Does any of this make sense?

Yes, makes complete sense.

As a resilience researcher, I think this is the aspect of resilience that fascinates me most, is that when I'm running resilience training and we're running a workshop or a master class or something, what we're trying to do is to get people to focus all of their attention on the things that they can change and somehow accept the things they can't change.

And it's all about, you know, attention, focus, is it helping or harming you, the emotional agility, and the psychological flexibility.

But the really big challenge for all of us, the big philosophical, existential crisis that is at the core of humanity, is that we have no control over anything.

Well, well, that's not true.

We do have control over some things, but we live in this world there where, you know, I can say goodbye to my daughter one Saturday morning and drop her off at the netball courts, and seven hours later, there's a policeman standing in front of me telling me she's dead.

Will I ever be happy again? G- Given what you've been through with your mom, with your brother, and of course with Abby, yeah, how do you answer that question?

Can you give just a couple of examples of what some of those really simple or ordinary things are that can help people to get back on track?

So I think the first one is to accept it.

And when I'm working with people, they often say to me, you know, I can't accept this.

And I will say to them, you're on one of my grief courses, or in this case, you've bought the book.

So actually, there is some form of acceptance there.

And what I want you to understand is that acceptance is different to coming to terms with, which is a much longer process.

And acceptance doesn't mean forgiving, forgetting or condoning.

Where are you now in terms of navigating that 12 years on? In your TED Talk, you know, you talk about suddenly being on the other side and having sort of to take your own advice, and you didn't really like it.

How hard is it for you still to talk about it?

[lip smacks] Um, in truth, it's not hard.

It's 12 years, um, since our little girl died.

Um, lovely, beautiful 12-year-old bubbly Abby.

I mean, in many ways it's great for me to be able to talk about her because I wanna keep her memory alive.

And all of the work I do, I wouldn't be doing if it wasn't for her.

I'd be doing the resilience psychology work, 'cause that's what I was doing.

Lucy, you've just written in How Will I Ever Get Through This? about what you call NDLs, which can you explain that and why in some ways the research tells you they're almost even more traumatic and harder work to get through?

So I love, and we'll get into that or we can now, but those types of losses, do you see that we often don't give ourselves enough credit to the pain that we feel in regard to a loss that we don't tend to think of as tangibly of a loss as like a loss of a death of a loved one?

Yes, well said.

I mean, that is exactly why I ended up writing my new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This Book? Because I...

too, had kind of fallen into the trap of thinking that we only grieve death losses.

So after our beautiful daughter, Abby, was killed a long time, 12 years ago now, you know, so I can talk about it.

I think people are sometimes surprised that I talk about it kind of reasonably, objectively, dispassionately, you know, sometimes I cry, sometimes I don't.

There's been a lot, we can get back into that.

My concern is, is the bigger consequence, again, I'm asking for your input, the meaning that we make around it.

[laughs]

Um, surely I was taking advantage of the situation by then.

But, um, we leaned on our friends.

We walked the dogs.

We got out.

Um, right at the beginning we put any semblance of routine that we possibly could into our days, which was very much based on what we'd learned from the earthquakes.

So having lived through the earthquakes, I had seen the way the kinda standard policy was to get the schools back up and running as soon as possible to enable people to put some kind of semblance of normality back into their lives.

Hmm.

Mm.

But it was our heavy lifting, our job to really start to rebuild a world, not completely from scratch 'cause some things were still true.

And for anyone who's listening I would encourage that question.

You know, if you feel like your assumptive world has been smashed apart, hold on to what is still true.

Double down on those things.

And then in time I used to think of every little insight, uh, little aha moment, something I would learn or some practice I would bring into my life that helped me navigate that appalling process.

I would think of them as those little pieces of jigsaw that were slowly coming into my world and rebuilding it, rebuilding the coherence and the fuller picture and some kind of new world order.

What's happening here?

How, how do you, n- not you specifically, but anyone, how do you not let, like, a dramatic life event like that just completely consume you?

It does completely consume you.

So at the beginning, you cannot stop it from consuming you.

Um, so anybody who's listening who's been through a major life event will be familiar with the fact that in the immediate aftermath, particularly if it is sudden and traumatic, you have what we call intrusive rumination, meaning that you just cannot stop thinking about it.

Like, you are consumed with thoughts.

I would think about Abby every single second of my waking hours for, I'm delighted to say, I can't remember how long now, but for a long time.

Months.

Mm.

Yeah.

Mm.

So I think that is part of all of this, isn't it? That-What I understand, um, is that when you have these big life events and you get your diagnosis or someone walks out the door who wasn't meant to have gone um, your assumptive world comes crashing down.

Mm.

So the assumptions you have made about how your life should be, other people should behave, and how the world should work are all suddenly, someone's put a wrecking ball to them.

Mm.

And over time our job, what happens, and this i- is literally what you can see in the research, but I can, I see this in my own research, in the conversations that I've had with people and the stories that they've shared with me, that over time, and it takes time as you come to terms with it, what you are doing is rebuilding your new assumptive world, which is basically your set of core beliefs about how you should work, the world should work, other people should work, and you rebuild it into a new operating system that is fit for purpose now that you know this thing to be true.

Mm.