Speaking to Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast Ask Me Anything, Hone recalled how she was like a “wild animal” when she got the news – “really sweaty, caged animal, thirsty, standing up, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, pacing”.
The incident came as Hone was near the end of her PhD in psychology. Now with lived experience, Hone transformed her focus into dealing with grief, both to help herself and to help others better deal with it.
She shared her advice in her book Resilient Grieving, which she has republished this year with new information and research.
She told Bennett that a lot of the existing advice for dealing with grief was “pretty wanting”.
“I was immediately told to write off five years of our life to Abi’s loss, and that we were now prime candidates for divorce, mental illness and family estrangement. And I just remember thinking, no way, you know, not on my watch.
“And I write this in the book, that I have this voice and I can still picture and remember this now standing by the oven in our kitchen thinking, choose life, not death. Don’t lose what you have to what you’ve lost.
“And what that post-losing the girls period taught me was that the existing grief advice was very pathologising, meaning it was like, this is what all the terrible things are that are gonna happen to you, and they really hadn’t discovered all of the incredible research that I had spent the last five years looking at.”
One thing in particular that irks her is the reliance on the “five stages of grief” as a teaching mechanism for resilience and trauma.
“Do you know that there’s no empirical evidence to support them at all? What’s interesting is, a, they’re not scientific, and b, we also, or what you are told is that grief is as individual as your fingerprint. So if it’s as individual as your fingerprint, how can we all go through five stages?
“Yet they’re still being taught in tertiary institutions across the world today. And what I’m really quite cross about them now is that they are actually proving hurtful and harmful for the bereaved because the bereaved end up feeling that they’re not grieving.”
For Bennett, the recent loss of her father has seen her go through this process, but she told Hone that she often thinks back on 1991, when her brother and her friend died only a few months apart.
“I got to the end of that year and I realised that I was not grieving myself at all, and that in fact my role was to look after her parents and to look after my own. In many respects that’s right, but for a 22-year-old, I just felt such a weight of responsibility. I literally had these two mothers ringing me every morning at 7am.
“And I got to the end of that year and completely melted down and just realised that, and kind of found myself standing on a cliff and screaming.”
Listen to the full podcast to hear more from Dr Lucy Hone and Paula on grief and resilience.
Ask Me Anything is a NZ Herald podcast, hosted by Paula Bennett. New episodes are out every Sunday.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
