Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Resilient Grieving: Practical, Evidence-Based Strategies For Coping With Loss And Change (#392)

Lucy Hone 1 2
  1. Director, New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
  2. Research Associate, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand

When Lucy Hone's 12 year old daughter was killed in a tragic road accident in 2014, grief experts recommended a passive approach to bereavement. She was told of Kubler-Ross' Five Stages of Grief, and that she and her family were key candidates for divorce, family estrangement and mental illness. Aware of research indicating that humans were, in fact, extraordinarily adaptive when faced with loss and challenge, and that the most common human response to a wide variety of potentially traumatic events (PTEs) is that of resilience (Bonanno, 2017), Hone set out to apply positive psychology theories and interventions to the bereavement context. Creating a toolkit for Resilient Grieving, Hone has now shared practical, evidence-based strategies for coping with loss with diverse populations globally from the UK (IPEN Accelerator), America (Mayerson Academy's Positive Parenting series), Australia (Keynote alongside Marty Seligman at PESA18) and across NZ. Working with diverse audiences dealing with loss - fertility nurses, palliative care and hospice workers, school counsellors, lawyers, emergency management and civil defense, search & rescue, Pediatricians and anaesthesiologists - demonstrates the widespread appetite for 'ordinary magic' strategies supporting individual resilience. Hone shares epidemiology and insights from these diverse experiences.