Tag: perspective

Ears & Parts & Brains & Hearts.

Please keep in mind that all I can speak to are my own experiences, reflections, and ponderings; these are things that ring true to me.

Before we get to ears, let’s talk about what’s between them – that big, beautiful brain that just got bonked. Mental health HAS to be one of your considerations in recovery because it simply cannot be unaffected (which isn’t to say that a hit to your mental health is always going to be obvious). You’ve literally injured your brain, the seat of who you are. You’ve wounded it physically, chemically, and psychologically. We are holistic creatures, which means that the overused cliché is also completely accurate: mental health is health.

After dozens of concussions and years of therapy, I only just grew to understand that trauma is trauma, regardless of the form it takes. Head trauma (brain injuries) and heart trauma (mental health injuries, if you will) are both trauma, and as such, it has served me poorly to not apply concepts for addressing one to the other as well. In Brain Blame Games, part two., I shared about how reframing my perspective, particularly regarding deficits and limitations, made “such a tremendous difference”, and that absolutely still holds true (6+ years later!). However, it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized reframing my thoughts wasn’t the only change that transpired; what allowed for healthy, lasting change was moving from desperation to eradicate to striving to integrate.

Earlier this week, I was conversing with a wise man I am honored to count as a friend. In addition to being a top-notch human, he’s also a skilled counselor. I asked about a book I saw on his desk and was introduced to We All Have Parts, an excellent book on “healing trauma with internal family systems.” It’s a profound yet unintimidating book, and there are lots of lovely things I could say about it, but suffice it to say that the book made an impression on me. This elegantly simple little book helped me realize that the real shift was from a mission of eradication to a desire for integration. After years of fighting to eradicate the scars and marks of trauma, I was finally introduced to the concept of integrating the messages my somatic system is trying to send into my responses.

Here’s how I see eradication vs integration:

Eradication says that trauma responses resurfacing mean you’re already drowning; integration says that trauma responses resurfacing mean your system is trying to keep you afloat for as long as possible.

Eradication provokes fear and establishes negative connotations; integration provokes self-reflection and establishes positive connotations.

There’s no real choice to be made.
Logic demands it; acceptance and partnership are key.

Consider this: my ears ring all the time now, sometimes soft like the bell on a kitten, sometimes overbearing like an 8th century church bell. It used to make me angry; suddenly, it felt like work to listen. Eventually, begrudgingly, I detected patterns and accepted that my ears aren’t ringing to piss me off – they’re ringing to get me to listen up, to pay attention.  Something is wrong; my brain’s warning light has come on, so to speak.  I learned to appreciate the tinnitus and it has become a tool I can’t live without – I have a gauge for my brain wired into my ears! Instead of suddenly sputtering to a stop, I can now better calculate my current and forecasted capacity. It buys me time and helps me make informed decisions…or at least the best, most informed decision my broken brain is capable of making at the time. I have grown from getting suddenly stuck to understanding how to use the tools I have to efficiently maintain momentum and forward motion.

It turns out my integrative response to my tinnitus should also be the modality I employ on behalf of my mental health, too. The concept of integrating these somatic messages makes perfect sense. It also makes obvious that choosing eradication has inadvertently left me unprepared and caught unaware when trauma resurfaces. As someone who craves efficiency and always strives to make informed decisions, integration then becomes the only worthwhile choice. I’m trapped in a symbiotic relationship with this brain for the rest of my life; I may as well make sure it’s effective, because it’s clearly not going to stop trying to help (whether I like it or not)!

Hello blog site, my old friend…

Hi.  It’s been a minute.

What can I say – life has been happening.  To be honest, as much as I value and enjoy this blog, I really enjoy the times when I am able to not hyper fixate on all things concussion.  It’s nice to be reminded that my identity is more than my little glass brain.  It has been almost two years since my last concussion, which is a HUGE record for me.  That said: I’ve missed this space.  I have missed exploring and learning, seeking and understanding, growing and changing.

There are a few things I already know I’m looking forward to sharing, such as:

  • Why the Nintendo Switch is my favorite adaptive game console;
  • Why Legos have become one of my go-to activities for concussion recovery;
  • Why I believe that advocacy and self-education can make all the difference in recovery; and
  • Why I am grateful that my ears act as an early warning system of sorts.

I’m sure there will be a million other things to blog about, but those are the ones that have been bouncing around in my head for the last couple of years.  This space is therapeutic for me, but I hope that it’s helpful for others as well – even if it just helps someone feel a little less alone.  So stay tuned – good things are coming soon, I promise.

Brain blame games, part two.

So what changed? I learned where else to place the blame. Oh, not what you were expecting to hear?

I slowly began to learn that blaming my brain was simply too broad a complaint, and that it (ironically) limited my ability to be hopeful about recovery. The biggest steps forward came from understanding how injuring my brain affects my eyes. Eye dysfunction can have a huge impact in life overall! If my eyes are sending completely different reports to my brain, my poor brain is having to work so much harder, as it now has to decode the messages and figure out what is actually going on; this, in turn, has a significant impact on cognition. If my brain is having to put so much work into figuring out what I am seeing, it’s that much harder for it to do other things. For example, if my brain is fighting just to figure out which line I am trying to read in a paragraph, of course it is going to be more difficult to actually remember what was written in that line.

This was a massive game-changer! I cannot express what a difference it made to reframe the thought “I can’t remember anything I read because my stupid brain is broken” to “OT will help my eyes do their job better, so my brain can do it’s job better; maybe then I’ll be able to curl up with a book again!”. I began to feel so much less helpless and frustrated; I finally felt like I was no longer hijacked by a broken brain, and had renewed faith in all the various rehab exercises I was doing. I could now face each new concussion with the thought “such-and-such is on the fritz, so I need to check in with so-and-so (OT, PT, SP) to get a tune-up” rather than “oh great – I just screwed everything up even more, and now my brain is that much more useless”. I cannot emphasize how important this has been: when you’re dealing with injuries that already have issues like anxiety and depression as symptoms, knowing that not all is lost can make all the difference in the world. Now, when I whack my head and find that the carpet appears to be rolling like the ocean, I remind myself that I have a super awesome OT and Neuro-Optometrist, and that we will work together to make the carpet stop moving.

Does this mean everything is rainbows and roses now? No. There are still things my brain cannot do that it used to be able to…but I’ve learned to accept that, and put my energy into fixing what I can and adapting to what I cannot. It’s a process, and I still have to remind myself to choose to embrace this perspective, but it has made such a profound difference already, and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact in the future as well.

Brain blame games, part one.

If we go back about three years/nine concussions ago, we would find a very different version of concussed me. EVERYTHING was frustrating and disheartening. Occupational Therapy made me want to cry: how can a string with some beads on it make me feel so broken?! Speech Therapy was soul-crushing: no, I really don’t remember the string of words you just read to me. The list of frustrations, “setbacks”, and deficits seemed utterly insurmountable most days…and it was just the beginning.

A couple concussions later found me in an even darker place. At one point, I was seeing four PT’s, one OT, one SP, one Neuro-Optometrist, and four MD specialists. When I would check in at the rehab desk, they no longer asked my name – they’d ask which therapist I was there to see (or, on bad days, tell me which therapist I was there to see). Life outside rehab wasn’t any easier. I couldn’t drive, so I would often take the bus everywhere. I couldn’t walk a straight line so I was often mistaken as being drunk; this led to some pretty unsettling interactions with strange men at bus stops (bonus: since it was early spring, it would get dark quite early, which really adds a special something to interactions with skeevy individuals). It was ~3 months before I was cleared to return back to work, so I was bored out of my mind. I tried to find things to occupy my time; for example, I tried to learn to knit. Despite learning the absolute easiest, three-step knitting technique, I would get stuck every few minutes, and have to ask my endlessly-patient friend where I was at in the process, and how to continue. I was in my early-thirties, failing at tasks demented senior citizens could do; I was despondent.

Since my brain was what had been injured, all of this fall-out must be my brain’s fault, right? At some point, it had all become clear to me: my brain was public enemy number one, and all hope was officially lost. What I failed to realize at the time was that my biggest challenge wasn’t my brain – it was my attitude. I had no idea how to move forward, what hopes or plans for the future seemed feasible; I had no idea how to go back to simply living life.

*Stay tuned for part two.*

My inner stranger.

Ninety percent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves.

Sidney J. Harris, American Journalist, 1917–1986

Three years ago, I was petrified. My brain was different – it felt as though I had been hijacked. My mind was slow, clumsy, deficient. As someone who has always relied heavily on their intellect, I felt utterly, terrifyingly abandoned…by a piece of myself which was still technically there, but didn’t feel like mine anymore. If you had told me then that I would come to be somewhat grateful for this, I would have scoffed (at best; more likely, I would have been mad). In some ways it’s as though I had allowed my intellect to replace my identity; I had mistaken who I was with what I was capable of.

One thing I have never been is artistic. In high school, I was very selective in who my Biology lab partner was: a total burnout with zero academic ambition, but excellent art skills. It was utter symbiosis: I had all the knowledge, and he had all the skill (seriously – no one wants to see me try to draw a crawdad). Fast forward to this last weekend, and you find me disassembling my aunt’s coffee table so I could make it into a wall-mounted plant hanger. I’m not saying that the last three years have made me believe I may be the next Michelangelo; however, I consistently surprise myself with just how creative I am becoming. One has to wonder: is my creative side “new”, or was I so reliant on my intellect that I never stopped to explore and nurture my creativity?

What else have I been missing?

I know that finally figuring out what to do with an unsteady, quirky little coffee table isn’t exactly news-worthy…and yet it is. Slowly but surely, I am figuring out what to do with this unsteady, quirky little brain. I have slowly learned to love my brain for the new things it’s mastering, rather than hating it for all the old things it’s forgetting.

PS: I wish I were all sunshine and rainbows about all of this…but I’m not. There will be another post that touches more on that side of things, but know that it’s still a struggle. While I have learned many ways to compensate for the cognitive losses, they are still there, and I am still learning. I still feel the loss; there is still grief. I still doubt my broken little brain, even while striving to show it patience, kindness, and graciousness.