There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it.

Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This?

In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go.

What you will explore:

• Why grief is not an emotion but a full-body experience that explains the exhaustion, brain fog, and 3 am waking you may have been blaming on other things
• What "living losses" are, the griefs that come without a funeral, and why they may be driving far more of our suffering than we recognize
• The difference between acceptance and coming to terms with, and why one word changes everything about how you move through loss
• What the research actually shows about post-traumatic growth, including the statistic that will surprise you about how common it actually is
• Why resilience is not about bouncing back, and what Dr. Hone means when she says you do not bounce back from anything that matters
• The one question she asks herself in the hardest moments, and why it is a more useful starting point than any technique

If you have ever minimized something you were going through because it did not feel like it counted as real loss, this conversation is for you.

You can find Lucy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo to talk about something that I think a lot of us are quietly carrying, the conversations we know we need to have with the people who matter most to us, and why we keep finding reasons not to have them. The research turns out to be really clear on this: we consistently overestimate how bad it will be and underestimate how much it costs us to stay silent. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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