Healing Your Heart

We’ve all heard about the five stages of grief. But what happens when your experience doesn’t follow that model at all? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone began to question how we think about grief after a devastating loss in her own life. She shares the techniques she learned to help her cope with tragedy.

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Healing 2.0: Life After Loss

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ November 13, 2023

You’ve probably heard that people who lose a loved one may go through what are known as the “five stages” of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But many people find that their grief doesn’t follow this model at all. In the latest installment of our Healing 2.0 series, we revisit our 2022 conversation with resilience researcher Lucy Hone. Lucy shares the techniques she learned to cope after a devastating loss in her own life.

Additional Resources

Books:

Resilient Grieving: How to Find Your Way Through Devastating Loss, by Lucy Hone, 2017.

The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us about Life after Loss, by George Bonanno, 2010.

The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles, by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte, 2003.

Research:

Destruction to Regeneration: How Community Trauma and Disruption can Precipitate Collective Transformation, by Lucy Hone, Chris P. Jansen and Denise M. Quinlan, Wellbeing and Resilience Education, 2021.

Cautioning Health-Care Professionals: Bereaved Persons are Misguided Through the Stages of Grief, by Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, and Kathrin Boerner, OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 2017.

The Science of Resilience: Implications for the Prevention and Treatment of Depression, by Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney, Science, 2012.

The Dual Process of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description, by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, Death Studies, 1999.

Grab Bag:

Lucy Hone’s TED Talk: The Three Secrets of Resilient People

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1960s, the psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was studying patients with terminal illnesses. She noticed a pattern as they came to terms with their mortality. The patients seemed to go through different psychological phases. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross eventually classified these phases into what she called the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The five stages were intuitively appealing and offered people a way to understand a complex experience. Very quickly, the simplicity of this framework began to seep into popular culture, books, TV shows, and later countless YouTube videos.Youtube Video on Grief: Your mind is protecting you by completely denying the reality. Numbness may follow. It's nature's way of letting you deal only with your emotions that you're capable of handling.Shankar Vedantam: As often happens, a system that was designed to be descriptive became prescriptive. The five stages, translated into popular culture, morphed into a model that told people they should expect to feel certain emotions and that their experience of grief would be a journey from one stage to the next.Youtube Video on Grief: Finally, five is acceptance. It's the fifth stage, and this is the end game here. And it is the result of all the stages of your grief.Shankar Vedantam: Over time, the five-stage model of grief became so ingrained in people's minds that new insights, based on rigorous research, did not get as much airtime. For decades, the popular understanding of what we feel when we grieve was largely drawn from the five stages model.Lucy Hone: Anyone who's ever been bereaved will know that people tell you about them, they expect you to go through them. And pretty quickly I became frustrated with them, because I don't want to be told what I'm going to feel. I am desperate to know what I can do to help us all adapt to this terrible loss.Shankar Vedantam: Today, we bring you the story of a researcher who's understanding of grief was transformed by a devastating experience in her own life. The surprisingly powerful technique she learned to cope with tragedy, this week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: Lucy Hone is a researcher of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, 2010. She was living near Christchurch when it was struck by a powerful earthquake. The disaster, and a series of aftershocks, killed 185 people and destroyed most of downtown Christchurch. Thousands of people lost their homes. Lucy had just returned from graduate school in the United States. She was about to embark on a PhD. Her area of study, resilience. Given the disaster unfolding around her, Lucy rolled up her sleeves and started applying what she had already learned to help the people around her. One day, during a powerful aftershock, Lucy was standing outside her home, which was perched on the cliffs, overlooking the city.Lucy Hone: And I just stood there looking down on our village and I could see the children's school there. And I could see them all lining up, obviously, being looked after and counted. But what was so awful for me was that I could also see the cliffs on the other side of the village, really close to them, less than a mile away from them, tumbling down in front of them. So it was a pretty scary moment in my life.Shankar Vedantam: The Christchurch earthquakes lasted for more than a year. Residents lived in a constant state of anxiety, not knowing when the next tremor would strike. At one point, Lucy was giving a talk on resilience to survivors, when a woman in the audience raised her hand and described a problem she was having.Lucy Hone: She just said to me, "I'm startling all the time. I just am so jumpy every time someone crashes a saucepan lid, I seem to jump in the air and my heart is pounding and what do I do about that? And I said, "Firstly, does anyone else feel like that?" And the whole room lifted up their hands. So I think it was a real moment of collective resonance when we all realized that we had exactly the same startle reaction from those ever-present earthquakes. You just never knew whether you were safe and you never knew when the next one was going to come, so that kind of hypervigilance was pretty omnipresent.Shankar Vedantam: The problem was some of this hypervigilance, it was totally justified.Lucy Hone: Because we had over 10,000 aftershocks and five or six really major events. One of those was on Boxing Day, and I had taken my two sons and a friend visiting from England over to one of the big malls to the Boxing Day sales. And we were all just sitting there afterwards, having something to eat in one of the cafes and suddenly the whole mall started shaking. And so we got under the tables and all the cups of tea were being knocked over. But it really terrified us. And I remember locking eyes with my eldest son and that was probably the moment that we realized that these earthquakes weren't going to go away. That actually we were probably now in for a pretty rocky ride.Shankar Vedantam: So I want to fast forward a couple of years. In the summer of 2014, this is a couple of years after the earthquakes. I think you're still working on your PhD at this point. You organized a family beach vacation. It was several hours from your home and you were planning to go with two other families. You and your husband, and two teenage sons drove together. I understand your daughter, Abi, went with another family?Lucy Hone: Yes, that's right. So my f

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