Grief can break your heart. Dr. Lucy Hone knows about living through the darkest days.

“I'm used to helping other people get through their darkest days, and suddenly, here I am, the grieving mum, wondering if anything that I've ever learned is going to be relevant and helpful to me now” - Dr. Lucy Hone 

After the sudden loss of her 12-year-old daughter, Dr. Lucy Hone was forced to put her life’s work on resilience to the ultimate test. 

In this episode of Standing Up Strong, host Dr. Jillian Coppley sits down with the renowned resilience researcher and grief expert to explore how personal loss shaped Lucy’s groundbreaking approach to grief, healing, and human flourishing. Lucy expands our understanding of grief beyond bereavement, introducing the concept of “living losses”—the heartbreaks that don’t involve death but still deeply impact our lives. From divorce and estrangement to illness, infertility, and job loss, these experiences can leave people feeling untethered, isolated, and unseen—and asking, How will I ever get through this? 

Through research and lived experience this conversation highlights the role of character strengths—including hope, forgiveness, curiosity, and perseverance—as tools we can draw on in times of adversity, even if they aren’t what we usually consider to be our strengths. These strengths don’t remove pain, but they can help us navigate it with intention, connection, and courage. 

Dr. Jillian Coppley is a visionary executive recognized internationally for her expertise in character strengths, wellbeing, and organizational transformation. With deep experience in positive psychology, strategy, and change, she has led large-scale collaborations, built global programs, strategic partnerships, and thriving organizational cultures that empower individuals, teams and organizations to flourish. Her leadership blends strategic vision, research-based innovation, and deep personal care for others —creating environments where people and programs thrive and where meaningful, lasting impact takes root.   

Dr Lucy Hone is a resilience researcher, grief specialist, and author committed to helping people face the toughest chapters of their lives with clarity, compassion and practical tools. Her TED talk, "Three Secrets of Resilient People," has reached over 9 million viewers worldwide, and her first book, "Resilient Grieving," is now in its second edition. She's spent over 15 years studying how humans cope with loss, disruption and change - blending lived experience with evidence-based strategies to help people rebuild after heartbreak. 

This series is part of the Cynthia & Harold Guttman Family Center for Storytelling at the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the science of character strengths is integral to our work, creating a community of upstanders.  

https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/  

https://www.youtube.com/@holocaustandhumanity   

Our thanks to the Mayerson Family Foundation and the VIA Institute on Character for their support of this series  

https://www.mayersonfoundation.org/    

https://www.viacharacter.org/    

Episode Resources     

Follow Jillian and Lucy 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcoppley/  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlucyhone/  

https:// www.instagram.com/drlucyhone/ 

https:// www.facebook.com/DrLucyHone 

https://www.tiktok.com/@drlucyhone 

Buy Lucy’s new book available from Simon & Schuster:  

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-Will-I-Ever-Get-Through-This/Lucy-Hone/9781668227893 

Lucy's TED talk 

https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_hone_the_three_secrets_of_resilient_people  

Take your free character strengths quiz here 

https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/upstander/assess-your-character-strengths/ 

Transcript

Lucy Hone on when grief changes everything

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Inside you lie unique character strengths just waiting to be used. Standing up strong is where we harness them to build resilience, spark hope, and inspire courage. Lean into the best parts of who you are and lift others as you rise.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Hello, I'm Dr. Jillian Copley and welcome to Standing Up Strong, the podcast where we get to welcome the biggest minds and biggest hearts in positive psychology, truly global luminaries in the field of human flourishing. I could not be more pleased to welcome Dr. Lucy Hone to join us here today. Lucy is just an extraordinary person in this field, an extraordinary voice that we're going to learn a lot from today. I want to share with you just a little bit about Lucy before we dive into the conversation with her. Dr. Lucy Hone is a resilience researcher, a grief specialist, and an author committed to helping people face the toughest chapter of their lives. Her TED talk, Three Secrets of Resilient People, has reached more than 9 million people worldwide and remains one of the most popular TED talks available. Her book, her first book, Resilient Grieving, is now in its second edition. And her new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This, is coming out in May of 2026 and addresses the critical issue of grieving in terms of living losses. We'll talk a lot more about that today. Lucy, I could not be more delighted to welcome you. I'm so glad to be in conversation with you and so glad so many people would get to hear from you.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Thank you, Gillian, and thank you for the lovely, gracious introduction and for inviting me along today. And hello to everybody who's listening.

Lucy's story: loss, grief, and resilience

SPEAKER_02 1:55

So we don't have as much time as I would like because I could talk to you all day long, as always. So I'm just going to dive right into it. So, Lucy, in your first book, that was so incredibly powerful, not only for the research you share and the wisdom and your beautiful eloquence, but because it was so deeply personal, talking about the loss of a child and how we can resiliently grieve in the face of, you know, a pain that most of us can't begin to comprehend. And your second book looks at a different kind of grief, what you've come to call living losses, as I mentioned in the bio information from you. And that's a whole different sort. I mean, you looked at 600 different people and 13,000 data points to inform your thinking. I'm wondering if you could tell us just a little bit about your original work and maybe the distinction between how you're seeing this current work and why those two types of griefs are so important to talk about

What are "living losses?"

SPEAKER_02 2:59

distinctly.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Thank you, Jillian. And yes, for those who don't know me and know my work, you do know me and my work so well. Um I had been, I just finished my PhD in psychological flourishing when we faced the unimaginable loss of our beautiful 12-year-old daughter, Abby, who was killed in a car accident. So I was suddenly really forced to rethink everything I'd learned about resilience and test it in, you know, in my darkest days. I'm used to helping other people get through their darkest days, and suddenly here I am, the grieving mum, wondering if anything that I've ever learnt is going to be relevant and helpful to me now. And so I wrote resilient grieving in the aftermath of Abby's death, really doing the Victor Frankel thing of being my own experiment and just testing everything I'd learned about positive psychology, everything I learned about resilience. Um, and I started, I'm a writer, so I started writing a blog, and then that became that book. And and truly, it just takes everything from positive psychology and says, in a death lot context, which of these tools might be useful to you, dear reader? You know, what can you do? Because we all know that grief is personal and well-being is personal, resilience is personal. You have to find your recipe in your way. So, and the TED Talk too was very much about my experience of what worked in the aftermath of Abby's loss. And by then I'd been doing a lot of work with other grieving people. So it is a distillation of what works for people when they are facing you know their toughest times. But then towards the a couple of years ago, people kept coming to me saying, Have I got something for when they've lost something, not someone? And so specifically, I had um a colleague come to me who had lost their job, um, somebody else who was struggling with fertility, and a dear old friend of mine had just separated from her partner. And so it suddenly I became really curious to know whether the same ways of thinking, acting, and being that I had identified as helpful from bereavement psychology, whether these were also helpful for what I term living losses. And at the same time, helpfully, I discovered that bereavement research as a field was also just starting to shine a light on what they call non-death losses, which I decided needed a slightly more quippy term than non-death losses. And improvement. So now I have these two books, really. So, how will I ever get through it is about living losses, the myriad of significant transitions and losses that we go through in a lifetime that we all go through, Gillian. You know, loss is universal. Um, and resilient grieving is more specifically

Why we don't talk about grief

SPEAKER_01 6:28

about when you've lost someone.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

You know, I think as you were talking, I was thinking about the um Bruce Filer's work about transitions in that sense that you know life is not longer, no longer linear. We can't think that it is. It's what's the shape of your life, and we're all going to face the things that you write about so eloquently and so powerfully that I I can imagine there's there's not a single person listening who who that wouldn't resonate for. Um so Lucy, I have to tell you, one of my favorite things, among many favorite things about you, is um your absolute candor and honesty and even irreverence at times.

SPEAKER_03 7:08

Um it is part of the joy of knowing you. And when I read your book, uh, the second book, that's that really comes through. I loved and I loved the candor of it, I loved the irreverence of it, I loved it. Um and I I wonder for you if that was a if that's just an expression of who you are, if that's a distinct choice, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:31

To name things so literally, so directly for people, if that, if that's you find that's meaningful and important and essential in this process.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

I I think it is all of those things, meaningful, important, and essential, and not done very often. And so I really am on a mission to drag grief associated with any type of loss out of the shadows so that people can have these really important conversations because currently so many losses are disenfranchised, meaning society doesn't feel comfortable talking about them, and we don't even spot the grief that is associated with um a job loss or a migration or infertility, you know, that moment where people decide that they are no longer going to try to have a baby, or even if they have a baby, there's a still loss of all of the effort and the years that you went through to conceive and have that child. So my yeah, my I and I think I do so because uh I probably am, you know, I have an openness about me, but I truly believe that we don't talk about childbirth in hush tones.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

So why do we talk about loss in harsh tones when it is so universal?

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah, yeah, so important. I mean, it's almost like it's adding um salt to the wounds to have something so devastating happen and then to also feel potentially lonely on

Feeling isolated in loss

SPEAKER_02 9:19

on top of it because we've disenfranchised that grief.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Is that true? That's exactly it. You have completely hit the nail on the head. So what happens is firstly, quite often, particularly with living losses, as I've said, people don't even realize there is grief associated with that loss, which leaves them feeling completely overwhelmed by their emotional landscape, untethered, misunderstood, they don't even understand themselves, and then they lack the support from others because others don't see that they're grieving too, and they don't also understand grief. So what I hear so often from people is why do I feel so isolated and lonely? And this applies to death loss and living loss, and it's one of the cruelest ironies of life, I think, Gillian, is that at a time when we need other people most, other people can just challenge us and say the wrong thing and wind us up and let us down in a myriad of ways. So my my job is to try and put language to that and help people see themselves, recognize themselves in their grief, and then hopefully to find a toolkit that works for them so they can rebuild their lives in a way that is meaningful and um valuable and be happy and connected again.

"Broken and brave"

SPEAKER_02 10:57

Yeah, well, I love that. And there's you know, you've been really um very practical about offering the things you offer up in this book, and I love that. I mean, at a time in your life where you really don't want to have to sort through a lot of complication, you're you're very clear but also evocative in your language. I love that. These kind of juxtapositions you put forward, like um the ordinary magic or broken and brave. Um and I I'd love for you to maybe talk about those two or others that you see as just really essential in this work.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Thank you. I think um I think essentially I am a writer, and I knew that resilient grieving had really helped people because they said to me it gave them hope, um, it made them laugh like when they never thought they'd be able to laugh again. So I think there's something about I'm very real, not perfect, and there's something about that very humanizing, relatable language that you know takes grief away from the hushed overtones or undertones. And and there is so much rich language here. And so ordinary magic is the phrase, for example, that comes from Anne Marston, who was one of the earliest resilience researchers in the field, who came up with this term to describe the unexpected but actually quite prevalent levels of resilience in children that she was studying, you know, way back a long time ago. And I love that phrase because I think it speaks to the ordinary nature of the everyday processes, the ways of thinking, acting, and being that help help us muddle our way through. But I love the magic bit too, because I think that speaks to the potency of these strategies. If you can find a way to make yourself do them. And then the so some of my language comes from the literature, and then some of it comes from the stressful life events study that I was running at the time, from which was both quantitative and qualitative, and so I had this rich data and language given to me, gifted to me by so many people from all over the world, and um and particularly this idea that you can be brave and broken at the same time. And I've always believed that coping with a stressful life event, with some hideous kind of unwanted loss requires tiny little ongoing steps of bravery and courage that you don't want to take and you wish you weren't here, but somehow that is what you have to do. That is the slow, determined walk to better days ahead. Um, and and lots of the language comes from my family. You know, we've been through a lot as a family, and the book opens with a beautiful dedication to my dear brother who had early, early onset dementia and died um just a few years ago during COVID. And so I think it's kind of this yeah, amalgam of different sources. But more than anything, I want it to be so that people feel seen and they feel like they've had a big warm hug by someone who gets them.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Yeah. That was my undeniable feeling as I as I read honestly both books, Lucy. Just they're both just masterpieces of my mind and gifts to the reader. They really are. One of the things that you were sharing, it just reminded me of something that, you know, after 10 years in this field and and getting to learn from and work with, you know, people that that we count as colleagues around the world, there's this there's this kind of um epiphany in the simplicity that just comes up over and over again for me. That um, and and the small steps are the steps that matter, right? They add up to actually real change. Um, but I I hear that in what you're saying. Does that ring true for you too?

Small steps that build resilience

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Absolutely. I think um, you know, I think of myself nowadays as a science communicator, and my job is to try and distill the best of science and lived experience because I'm lucky enough to have ongoing conversations with people who are coping with so many different types of transition and potentially traumatic events. So my job is to distill that into words and actions and tools that are both relatable and rigorous. And and I think it it is it's a funny thing, isn't it? Because you don't want to lose the nuance either. Um and that is yeah, that but that is the place that I really feel that I operate best in that, in that fuzzy place between academia and TikTok.

Character strengths and flourishing

SPEAKER_01 16:20

That is excellent.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

That is a true Lucyism. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Um so Lucy, of course I have to ask you the question because of my background and and work with uh the Via Institute on Character. Um, you know, where we see things through the lens of character strengths. And I'm curious how you see the intersection of your work through through that particular part of the science in the field. Um, if you can just, I don't know, share with us anything.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

I um I, like you, have been very um, I've had a long journey with character strengths. And um as a younger woman, when I was first introduced to strength psychology by Chris Peterson, I was a little bit skeptical. And that has changed throughout the last 15 years and partly through so many other people's research, but a particular study I did of my own where we managed I managed to identify the top 25% of people from a really big study I did that did have 10,000 adults in it. So we got the 25% of people who were psychologically flourishing, and then we did the sophisticated you know statistical analysis to work out what do you need to do to get in that group, that top tier. And what we discovered is that those people who used who knew their strengths were nine times more likely to be flourishing, and that blew me away. But then what was even more amazing is that the participants who told us they regularly use their strengths were 18 times more likely to be flourishing, and I think Gillian that really hit the nail on the head for me. It really made me think it isn't enough to know them. You have to find ways to use them in your everyday life, in work, love, play, and struggle to. That has really been the big epiphany for me as well. And to understand that when we are going through hardship, our strengths can change, sometimes quite dramatically. And to give you an example, for me, zest and enthusiasm has always been one of my top strengths. Well, of course, I didn't feel those things after Abby died. And so I did feel like I'd had an identity shift, but I also pretty quickly realized that I could really double down on my curiosity, my love of learning, my hope, my forgiveness for the driver and my perseverance and love. I mean, that literally is the constellation of character strengths that came to my age and saved me and buoyed me up like an absolute life raft in my darkest days, and I will be forever grateful for them.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Yeah. That's such a beautiful articulation of what we we talk about in this work that, you know, while yes, you do have these signature strengths that when used, you know, you are much more likely to be flourishing. And when you are actively calling them up, much more likely to, you know, have a sense of life satisfaction and so many other extraordinary outcomes, but that you have access to all 24, just like the rest of humanity, something we share, right? This access. So I love that. It's such a it's such a um clear articulation of of what the science has shown us from researchers again

Forgiveness in the face of tragedy

SPEAKER_02 20:04

all over the world. Um, so thank you.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

And I I should add then, when you talk about the all 24, that I the first time I ever did the via, I think forgiveness was in my bottom three.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

And yet when Abby and her friends, our friends, were killed, I knew instinctively, our whole family knew that the only way out of that hole was through forgiveness. And I think that also describes, doesn't it, that there is always a choice that you cannot control the circumstances of your life, but you can influence your behavior and what you choose to do. And you know, that strength of forgiveness was right in my right around the back of my, you know, back of my toolkit. But it was there. And if I deliberately chose to double down on it, it saved me a whole world of pain.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's such, you know, it's it's such an important description of something that we get asked all the time in this work, which is um, you know, how is it that I activate those things that are lower? So we know those top strengths are essential and they're effortless and they are um energizing to us. But, you know, how do we access the rest of our profile, if you will? Um, so you know, Lucy, this might be a hard question to answer, but when you are activating forgiveness as your um, you know, one of your lowest strengths in your greatest time of need, do you have a sense of, you know, you were using another strength, as we will sometimes say, to tow it or pull it up? Or do you have a sense of what made it possible for you to really activate that lowest strength? Because not everyone would have made that choice. And it it truly is a perennial question for us.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yes, it's such a good question. And you know, it's not one that anybody has ever asked me before, and I it's not something I have thought about before. But I think there is um so I can tell you what I've told myself in my head, and then you and I can unpack that. Okay. That um I felt sorry for the driver because I pretty quickly somehow discovered that he had pretty much the same children as us. We have two beautiful boys and then Abby, and he he had two sons and a daughter, so I knew he would be you know in dire strait. And I also it was a bit of self-preservation too, that I used my favourite tool, which is what I'm doing helping or harming me in my quest to get through this. And so I remember thinking, Will forgiveness is that gonna help me or harm me in my quest to get through this? Well, that's a no-brainer for me because I wanted to keep him just a small part in my story. I didn't want him to take over my already very cluttered head, and so I there's a bit of sort of judgment in there, isn't there? Absolutely. There's a bit of empathy. Um what do you think? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Absolutely. So I hear this a very intentional choice about what you wanted for your life, and that certainly takes an amount of perspective and judgment uh to consider the options and make a choice, which would be the judgment piece of it. And then I also hear um a strong sense of kindness and love, right? That even in the midst of my hurt, and it may be a combination of social intelligence there too, even in the midst of my hurt, I can see beyond and I can care for that person. Um, and so those things which I I can very easily imagine kindness is at the top of your signature strengths, um, that you would have been e it would have been easy for you to activate to to elevate that lower strength of of forgiveness.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

And again, really interesting because kindness has always been kind of middle range. I don't think of myself as very kind. Um I think this is really interesting conversation, isn't it? That I often you and I are told um or asked by people we're working with, you know, it's all about the top ones. They worry about the top ones, they worry about their bottom ones. But actually, these middle strengths have real power if you choose to pick them up and run with them. Absolutely. Or I wasn't running, I was crawling.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Yeah, absolutely. They are the pivotal players. I mean, that's the top five are day in, day out, they're our essentials, and the middles are our pivotal players that we that we use to amp up our low our lowest and and um again synergize with our top. Um yeah, thank you for that. Um so Lucy, we have talked about uh a lot of things that that I think have been important since the beginning of time. People hurt, and how do we solve that? But I have a strong sense that this work is potentially more important than ever. I'm curious why you think this was the time to write this book or why this is important right now.

Why this message matters now

SPEAKER_01 25:31

It's so true, isn't it? I think um books come as part of a time, and I think we do live in a tumultuous world right now, and there is a whole load of hurt and suffering. And my optimism, I guess, is to try and encourage people to realize that as much as humans would love to avoid struggle and suffering, we are actually incredibly adaptable. That that kind of psychological flexibility, that ability to reinvent ourselves, to keep going forward when we don't want to, is in our DNA. You know, we are hardwired to cope as much as we don't want to live through these things. And I I think there is an additional layer of disenfranchised grief going on in that people don't realize they're grieving, and that's unforgivable nowadays when we have really solid modern bereavement findings to help people. The fact that they're not getting out to people in their time of need is frankly not good enough. But on top of that, Gillian, I am seeing things change, such as um, I don't know the American statistic for this, but I know that in the UK and in Australia, approximately one in four families now have a family member who is estranged. So that gives you one example of how we are living in a more isolated, fractured time. So people, I want people to be empowered and equipped to find their own way through potentially traumatic events, or even chronic ambiguous losses. You know, ambiguous losses are when the person might still be alive, um right in front of us, but emotionally and cognitively not there, like dementia, or they might be absent, so they're physically not there, and they are maybe estranged, or you know, we don't know where they are, and then they are ever so present in our minds and our hearts. So I just think there is a whole lot of pain in the world, and my job is to grow the grief literacy and the well-being literacy, the language and the tools and the understanding, so that people can get the hope, the help they need, find the help they need, and find what works for them and get that support. So yeah, so important.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Um so Lucy, I'm I'm curious amidst all the things that we've talked about, and there are so many, and you have so many insights and so many practical strategies for folks, but if you were going to give them just one thing to remember or one thing to do, because surely there's somebody watching who is going through it right now, or certainly all of us know someone if we are personally going through it. Um what is the the one thing that you would want them to remember or know or do um from our conversation today?

Finding your "Islands of Certainty"

SPEAKER_01 29:10

So two things. One is you will get through this because actually all the science shows that however much you don't want to, you do have it within you, this incredible strength and ability to adapt to unwanted change. So that's the kind of the meta theory of it all. But in a more kind of micro-practical way, I would encourage people to identify their own islands of certainty, we call them. And so these are the people, the practices, the possessions, and the places that you can anchor yourself to when the world is storming around you and you feel all at sea. And these can be really, you know, it might be a park bench, might be your place. You might just have a certain place that you escape to in your working day when everything's hard and you can't face up to it during the day, and you've just got to keep the show on the road. Then you might just sneak off at one o'clock or three o'clock and take your you know drink out there and just soak in a moment. It might be the practices of really noticing and having that mindful gratitude when you're standing in the shower or getting your cup of coffee. And then it can be things like your possessions, your your little you know, rings and trinkets that we all have, so many of us have, that mean so much to us and give us strength. And then, of course, there are other people. It's so important in our times of struggle, however hard it is, to not get isolated and to really try and tune into who is there for you, what they might be able to do for you, and then have that micro bravery of daring to ask for help. And that would be my you know, my biggest wish for anyone listening and watching.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

Oh my gosh, that term islands of certainty is just that's so powerful. I mean, truly sitting here and having this most enjoyable conversation with you, and I couldn't be more delighted to do so. Just that phrase I found instantly calming, Islands of certainty. That's just it's very powerful. Oh my goodness, Lucy, thank you so much for your time today, and just thank you for the gift that is your work. I know this second book is going to be, you know, just as powerful and impactful as the first one, and I'll be delighted to read others' reactions with you. Um, truly, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Thank you so much, Gillian, for inviting me and to everybody watching and listening. Thank you for sparing us the gift of your time. We so appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

Absolutely. I will just join in and say thank you as well. And let's just keep standing up strong and standing up for one another, showing up for the best in ourselves and the best in one another, because that's how we'll make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Standing Up Strong is a production of the Nancy and David Wolfe Holocaust and Humanities Center in partnership with the VIA Institute on Character. Find the link in the show notes to take a character strengths survey for free. Managing producer is Ann Thompson, technical producer is Robert Mills, and technical director is Josh Emerson. This series is part of the Cynthia and Harold Gutman Family Center for Storytelling and is generously supported by the Mearson Family Foundation. It is recorded at Technical Consulting Partner Studios in Cincinnati, Ohio.