2. Since your old habits don’t quite work well enough, you need to TAKE CONTROL of your brain….

From the Give Back Give Back – TBI Self-Therapy Guide – which you can download by clicking this link, here’s the second point about how to fix your brain. It’s an important one, because it puts you in the driver’s seat of your own recovery. That’s huge.

2. Since your old habits don’t quite work well enough, you need to TAKE CONTROL of your brain and get it to think through the things you are going to do.

• Your BRAIN no longer does its job well enough on automatic pilot.

You may think it does, but it doesn’t. All those years your brain invested in learning how to do things… well, the things it learned about “the right way to do things” has changed. The connections and pathways that your brain was used to using to get from Point A to Point B… well, those old highways and byways may have been “washed out” by your TBI, so all the signals traveling through your brain need to find new ways to do their job.

• Now, your MIND has to make sure it does its job properly, whenever you do anything in which the results are important.

You can’t just rely on your brain to be on autopilot. You have to use your MIND. And you have to stay engaged. You have to pay attention. The brain can do its job, but it needs to be watched — cared for — tended. And that’s the job of your mind.

• Any time you need your actions or your words to have quality, your mind has to make sure that your brain produces quality at every step.

Your mind is in your control. Your brain … well, not so much. Some people make no distinction between brain and mind, but for our purposes here (and for Give Back purposes), we need to make that distinction. The brain is the organ, the result of a whole lot of physical and neurological processes. The mind is the result of the brain’s activity and your presence… of mind.

• It’s as if your mind now has to be the boss.

Yep. It does. It has to run the show. You can’t rely “mindlessly” on your brain to just do its job as usual. Because the ways that it used to do things have altered. And that change is permanent. Does that mean you can’t create new ways and pathways for your brain to do things differently? NO.  That’s the point — it can change and learn and grow. But it’s used to doing things the same-old-same-old, and that’s not going to work for you anymore.

• You need to be MINDFUL so that you can be an effective boss.

Give yourself a promotion. Make yourself the CEO of your own life. You’ve got to run things, now. Not just your autopilot brain, but your powerful mind, which learns and grows and changes constantly and acquires skill over time. Mindfulness, paying attention, properly managing your energy and frustrations… you’ve got a new job.

You can do it. You got this. Many, many other people have been through this and have come out on the other side in good shape. Follow this link to read more: Models of Exceptional Adaptation in Recovery After Traumatic Brain Injury: A Case Series

TBI recovery (even for the so-called “mild” type) is an ongoing process which involves your whole self. Take heart. There is a way forward. I found my own way, and you can too.

Onward.

1. Know that you have a new brain, one that can work well once it is reprogrammed.

One of the things I really appreciate about the  Give Back Orlando materials is that they don’t sugar-coat TBI recovery, but they also don’t make it into a “accept your new normal” approach, where you have to resign yourself to everything being so much worse than before. The core message is that you can improve… provided you make some specific changes in how you live your life.

The first change is:

1. Know that you have a new brain, one that can work well once it is reprogrammed.
   • It needs to be reprogrammed because your old programs don’t run quite right on your new brain.
   • Help yourself to keep this fact in mind as you go through your day.

When we’re very young, we come into the world with the capacity to create a whole lot of synapses — connections in the brain that carry information. Over time, our synapses are “pruned”, as our brain refines its ways of doing and understanding things. By the time we get past adolescence, a lot more connections have been pruned than we had, just 10 years earlier.

It’s been said that one of the things that “gets you” after TBI, is that you may have lost a bunch of the connections you really depended on… and that’s a loss.

But here’s the thing, see? If we have “neuroplasticity”, we can create new connections to take the place of the ones we’ve lost. That, to me, is the essence of TBI recovery.

Granted, there may be parts of the brain that are so damaged that there’s no repairing them by present means. Maybe sometime on down the line, but not right now. But the brain is an amazing thing, and we can create a lot more connections than people used to think we could. In fact, the old ways of understanding the brain — that you can’t repair it, if it’s injured… that only certain parts are used for specific activities… that damage is permanent — those old ways have been disproved.

It’s not true.

What IS true, is that with regular practice and the right approach, the brain can be “reconditioned” to perform at, near, or even better than levels you had before.

But you have to realize that change has to happen. You have to deliberately create those new synapses, those new connections, those new ways of your brain functioning. You can’t keep doing things the same way as before, over and over.

You have to realize you have a new brain.

And you have to keep reminding yourself of that, through the course of each day.

It’s like trying to run a Windows 10 program on Windows 3.1 (remember that? I do). It’s just not going to work. Not because Windows 3.1 was so much worse. It was good for what it did. It’s just that the “gears” work differently now.

And you have to accept that fact.

I’m not talking about accepting it because it’s a sad fact that life is going to be so much worse.

I AM talking about accepting it, so that your life can get so much better.

Big difference.

So, that first step is the best kind of acceptance of all.

Again:

1. Know that you have a new brain, one that can work well once it is reprogrammed.
   • It needs to be reprogrammed because your old programs don’t run quite right on your new brain.
   • Help yourself to keep this fact in mind as you go through your day.

Good reading

I’ve just “re-discovered” Give Back, Inc., the organization/group that helps traumatic brain injury survivors get their lives back with self-therapy.

Their mission says:

GiveBack, Inc. is a recovery group for traumatic brain injury (TBI). Its purpose is not to help survivors to accept new lives that offer them limited options, but rather to help recoverers to deal with their deficits, improve their functioning, become active, and regain self-control of their lives.

I originally encountered them as Give Back Orlando, but the website has since disappeared, and it seems they’ve moved their operations to LA, as well as online. There is a Traumatic Brain Injury Support Group online that features regular postings from Dr. Larry Schutz, the founding director of this great organization.

I’ve been reading some of the articles about TBI and recovery and the different systems available to people. What I really respect about what I see, is that it’s based on many years of experience — both good and bad — and there’s still a perspective and a commitment to rehab and recovery, despite all the roadblocks in the way.

It’s safe to say that I would not be nearly as well-off as I am today, had I not come across Give Back. There was just the right amount of information for me, about just the right subjects, and I had room to move and develop my own self-therapy program based largely on what they outlined and suggested. And the changes to their suggested approach which I made to the recovery program I’ve been on didn’t negate the good their approaches offered. Obviously, everyone is different, and some of the suggestions just sounded hair-brained to me. But overall, the advice was sound, and I was under no obligation to do things exactly the way they said I should.

I’m really glad I came back to Give Back. Going along in my everyday life, it’s easy to forget about the things I need to do, to stay functional. And with the successes I’ve had, it’s easy (and tempting) to dismiss my difficulties and downplay them, thinking, “Well, I’m glad that’s over!”

But it’s not over. Brain injury is never over. The attention issues, the short-term memory issues, the fatigue and physical issues, as well as the processing speed issues may be mitigated by my coping mechanisms and compensatory techniques, but they aren’t going away. And if I don’t stay vigilant with them, they can rear their ugly heads and make my life a lot more “interesting” than need be.

The fact of the matter is, I have developed a lot of ways to deal with my issues. But if I don’t use them, I can get into trouble real quick.

So, I need to keep it green. I need to remember how close to the edge I was, when I first embarked on my recovery. I also need to remember that there ARE areas where I still have issues, and while my coping mechanisms may be great in most cases, they are not always second-nature, and I really have to work at them. I have to remember to do them.

And I have to keep in mind that when it comes to TBI, I may be a whole lot more functional now than I was three years ago, but I can easily go back to being non-functional with almost no effort at all. All I need to do is stop interacting with people when they talk to me, tell myself that I understand everything I think I do and not double-check, never write anything down, expect to keep everything in my head, and eat crappy food, drink too much coffee and soda, and stay up till all hours snacking and surfing the channels. I could also quit exercising each morning and stop paying attention to what’s going on around me. That’s a great way to go back to the way things were.

But if I keep my wits about me, stay mindful and pay attention to what’s going on, eat right and exercise each day, and I interact with the world and ask plenty of questions so I’m sure that I’m clear (even if I do feel like it makes me look stupid), I can stay on track. I just need to remember to do it.

And that’s where Give Back helps. Not only because of the forums they have there and the self-therapy materials they offer, but also because of the articles by Larry Schutz (I’ve been a fan of his work for some time, and that hasn’t changed). It’s so important for me to remind myself of where I come from, what I’m dealing with, and where I can end up, if I’m not careful.

I may move past the basic problems, and I may have my coping mechanisms in place, but if I don’t stay vigilant and keep up the level of effort required, I could end up like so many other TBI survivors — doing well initially, then slipping into long-term disability that I can never seem to shake loose.