Losing her daughter put Lucy Hone's resilience research to the test.
Parental bereavement is considered to be the hardest of all losses to bear, meaning that, when you lose a child, you are swamped with support—some of it helpful, some less so. In the days after the girls died, we were told we should expect to write off the next five years to grief, and handed pamphlets explaining how “grief is as individual as a fingerprint” and outlining Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Somehow, even the uninvited news that we were now prime candidates for divorce, mental illness, and family estrangement managed to trickle through.
Being one of those people who truly believes that knowledge is power, and frankly thankful for any kind of distracting activity, I threw myself into bereavement research, reading all I could to help me and my family survive Abi’s loss. To be honest, I was stunned by what I found there. Articles warned about the perils of “delayed” or “absent” grief (rare and pathological responses in the form of denial or avoidance); others questioned whether clinical treatments could be helpful at all for “complicated” grief. There was virtually no mention of the value of positive emotions when coping with loss, no articles on hope, gratitude, kindness, or bravery.
When I look back on it now, I consider myself extremely lucky to have been one of the few people in the world who’d been trained in how to apply resilience research to real-life challenges. I’d sat in the lecture halls at the University of Pennsylvania listening to Martin Seligman explain that the most common human response to adversity was not trauma, but in fact resilience; I’d been taught to dispute catastrophic thinking by Karen Reivich, who pioneered the U.S. Army’s Master Resilience Training; I’d learned about the power of using our strengths from Christopher Peterson and the importance of positive emotions for resilience from Barbara Fredrickson. In studying positive psychology, I’d stumbled upon a roadmap for navigating my way back from tragedy. Would these ways of thinking and acting work for me and my family now?
To read more of Lucy Hone's article, please click here.
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