Q&A: Dr Lucy Hone, resilience researcher and grief expert.

I began my career as a writer and researcher, specialising in resilience psychology and wellbeing. I’ve always been fascinated by why some people adapt better than others when faced with challenge, change and loss.

Then, in 2014, when I was nearing the end of my PhD, my world was turned upside down when our 12-year-old daughter Abi and her friends were killed in a car accident. I had already applied my research in disaster recovery work after the Canterbury earthquakes, but their deaths tested my understanding of resilience at a far deeper level.

I’ve spent the years since translating the scientific findings of resilience psychology and bereavement into tools to support others navigating loss and change. Sharing my knowledge to help people through their darkest days also helps me live with my own loss. And it means Abi’s short life leaves a longer, more enduring legacy.

That grief is not just about death. We grieve any significant loss: relationships, health, identity, careers, fertility, financial security, community, certainty, and the future we thought we were going to have. These ‘living losses’ can be just as painful and destabilising, yet they often go unrecognised, even by ourselves.

Many of my research participants who have experienced both death loss and living loss tell me these non-death losses can be harder to handle. Death usually brings rituals and collective support, whereas living losses are often invisible and unsupported. Psychologists refer to this as ‘disenfranchised grief’ because people rarely recognise the pain associated with estrangement, infertility, redundancy, ageing, empty nesting, bankruptcy or divorce.

Absolutely. Like many people, I expected grief to follow set stages, but I soon discovered that wasn’t my experience. Immersing myself in the scientific literature, I found decades of research showing that everyone grieves differently. There are no five stages of grief; instead, it’s as individual as your fingerprint. When I share this with clients, they often breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Over the years, living through events including the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes, the mosque attacks, Covid and personal family challenges, I’ve learned that resilience is not about staying strong, positive or composed. It’s about learning how to keep going, imperfectly, while carrying deep pain. We can live and grieve at the same time.

I also discovered just how exhausting grief is – cognitively, emotionally and physically. You can know the theory and still be flattened by the reality. That experience reshaped how I teach, write and speak about resilience.

I stay connected to ordinary life: family, friends, exercise, nature and creativity, and deliberately tune into what’s good. I also give myself permission to step back when I need to. This work is meaningful, but it requires replenishment, and I have an amazing team who help protect my time.

There is no such thing as grieving properly. If you are feeling stuck, numb, angry, proud, sad, distracted, hopeful, grateful, relieved or overwhelmed, those are all part of grief. Grief is messy. The idea that grief should follow predictable stages or timelines is one of the most damaging myths I see in my work. Your grief is valid exactly as it is. You do you.

Whether you’re facing living loss or bereavement, sudden waves of emotion can overwhelm you, often at the most inconvenient times. When we have these ‘grief ambushes’, pause and focus on your breath. Breathe in to the count of four, hold for four, exhale for four, then hold again for four. A few rounds of this ‘box breathing’ helps regulate the nervous system and brings us back into our bodies.

Show up. Stay present. Ask, don’t tell, and listen more than you speak. One of the hardest things for those in support roles is resisting the urge to fix. In many situations, resolution isn’t possible, so the task becomes learning how to sit with discomfort. Many people tell me how much it matters when someone is willing to walk alongside them in their pain.

How Will I Ever Get Through This? explores the hidden grief that accompanies life’s many living losses, because my work has shown how rarely this grief is recognised, both by those experiencing it and by the people around them. I describe grief as the gap between where we are and where we thought life would be, which helps people understand why any transition or diversion can feel so destabilising.

Understanding grief matters; without that insight people often feel overwhelmed, helpless and powerless, wondering what on earth is going on. Early readers tell me they find it hugely comforting to understand what’s happening and to learn practical tools to empower them. My words won’t remove all the pain, but they can help ease it and support people to process their loss.

What I love most about the book is that it is organised around the real questions people ask themselves during major life upheaval: Why do I feel so isolated and lonely? What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel physically exhausted? Who am I now? Will I ever be happy again? Each chapter responds to one of these questions, combining contemporary resilience and bereavement science with practical tools readers can use straight away.