****************Scene 25 - Gimp***********************
I wanted to be like my sister, I wanted to remain true to Who I Am, but…
Who Am I!
I remember being the Gimp.
That was my title, Gimp.
It was a Nickname my friends gave me
And I couldn’t deny it, you know.
I couldn’t walk right,
couldn’t talk right,
couldn’t - Laugh right!
I was…A gimp.
But at least I was somebody.
At least I had a title,
and an excuse.
Whenever I screwed something up I could say, “Hey, don’t blame me, I’m a gimp, remember!”
And they would laugh and I would,
bray, along with them.
It was funny,
I guess.
**********************Commentary*********************
Friends tease one another.
In previous articles I’ve mentioned how — following my injury — I was involved in a rock band. As we were boyhood friends in this rock band, we would tease each other. The title of “Gimp” was first granted by one of my bandmates — don’t remember who said it and it doesn’t matter. As adolescent boys who are playing in the parent’s garage, it’s natural that we would flippantly toss insulting words - casually degrading one another — like peacocks flaunting plumage, young men throw jibes to display juvenile prominence — dissecting a companion’s flukes and flaws in what is a generally a safe environment. Everyone’s seeking to win this social game — the “score” seems to be kept by any laughter that is a result of these trite insults, and is generally forgotten soon after.
But some words resonate — hanging in the memory like a chime’s solitary tone through an empty night.
“Gimp” — I remember this word roused laughter, and this laughter caused the word to become lodged in my mind as an easy way to get a laugh while simultaneously explaining away any flub, fumble, or folly. And I embraced the word, proudly seeking comic approval through self-degradation. Yet at times, I went to far with my “gimp” routine — it was too much, and I have memories of the laughs that left a bandmate’s mouth becoming uncomfortable exhalations instead of jovial vibrations — but I clung to the word because it got a reaction.
And the quality of the word began to change — no longer a playful jest, but a false crutch.
As friendships became strained, when other’s used the term “gimp”, it became a safe way to lash out and express frustrations. When it was used by me, the term became a self-pitying excuse for my failures. And the term migrated from a term used solely within among bandmates to something widely known by my social circles — and I accepted this without hesitation.
I would even encourage it, thinking I could to wriggle my way into the social scene by turning myself into a sitcom character. I wanted to be the fool — the duffus — the Barney Fife character that everyone loves — and there were times when I would accent an error in order to flaunt my “gimpiness” in the hope of comic approval. But in reality, not everyone loves this character.
There were times I was called out on this excuse — by close friends — scolding my attempt to shirk responsibility for a mistake by using the term “gimp” — yet simultaneously, members of the same social circle would tease me with that title. I felt trapped — by the word, and what it implied — by the habit of its usage.
Until I made the choice to shed the title.
The date has been lost to memory, but I remember being at band practice when the word was thrown at me — not with excessive malice, just casual teenage cruelty — and I remember taking a stand — “Hey, don’t use that word — I’m trying to get better and that word…it just doesn’t let me do that.”
“Okay.”
And that was it. There was no discussion, no resistance — everyone in the band, and soon all people in my social groups, stopped branding me with the term. It simply took me making a decision to not allow the word.
Words are remarkable — intangible vibrations inspired by even less tangible thoughts that are transmitted by pithy bursts of air — words have no direct effect upon the physical world, but we imbue them with such power that they inspire, degrade, encourage, deceive — words can build a civilization, destroy a planet, create a love, manipulate a people — and the same words carry different power for whomever hears or uses them. One person may hear a term or phrase and it festers in his or her soul and creates rage or sorrow that terrorizes the mood for days — while another person will hear the same words and give them no more attention than a fly’s fart.
The term “gimp” had very little power for my friends other than an easy insult they could give in what was most often meant to be a playful manner — it was my process that wrapped the word in self-criticism, anger, and pity. This is not to suggest it is my fault that the word carried such power, or that I could have simply released what the word meant to me — I will not explore that sort of argument here — instead what I want to recognize in this moment was how easy it was to ask that the word not be used — and how freeing. I asked them to stop — they said, “Okay” — and there was a physical sensation, a weight lifted off my brain — and we went back to band practice.
Nearly nothing for my bandmates, it was a moment of personal rebirth.
This is not to say I have removed power from the word — to this day, the word has an affect upon my conscious when I hear it, and it hurts when used toward any person — but my response is different. Instead of allowing it, I will face the term and ask that it is removed.
And I suggest you do the same. In my time as part of the brain injury community, I’ve been shocked at how often I hear or see the term “gimp” used as a phrase of self-deprecation — and on several occasions I have spoken to survivors, suggesting they banish the word from their vocabulary. I don’t know if these survivors have done this, and I don’t know if they let the term have the same damning power — but too often I have heard the term used as a way to quickly dismiss personal difficulties in recovery, and I suspect that this word does carry a painful power for many people.
So therefore, as a survivor who is still healing, don’t allow the this term — or other similarly simple degrading terms. Don’t get mad or try to scream these words away, just state to anyone who uses them that you would prefer they not be used around you — if such simple request is refused, these people are probably not good for your recovery and you should try to minimize time together. No one is a “gimp”, and everyone healing. Surround yourself with language that supports your healing process.
Thank you for reading, please leave comments below.
Please note, the scenes appear in reverse order and may cause confusion. To get a clearer understanding of the story, please start with the early entries in the blog. Thanks - enjoy.
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Monday, December 24, 2018
Scene 24 - My Sister's Story
****************Scene 24 - My Sister’s Story*********************
You may have noticed, that I haven’t spoken much about my sister -
At the start of the story, I dropped her off at school and then…
well, she hasn’t been hardly mentioned
Now she was a large part of my recovery, and involved in the process,
but,
her story is just so different, it doesn’t easily fit into the frame of my story that we’ve been using,
but I want to highlight her story here,
because my sister tells the story of a girl -
- a young woman -
who witnessed her brother’s accident and rehabilitation.
Witnessed.
I was half way through my eighth grade year,
he - my brother - had just dropped me off at school,
when it happened.
And I witnessed the whirlwind of action and drama surrounding the accident.
Witnessed how hard both my parents worked - I hardly saw either of them for two months.
And I witnessed the explosion of joy with my brother’s return
from the hospital. He was coming Home from the hospital, that must mean that he’s better, right?
maybe now things could return to normal,
Maybe even a better normal.
And I witnessed the return.
Inconsistency of his moods -
anger.
I remember getting into fights,
being afraid I was going to be hit…
The hand would raise,
pause,
and I witnessed the struggle between rage and reason.
You could see it on his face -
And he did hit me,
once,
not hard, but it hurt.
and I wanted to help -
to be part of the recovery process.
I wanted to bring my brother back.
because That, was not my bother,
but I never knew what I could do,
what my job could be,
I felt I was always just getting in the way
Until, one day, it was a Saturday afternoon, and I heard my brother and my father fighting downstairs.
and it was loud, so I stayed upstairs,
but after the fight was over -
the screaming had stopped -
I went down,
and I saw my father,
curled up, on the red couch, like…
Crying.
And my father saw me, pulled himself together, carried on…
and that’s when I knew my job. I had to be strong.
I had to be, Independent. I had to Stay out of the way so that my parents could take care of my…older…brother.
It didn’t make sense, but I knew what I had to do.
And my sister took on that job.
Displaying maturity beyond her years.
Finding solace in her friends, her community.
Remaining True to Who She Is,
and becoming an inspiration for her older brother.
************************Commentary*************************
My sister and I do not have the closest of relationships. That’s not to say we’re absent from each other’s lives, just distant.
In the scene above my sister expresses how she felt about her role in my recovery — that she had to “stay out of the way so that my parents could take care of my older brother.”
When my sister first shared this sentiment with me almost a decade ago — as the storytelling piece was being composed — I heard her words as inspirational. As I narrated the story, I felt that this moment showed my sister taking on remarkable dignity and responsibility. But now, as I take the time to reexamine these moments with a matured scrutiny, I recognize deeper layers of emotion tied into my sister’s words — not to diminish her aforementioned dignity and responsibility, I now see that with her recognition of a need for independence, she also needed to get distance from me. She was seeking to be independent not only to relieve our parents, but — and perhaps more importantly — to give herself the space for personal growth and youthful enjoyment. For years I have viewed her claiming a need to be independent as her attempt to assist in my recovery, and it’s only now that I recognize her actions may have been personal sanity and safety.
I will acknowledge that these thoughts are mine — I attempted to contact my sister multiple times, but she has not responded — I believe she has been too busy, as she is a new mother.
Also, as stated above, my sister and I are not close — though sometimes I wish that we were — or at least closer — that we could keep regular contact — and when I softly mourn not having this connection, I tend to select the time period during my early recovery as the reason why we are not closer. This reasoning presents itself as a mishmash…me piecing together an argument…digging into the logic of events …citing created causes for our relationship beginning to dissolve following my accident — and I tumble down a rabbit hole of self-blame and pity, placing the initial blame for the loss of our relationship on my accident. It’s an argument along the lines of — my sister had trouble understanding and adapting to my new mental state while I had difficulties with emotional control, and thus a rift began to develop between us. This rift grew over time and is now what often feels to be a canyon.
When I began trying to write this article, this was the habit of my thought process — and as I began to reexamin the scene, my mind circled like a vulture around the idea that the accident was the cause — seeking to snarf up any scraps that confirmed my hypothesis. Dozens of hours were spent creating cause and effect charts, beginning drafts that outlined the relationship’s decline, yet my writing did not feel honest. Words and emotional confessions were forced onto an outline that supported what I had convinced myself to believe, and these words rang hollow — and so I begin again — back to sketching outlines in notebooks — back to not finding the honesty I hope to share in these writings…And damn me if it wasn’t frustrating!
And then an epiphany — my accident is part of my life.
To adjust the emphasis of that epiphany, my accident is Part of my life.
Part Of
Life is a jigsaw, and my accident — along with the attached recovery — is but a section of the puzzle — to grant one segment too much importance is to not see the entirety of the picture. Perhaps the distance in the relationship between my sister and I grew with my emotional instability following the accident — perhaps my sister’s fear for self-preservation created a fissure that has not yet fully healed — perhaps it is even likely that the abundant snags in the recovery process marred our relationship — but the accident cannot be the entirety of our story. As I realized the truth held in the words “part of”, I found a release — to grant the accident as the thing that caused a distance between us is to grant an undeserved power to that accident — to events that have passed. Furthermore, granting this power to the accident presents the consequences of the changes that came from the accident as finite — and this is simply not true.
My accident happened — that is a truth — and to some degree the effects will resonate within my brain and body for all my life — but that does not mean I must accept difficulties that come from these effects as “consequences of my accident”. Instead, I must recognize what limitations these effects may have created, and — if I choose — work within my current abilities to alleviate the consequences of such effects.
Notice what I’m doing — separating “effects” from “consequences”. “Effects”, as termed here, are the physical changes to one’s body and brain that come after a traumatic event. While modern medicine is consistently finding new ways to heal the body, some physical “effects” from injuries are not yet able to be fully remedied. These effects, however, are not “consequences”. I hold that “consequences” are how we allow the effects to affect us.
To explain with a hypothetical, Sandra broke her spine and lost the use of her legs — that is a tragic effect of the accident — and due to her impaired ability to walk, Sandra has not left her house for the past three years — this is a consequence that Sandra allowed the accident. Granted, without the use of her legs traversing the world is now much more complicated, but with technological and/or human assistance, remaining stationary is in no way necessary. For her to claim, “I cannot leave the house because of my trauma,” is false. It can be viewed as a consequence of the injury, but that consequence is a choice.
The emotional instability was an effect of my accident, and it may have encouraged a distance between my sister and I. As the years passed — with this distance unaddressed — we may have continued to drift apart — not maliciously, but ignorantly — and this is a consequence.
Working on this entry helped me to realize how easy it is to become hyper-focused on a traumatic incident as THE creator of consequences — it is the creator only if we allow it to be so. To blame negative consequences on the effects of a trauma is a choice, but to embrace life and direct it toward healthy goals is also a choice.
My sister and I don’t have don’t have the closest of relationships — now — but there is the possibility of change. The consequences of the future will come from the choices we make.
You may have noticed, that I haven’t spoken much about my sister -
At the start of the story, I dropped her off at school and then…
well, she hasn’t been hardly mentioned
Now she was a large part of my recovery, and involved in the process,
but,
her story is just so different, it doesn’t easily fit into the frame of my story that we’ve been using,
but I want to highlight her story here,
because my sister tells the story of a girl -
- a young woman -
who witnessed her brother’s accident and rehabilitation.
Witnessed.
I was half way through my eighth grade year,
he - my brother - had just dropped me off at school,
when it happened.
And I witnessed the whirlwind of action and drama surrounding the accident.
Witnessed how hard both my parents worked - I hardly saw either of them for two months.
And I witnessed the explosion of joy with my brother’s return
from the hospital. He was coming Home from the hospital, that must mean that he’s better, right?
maybe now things could return to normal,
Maybe even a better normal.
And I witnessed the return.
Inconsistency of his moods -
anger.
I remember getting into fights,
being afraid I was going to be hit…
The hand would raise,
pause,
and I witnessed the struggle between rage and reason.
You could see it on his face -
And he did hit me,
once,
not hard, but it hurt.
and I wanted to help -
to be part of the recovery process.
I wanted to bring my brother back.
because That, was not my bother,
but I never knew what I could do,
what my job could be,
I felt I was always just getting in the way
Until, one day, it was a Saturday afternoon, and I heard my brother and my father fighting downstairs.
and it was loud, so I stayed upstairs,
but after the fight was over -
the screaming had stopped -
I went down,
and I saw my father,
curled up, on the red couch, like…
Crying.
And my father saw me, pulled himself together, carried on…
and that’s when I knew my job. I had to be strong.
I had to be, Independent. I had to Stay out of the way so that my parents could take care of my…older…brother.
It didn’t make sense, but I knew what I had to do.
And my sister took on that job.
Displaying maturity beyond her years.
Finding solace in her friends, her community.
Remaining True to Who She Is,
and becoming an inspiration for her older brother.
************************Commentary*************************
My sister and I do not have the closest of relationships. That’s not to say we’re absent from each other’s lives, just distant.
In the scene above my sister expresses how she felt about her role in my recovery — that she had to “stay out of the way so that my parents could take care of my older brother.”
When my sister first shared this sentiment with me almost a decade ago — as the storytelling piece was being composed — I heard her words as inspirational. As I narrated the story, I felt that this moment showed my sister taking on remarkable dignity and responsibility. But now, as I take the time to reexamine these moments with a matured scrutiny, I recognize deeper layers of emotion tied into my sister’s words — not to diminish her aforementioned dignity and responsibility, I now see that with her recognition of a need for independence, she also needed to get distance from me. She was seeking to be independent not only to relieve our parents, but — and perhaps more importantly — to give herself the space for personal growth and youthful enjoyment. For years I have viewed her claiming a need to be independent as her attempt to assist in my recovery, and it’s only now that I recognize her actions may have been personal sanity and safety.
I will acknowledge that these thoughts are mine — I attempted to contact my sister multiple times, but she has not responded — I believe she has been too busy, as she is a new mother.
Also, as stated above, my sister and I are not close — though sometimes I wish that we were — or at least closer — that we could keep regular contact — and when I softly mourn not having this connection, I tend to select the time period during my early recovery as the reason why we are not closer. This reasoning presents itself as a mishmash…me piecing together an argument…digging into the logic of events …citing created causes for our relationship beginning to dissolve following my accident — and I tumble down a rabbit hole of self-blame and pity, placing the initial blame for the loss of our relationship on my accident. It’s an argument along the lines of — my sister had trouble understanding and adapting to my new mental state while I had difficulties with emotional control, and thus a rift began to develop between us. This rift grew over time and is now what often feels to be a canyon.
When I began trying to write this article, this was the habit of my thought process — and as I began to reexamin the scene, my mind circled like a vulture around the idea that the accident was the cause — seeking to snarf up any scraps that confirmed my hypothesis. Dozens of hours were spent creating cause and effect charts, beginning drafts that outlined the relationship’s decline, yet my writing did not feel honest. Words and emotional confessions were forced onto an outline that supported what I had convinced myself to believe, and these words rang hollow — and so I begin again — back to sketching outlines in notebooks — back to not finding the honesty I hope to share in these writings…And damn me if it wasn’t frustrating!
And then an epiphany — my accident is part of my life.
To adjust the emphasis of that epiphany, my accident is Part of my life.
Part Of
Life is a jigsaw, and my accident — along with the attached recovery — is but a section of the puzzle — to grant one segment too much importance is to not see the entirety of the picture. Perhaps the distance in the relationship between my sister and I grew with my emotional instability following the accident — perhaps my sister’s fear for self-preservation created a fissure that has not yet fully healed — perhaps it is even likely that the abundant snags in the recovery process marred our relationship — but the accident cannot be the entirety of our story. As I realized the truth held in the words “part of”, I found a release — to grant the accident as the thing that caused a distance between us is to grant an undeserved power to that accident — to events that have passed. Furthermore, granting this power to the accident presents the consequences of the changes that came from the accident as finite — and this is simply not true.
My accident happened — that is a truth — and to some degree the effects will resonate within my brain and body for all my life — but that does not mean I must accept difficulties that come from these effects as “consequences of my accident”. Instead, I must recognize what limitations these effects may have created, and — if I choose — work within my current abilities to alleviate the consequences of such effects.
Notice what I’m doing — separating “effects” from “consequences”. “Effects”, as termed here, are the physical changes to one’s body and brain that come after a traumatic event. While modern medicine is consistently finding new ways to heal the body, some physical “effects” from injuries are not yet able to be fully remedied. These effects, however, are not “consequences”. I hold that “consequences” are how we allow the effects to affect us.
To explain with a hypothetical, Sandra broke her spine and lost the use of her legs — that is a tragic effect of the accident — and due to her impaired ability to walk, Sandra has not left her house for the past three years — this is a consequence that Sandra allowed the accident. Granted, without the use of her legs traversing the world is now much more complicated, but with technological and/or human assistance, remaining stationary is in no way necessary. For her to claim, “I cannot leave the house because of my trauma,” is false. It can be viewed as a consequence of the injury, but that consequence is a choice.
The emotional instability was an effect of my accident, and it may have encouraged a distance between my sister and I. As the years passed — with this distance unaddressed — we may have continued to drift apart — not maliciously, but ignorantly — and this is a consequence.
Working on this entry helped me to realize how easy it is to become hyper-focused on a traumatic incident as THE creator of consequences — it is the creator only if we allow it to be so. To blame negative consequences on the effects of a trauma is a choice, but to embrace life and direct it toward healthy goals is also a choice.
My sister and I don’t have don’t have the closest of relationships — now — but there is the possibility of change. The consequences of the future will come from the choices we make.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Does Brain Injury Change Personality?
Brain injury causes changes in personality.
Big claim - but it seems to be generally agreed upon by much of the post-TBI rehabilitation community. In relatively recent articles for this blog, I have alluded to changes of this sort in my own recovery - and while discussing these articles with my girlfriend, she asked me, “But what does it mean - to change personality? What you’re talking about doesn’t sound like a change in personality as much as a…a…an intensified personality. Is this really a change?”
Well this question surprised me - and I tried to splutter out a response about my research over the past several weeks/months and how this has led me to the belief that personality changes after TBI are accepted… but I found that none of the words that fell out of my mouth fully satisfied her — or me. And so, for this entry I have decided to relook at what I understand such a big claim to mean.
What does it mean to “change personality” after brain injury?
To quickly review some of what we’ve discussed in the above mentioned articles - when brain injury occurs, one relatively common effect is that a survivor will have his or her “emotional control center” of the brain damaged - and as a result, the survivor has difficulty regulating which, how, and to what extent emotions are expressed.
In the article “Can a Brain Injury Change Who You Are” - posted at www.theconversation.com - Dr. Leanne Rowlands shares three examples - two historical and one relatively contemporary - of personality changes related to brain injury - the stories of Phineas Gage in 1848, Eadweard Muybridge in 1860, and finally the more contemporary story of a school teacher (name not given) in 2000. In all three of these of these cases, the person who received the injury is said to have developed previously unknown personality traits — Phineas Gage developed powerful aggression, Eadweard Muybridge developed emotional instability, and the school teacher developed a tendency toward sexually assertive pedophilia. Thus, as Rowlands argues, this demonstrates the relation of the brain to personality - particularly the prefrontal cortex region of the brain — this being the area all three of these individuals received brain damage. Please note, I cite this article because it clearly states a historical recognition of such changes, but comparable examples are discussed in much of what I read - search “personality changes after brain injury” on the internet.
It is also important to recognize that a survivor is going through a major traumatic experience, and as a part of this experience he or she must learn to apply a new set of mental and physical skills - those available post-trauma - to the life that the survivor previously understood. Let’s be honest - this is a level of stress most people cannot realistically comprehend. Even I - after having experienced this as a survivor of TBI - I have difficulty recalling the magnitude of this stress level. I remember and acknowledge that it happened, that it was… painful, confounding, debilitating… but I recognize that — for the self preservation of my personal sanity — my mind has muted much of the true pain and frustration that resides within these memories.
This sort of stress, coupled with the damage to the “emotional regulation centers”, causes a survivor to react to situations in a new way. He or she may develop a fast and/or unpredictable temper, become sexually withdrawn or hyper aggressive, find the creation of new memories difficult, lose an ability or desire to stay focused tasks…the list can continue, but I think its important to recognize that the majority of these changes tend to be viewed as negative. Changes in personality that are viewed as positive after brain injury —while not unheard of — are rare.
So let’s look at the claim we started with again - “Brain injury causes changes in personality.” I suggest these are not really changes, but simply tendencies that had been perviously constrained by an adherence to societal standards that are now splorging1 out in unacceptable displays. Furthermore, I propose that when a colleague, friend, or family member says that brain injury causes a “personality change”, the truth behind that statement is — brain injury makes it harder to enjoy interacting with the survivor and we don’t understand why. It’s not that brain injury changes one’s personality - it’s that the unfiltered behavioral impulses of nearly anyone are not easily enjoyable or socially acceptable, and because of the psychological and physical situation — the stress of rehabilitation combined with damage to the frontal lobe region of the brain — a survivor is more likely to act upon impulses and create uncomfortable social situations. This does not mean a survivor has a different or new personality, but that the survivor is re-learning how to regulate impulses and interact with the world.
That’s my big claim, so I’ll repeat it - a person does not get a new personality because of brain injury.
Furthermore, survivors, supports, and caregivers should not attempt to write off social follies or abrasive behavior as part of a personality change, but must accept that a brain injury survivor is in the process of reestablishing his or her self-regulation process. Granted, this is difficult for all parties involved, and will undoubtably involve having to navigate embarrassing public social situations, but re-learning social control as part of the healing process needs to be recognized and respected - a person who has lost his or her legs should not be chided for needing to learn new ways to move by him or herself, nor should a brain injury survivor be shunned for needing to discover new methods for controlling impulses and moderating actions.
To look at why recognition of this part of the healing process is so important — the separate things of “personality” and “personhood” are — at least in English, Russian, Croatian, French, German and several other languages (still need to research Asian languages) semantically linked (linked through language) — and because of this, it is easy to equate a change in personality to a change in person-ness — especially for a survivor working on establishing his or her way of living with new skills. Therefore, stating that there has been a “personality change” invites identity confusion for a survivor, raising questions about a consistency in one’s self-personality. As stated by survivor Mac Fedge in an interview with NBC news, “It feels like part of me has disappeared since the accident and trying to get that aspect of me back and that’s probably one of the toughest aspects of the recovery…”.
The linking of “personality” with “person-hood” may be a side effect of language — but regardless, questions of self-identity do exist after brain injury. Recalling from my experience, these sort questions are damningly hard. The title of my storytelling work is the question Who Am I, Again? — and I named it this because I found variations of this question dominating many of my thoughts during the early years of my recovery —
Am I the same person?
Was I reborn?
Can I have any of the same hopes or dreams as before?
Is the person I was before my injury no more?
After brain injury, questions such as this will likely already exist within a survivor — and many of these are questions that cannot be answered — to encourage further impossible questioning of this sort by claiming one’s personality has changed is at best unproductive and — perhaps more likely — can quickly lead to dangerous thought patterns.
But for now, returning to the statement that began this entry - “Brain injury causes changes in personality” - I have examined this claim, and I cannot agree with it. This disagreement is a conclusion I reached as part of writing this entry — I played and pondered with the research and reasoning, and now feel that to claim a personality change is - in the majority of cases - more accurately a way to explain away the social discomfort that often exists around a survivor. The expression of one’s personality may have changed — and this may make it more difficult be socially engaged with such a survivor — but the personality is constant.
In my performance, I bookend the storytelling by stating “I am Lethan.” After brain injury, a survivor - though learning to adapt to a new set of skills - is the same person. You are You - and that includes all the personality that comes with You.
***************************************************************************
Footnote - 1 Yes, this is a made-up word, but I believe it best depicts the action I want to describe. Definition of “Splorging” — verb. — the sound and motion of a gelatin substance when it is squeezed by a person’s hand and it escapes compression by seeping through said person’s fingers.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Types of Relationships after TBI
This article will continue with the idea of a person having multiple “circles of friends” as presented in the previous posting.
In the previous article, I suggested five categories into which relationships can be divided. Again, this is NOT intended as any sort of definitive list, but as a tool to help generalize relationships into a recognizable manner that is easer to discuss.
These five categories are:
Immediate Family
Close Friendships
Casual Friendships
Acquaintances
Strangers
First, I must eliminate the final two categories as unimportant for this article. These are - 4) Acquaintances and 5) Strangers - and are people who were not strongly affected by my accident. Living in a small town, some people I would group into these categories may have been aware of pieces of the drama, but it had no recognizable impact upon their lives - we will not discuss these categories for this entry. Also, in the last posting I spent a long time explaining how my relationship with “close friends” was affected after my accident, so in the first we will not focus on the specifics of this of sort of relationship except as a point of comparison.
That leaves two other relationship types - 1) Immediate Family and 3) Casual Friendships - this article looks at how these relationships differ from relationships of 2) Close Friendships and then goes on to suggest that these Close Friendships are the relationships most affected by brain injury and why this is so.
Let’s start by looking at category 1) Immediate Family. This was the group with which I was most involved on a daily basis - specifically, my parents and my sister. I am fortunate to have a loving, supportive, proactive family that has always made a conscious effort to provide the support and guidance I need - in all aspects of life as well as the time of my accident - yet the extremities of emotion that grew from my recovery made even these relationships tense. My parents, however, took on the responsibility of continuing to find ways to work with me through the hardships. This was due, in part, to the living situation. Please note, I recognize that my parents went far beyond providing any minimal support in my recovery, and I am deeply grateful for their dedication to helping me heal, but that said - the close quarters and immediacy of the living situation encouraged my parents to be active in my recovery - it is a lot harder to exclude someone from social interaction when he lives under your roof. My sister is a slightly different story - and I will present more of her story in an upcoming posting - but she also, in part due to the living conditions, was forced to deal with me on a near daily basis.
With this living situation as the setting, combined with a commitment to helping me heal, my “immediate family” took a direct role in my recovery - actively seeking therapies, adjusting schedules to make time for doctor’s appointments, confronting my anger and helping find new ways to express frustration. While close friends could step away from the “Lethan drama” of the moment, my family had to find a way to adapt life to the needs at the time.
Not to diminish the extensive extra work my parents - and my sister - did as part of my recovery process, but they were encouraged by social responsibility and societal expectations to take up the mantel of assisting in my recovery. My close friends, however, did not have the same set of social and familial pressures.
Now, to category 3) Casual friendships. These are people that I have a friendly relationship with, but we do not often go out of our way to interact - friends I pass in school, people involved in similar activities (sports, chorus, theatre, etc…), friends of the family I know through my parents. These are people who casually care about me and my family, but usually make no attempt to be involved in our family affairs.
I make it a point to highlight this group of friendships because - at the time of my early recovery - many people from this category quickly became more active in the lives of my family and sought ways to support the recovery process - yet I separate them from the category of “Close Friends” because they were not involved in day to day interactions that caused them to witness the process of my recovery - news of my progress would get out and these “Casual Friendships” could be appropriately happy or sad while - for the large part - remaining unaffected by and/or unaware of the emotional confusion I demonstrated with closer relationships.
To quickly summarize the parameters of social interaction for these categories - Immediate Family relationships were required to deal with me because of the living situation, while Casual Friendships - being further removed from daily interaction - were not often affected by the social confusion that grew as part of my recovery. That leaves Close Friendships stuck between the other two in a strange social neither-zone - the changes and social difficulties that come as a part of recovery are apparent and DO affect the lives of these close friends, but by most standards they are not socially obligated to deal with this uncomfortable behavior. It can leave these friends saying uncomfortable phrases, such as - “I mean, yeah, he’s a friend, but he’s acting really weird now, let’s…I guess…not invite him.” Close friends want to help, but they also have to worry about their own lives.
Dr. Mariann Young speaks very clearly about this on the “Brainline” YouTube channel - How to Deal with Friends Falling Away After a Brain Injury. In this video, she suggests that it is important to educate friends about the changes that will likely occur as the brain injury survivor is returning to the community - it is important to recognize that the survivor has changed and there will be a new set of challenges - Dr. Young doesn’t use the word “storytelling” - as I suggested in the previous entry - but I believe the intent is the same. By hearing stories of recovery from survivors and caregivers, healing supporters who are new the experience can be better educated and more fully psychologically prepare for any changes that occur in the survivor.
Retaining former friendships after brain injury is not an easy task. It requires commitment by both the survivor and the friends - I will even suggest that “Close Friendships” are the hardest relationships to retain after an injury because they exist in that strange in the in-between-neither-zone described above, and there’s the rub. Pulling from my experience, I remember trying to hold onto these friendships as one of the most important things after my accident - and therefore, as some of these friendships drifted away, these became some of the most difficult loses. Recognize, this is MY experience, and I do not claim to speak for other survivors, but these friendships came to represent - in a very personal manner - the progress of my recovery - a fantasy scale that measured how well I was doing. I felt that if I could retain these close friendships - or forge a new, similarly close group of friends - that would prove that I had recovered successfully and was still the same person - that some core social aspect of me remained constant. Was this just me? Do other survivors place the same sense of the importance in former friends?
Friendships come and go, yet the sudden nature of brain trauma clearly highlights this inevitable change - and so, this is another example of the difficult job a survivor has of acknowledging the pains of change in all its slow and sudden forms.
Having shared those thoughts, I’m eager to read your ideas. The reaction of close friends after brain injury is a topic I’m interested in, and I would love any leads to readings about this. So far, most of what I have found discusses the survivor’s perspective of losing friends and how to accept and prepare for these changes - understanding the survivors story is important, but I’m curious to find any information from the perspective of the friends - why do they feel the urge to pull away from a survivor? How do friends see their role during a survivor’s recovery process? Any leads you can pass my way will be greatly appreciated.
Chat soon.
In the previous article, I suggested five categories into which relationships can be divided. Again, this is NOT intended as any sort of definitive list, but as a tool to help generalize relationships into a recognizable manner that is easer to discuss.
These five categories are:
Immediate Family
Close Friendships
Casual Friendships
Acquaintances
Strangers
First, I must eliminate the final two categories as unimportant for this article. These are - 4) Acquaintances and 5) Strangers - and are people who were not strongly affected by my accident. Living in a small town, some people I would group into these categories may have been aware of pieces of the drama, but it had no recognizable impact upon their lives - we will not discuss these categories for this entry. Also, in the last posting I spent a long time explaining how my relationship with “close friends” was affected after my accident, so in the first we will not focus on the specifics of this of sort of relationship except as a point of comparison.
That leaves two other relationship types - 1) Immediate Family and 3) Casual Friendships - this article looks at how these relationships differ from relationships of 2) Close Friendships and then goes on to suggest that these Close Friendships are the relationships most affected by brain injury and why this is so.
Let’s start by looking at category 1) Immediate Family. This was the group with which I was most involved on a daily basis - specifically, my parents and my sister. I am fortunate to have a loving, supportive, proactive family that has always made a conscious effort to provide the support and guidance I need - in all aspects of life as well as the time of my accident - yet the extremities of emotion that grew from my recovery made even these relationships tense. My parents, however, took on the responsibility of continuing to find ways to work with me through the hardships. This was due, in part, to the living situation. Please note, I recognize that my parents went far beyond providing any minimal support in my recovery, and I am deeply grateful for their dedication to helping me heal, but that said - the close quarters and immediacy of the living situation encouraged my parents to be active in my recovery - it is a lot harder to exclude someone from social interaction when he lives under your roof. My sister is a slightly different story - and I will present more of her story in an upcoming posting - but she also, in part due to the living conditions, was forced to deal with me on a near daily basis.
With this living situation as the setting, combined with a commitment to helping me heal, my “immediate family” took a direct role in my recovery - actively seeking therapies, adjusting schedules to make time for doctor’s appointments, confronting my anger and helping find new ways to express frustration. While close friends could step away from the “Lethan drama” of the moment, my family had to find a way to adapt life to the needs at the time.
Not to diminish the extensive extra work my parents - and my sister - did as part of my recovery process, but they were encouraged by social responsibility and societal expectations to take up the mantel of assisting in my recovery. My close friends, however, did not have the same set of social and familial pressures.
Now, to category 3) Casual friendships. These are people that I have a friendly relationship with, but we do not often go out of our way to interact - friends I pass in school, people involved in similar activities (sports, chorus, theatre, etc…), friends of the family I know through my parents. These are people who casually care about me and my family, but usually make no attempt to be involved in our family affairs.
I make it a point to highlight this group of friendships because - at the time of my early recovery - many people from this category quickly became more active in the lives of my family and sought ways to support the recovery process - yet I separate them from the category of “Close Friends” because they were not involved in day to day interactions that caused them to witness the process of my recovery - news of my progress would get out and these “Casual Friendships” could be appropriately happy or sad while - for the large part - remaining unaffected by and/or unaware of the emotional confusion I demonstrated with closer relationships.
To quickly summarize the parameters of social interaction for these categories - Immediate Family relationships were required to deal with me because of the living situation, while Casual Friendships - being further removed from daily interaction - were not often affected by the social confusion that grew as part of my recovery. That leaves Close Friendships stuck between the other two in a strange social neither-zone - the changes and social difficulties that come as a part of recovery are apparent and DO affect the lives of these close friends, but by most standards they are not socially obligated to deal with this uncomfortable behavior. It can leave these friends saying uncomfortable phrases, such as - “I mean, yeah, he’s a friend, but he’s acting really weird now, let’s…I guess…not invite him.” Close friends want to help, but they also have to worry about their own lives.
Dr. Mariann Young speaks very clearly about this on the “Brainline” YouTube channel - How to Deal with Friends Falling Away After a Brain Injury. In this video, she suggests that it is important to educate friends about the changes that will likely occur as the brain injury survivor is returning to the community - it is important to recognize that the survivor has changed and there will be a new set of challenges - Dr. Young doesn’t use the word “storytelling” - as I suggested in the previous entry - but I believe the intent is the same. By hearing stories of recovery from survivors and caregivers, healing supporters who are new the experience can be better educated and more fully psychologically prepare for any changes that occur in the survivor.
Retaining former friendships after brain injury is not an easy task. It requires commitment by both the survivor and the friends - I will even suggest that “Close Friendships” are the hardest relationships to retain after an injury because they exist in that strange in the in-between-neither-zone described above, and there’s the rub. Pulling from my experience, I remember trying to hold onto these friendships as one of the most important things after my accident - and therefore, as some of these friendships drifted away, these became some of the most difficult loses. Recognize, this is MY experience, and I do not claim to speak for other survivors, but these friendships came to represent - in a very personal manner - the progress of my recovery - a fantasy scale that measured how well I was doing. I felt that if I could retain these close friendships - or forge a new, similarly close group of friends - that would prove that I had recovered successfully and was still the same person - that some core social aspect of me remained constant. Was this just me? Do other survivors place the same sense of the importance in former friends?
Friendships come and go, yet the sudden nature of brain trauma clearly highlights this inevitable change - and so, this is another example of the difficult job a survivor has of acknowledging the pains of change in all its slow and sudden forms.
Having shared those thoughts, I’m eager to read your ideas. The reaction of close friends after brain injury is a topic I’m interested in, and I would love any leads to readings about this. So far, most of what I have found discusses the survivor’s perspective of losing friends and how to accept and prepare for these changes - understanding the survivors story is important, but I’m curious to find any information from the perspective of the friends - why do they feel the urge to pull away from a survivor? How do friends see their role during a survivor’s recovery process? Any leads you can pass my way will be greatly appreciated.
Chat soon.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Scene 23 - We Just Want to Hangout
Hello everyone - its been a while since I was able to write - a lot of life changes and growth, including moving to a new job in a new city in China (Ganzhou, Jiangxi province). Thank you for being patient as I took my time settling into my new home and living situation.
Now lets get back to the writing.
********************Scene 23 - We Just Want to Hangout**********************
but my friends didn’t always want to hang out with me.
It was just hard, you know.
Ryan tells me -
We’re always being told if he does this do that and if he does that…
I mean,
it felt like babysitting -
Sometimes…
and dude, we never knew what you would do…
I mean, you’d go from laughing to…Yelling…to laughing again real quick…
and the laugh - it was almost like this, this Donkey Bray of something.
It was scary.
I mean, we just wanted to
hang out, you know.
***************************Commentary******************************
For this article, we start with the idea of a person having various “circles of friends” or “levels of friendship” - the idea that a relationship can be introspectively categorized according to the level of social intimacy that exists between the persons involved in said friendship/relationship. I do not believe there is any real (objective) rule about the number of friendship categories that exist or the defining characteristics of each friendship type, but I do believe that creating these “circles” can be beneficial for a person’s wellbeing - this could be done unconsciously or as a conscious effort done with guidance.
Note, I do see potential flaws and/or dangers in this method of friendship categorization, but this article is not a critique of this method - instead, I use the idea as a tool to better define what I am discussing.
With that established, for this article (and the next) I have created 5 categories by which one can view social relationships:
1) Immediate Family
2) Close Friendships
3) Casual Friendships
4) Acquaintances
5) Strangers
Below I have defined these categories as they related to me at the time of my recovery:
1) “Immediate Family” are people whose lives are unavoidably intertwined with mine - people for whom my process of recovery had a very real effect on their daily activities - I consider this to be my parents and my sister.
2) “Close Friendships” are the people I interacted with at private social events - parties, trips to the diner, forming a rock band - friends with whom I made social plans and would generally “hangout” with multiple times a week. These are people I could confide in, ask for advice, and would turn to for support. I was fortunate to have had a moderately large, close knit group of high school friends whom I place in this category.
3) “Casual Friendships” are the people with whom I was friendly, but refrained from sharing personal details. Classmates I would see in the hall - family friends my parents would introduce me to - people I would regularly pass in my daily routine - I might have had the “broad brush picture” of their life, but the details were not filled in.
4) “Acquaintances” are the people whom I knew in passing - classmates I see in the hallways - a recognized face with a name just out of reach. People I see and “…Hey!…. You!…You…How are You doing? You still at…? That’s great! Take it easy…catch up soon!”
5) “Strangers” are exactly what the names implies. People not (yet) known.
These divisions are artificial - and there is an inevitable blurring of the lines between all these categories - but by creating this separation, it helps with the discussion of generalized styles of social interaction after my brain injury, and therefore will be used for these writings.
Returning to the scene above - as the narrator/character of Ryan is an amalgamation of my close friends, so for this article we will focus on relationships in the second category - “Close Friendships”.
As stated, at the time of my accident, I had a moderately large group of friends, many of whom I considered close - people knew me and for the most part liked me. It was a relatively healthy, active, social life - I recognize that I was fortunate to have grown up with such a social network, but I feel that the social life I lived was within the spectrum of “normal” for small town America.
After my accident, I wanted to be “normal” again. Now, granted, “normal” is a loaded term. The teenage years - at least in US culture - is a time when a person has the privilege of trying on costumes of personality and choosing the aspects that best fit one’s truth - the parts he or she wants to retain into adulthood. I was finding myself by trying aspects free-love, radical-thinker, retro-hippie, creativity tortured performance-artist costumes - what are sometimes thought of as “alternative” lifestyles…that are still accepted and embraced as a part of US culture. I wanted to be the artist that refuses the constraints of society, but is still accepted by an audience of like-minded misfits - so my task was to find how I wanted to present myself in order to achieve this goal.
Now finding oneself is a personal journey for everyone, but social relationships (friendships) are inevitably a large factor as to what styles of personality a person is exposed to and adapts - a person can only try on a costume if they know it exists. Nothing wrong with this, just pointing out that in this journey, friendships and relationships can never be fully separated from the process of self-exploration and discovery.
We need to interact with other people to find who we truly are.
Returning to my story, I had friends, plans for college, independent artistic pursuits - life was good - and after my brain trauma, I wanted to continue this social self-exploration process with all my friends - but, to be blunt, this was not possible.
What do I mean?
In the commentary to Scene 17, pt 1 - The Job Ahead, I talk about the frustration of having to relearn what what were previously viewed as basic skills. One of the skills that requires relearning is how to be a friend - or put in a more specific manner - relearning how to be the friend you were prior to the trauma.
The re-acquisition of some skills can be clearly evaluated - relearning how to walk, for example, has a clear goal or a way to measure success - to achieve what physicians consider to be the correct way to walk allowing for maximum efficiency of movement in a manner that can be sustained for many years. Being a friend can also have a set of standards, and although these are slightly more subjective and open to interpretation, there is still a set of generally agreed upon skills that can be employed to be a friend - skills such as honesty, supporting the other person, providing feedback, and so on. However, in the case of this story - and as is true for other survivors of a trauma who want to return to a social life - I wanted to return to the specific set of friends that I had prior to the accident - wanted to continue as the friend I had previously been.
This was, however, I repeat - not possible. To start, there were the physical factors of my body recovering, but what caused more social hangups was my brain’s healing process - my decreased inhibitions and lack of self-control. As summarized in Scene 21 - That's Just How She Feels, the frontal lobe region of the brain has an “emotional filtering” function that helps to regulate the expression of emotions - because this area of the brain was damaged in my accident, there were times after my accident when I would unnecessarily express or over express myself - showing love, joy, anger, or even sexuality in a manner that could offend my social peers - or at least make them uncomfortable.
During this time, my goal was to return to being the friend I had been before. Note that previously (before the accident) I had attained my spot in the social scene by acting according to internal/subconscious rules of behavior and adhering to my natural social instincts. After the accident, what I did not realize is that my internal regulating processes had changed, and thus my social actions were not the same. My mind reasoned that I was behaving the same as before - naturally - when in truth I was less able to restrain the raw impulses or emotions presenting myself as a seemingly different person. Behaving “naturally” after the accident was not the same as behaving “naturally” prior to the accident.
To better explain - it was as if I had a sack labeled “Natural Behaviors and Reactions” that I reach into when choosing how I act in a social situation. This sack was never taken away from me, but while in the coma, the contents of the sack were switched with a new set of behaviors and reactions - this new set had some similarities to the previous set, but often seemed more extreme, less aware of social consequences, and at times downright offensive. Due to this, when I was in a social situation after my accident, I was reaching to the same place for “Natural Behaviors and Reactions”, but what I pulled out was from a completely different set.
My peers - people who knew the set of behaviors I used prior to the accident - didn’t understand, know how to anticipate, or feel comfortable with the new set of behaviors - and so there were times when these interactions would just get awkward, uncomfortable, or offensive.
For this reason my close friends - a group that loved me, had physically shown up many times to support me and my family in the initial stages of recovery, hoped and wished and prayed for my healing - began to step lightly when I was around and at times made an effort to not include me in social activities. To these friends, I was no longer the crazy, creative, socially acceptable performer - but a mutated version of that - mashed together with a bundle of emotions and cautions - and it was an effort to hangout with me. For this reason, sometimes (or many times) they didn’t want to make that effort.
Please note, I was still involved in social and extra curricular actives at this stage of my recovery - I had a moderately active social life and was engaged in various school and community organizations - but where previously I had felt in the heart of the action, I now often felt as though I had to either push myself into interactive situations or remain on the outskirts of any social event.
Some might say that this set of emotions is common to high school students, and I acknowledge this, but after interviewing survivors of brain injury and researching the recovery process, I get the sense that this feeling of exclusion is a relatively common experience for survivors. What’s more, I can understand my peers desire to push me out - when I examine my current social impulses (as a 36 year old man) I recognize the urge to avoid social situations that are uncomfortable - and I think this is a completely reasonable and rational urge. Building from this, sometimes that means not inviting a particular person or persons to a party - I don’t think this is always the right course of action, but I do believe that the urge for social ease stays with us throughout life. It was perfectly valid for my friends not to want to hangout.
But a loop was created - as they pull away, I want to hangout and try harder to please - more discomfort - they retreat - I try to please… Its a conundrum.
I also suggest that this social discomfort loop occurs not just in cases of brain injury when “emotional filters” are damaged, but can also occur when a survivor from some other form of trauma seeks to reconnect with his or her social group prior to the accident - the specific reasons for having difficulty reintegrating with social groups may be different, but I suggest that a disconnect between a survivor’s current behavior and previous patterns of behavior likely exists.
How do we remedy this?
There is no easy answer, but I will advocate for a tool to assist in this process being - as I’ve repeated throughout this blog - storytelling. Stories told to the previous friends can educate listeners about the process of recovery and how a surviving friend may have changed. This does not mean it needs to be the surviving friend that tells the story - often the events are so close to the survivor that he or she has not learned how to clearly relate what is happening. The survivor’s immediate story is important, but if it is told, it should be in tandem with stories from other survivors - hearing stories from multiple sources helps to show the common occurrences or recovery and provides examples of how other people how navigated the path of reintegration.
Furthermore, for this article, I want to emphasize the benefit of storytelling from one survivor to another. When a survivor hears stories of recovery, he or she can anticipate changes in oneself that may strain social relations - by being aware that these changes might happen, a survivor can be more aware of his or her own journey. This is not a complete solution - storytelling will not magically fix friendships after a trauma - but it is a tool that can ease a part of the struggle and make the return to life that little bit easier.
Thanks for reading - would love your comments/thoughts - leave them below!
Now lets get back to the writing.
********************Scene 23 - We Just Want to Hangout**********************
but my friends didn’t always want to hang out with me.
It was just hard, you know.
Ryan tells me -
We’re always being told if he does this do that and if he does that…
I mean,
it felt like babysitting -
Sometimes…
and dude, we never knew what you would do…
I mean, you’d go from laughing to…Yelling…to laughing again real quick…
and the laugh - it was almost like this, this Donkey Bray of something.
It was scary.
I mean, we just wanted to
hang out, you know.
***************************Commentary******************************
For this article, we start with the idea of a person having various “circles of friends” or “levels of friendship” - the idea that a relationship can be introspectively categorized according to the level of social intimacy that exists between the persons involved in said friendship/relationship. I do not believe there is any real (objective) rule about the number of friendship categories that exist or the defining characteristics of each friendship type, but I do believe that creating these “circles” can be beneficial for a person’s wellbeing - this could be done unconsciously or as a conscious effort done with guidance.
Note, I do see potential flaws and/or dangers in this method of friendship categorization, but this article is not a critique of this method - instead, I use the idea as a tool to better define what I am discussing.
With that established, for this article (and the next) I have created 5 categories by which one can view social relationships:
1) Immediate Family
2) Close Friendships
3) Casual Friendships
4) Acquaintances
5) Strangers
Below I have defined these categories as they related to me at the time of my recovery:
1) “Immediate Family” are people whose lives are unavoidably intertwined with mine - people for whom my process of recovery had a very real effect on their daily activities - I consider this to be my parents and my sister.
2) “Close Friendships” are the people I interacted with at private social events - parties, trips to the diner, forming a rock band - friends with whom I made social plans and would generally “hangout” with multiple times a week. These are people I could confide in, ask for advice, and would turn to for support. I was fortunate to have had a moderately large, close knit group of high school friends whom I place in this category.
3) “Casual Friendships” are the people with whom I was friendly, but refrained from sharing personal details. Classmates I would see in the hall - family friends my parents would introduce me to - people I would regularly pass in my daily routine - I might have had the “broad brush picture” of their life, but the details were not filled in.
4) “Acquaintances” are the people whom I knew in passing - classmates I see in the hallways - a recognized face with a name just out of reach. People I see and “…Hey!…. You!…You…How are You doing? You still at…? That’s great! Take it easy…catch up soon!”
5) “Strangers” are exactly what the names implies. People not (yet) known.
These divisions are artificial - and there is an inevitable blurring of the lines between all these categories - but by creating this separation, it helps with the discussion of generalized styles of social interaction after my brain injury, and therefore will be used for these writings.
Returning to the scene above - as the narrator/character of Ryan is an amalgamation of my close friends, so for this article we will focus on relationships in the second category - “Close Friendships”.
As stated, at the time of my accident, I had a moderately large group of friends, many of whom I considered close - people knew me and for the most part liked me. It was a relatively healthy, active, social life - I recognize that I was fortunate to have grown up with such a social network, but I feel that the social life I lived was within the spectrum of “normal” for small town America.
After my accident, I wanted to be “normal” again. Now, granted, “normal” is a loaded term. The teenage years - at least in US culture - is a time when a person has the privilege of trying on costumes of personality and choosing the aspects that best fit one’s truth - the parts he or she wants to retain into adulthood. I was finding myself by trying aspects free-love, radical-thinker, retro-hippie, creativity tortured performance-artist costumes - what are sometimes thought of as “alternative” lifestyles…that are still accepted and embraced as a part of US culture. I wanted to be the artist that refuses the constraints of society, but is still accepted by an audience of like-minded misfits - so my task was to find how I wanted to present myself in order to achieve this goal.
Now finding oneself is a personal journey for everyone, but social relationships (friendships) are inevitably a large factor as to what styles of personality a person is exposed to and adapts - a person can only try on a costume if they know it exists. Nothing wrong with this, just pointing out that in this journey, friendships and relationships can never be fully separated from the process of self-exploration and discovery.
We need to interact with other people to find who we truly are.
Returning to my story, I had friends, plans for college, independent artistic pursuits - life was good - and after my brain trauma, I wanted to continue this social self-exploration process with all my friends - but, to be blunt, this was not possible.
What do I mean?
In the commentary to Scene 17, pt 1 - The Job Ahead, I talk about the frustration of having to relearn what what were previously viewed as basic skills. One of the skills that requires relearning is how to be a friend - or put in a more specific manner - relearning how to be the friend you were prior to the trauma.
The re-acquisition of some skills can be clearly evaluated - relearning how to walk, for example, has a clear goal or a way to measure success - to achieve what physicians consider to be the correct way to walk allowing for maximum efficiency of movement in a manner that can be sustained for many years. Being a friend can also have a set of standards, and although these are slightly more subjective and open to interpretation, there is still a set of generally agreed upon skills that can be employed to be a friend - skills such as honesty, supporting the other person, providing feedback, and so on. However, in the case of this story - and as is true for other survivors of a trauma who want to return to a social life - I wanted to return to the specific set of friends that I had prior to the accident - wanted to continue as the friend I had previously been.
This was, however, I repeat - not possible. To start, there were the physical factors of my body recovering, but what caused more social hangups was my brain’s healing process - my decreased inhibitions and lack of self-control. As summarized in Scene 21 - That's Just How She Feels, the frontal lobe region of the brain has an “emotional filtering” function that helps to regulate the expression of emotions - because this area of the brain was damaged in my accident, there were times after my accident when I would unnecessarily express or over express myself - showing love, joy, anger, or even sexuality in a manner that could offend my social peers - or at least make them uncomfortable.
During this time, my goal was to return to being the friend I had been before. Note that previously (before the accident) I had attained my spot in the social scene by acting according to internal/subconscious rules of behavior and adhering to my natural social instincts. After the accident, what I did not realize is that my internal regulating processes had changed, and thus my social actions were not the same. My mind reasoned that I was behaving the same as before - naturally - when in truth I was less able to restrain the raw impulses or emotions presenting myself as a seemingly different person. Behaving “naturally” after the accident was not the same as behaving “naturally” prior to the accident.
To better explain - it was as if I had a sack labeled “Natural Behaviors and Reactions” that I reach into when choosing how I act in a social situation. This sack was never taken away from me, but while in the coma, the contents of the sack were switched with a new set of behaviors and reactions - this new set had some similarities to the previous set, but often seemed more extreme, less aware of social consequences, and at times downright offensive. Due to this, when I was in a social situation after my accident, I was reaching to the same place for “Natural Behaviors and Reactions”, but what I pulled out was from a completely different set.
My peers - people who knew the set of behaviors I used prior to the accident - didn’t understand, know how to anticipate, or feel comfortable with the new set of behaviors - and so there were times when these interactions would just get awkward, uncomfortable, or offensive.
For this reason my close friends - a group that loved me, had physically shown up many times to support me and my family in the initial stages of recovery, hoped and wished and prayed for my healing - began to step lightly when I was around and at times made an effort to not include me in social activities. To these friends, I was no longer the crazy, creative, socially acceptable performer - but a mutated version of that - mashed together with a bundle of emotions and cautions - and it was an effort to hangout with me. For this reason, sometimes (or many times) they didn’t want to make that effort.
Please note, I was still involved in social and extra curricular actives at this stage of my recovery - I had a moderately active social life and was engaged in various school and community organizations - but where previously I had felt in the heart of the action, I now often felt as though I had to either push myself into interactive situations or remain on the outskirts of any social event.
Some might say that this set of emotions is common to high school students, and I acknowledge this, but after interviewing survivors of brain injury and researching the recovery process, I get the sense that this feeling of exclusion is a relatively common experience for survivors. What’s more, I can understand my peers desire to push me out - when I examine my current social impulses (as a 36 year old man) I recognize the urge to avoid social situations that are uncomfortable - and I think this is a completely reasonable and rational urge. Building from this, sometimes that means not inviting a particular person or persons to a party - I don’t think this is always the right course of action, but I do believe that the urge for social ease stays with us throughout life. It was perfectly valid for my friends not to want to hangout.
But a loop was created - as they pull away, I want to hangout and try harder to please - more discomfort - they retreat - I try to please… Its a conundrum.
I also suggest that this social discomfort loop occurs not just in cases of brain injury when “emotional filters” are damaged, but can also occur when a survivor from some other form of trauma seeks to reconnect with his or her social group prior to the accident - the specific reasons for having difficulty reintegrating with social groups may be different, but I suggest that a disconnect between a survivor’s current behavior and previous patterns of behavior likely exists.
How do we remedy this?
There is no easy answer, but I will advocate for a tool to assist in this process being - as I’ve repeated throughout this blog - storytelling. Stories told to the previous friends can educate listeners about the process of recovery and how a surviving friend may have changed. This does not mean it needs to be the surviving friend that tells the story - often the events are so close to the survivor that he or she has not learned how to clearly relate what is happening. The survivor’s immediate story is important, but if it is told, it should be in tandem with stories from other survivors - hearing stories from multiple sources helps to show the common occurrences or recovery and provides examples of how other people how navigated the path of reintegration.
Furthermore, for this article, I want to emphasize the benefit of storytelling from one survivor to another. When a survivor hears stories of recovery, he or she can anticipate changes in oneself that may strain social relations - by being aware that these changes might happen, a survivor can be more aware of his or her own journey. This is not a complete solution - storytelling will not magically fix friendships after a trauma - but it is a tool that can ease a part of the struggle and make the return to life that little bit easier.
Thanks for reading - would love your comments/thoughts - leave them below!
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