When grief throws a 'wrecking ball' into your life - name it

Grief needs a name if you want to move on from it, says resilience expert and educator, Lucy Hone.

In her new book, How Will I ever Get Through This?, she calls it a "bloody, f#$%ing thing" (or BFT).

“I think there is amazing, important power in actually acknowledging that what you are going through is a BFT,” says Hone.

In 2014 Hone lost her 12-year-old daughter Abi in a car crash in Christchurch. Abi’s best friend, Ella, Ella's mum Sally, one of Hone’s best friends, also died in the crash.

Hone's TED talk about recovery from that event has been viewed more than 9 million times. And while her experience of grief was linked to death, she explains the feeling can manifest following things like divorce or estrangement or redundancy.

She now runs grief resilience workshops and the number one question she is asked is: 'How will I ever get through this?' Research shows most people do, Hone tells RNZ's Nine to Noon.

“When people go through these big life events, in the struggle to come to terms with it in the aftermath, they experience so much personal growth. I know the word growth here is kind of hideous and vulgar and not what we want to use. But technically, that is the term.

“And they say so often, literally that I am so much stronger than I ever could have imagined. I didn't think I could get through this, and yet somehow I have.”

Grief is the difference between where your life is and where you thought it would be, the writer, researcher and public speaker says - what psychologists call the assumptive world.

“It's like someone throws a wrecking ball into your world. And suddenly, you find yourself questioning all of those deeply-held core beliefs that you had assumed to be true.

“And so, in the aftermath, this is the grieving process that we do.

"This coming to terms with the fact that such an unbelievable thing could happen, that it did happen, and how on Earth are we going to re-build our lives - that process of cobbling them back together in the aftermath of unwanted change.”

The rumination that follows grief has a healing purpose, she says. She experienced it after the death of Abi.

“I literally couldn't stop thinking about her for months… and it's exhausting, and I desperately wanted to stop thinking about her.”

Research for her book, and her own personal experiences, taught her this is a necessary process.

“Somehow over time, all of this thinking is what enables us to integrate this unthinkable thing into our broader and longer life story,” she says.

Along with the mental stress of grief comes physical symptoms, she says.

“People expect grief to be emotionally exhausting, but they don't understand that when you've got your fight, flight and freeze response, your stress response permanently dialed up, that has a massive physical impact, both on your thinking, your physiology, your ability to keep going - your tiredness.”

It’s important to acknowledge this as a natural response, she says.

“Understand that that is really typical and then find ways to punctuate all the things you have to get through in the day with some moments to cut yourself some slack and get the down time and the sleep that you need - which of course is really hard when you're grieving, very hard.”