wrong from Buddhism? 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 It's foundational argument of non-attachment being the only way to survive in a world of relentless non-negotiable impermanence.

44:07And so I actually think it's about where I've come down on this, and please, Buddhist scholars, you know, don't at me. 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? 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 everything's changing all the time? And I think it in moments when I can come close to operationalizing this, it just infuse it, it amplifies my love and infuses it with a sense of poignancy because I know it's not going to last.

45:06and um 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 and i'll describe it for people listening uh if you hold your hand out and the person you love is you know in your palm a clenched fist would be an unhealthy attachment and an open fist would be, you know, love in the Buddhist sense. Does any of this make sense? Yes, makes complete sense. As a resilience researcher, I think this is the aspect of resilience that fascinates me most is that when I'm running resilience training and we're running a workshop or a 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.

46:08And it's all about attention, focus, is it helping or harming you, the emotional agility and the psychological flexibility. But the really big challenge for all of us, the big philosophical existential crisis that is at the core of humanity is that we have no control over anything. Well, that's not true. We do have control over some things, but we live in this world where 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.

46:59And on February the 22nd, 2011, at 1.20pm it was, we were rocked by a massive earthquake that killed 195 people. And so I've learned that, and I think you're right, Dan, that it gives you, if you really know this in your bones, that suffering and struggle happens to us all, that the world, that your life, your assumptive world can be flipped in a 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 and does acknowledge the fact that these things can change in a second.

48:01that 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. I've had no shortage of examples that life is wild and precious, to borrow Mary Oliver's phrase, and it has changed the way I live. And in my research and my conversations with so many people who are going through a death loss or a living loss, these things change us. While we're here, I'd say that's why I hate that definition or summary of resilience as bouncing back, because A, you don't feel bouncy, And B, you never go back. These big life events morph us, they shape us, they leave their imprint on us.

49:04And what we're all doing in life is learning and relearning, particularly in the world that we're living in right now. We're literally having to learn about AI, learn about so many new things so fast, and that is what it means to be human. And fortunately, history would teach us that humans are incredibly adaptive. And even though we don't like these changes, and I certainly, boy, do I wish Abby was sitting next to me now instead of two books that 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, thousands of people all over the world, somehow we do get through this.

49:59It's amazing to see, I'm in this privileged position where I get to have these conversations with people who are going through their hardest life moments. It's amazing to see that process of adaptation in real time and to experience and witness the suffering and the struggle that go alongside it. I never want to sugarcoat it. At no point am I saying this is easy, but we are incredibly adaptable. I'm so happy that our son is now back from summer camp. He went away for three and a half weeks to make his re-entry smooth and joyous. We bought him a few gifts, one of which was a floating basketball net for our little pool in the backyard.

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52:40I think you're arguing we're built to adapt. And I think the phrase you use is ordinary magic. 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 what we have to do when we're rebuilding our lives is very ordinary processes. You know, making yourself pick up the phone and respond to that text of that kind friend who's offering to take you 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.

53:36I'm going to stop doing that right now. I'm going to, you know, get up, get out of bed at 3am and turn on the lights and make myself a hot drink instead of just lying there and ruminating and, getting stuck in that cul-de-sac thinking. It is the hope for better days ahead and 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, literally just giving them the hope and the belief that they can get through this. But I also love Anne's phrase, the magic part, because you have to do this stuff. But if you do it, it is kind of magical.

54:28There is a potency and expediency that actually does occur. 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? It's such a, I'm pausing because when people ask me this question, I feel kind of tearful, which is ironic, isn't it?

55:23Because 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 underlaying that. But essentially, yes. So let me talk about happiness from my own perspective. It took some time and I'd be the first to acknowledge that. Happiness is a big catch-all phrase for a lot of emotions, isn't it? So when I say it took some time, it took some time for me to re-experience joy. I think it's a really hard emotion to tap into.

56:07What I did experience immediately very soon after was being able to tune into what 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, and all these big researchers. So I had this body of knowledge that gave me hope. I was really fortunate to have that because boy, did none of the grief experts who came to talk to me, none of the helping professionals gave me hope. We were told in the first couple of weeks after the girls died that we were...

56:53Somebody, a professional 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. I just remember thinking, interesting that you say that because my body of science tells me differently. It tells me otherwise. And that is that while it's hard work adapting to these big life losses, actually most people do get through it.

57:40I mean, I now know the science that shows that around 10 to 15 % of people will develop prolonged grief disorder, which demonstrates, and that's in the book, to give people hope that most people get through this in very kind of natural ways. But going back to the me and happiness question, I do remember the moment where I was at a Bruce Springsteen concert three years after the girls died. And I was with Paddy, our middle boy, and a bunch of friends and standing there outside in the sunshine in the evening, you know, drinking hand. And I had this moment of thinking, oh, and I literally caught myself and thought, oh, what's that you're feeling?

58:33And I remember thinking, hello, Joy, my old friend. That was the moment. But before that happened, I had to rely on, I'm a runner, so I would put my headphones on, put some pumping house music in my ears and go for a run. And that was my only really way of being able to sort of tap into that slightly kind of more euphoric emotions. But otherwise, it was more about having hope, having moments of pride, of noticing that we were getting through this. 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, it's a catch-all phrase.

59:25My recommendation to people would be that you break it down. I mean, 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 because it makes it sound exceptional. And actually, when you're doing it, as many times as I felt proud and inspired by something and I was full of love, I was also full of misery and tears and jealousy.

1:00:15And, you know, it was hard. I don't want to sugarcoat it. But I do think it's important for people to realize that you can live and grieve at the same time. There's so much duality involved in relearning to live in the world, doing both. I want to cover, before we run out of time, I want to cover a couple of other questions 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.

1:00:53But like it's it. It can come off as empty. Like, what do I do? What is what is being kind to myself even mean? So what do you mean when you say when you recommend self-kindness? So my catchphrase is that it's better to be real than perfect. And so this real not perfect has become a 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 I'm going through something and everything's gone wrong, then I used to say to myself, this is a moment of suffering. Everybody suffers. What do you need to do to be kind to yourself in that moment, which is Kristin Neff's self-compassion break?

1:01:50But 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 catch-all phrase for me to just bring me back to the fact that everyone stuffs up and suffers, to bring me back to what I need to do. But I think you're right. 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.

1:02:40And 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. If you're grieving right now, on my website, there is a download resource that pretty much says, in the first few days of grief, lower the bar, do what you need, just park everything else. 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.

1:03:33Stop trying to people-please everyone else and do what you need. So I think so much of my work is incredibly pragmatic and raw and real. I think that's why people are drawn to my work because I don't sugarcoat it. I might sit here with a smile, but I'm equally happy to tell you it was bloody awful for a long, long time. You raised this question earlier, what you're pointing at. And again, this is a question from the second half of your book that you're asking the reader to consider for themselves. Are you reading this situation accurately? So what does that refer to? As humans, we have this propensity to be mind readers, and we fall into thinking traps so readily, so frequently, and so commonly.

1:04:24And in that chapter, I would say to the reader, I do say to the readers, 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 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.

1:05:13And we particularly do so when we're stressed or when the stakes are high. And there are ways to pull yourself out of those thinking traps. And I mean, very basically, for the benefit of your listeners, one of those ways is to say to yourself, that's not completely true because, finish this sentence. Or another way of thinking of this is, finish this sentence. Or just as you alluded to earlier on, actually, how would a friend, if you said this crazy thing that you're thinking in your head out loud to a friend, how would they dispute the way you are reading this situation. So it is about increasing the mental agility of my readers so that they are better able to check their own thinking for accuracy and push back on those overly pessimistic interpretations of events that aren't necessarily accurate.

1:06:21I always finish or I usually finish interviews with two questions. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't get to? I think it's really important for people not to disenfranchise grief. 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 that disenfranchisement, that inability for us as people to be able to talk about grief.

1:07:22You 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 heart and humility, then I think it's so important to try. 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? Ha ha, got them both here. 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 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.

1:08:06But anyone can find my work. 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 Talks, yeah, I mean, any of them. You can find it. I'm not hard to find, Dan. We'll put links to everything in the show notes. And in the meantime, Dr. Hone, thank you so much for your work, your time. Appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. And to all your listeners, all of my work is about building well-being, grief and resilience literacy. And you do that on this show every single week. So massive kudos to you. Thank you.

1:08:48Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. 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 Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers.

1:09:23Add 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, 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.

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