You just feel like you are climbing a mountain every day.
And every day you get up and the same mountain is ahead of you.
My wee girl Abi, who was 12 at the time,
hopped in the car with her best friend Ella, and Ella's mum,
who was also a really dear friend of mine.
And on the way down, a driver sped straight through a stop sign,
crashed into them and killed all three of them.
So I just have this peculiar insight really that
I've done the academic study,
I've trawled over all of the research -
and then I've had to really test
what works in a really, obviously horrifically personal way.
And I can say that I feel really lucky now
because having had that training,
I did at least have some tools at my fingertips.
But I want to make a really important point here,
that too often people focus on resilience
thinking it's just a personal thing,
and actually we know that it's much, much bigger than that.
Not seeing yourself represented in society
is potentially damaging for your resilience,
whether it's race, sexuality, ability, mental illness.
Any form of prejudice like that -
that feeling that you don't belong,
you're not seen and you're not heard -
is hurtful and reductive when it comes to resilience.
So why is it important for a country to be resilient?
Because it enables us to mobilise our resources faster.
And in that I mean everything from portaloos to trust.
Think about our ever-changing environments
that we know we all live in nowadays -
bushfires, Covid, the earthquakes.
Change and adversity come thick and fast
and resilient societies, resilient nations, are so much better able
to respond in that time.
To be able to protect their weak, their vulnerable,
to be able to protect the economy - to weather whatever comes
in a much better way.
So, on that personal perspective, the good news is that research shows
that resilience really requires what we call "ordinary magic".
It's not some elusive trait that is only available to a few.
We can teach people to be more resilient.
The three strategies that I relied on when the girls died,
and to be fair, I absolutely still rely on now,
I've wheeled them all out again recently, are...
Whether it is divorce or redundancy, losing a partner -
really tough things happen to us all.
So knowing that, going into this terrible experience,
knowing that adversity was common and that suffering was common,
really did make a difference because it prevented me
from feeling singled out.
We get sucked into what we call in psychology
a negativity bias.
We're really good, humans, at looking at all the crappy bits.
But actually we're not so good at tuning into the good stuff.
And it's really, really important for us to counterbalance that
by choosing to focus our attention on some of the good stuff.
"Is the way I'm thinking,
is the way I'm acting right now, helping or harming me
in my quest to get through this?"
All too often people think that resilience is about that
good old stiff upper lip. And it's not that at all.
Studies have shown that having strong, supportive relationships
is probably the most important thing we can do to build resilience.
We were really lucky.
We had a really supportive community, who helped us.
And all of this is what you need when you navigate trauma and adversity.
Nobody goes it alone.
And one of the key researchers in the field, Chris Peterson, used to say:
That that was the three-word summary of his decades of research.