Dr Lucy Hone's career path as a Resilience Expert became incredibly useful in the aftermath of the earthquake which devastated her city of Christchurch, New Zealand in 2011. She was able to support her community and help them rebuild their mental health and wellbeing - putting her research and studies into action. She believed this was her true test.
But Lucy was forced again to call on her knowledge when she experienced heartbreaking loss in 2014 - the passing of her young daughter, Abi. Abi was killed in a car accident, leaving Lucy to not only navigate her own journey with grief, but hold her family together.
In this episode, Lucy shares how she coped, and now dedicates her life to helping others facing the same battle.
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Host: Ant Middleton
Editor: Adrian Walton
Executive Producer: Anna Henvest
Managing Producer: Elle Beattie
Nova Entertainment acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we recorded this podcast, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to Elders past and present.
We'd like to acknowledge that traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was produced, the Galligel people of the orination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
It's twenty ten and Lucy Hoane has just finished her studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She's returning to her adopted hometown of christ Church, New Zealand with a degree in resilience psychology in toe. Just after her return, a devastating earthquake hits christ Church, killing one hundred and eighty five people. As an expert in resilience, Lucy rushes to help her community. She puts her doctoral studies on hold to lend her expertise to those who need it most. She thinks this is her moment, her calling, But this all changes on Queen's Birthday weekend in twenty fourteen, when a family holiday turns into devastating heartbreak. Her twelve year old daughter Abby hops in the car with her best friend and mother. A driver's speeds for a stop sign and kills all three of them Instantly, Lucy is faced with every parent's worst nightmare. I'm at Middleton and this is headgame. Today a powerful lesson on choosing to live and grieve at the same time. Doctor Lucy Hoane, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on my podcast head Game. How are you ah?
Thanks very much and for inviting me along today. I'm very well and I'm really looking forward to getting into this conversation all things resilient mindset with you, because I think you and I have probably got quite a lot in common.
Now I can tell straight away, I can just feel the energy through the screen And what made you want to study resilience and talk to me about this resilience course that you've done in America.
So in two thousand and nine, when I decided I wanted to take a deeper dive into really understanding the complex dynamics of resilience, there were two places in the world that I could have studied. Actually, at that point there was only one place, I think, and that was the University of Pennsylvania and they had a master's program in resilience and well being science. They also very soon after one came at uel University of East London. But at that point I was ensconced in New Zealand, so that was just even a bit further commute, So I commuted thata Was and forwards over two thousand and nine twenty ten, went eleven times to Philly and that was really exciting, amazing time. And for me, it was particularly amazing time because the academic department that I was aligned with had just picked up the contract to create the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program to make American soldiers as mentally fit as they have traditionally been physically fit. So it was a you know, for someone like me, as I say, like, my only interest is how can we drag the best of findings out of the ivory towers of academia and bring them to people in their everyday lives. Then you don't get a much more discerning, skeptical, cynical audience than those guys who were heading out to Afghanistan at.
The time, and that program was just starting, was it just.
They were literally creating it and training the trainers while I was there. So I came back from Penn and did my PhD out of Auckland and ended up working here in christ Church because then suddenly we had those earthquakes. So once I came home, I was suddenly really entrenched in helping my own community get back on their feet in that post quake.
Yeah, so you come back from your studies fully qualified, in a real, real good place, obviously, and then talk to me about the christ Church earthquake, because that was devastating. It killed I think one hundred and eighty five people, and obviously the community and the country was just in a state of emergency.
Yeah, it was. It was really devastating. And I have no experience of earthquakes, and to be fair, nor did anybody in christ Church. And so we had a kind of minor ish event for the city. It was further more of rural in September, and I think we all thought nothing of that particularly, and then on February the twenty second, twenty and eleven, Tuesday lunchtime, the city was just absolutely hammered by this one very big event and it was really shallow under the city, and so it ended up bringing down I think it was either I can't remember, it was seventy ninety percent of our city buildings in the years afterwards. And the other thing that I think people I certainly didn't understand in the immediate aftermath is that you don't just get one event. So we ended up having ten thousand after shocks in a two year period and five major events. So it taught me a lot about anxiety.
And that's all from the from the one one event, from the one major earthquake, and that was the is that sort of like the ripple effect the after mouth of.
Which of a seismologist. But I know enough having lived here now, but it is pretty normal to get big after shocks, and that just adds to the whole stress of the recovery and the rebuild because every time you have another major event, that sets the clock back insurance wise, and everyone has to put in new insurance claims. Apart from the fact that it is harrowing, and I would say that for a two year period, we never really went to bed as a family knowing what was going to happen that night, and so that's a lot of stress to deal with. And it just did teach me a lot about communicating the best of science that I knows. By then, I was pretty all over the science, but I'm always curious about how you package up these findings in a way that might actually resonate with people. So it was professionally a really steep learning curve. I've never done any speaking like public speaking at the time. We went and did a resilience road show around the city and I worked with everyone from huge construction companies to you Heart Foundation and government agencies and some of the search and rescue. So yeah, it was a big It's a long time ago now and the city is a beautiful, recovered place.
Can you remember that day, Lucy? Can you remember that the day? And can you just talk me through the day and how you reacted to it.
I was working from home and I'm a mum of three, and when we live in a hills seaside community with big steep hills, and the hills came tumbling down and so that the hills were terrifying and people were killed under boulders that came crashing down from our hills. And so I can see our kids school at their little primary school from here, and I watched them watching the cliffs collapse in front of them. And it became my job to stay at home with children that got home and other neighborhood people. And I don't think I would as a mum, I was, I remember that was kind of my complaint at one point, was I was just stuck at home. My husband is a builder, I should have explained, so out of the two of us, he was probably a bit more useful to the community in those immediate days and hours. So I remember being really frustrated that I couldn't get out and help people more. But actually it was just doing the mothering thing and looking after the kids, and then we all had to be evacuated. I mean, at the point that the tanks came rolling through our village, I remember think it's definitely time to get out of here. And we had no services for you know, weeks, so we had to go and live somewhere else for a bit. But we had three families that night. We had twenty one people that night, and another night here in a tsunami warning, we've had sixty sixty people and seven dogs in the house. So you know, you just do you know, you learn to muddle your way through. And I think that's a very little understood aspect resilience, is that it's not all about perfection and strong stoic behavior. It's about muddling your way through. Because my sister was lost her home three hours north of us in a later event in twenty sixteen, and I remember at that point I nearly lost it because they had the river coming towards them. We already thought they'd lost their home, they'd lost a bridge, there was no access, and at that point I've lost my daughter, my mum, and my sister was threatened, and I was really losing the plot. And I remember someone sort of saying to me, Oh, this isn't looking very resilient, and I was like, no, no, this is absolutely the appropriate response to what is going on in my life right now. And that is all part of resilience.
Being scared, Yeah, it's finding a way through over around under. Its crawl is literally you know, yeah, it's you know, survival is resilience, right. You know, you're you're coping in a way that you're getting through each hour, You're getting through each day. You'll get then getting through each week. And again I'm glad that you mentioned that, because you know, people do think it's just about you know, being brave there with your chest out and bouncing things off. It's like, no, no, you've got the rubble on you. You are, you know, in the trenches, you are. You know, you're you're still crawling, You're still making small, small, tiny progress. And I always say, you know, progress over perfection. You know, in the right direction, even if it's an inch at a time, you know that ultimately you know why you've got your whole world, you know, crumbling around you. But that is the epitome of resilience is realizing that you're you're still here. You know, you're you're you're still breathing, you're still moving forward. You know, you look around, you use the positive people around you to keep going. And you are one of those positive people during the during the aftermath, shall we say, of the earthquake, because your skill set certainly came into play, then, didn't it.
Yeah. I mean there was a moment where I remember saying to my husband, will there ever be a point at which we leave? And he kind of looked at me and laughed and went, you do resilience, and I'm a builder. I don't think we're going anywhere for a good ten years, and where would we go? And yeah, yeah, it was definitely. It was a revealing time. It was a hugely challenging time, and I learned so much about resilience, about the community, the collective resilience that you know, we really are stronger together, and oddly and it became an amazing time to have my skill set because whereas previously people weren't very interested in it, and you know, it's quite hard to do well being and resilience training. Back in two thousand and eleven, never one thought that was just kind of soft, you know, Nambi paired being woo woo stuff. Suddenly people in this community really got it. They understood how grateful they were to have each other. They understood that you needed to check in on your neighbors and that whole community resilience. As I've watched that play out time and again here and that has been an absolute privilege to see the dynamic processes in action. And you know, I feel pretty lucky to have seen that in terms of my own academic and professional and personal understanding of this really complex topic.
And did it force you to stay in New Zealand? Did you just find a sort of need to just stay in New Zealand? Say, right, I've got my work cut out here. I'm far from finished, it's far from over, you know, I'm going to stay with it for a while.
I think that's really true. I think that is absolutely true that our community, the greater City was decimated, and already we've forgotten how bad it was. I watched a movie the other day where they showed you some drone footage of downtown. We couldn't get into downtown christ Church for nearly two years. I think it was because they then just dismantled the whole city, and literally, this strange footage just showed you what looks like parking lot after parking lot. It was just an empty city with the odd building here and there, and there was a feeling that, yeah, we were locked and loaded, and we didn't want to go anywhere, and we wanted to be part of this rebuild. And I also have written about academically the post traumatic growth that I have witnessed in this city that has prepared us better for COVID and better for any other subsequent disasters, because we know what it takes to rely on each other. And because of the earthquakes, our education sector, our health sector had all created much stronger closer ties and had wandered out of their silos that so often happens, you know, And there was much more multi cross government agency work going on, so that when COVID hit, we ended up writing a piece of some research and in a big international journal about the post traumatic growth and how all that we'd gone through had actually enabled us to set up the systems and infrastructure that enabled us to be more ready and more adaptable when COVID put us into those lockdowns. Really interesting.
Does resilience breed resilience? You know, when you have a community where you see resilience, where you look around and you go wow, you know, people look at you, they see what you're going through. You look at other people and you see that you're all getting through this and you're pulling through. Does that create resil within itself?
I think that's a big question, and I think it's pretty complex things going on there. So we know that there are things like social emotion or contagion, and we know that that means that if everybody's really struggling and high levels of negative emotions, then that actually is pretty contagious. So we know that when you're in that post disaster recovery period that what you want from your communities is that Stockdale paradox of realistic optimism or pragmatic optimism. So you want people to be really realistic with what they're up against, but never lose hope. That they will get through somehow, And so what I can speak to is that in that post quake period, I remember being on the building site one day and one of the boys calling the local newspaper, which was called the Press they should rename this depress because it was just so depressing, and you know, his observation was, it's not good for me to read this in the morning when we're all trying to get out there and rebuild the city, and I need some good news. And so I think there is a kind of contagion effect going on. But at the same time, as you say, when you see the incredible agility that our communities were displaying, and I remember that our children, our schools had to cite share for a long time, so we lost, you know, I don't know how many, but a third or more of the schools. None of the premises could be used, and so our eldest, who had just started at secondary school, suddenly went right across to the other side of town where he was at school in the afternoons. I think I can hardly remember now. So the school basically had yeah, they had Papnui high in there from seven thirty to one o'clock and then my ed's school went in there at one third and they use the same site in the afternoon. And I remember one day sitting at a zebra crossing watching Kappenui High School. You know, I don't know a thousand kids go that way and then fifteen hundred boys from this other school going there for the afternoon, and think that is pretty incredible, isn't it. This is literally the mental and physical agility that resilience requires in action and was blown away by the tolerance. I remember at one point thinking I should scrap my PhD, which was on well being psychological well being and how do we measure and conceptualize well being? I remember thinking, I think I should scrap it and study tolerance because the levels of tolerance and how many times all the roads were dug up for years is just quite staggering to see that ability of humans to just cope and not complaint that much. Yeah, it was really amazing.
You lost your daughter. And this is a point I really wanted to talk to you about because I'm a father of five, and you know, when I read your story, it is every parent's worst nightmare, and it sends shivers down my spine and you know, just to think about it psychologically, just to think about it for a second. I have to just go no, because I can't. I couldn't even fathom. I couldn't even imagine what it's like. So you go through these earthquakes, you're coming out at the other end, and then you lose your daughter Abby in twenty fourteen in a car crash. If you can, could you take me back to that moment if possible.
Yeah, So, you know, you say that it's hard to fathom, and it is for every parent, you know, it is impossible to imagine. And it was an unsuspecting Saturday, and we were all going three families to buy can you newly opened Mountain Bike Trail And at the last minute, Abby, who was twelve years old at the time, the phone rang and she said, can I go in Ella's car? So we said yeah, sure, you know, they were tied at the hip and we thought nothing of it and dropped her off at the network courts. So she went off with Ella and we're having dinner later on that night, and Ella's family hadn't turned up, and we, as you do, just assumed they were stuck in traffic or something had happened. But we then got a phone call from the policeman say he was on his way to see us and there being an accident and as they had driven down through the back country lanes to come and join us, and someone had driven through a stop sign at one hundred kilometers an hour and crashed into their car and killed Ella's mum, Sally, who was a really great friend of mine. And Ella and Abby and so you know, they literally the unthinkable is suddenly very much our reality. And I remember the policeman coming tracking us down in this country lodge mountain lodge, and distinctly thinking that it was like one of those moments where your life path splits that you never see coming and is completely unfathomable. But and you'll probably appreciate this a because I can't quite help. I can't really separate me the researcher, from me the mother. And I remember thinking, like almost like an outer body experience going whole. I didn't see that coming, and that is now my life, that we are going to be forced to live down this completely unexpected path and somehow have to survive her loss. And I think the words were I mean, I only now remember this because I've written about it in my book, but you know, that's your life now, time to sink or swim. And that was my survivor's mission. And you see this a lot and the resilience literature that people talk about as survivor's mission. And it was crystal clear to me from that very first moment that we were on We were fighting for survival and I was bloody determined that we would somehow make it through.
And the obvious quer how do you tackle something like that? I know that you said that, you know you're forced and when you're forced down a certain road or in a certain direction, then you have to put.
Up or shut up.
Really, you know you have to. That's you can't. You've got no other option. It's a case of we have to tackle the how do you even start to tackle something like that?
I think? And thus so so I do lots of work nowadays. We run a program called Coping with Loss, and so I spent my life now talking to breathed people about how they can cope with loss. And so what I'm talking to you about now is partly my own experience and partly what I have seen work with others. And the first thing is that you've somehow got a believe that you're going to get through. And I didn't want to be a victim. And we were told that we were now prime candidates for divorce, mental illness, and family estrangement in that first week, and I remember thinking, WHOA, thanks for that. I thought my life was already pretty shit. Can't believe that you're just making it worse for me. And I became very determined to think, Okay, that's not happening on my watch, and that's kind of Mamma bear instinct thing of just going nap. We're not doing that. I am going to hold my family together and we're somehow going to get through this. I knew, of course, I had all my training to lean on, and even in those first earliest days and weeks, I was using tools such as really thinking about where I was focusing my attention, and so I had this voice in my head that said, choose life not death. Don't lose what you have to what you've lost. And we are fortunate enough to have two beautiful sons who were teenagers at the time, and I was really determined to live for them and be there for them, and they needed me right now, you know, we needed to somehow cobble together a family existence that was going to enable us to just get through the days and weeks. All of what I'd learned in the disaster recovery was really helpful. For instance, I knew that it would be helpful to us to create some semblance of a normal routine. And you know, I'm being using the word routine really loosely here. We would get up in the morning and walk the dog and have a cup of coffee, and then you know, talk to other people, and then have some lunch, and then walk the dogs again, see the kids after school. But getting the kids wanted to go back to school, and I think me knowing that that would help them, knowing from my training that we let them go about much sooner than.
Me trying to lead a sort of semi normal life without too much disruption.
Yeah, that mainly functioning was my kind of goal. I remember my husband and I talking about that, saying, you know, we can't control so much of this, but if we just endeavor to kind of mainly function, and if we acknowledge when we can't do that, that we it's okay to lie on the character and not get out of bed. Then there's a lot of self compassion. And in my I don't know if you see my ted talk, but those are those three secrets of resilience I think are these are my kind of three sort of tools of resilience. That is self compassion. You've got to be kind to yourself and let yourself off the hook and lower the bar and do what you can. So that's the first bit. And then this ability to really be or grow yourself awareness the way you are putting your attention and then asking yourself is what I'm doing, the way I'm choosing to think, act, or be helping or harming me in my quest to get through this. So those were my absolute foundational resilience tools that I had picked up at the University of Pennsylvania that without doubt came and saved me. So in essence, they are self compassion. You know, you know that shit happens, and that stops you from feeling discriminated against and singled out. And then you grow your self awareness to really tune into what is still available to you and the strength and supports that you have got. And then you do that. I use that question around helping or harming me to give me some self control, to put me back in the driver's seat, so that I am doing everything I can to survive, taking action and not just being a passive participant in this journey.
I find a lot of people as well, Lucy. They they take things extremely personally when it's out of their control. And I found that with soldiers, you know, and when I talked to veterans that have witnessed you know, their friends being you know, blown up in front of them, and they take it terribly personally, as if you know, that should have been me, Why wasn't it me? And I always say to them that, listen, it wasn't put that id, didn't have your name on it. It was just a you know, it's just to disrupt and to disturb. And how hard was it not to take things on personally, especially because you mentioned that you you know, it's just saying to you, oh, yeah, jump in that, guys, it's fine, and you know, there's so many different variables that could have happened. But you can't take it personally, can you? Because I think that's a huge downfall of not being able to process something and eventually you sort of not move on, but move forward, Yeah.
Totally, and having my training helped me not take it personally. And my husband said in the police car that night when because they drove us home, and he said, we're not going to blame the driver and our boys and I all went, yeah, we're all going to agree on that now because we know that life is random, and that helped us, like we didn't do the why me because we all know that tough times, awful things happen to people all over the world every day, and it's not like people get singled out, and we know that life's not fair. I think these are some of the deeply held core beliefs that came to save us. And I also that stopped me from doing the what ifs that I would knowing that I could kind of coral my attention. I used to have a rule that would myself do too, what if, you know, what if I hadn't let her get in the car that day, what if I hadn't put the trip away? And then I'd say, seriously, Lucy, is this helping our harm in you? It's just that your honor hiding to nowhere. And I would use it all the time, you know, like do we want to meet it. We were offered a restorative justice session with the driver afterwards, and I thought, well, will that help me? Like I don't, I've forgiven him. Forgiveness is not condoning. Just pause there and say that for a minute. But I've forgiven him. But do I want to spend time with him? No? Well that helped me. No, I just said no, thanks, But my husband, asking exactly the same question, said yeah, that will really help me. I want to spend time with him. And I think that speaks to the fact that that question really empowers you and puts you in the driver's seat. And I truly believe that we all have to make our own recipe for resilience. We have to work out what works for us, and it changes all the time. You know, it's situational, contextual, so and it's a very powerful tool to help you with your decision making in those tough moments.
What really interested me about having you on, Lucy was, you know, I speak to a lot of psychologists and a lot of you know, resilience coaches, and you know they've been to they've got all their masters, they've got all their degrees, and they've practiced it. You know, there there the subject matter expert, you know, reading books, et cetera. But you've lived through both, which I find absolutely fascinating. Does what you've taught, what you've learned, and what you've you know, taken in over the years through your education and through your books, does it sink with the life experience that you had, And how much did that help having gone through college, UNI, et cetera and got all these qualification.
Yeah, it's such a great question, and I think it has given me a lot more confidence in the material because I've tested it. And oddly, because we've all lived through COVID and like I said, I had to live through two years of earthquakes and then my sister's earthquake where they lost their family home, and then we had that mosque shooting here in twenty and nineteen. And my brother has died early, very early mid fifties to dementia. We've lost Abby. You know, we've all we all have we all have stuff to deal with in life. But I guess I have this kind of birdseye view, like I'm the drone looking down going Yeah, this is so bizarre that actually these ways of thinking, acting, and being which I might not have been so confident in when I first came out with my newly minted master's degree. Now I'm like, seriously, you know, we don't really understand the genetic makeup of resilience. You can't always influence your environment, but actually, if you are really careful and able to choose how you think and act, you definitely can have a big influence on your lived experience. And it has made me. It's made me much more much. I just feel much more strongly about the material, and it's given me a lot more confidence. And nowadays I've learned so much more about grief, which frankly is a topic that no one knows anything about really. Out in the everyday world. We live in grief awkward, grief illiterate, you know, death phobic societies. And yet if seventy six percent of people have dealt with a potentially traumatic event, then most people are coping with loss. And I am now just forever fascinated by that, by how we cope with loss and what enables us to adapt in a healthy way while still grieving. And who knew that you could live and grieve at the same time, Because I didn't, as sure as hell do.
Now, Yeah, That's what I find. It's so fascinating that you've lived through both your you're highly you know, you're highly educated in it, and then you can't talk about living at the top end of it of resiliency and you say, oh, everyone goes through hard times. But wow, now, fusing the two together, have you come up with new practicing? There are new ways to deal? Has there been a light bulb moments where you I sort of kick yourself moment where you said where you thought, oh, I did understand that, But now I can understand it, and I can really unravel it, unpick it and enhance it in a way where where no one you know this is a new practicing. This is that this is a new way I believe of dealing with a situation, whether it's grief or you know, compassion, whatever it may be. Fusing the two together, have you as it given you a little combustion of ideas, so.
Many aha moments, and a really good one I can share with you now is that, like so many people, when Abby died, I knew of the five stages of brief I might have been able to name three or four of them. That whole kind of bargaining depression, denial, anger acceptance model that came from Elizabeth Kugler Ross, and I remember thinking, Ah, this isn't really fitting with my experience, Like I don't feel angry, I'm not doing I'm not in denial. I've seen my daughter's dead body. I mean there's no denying that. And I reached acceptance right at the beginning. So that made me curious. And then I went looking for scientific evidence, and turns out a she created that model for people who were anticipating dying, so actually it's not about breathing whatsoever. It was about the people who were dying, what the stages that they might go through. And then I dug a bit deeper to go and actually, there's very little evidence to show that we go through those stages at all. So instead of that, I then realized that I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process rather than just waiting for this supposed stage theory to happen. And I bumped into what I didn't bump into. I found in the research something called oscillation theory, which is so much of a more helpful model, which says that when you're grieving, you've got to do two things. You've got to cope with the loss. You've got to cope with the actual bereavement. You know, you're misery the loss, and then you also have got to cope with rediscovering and rebuilding a new life. And so what we do is we ever flow between these two states. Sometimes we're in what they call the loss oriented stressor you know, I'm crying, I'm on the couch, I'm hiding under the dovet and then at other times I have to get the kids to school, I've got to get some food and on the table. I've got to go and work. I've got to just reapproach life. And what the theory shows is that you don't want to spend too much time in either of these. So you don't want to be sucked into the brief all the time, and you don't want to be avoiding it getting on with the everyday life that you actually just want to ebb and flow, And that I think is so interesting when you then put it, when you bring that bereavement model back to resilience and a wider perspective and go, this is really true of most challenges. Isn't it that you actually isn't that you don't need to go at it all the time. You can actually approach it in bite sized chunks. Try and sort this Nihli problem out, and then come back and go, Okay, I'm going to take a break. I'm going to go and distract myself with something, you know, ideally a kind of healthy distraction rather than boots, but you know, find your way to ebb and flow that was and forwards between the problem. And so we've learned so much about grief that everybody should know. And it appalls me all the time how little everyone knows about grief when we all need to know this stuff we all go through.
And how I suppose a question for myself, but also I would imagine from a lot of people, how hard is it to live a positive life or to move on rebuilding a new life without the guilt taking over and without you know, you're feeling that you know you're rebuilding a new life, you're almost letting go of your old life.
So it'll go another great question because one of the contemporary grief theories that I rely on, which I basically discover when I was first breathing abby and now we share with our clients all the time, it's something called continuing bonds theory, and it suggests that the most healthy way to cope with a loss is to actually work out ways to keep that person close to you and continue to honor them in life so that you move forward without really feeling like you leave you have left them behind. And so you can do that in like small ways. You know, I can wear I've got a little a for Abby on my necklace here. You know, she's always close, but I can you know, one of my sons is coming home this weekend, and I'll always buy Abby's favorite crisps, you know, to have in the house when he's here. But I'm also building her legacy. And all this work I'm doing on our Coping with Loss program is I've learned all this stuff because of her. And I never would be doing this work if I didn't, if I wasn't lucky enough to have her in my life. And it's amazing how of course, it doesn't take all the pain away, but it does really make you build a more constructive approach to coping with that grief. And you know that she's forever with us. You know she's not here, but she will never be forgotten. And we're so glad we had her.
I love that, and it is it's just the small things, you know, the small memories, the small thing that there will always be a topic of conversation for Abbi, right, so that she's always She's always part and parcel of you know, you guys going old together and moving on. And talk to me about your ted talk because I found that. You know, I could listen to you for I could talk to you for ages. But why do you do the ted talk and do you enjoy doing them? And does it help you as an individual?
So firstly, I did it because I was asked. I was asked to do it in twenty sixteen and I said no way. And I was writing my book Resilient Grieving at the time, and I said, no, I'm not doing that. And then Kylo, who runs sed X came here, came back to me in twenty nineteen and said, look, we're reopening the town hall. You are so much part of the resilient store of this city. You've got to be there when we open the town hall. It's been closed for whatever it was, nine years. And I remember laughing, so seriously, you know how to get me, don't you. So she persuaded me to do it, and then, of course I had only done it about six months earlier before COVID hit, and I was lucky enough that in that COVID period it was then put up, elevated, promoted onto the ted dot com platform, so it went from a ted X to a Ted Talk and that meant that suddenly it was helping people all over the world. And it has been incredible having I get literally emails and messages on instarem, LinkedIn or whatever weekly from people saying, just watch your Ted talk or we watched it at work, and it's been really great, you know, to understand the three secrets that I talk about of resilient people in truth. Yes, so I think all of my work helps make sense out of something so senseless. And I also know from all my research into bereavement nowadays that sense making and meaning making is actually the key process that goes on in grief. That is what we're trying to do is trying to understand how something so awful could happen and trying to recreate core beliefs and a meaningful world that makes sense to us in the months and years after that loss. So we are deeply meaning making beings humans. We search for meaning in everything we do.
We're problem solvers, right.
Yeah, we are? Yeah, and sense makers, you know, just like how did this happen? And what Over time, when something so traumatic has happened and you've had all your core beliefs smashed apart, over time you are rebuilding a world that makes sense to you again. And one of the key researchers whose work I love is a guy called Tom Attic, and he talks about relearning to live in the world, and I think that's kind of what it's all about. Wow, Lucie.
Before I leave you, one final question, how do you help yourself? Because I know it can become draining and I know when you can't help yourself or you haven't got that support network around you, you know you can crash and burn How you have you stopped yourself from doing that?
So, in truth, having a PhD in well wing science and lecturing on burnout prevention helps me because you've got to. You know, I'm a ruthless prioritizer, So one of my sessions I run is on ruthless prioritization and I am ruthless, so I really try not to get sucked into all the noise and stuck in the wheat. And then in terms of my own wellbeing, we've got to really annoying Jack Russell's and at about you know, at the end of the day, or they're at our heels and they want to get down to the beach and get out. And yeah, I know the social support. I've just recently been thinking, you're not doing enough exercise, Lucy, You're not seeing enough of your friends. So just this morning I rejoined a gym and went along with a couple of my mates, thinking you need a top up, you need to get out and pretending that I'm going to get into our garage gym and do that. And I need to stop fooling myself and join a gym. So yeah, it's that self awareness. You just got to keep it going, haven't you of what's helping and what's harming you?
You do, Lucy, well, listen, do ten squats for me, please, And it's been an absolute pleasure. I honestly could talk to you. It fascinates me. I'm sort of now digging my head into the books, you know the practical side of you know, I keep going through and I keep putting myself in these situations to keep myself resilient and to learn about it. And I'm getting my head in the books now, so you've definitely sparked that within myself. So thank you so much, Lucy, and thank you ever so much for coming on Headgame.
Thank you awesome, thanks for inviting me, and it's been a pleasure.
Doctor Lucy Hone is the author of Resilient Grieving, How to Find Your Way Through Devastating Loss. I'll link the details in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining me on Headgame. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of our incredible stories, and leave me a review wherever you're listening. I'm Att Middleton. Catch you again next time.