Well, why didn’t they just SAY so?

People need to explain things so others can understand

When I was a little kid, I had trouble hearing. I could pick up a full range of volume just fine, according to the tests they gave me, but I had a hard time distinguishing between sounds.

“S” sounded like “F” and the soft “TH” to me.

“B” sounded like “V” to me.

Unless I saw a word written out, it was sometimes hard for me to understand precisely what was meant. Based on what I heard, it could have meant anything, really.

I was also a very literal child, who didn’t “get” the whole slang thing. That 1970s song “Convoy”, which was an extended conversation between truckers using their trucking slang, was pretty interesting for me to listen to. I had all sorts of unusual ideas about what exactly was going on there, and when my mother asked me if I knew what the song was about, I said, “Sure! It’s about truckers going bear hunting!”

She gave me a strange look that made me think I was probably wrong — and sure enough, the “hunting bear” reference was really about truckers doing battle with the highway patrol.

I also had a lot of disagreements about what people were talking about and what they were saying to me. I got my letters mixed up, because they all sounded the same to me, and I made up my own (stubborn) mind about what words should be used — and how.

I remember one time I had a pitched battle with my mother, who told me that the name of one of my school friends was “Valerie” — with a “V”.  I heard “Balerie” — with a “B”. Never in my life had I heard her name pronounced with a “V” sound, so being the stubborn kid I was, I argued for quite some time and got very, very angry, that my mother had it wrong.

She kept repeating “Valerie… Valerie… Valerie”, drawing a “V” in the air with her finger, and I got angrier and angrier.

Because that wasn’t what I experienced. It wasn’t what I heard.

I also had trouble pronouncing words. I had a “lisp” when I was little, partly because I didn’t realize you had to form “F”, “TH” (the soft one), and “S” differently with your mouth. I thought they were all the same sound, so I picked the one that was the easiest for me to tolerate.

Part of the issue was that I had trouble with my ears — they were so hyper-acute, the sound of an “S” literally hurt them. It was painful to pronounce “S”, so I tried to soften it, like a “TH”. And of course, that was wrong, so I was in speech therapy for some time, to try to correct it.

That was rough. They took me out of my regular classes, and not only was everyone staring at me, but then they walked me through the halls of the massive school that seemed so cavernous and vast to me. I could never remember how to get there, and I got lost a number of times. People got upset with me, because apparently it was easy to get to the speech therapist’s office. Easy for everyone else. I got turned around and couldn’t find my way. And the speech therapist had to keep coming to my classroom to show me the way.

So, I figured I must be an idiot.  Such a simple thing … and it was so hard for me. There must have been something really wrong with me.

I also couldn’t makethe sounds right. The speech therapist kept trying to get me to sound out the sounds, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell that there was a difference between them, and try as I might, I couldn’t make the connection between what they were telling me to say, and what I could/did say. It all sounded the same to me, and nobody explained to me the way to shape the sounds in my mouth, so I could say them correctly.

After some time trying to work with me, the speech therapist gave up. They may have suspected I just wasn’t trying. Or they couldn’t justify spending any more time with me, because I wasn’t making any progress. They may have also believed I was deliberately being difficult.

There were a lot of things that were pretty challenging for me, which I “should” have been able to do. But I couldn’t. And nobody seemed to know how to help me.

What really would have helped, is if someone had just told me that you shape words different ways with your mouth. Everybody seemed to take for granted, that everyone knows that. But looking at someone’s mouth from a distance, you cannot see the position of their tongue or their teeth or even the subtle differences in their lips. “B” looked pretty much like “V” to me. And even though “TH”, “S”, and “F” look different from a distance, I could not tell the difference in the sounds, so I could never tell if I was saying it correctly.

So, I went with the sound that was the least painful — the “TH”.

Eventually, it dawned on me that sounds were shaped differently, and if I just formed them properly, even if it didn’t sound right to me, others would get it. I have no idea if I reached this conclusion myself, or if it finally sank in, after I was on my own and the lessons of the speech therapist finally sank in with me. I used to think I figured it out by myself, but now I think it could have been a delayed realization.

In retrospect, it would have been really helpful, if someone had just sat me down and explained to me slowly and carefully, in very clear and logical terms, that words and sounds were produced with certain positions of lips, tongue, and teeth. And have me practice making those sounds with my mouth. Even if I couldn’t hear the sounds properly, I could know that I was forming the words correctly, so others would understand me. Even if I didn’t get it, at least someone would. And 1 out of 2 is better than 0 for 2.

Then again, they may have tried. But I was a tough case. I had trouble paying attention. If people didn’t explain to me why we were doing something, I lost interest. I was also overwhelmed and stressed from the walk to the speech therapist’s office, so that made it hard to concentrate. Plus, I didn’t know why I wasn’t getting it. I just didn’t know. And neither did they, apparently.

The whole speech and articulation thing just messed with my head when I was little — to the point that I started hyper-articulating things, and I became pretty OCD about making sure I was pronouncing words exactly right. It’s one of the reasons I can pronounce foreign words pretty well and also simulate a non-English accent pretty well. I get extremely nervous if I don’t pronounce something right. It’s a visceral reaction to past bad experiences, I guess.

As a kid, I had so many failed interactions, thanks to my speech and comprehension difficulties. On my first day at kindergarten, I couldn’t articulate to the teachers what my address was, so they couldn’t put me on the right bus. And after my first day of school, ever, when my mother was waiting at the bus stop, her firstborn was nowhere to be found. The school called to tell her they were giving me a ride home, but my mother almost lost it when I didn’t get off the bus.

I had lots of trouble with kids at school, too. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t seem to make myself understood. I felt like I was babbling into the wind, and it might have sounded that way to them, too.

Ultimately, when I could read books, I turned to them for company. That was enough. It was more than enough for me. Books didn’t make fun of me, they didn’t look at me strangely, they didn’t correct me, they didn’t test me to see if I got it. They were just there, waiting to impart their knowledge. Of course they never told me how to pronounce the big words that I found there (I thought rendezvous was pronounced renn-dezz-vus, until my dad told me otherwise), but then, that never mattered, because I had the meaning in my head.

I swear, I really don’t know what is up with people who can’t be direct and just come right out and tell people what the deal is. Hinting around and intimating makes me nuts.  It drove me nuts as a kid, and it still does today.

If I’m messing up, just tell me. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. And it’s a heck of a lot easier to deal with, when you have direct information, rather than trying to “go easy” on me. Easy is hard. Direct is simpler.

Don’t make me guess — just tell me what the deal is.

And then I’ll deal.

The biggest barrier to progress, is being convinced that you KNOW

Imagine what’s possible, when you just let it go — and grow

Okay, so here’s my question of the day:

In the land of mindfulness-oriented behavioral health providers, how is it that the concept of Beginner’s Mind gets lost?

I’m specifically talking about my own experience with behavioral health folks, including friends who are psychotherapists, counselors I’ve seen, as well as my neuropsychologist. In all my years of seeking out help for my issues, I have but rarely encountered individuals who were really able to suspend judgment and not get stuck in the trap of continually seeking out ways to reconfirm their own world views.

And how many times have I sat across from someone who was professionally trained to help me, watching them not listen to me for what I was saying, rather for confirmation of what they believed…?

I think it’s wonderful that there are professional tracks for people to go down, to learn how to help others. At the same time, though, people also need to not get stuck in thinking they have it all figured out.

Because the behavioral health landscape is changing dramatically, especially compared to where it was just 10 years ago. We know so much more about the brain and its mechanisms than ever before. Yet we have just only begun to scratch the surface. So, let’s not get all hoity-toity about how much we know and how clued-in we are, thanks to our specialized skills and whatnot.

To me, orthodoxy (being convinced that you’ve got THE SECRET to how things work) and rigidity (never, ever changing your world view) are even worse liabilities than a brain injury. They make it extremely hard to adapt — which is precisely what we need to do as TBI / concussion survivors. We may be changing and growing and whatnot, while our providers are still stuck in their own versions of reality — which may or may not be useful to us.

It really is a problem. But I’m not the one to run around telling people that they’re too stuck in their ways. They have to see and realize it for themselves, and let go of their pride, arrogance, hubris. I’m sure it can be very, very difficult, dealing with brain-injured folks and their families/loved-ones, not to mention the healthcare system. It can put you into a state of perpetual fight-flight, which makes you even more susceptible to egotistical tendencies, arrogance, and prideful blindness.

I think especially for those folks who have been on the leading edge for many years, who were ridiculed and marginalized and made to feel “less than” because of their forward-looking stance. When you’re continually attacked and thwarted, it can do a number on you. I know how that is, and it’s no fun.

So, that cannot help but affect you. It cannot help but color your world view and make you biochemically and neurologically inclined to behave in ways that are defensive and self-supporting. Especially if you’ve had to shore up your own self-confidence and self-image and professional reputation, lo these many years, that can train you to be a certain way… a way which is intent on finding proof that you’re right, that you were right all along, and “they” were all wrong to doubt and thwart you.

Yes, I get how that shapes and conditions you.

At the same time, the higher purpose (of being of genuine help to others) needs to trump the hunger of your ego.

In the end, isn’t it more fulfilling to continue to learn and grow, rather than being someone  whose main purpose is to ease the pain of the daily stresses of life and prove their “rightness” to themself and others?

I’m not a behavioral health provider, but personally I think I’d rather be learning and growing than constantly being on the defensive about my own convictions.

In the end, it can much more interesting to find out you’re wrong… and expand your concept of what’s right. There is so much more to discover about the human systems, the brain, and how they all interact.

I hope I’m not alone in this.

DIY OT for TBI

The magic koosh ball

When it comes to TBI/concussion recovery, we are so very often on our own.

We frequently don’t get the rehab help we need because:

1. we don’t realize we need it
2. we under-report our symptoms so they go unaddressed
3. the people around us don’t recognize the signs
4. our medical care providers don’t have a clue
5. long-term options for ongoing treatment aren’t always great
6. different sorts of therapy can’t go on as long as we need them (insurance won’t pay)

Now, most of us reading this know that. What we don’t always know is what to do about it.

I have found a number of “occupational therapy” (OT) solutions for myself that — in addition to getting regular feedback from a trusted source — have really moved me ahead in my life. They are simple, they address basic issues I have (but nobody realizes this, or they think I “shouldn’t” have), and they are practical — and fun — things I can do for myself, each day, to get myself on the good foot.

Some of these things are:

• Making lists of what I need to do — especially things that I do regularly, that I screw up regularly, like get out of bed and get ready for work each day. When I started my TBI recovery process, just getting from the bed to the office each day was a bit of a gauntlet. I began using a list of all the things I needed to do — in the order that I needed to do them — and it solved a lot of issues for me. Things as simple as the order in which I brushed my teeth, showered and shampooed, got all jumbled up, and I spent way too much time thinking about “what comes next?” to have a very relaxing morning. A list of the most basic activities solved that for me. Even though people around me said having a list was too “remedial” for me — I knew it wasn’t. It truly helped me.
• Cooking — breakfast and dinner. Again, this is about doing things in order at the right time. I have been the main cook of the house for years — ever since my spouse got seriously ill in 2007 and could not function as well as they used to. I started my TBI recovery about a year after that, when I realized that there was something very wrong with how things were fitting together in my head. Cooking helped me with organization, and timing things out. It also helped me with my emotional regulation. Years ago, if I was in the kitchen, nobody could talk to me because it would throw me off and I would mess up what I was doing. It’s been several years, since that stopped. Now I can have a conversation while I am cooking, most of the time. And when I can’t, I now know enough to say I can’t talk now, but can later.
• Dual N-Back training — helps with response times and short-term working memory. It helps me think more “fluidly”, and it helps me follow conversations better. It also helps me interact with others more easily — and I am noticing this after only a week’s worth of work — so that is a huge help to me socially and in general. It gives me more confidence, it improves my self-image, and with my Brain Workshop program, which I have on my computer, I can do it whenever I like, without needing to be on the internet. I also have one for my smartphone, and I need to get one for my tablet, so I have it on the go, as well. It has really helped me, and I keep doing it each day.
• Juggling — this is also a new one for me, which is a welcome addition to my daily routines. It helps me with
  • eye-hand coordination
  • timing
  • being able to pick up quickly after mistakes and move on without getting bent out of shape
  • dealing with frustration — not getting so upset over disruptions
  • physical stamina
  • left-side abilities
  • left-and-right-side coordination
  • sustained focus
  • resistance to distraction

  Probably more than anything, juggling has helped me gain a new balance and poise in my outlook and abilities. After just a couple of weeks of training, I am really enjoying it AND I am seeing the benefits in my outlook and my fluidity. It is helping me to keep calm in situations which normally fluster me, and that did wonders for me at my interview — which turned out successful on every single count. Six out of six people want me to join the company, and that’s a great testament to the power of just some simple exercises I do for fun and conditioning.

These four things are all DIY — Do It Yourself. They are also either free or extremely low cost, and some of them are part of everyday living — like cooking and making lists.

The one thing that determines the success of these approaches, I believe, is motivation and consistency. You have to do them, and you have to keep at them. You can’t just do them now and then, and take a long break to do something else. You have to really commit to them — like anything important — and be willing to learn the lessons they teach.

That commitment to work and to steady improvement — more than anything — is probably the biggest ingredient in all of this. Without that, none of these DIY techniques would work. In fact, it’s probably even true that just about any activity in the course of the day-to-day can be DIY TBI OT.

But juggling is a fun break.

And dual n-back has specific things it trains in your brain.

So these are good foundations to get the brain rewired in a positive direction.

 

 

 

 

 

Brain Injury and Lying – The Rest of the Story

Summary: Brain injury and lying can go hand-in-hand. First, there is confabulation, where the brain-injured individual genuinely thinks they are telling the truth, but they have their details confused. Second, there is the outright lying, which can come from experiencing an intensely emotional “catastrophic response” to situations which seem insurmountable. This is an account of how a good friend of mine changed from a basically honest person to a compulsive liar after experiencing several strokes.

It seems so innocent…

I’d like to write this morning about a friend of mine who had several strokes back in 2007, a couple years after I had my last TBI. In fact, I’d say that working with them after their strokes really make me aware of brain injury issues… so that I could recognize and deal with my long-standing issues, at last.

I have known this individual for more than 20 years, and we’ve worked together on a number of occasions. We have common friends and we have similar senses of humor, so it’s been pretty easy to become – and stay – friends with this person. I am friendly with a lot of people and I make a lot of effort to really be a good person, but this particular friendship is closer than most others I have. This individual knows things about me that I wouldn’t tell most other people. And I know more about them than most others do.

The one exception to this is TBI. When they had their strokes – two of them, a week apart – in 2007, I was one of the few people who didn’t back away from them and run. I have actually known a number of people who had strokes and TBIs, and even before I knew that I myself had traumatic brain injury issues, I was willing and able to hang in there with them. So, this time was no different really. Different strokes for different folks, y’know? 😉 But when I was dealing with my TBI stuff, they just couldn’t deal with hearing about it. It was like they thought that it meant I couldn’t be there for them – and since I was one of their main supports after their strokes, the idea that I had neurological issues must have been pretty frightening for them.

Anyway, despite not getting any support from them, I really went out of my way to make time for this friend, to help them get back on their feet and rehabilitate. I have always been a firm believer that the human brain and body and spirit are incredibly plastic — and they can and will recover to a much greater degree than the “experts” believe, if you give them a chance, keep working, and don’t give up.

Working with this friend, we got them on a regular eating and sleeping routine… we got their weight down about 30 pounds… we managed, changed and then regulated their meds… we restored the strength and coordination in their right side… we got their speech and organization together… and – together – we got them back to functioning again.

We had to do it ourselves, and we had to do it alone. Because even though the MRI showed even more damage to their brain than “just” the strokes — they had other evidence of brain injuries that they couldn’t remember having — the doctors never gave them any indication that they needed any neurological or neuropsychological help, and their strokes weren’t “disabling” enough to warrant official rehab.

The impact was pretty noticeable to me, though. Their processing speed had really slowed down. They got confused a lot more than before. They had extreme emotional reactions to things that are sad or frustrating but aren’t exactly the catastrophes they thought they were. They had trouble keeping a conversation going. Their ability to multi-task was pretty much out the window. They basically went from having six gears, to having two, one of which was reverse, and when pressed to do more, they blew up or broke down in tears.  But since I’m not an “official” family member, there was only so much the doctors could offer me. Unfortunately, they and their family weren’t really emotionally or logistically able to deal with all of it. They just wanted things to go back to normal.

Out of everyone, I turned out to be the only one who was A) able to deal with the fact that they’d had several strokes (and evidence of previous TBI), and B) willing to do something about it. I’ve worked with relatives who had strokes and TBIs in the past, and this time was a repeat of those past experiences.

It took several years to get them back on track, but we did it.  And it was really gratifying to see. Plus, in the process of helping them, I realized I had my own set of issues I needed to deal with — which I’ve written about plenty in the past. Again, it’s taken me years to get back on track — more years than my friend, actually — but I’ve done it.

The only thing is, this friend of mine didn’t continue to take care of themself. They didn’t have the support of their family and friends, and I couldn’t be with them 24/7. One of the reasons that I’ve “gone off” on therapists in the past, was that I was being actively undermined by their friends who were therapists, who kept telling them that their issues had to with their terrible father, their hell-on-wheels mother, or other past relationship issues. When I tried to get support from these therapist friends, to deal with the neurological issues, I got either blank stares or active opposition, because they were so sure it was an emotional thing, not a neurological thing.

So, with family pressuring them to just get back to how things were, their friends telling them that they just needed to make peace with their parents, and me not being able to be around as much as I wanted to, because I had a lot of work commitments, they just went back to how things were before.

They stopped eating the right things and they stopped eating at regular hours.They started eating the wrong things, too — lots of sugar and fats and junk food, which has put the weight back on them — and is how they got into their situation to begin with. They let their sleeping schedule go all to hell, and by now they are pretty much nocturnal and they are rarely available during daylight hours.They stopped cleaning up after themself, and they live surrounded by piles of stuff that they can’t seem to figure out how to clear away.

It’s been really weird — it’s like they just got to a point where they decided, “Oh well, I’ve had some strokes, and I’m getting old like my parents did (my friend is  now in their 60s, and their parents both died in their late 60s/early 70s)…. so I really don’t feel like doing all this work anymore. I’m going to take a break, because I’m going to die pretty soon, anyway.”

And it hasn’t had good consequences. A lot of times when I see them these days — which is more rarely than before, because I’m on a “real world” sleep-wake schedule — they look more and more like a “stroke victim” — and less and less like the person I know they are. I try to bring up their progress with them, but they always shut me down. I try to hint that they may want to take better care of themself, but they either start to yell at me, or they change the subject, or they start to cry. It’s that catastrophic response, for sure — a reaction that is just dripping with the emotion of fear and overwhelm.

Fear that there is something terribly wrong with them.

Fear that they are damaged beyond repair.

Fear that others will hate and look down on them because of the strokes.

Fear that they will never be “normal” again.

Fear that they’re going to die a horrible death and go to hell forever.

Fear that it is all TOO MUCH to handle.

So, even though I have seen changes in their behavior and their functionality, I am helpless to change any of it. I can’t even bring it up – not with them, not with their family, not with their friends. People tell me that I have no control over others, and that I should take care of myself first, but it is so painful to watch them do this to themself. Not only do they have physical and logistical issues, but there’s more.

There’s the lying.

I’ve written before about confabulation and how traumatic brain injury can mix things up in your head and make you think you’ve got it right, when you have it completely wrong. I have a had a long history, myself, of accidentally “lying” about things  — it wasn’t my intention to lie, and I didn’t actually think I was lying, but I had my facts all turned around… which looked a lot like lying. I still do it today — I miscalculate, or I get things turned around — but fortunately I have a lot of people around me who genuinely care about me and want to help, and they don’t hold it against me. So, the consequences are less, even if the problem persists.

I have seen confabulation happen with my friend, as well. They were so sure they had things exactly right… but they didn’t. Not even close. Over the past few years, however, I have seen their accounts turn into outright lies — some of them more extreme than others. They know they’re lying, but they either can’t seem to help themself or they just LIE, and then make excuses.

It’s getting really bad. On a number of levels.

First, there’s the routine lying to people about what they do with themself all day — they paint a picture that makes them look quite functional, when the opposite is true. They talk about doing things that they aren’t even close to doing — like running errands or working on important projects and going about their business like they’re “supposed to”. They’re just thinking about doing them, but they tell others that they actually have done them.

And then there’s the deeper sorts of lies — the adulterous affairs, where they aren’t only sneaking around behind their spouse’s back and flirting with people who seem intriguing, but they are actually having sex — a lot of it, and really wild stuff — with these adulterous interests, lying about it, getting hotel rooms, visiting the long-time family vacation spots with the object(s) of their adulterous affairs, and openly talking about their affairs with people who know both them and their spouse. I found out about it by accident, and I got a lot more details than I wanted to. I almost wish I’d never found out, to tell the truth.

And that’s a pretty extreme turn of affairs. Not only are they spending money that they (and their spouse) cannot afford to spend on hotels and meals and entertainment, but they are also doing it in plain view of people who know them and their spouse. But when I have confronted them about it, my friend has lied right to my face about what was going on. They have sworn – up – down – left – right – that there was nothing untoward happening, just a “close friendship”, and when I have pushed them, they claimed it was just for “emotional support”.

Right. Emotional support. Unfortunately, I know differently.

This, dear readers, is very out-of-character for my friend. For as long as I have known them, they have been stable and loving and committed to their spouse. And they’ve at least tried to be honest. Until the strokes. Since the strokes, and especially they stopped taking care of themself, their behavior has become so erratic, so chaotic, so extreme — with the cursing and laughing and crying and lying — that I frankly don’t want to be around them much. I can’t just abandon them, but it’s hard to be around it all. And when I try to bring this up and discuss with them, they just can’t hear anything about how their strokes have affected them. It’s too much. It’s just too much for them to handle. And they pitch headlong into yet another mother-of-all-catastrophic-reactions. Yelling, cursing, crying… and more lying.

Watching someone who used to be level-headed, strong, secure, and self-confident burst into tears or blow up in a rage or come up with some cockamamie fantastical version of “reality”, because you’ve drawn their attention to something that everyone else on the planet can see clearly… something that is really and truly wrecking their life (how long till their spouse finds out about the affair(s)?)… well, that’s a pretty bitter pill. Trying to reach out and help one of your best friends — only to have them freak out on you and become threatening… it’s a hard one.

And it’s complicated. There are a lot of factors in play. And I can understand why a lot of this happens. But the lying doesn’t help matters any. It’s one thing to confabulate, but outright telling a falsehood deliberately is something that doesn’t sit right with me.

It’s just wrong. And to see them do it so compulsively… that’s pretty hard to take. I am almost neurotic about telling the truth — I get myself in trouble all the time, because I’m not willing to lie to people. And when someone who matters this much to me just runs around lying through their teeth, left and right, to everyone — including their spouse — it really works on my nerves.

But when I look at this in terms of catastrophic reaction, it starts to make sense. It’s like there’s all this conflicting stuff rattling ’round in their head that they can’t make sense of, and it puts them on edge. They have a history of trauma, too, with a father AND a mother who were each a real piece of work, so that personal history has biochemically primed them to go into fight-flight over just about anything that looks like a threat. From what I’ve seen, they are geared towards a fight-flight response to life in general… and their blood sugar is out of whack, so that it’s making that fight-flight even worse, and every little uncertainty looks like an enormous THREAT!!!

So, being on edge, and having the perception that there are things that are too big for them to handle, and they’re not going to be able to handle them, and they are in DANGER because they can’t handle them… well, that sets up the perfect “petri dish” for growing lies. Because lying is the one (and only) way they can immediately cope with an imminent threat — which of course everything looks like, especially when a social situation calls for the kind of quick thinking they cannot do anymore.

When I look at this whole business through a neuropsychological “lens”, I can understand the reasons for their behavior. And bottom line, knowing what I know, I actually don’t blame them. Yes, they are an adult, and yes they are responsible for their actions, but this is a neurological condition, not a psychological or emotional one. I’m not letting them off the hook — lying is still wrong, and I am still very uncomfortable with it.

At the same time, I’m seeing the real reasons behind it. I’ve discussed this a few times with my neuropsych, and they propose that their brain might be experiencing further vascular damage, because not only do they have a history of strokes, but their blood sugar is on the diabetic side, as well, which can cause more vascular “insults”. And that’s a whole other ball of wax to deal with.

But still, the lying… I keep coming back to that. It’s really tough to watch, really hard to handle. One of my best friends is self-destructing before my very eyes, and I am helpless to do anything about it. All I can do, is learn from their actions and their mistakes, and do what I can to help them as best I can. To be honest, it motivates me to take even better care of myself and better manage my physical and neurological health, because I don’t want to end up like them. I have noticed myself lying at times, when I felt cornered and felt I couldn’t handle everything that was coming at me. That is something I DON’T want to make a habit of, and seeing my friend go through everything they’re going through, is lighting a fire under me to do better. To be better.

None of us has control over others, which is probably a good thing. But we do have control over ourselves, which is an even better thing.

Here’s to life – onward.

PTSD/TBI Factor #6 – Perpetrating Violence

Here it comes… everybody feels its wrath

This is a continuation of the discussion about PTSD from TBI – Exploring some possibilities.

So far, we’ve looked at how TBI directly contributes to PTSD through proximity, duration, extent of brutality, betrayal, and threat of dying. In all cases, the big way TBI contributes to these factors is through the skewed perception it can create, causing us to perceive “threat” where there is none, as well as amplifying our emotional and physiological reactions to events. There’s nothing like a hyper-activated amygdala pushing the brain’s automatic fight-flight response, to make everyone’s day that much more “interesting”.

And now we come to an area that has particularly strong implications for TBI survivors — perpetrating violence. As Belleruth Naparstek points out in Invisible Heroes (p. 51), we don’t normally think of folks who perpetrate violence as the ones affected by post-traumatic stress. It’s the victims after all, who bear the brunt of it. Right?

Not so fast. Post-traumatic stress which manifests in “more violent outbursts and greater severity of intrusive symptoms, as well as a greater sense of alarm, alienation, survivor guilt, and a sense of disintegration” is prevalent among those who cause harm to others. It’s a subject I’ve written about before in Putting my soul back together, one act at a time, in September of last year, and it remains a serious concern of mine.

See, TBI is all too often accompanied by anger issues. Outbursts. Meltdowns. And violence. I myself have been plagued by violent temper outbursts and extreme mood swings that shook me like a terrier shakes a rat… and I couldn’t do a thing about them. For someone who has long been known as an even-keeled sort of person who can be relied on to stay calm in stressful situations, it was a terrible blow to me to watch myself (like a train wreck) blowing up at people over what I logically knew was a small thing, but which seemed like the end of the world to my frayed wiring.

It was so distressing and so shocking to me, that I rarely brought it up with my neuropsych, and then I played it down because I couldn’t stand having someone know about what was going on inside of me. It was almost too much to take. My sense of honor, my sense of dignity, my sense of propriety, and my feelings for those I loved and cared about and worked with went right out the window without me having any understanding or control over things… and then I had to deal with the aftermath.

And the more I blew up, the more things I threw, the more I melted down, the more intrusive the memories of those times became, and the more I felt like I was in the grip of it all.

It’s no friggin’ fun watching yourself dissolve before your very eyes, and that’s exactly how it felt. Which added a sense of impending destruction/death to the whole experience.

The crazy eff’ed-up thing about TBI is that it can turn even the most mild-mannered individual into a raving lunatic, and it can cause them to do things they would never, ever choose to do on their own. It can turn even the most mellow individual into a violent perpetrator. I’m not trying to scare anyone, but at the same time, this is the dark side of TBI that people don’t like to talk about. And the toll it takes is something that really needs to be looked at.

Now, I don’t want to say that everyone who does violence to others is not in control of their behavior. Some people very much are. But with TBI, the right combination of fatigue, malaise, agitation, restlessness, and anxiety-producing sense of lost control, that nastly little switch can get flipped and you can find yourself becoming a stark raving lunatic over the stupidest little sh*t.

This is not to say that it has to — or should — stay that way. If we can see (or are informed) that our behavior is unacceptable, it’s our responsibility to fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But all too often — especially at the start of your recovery — a lot of incidents can happen that result in feelings or experiences of violence.

And that takes a toll.

It takes a toll because you see and hear yourself doing these things, and it takes a toll because you may not be able to do anything about it, until you gain understanding and self-awareness, which can take months, if not years.

In the meantime, you’re racking up some serious mileage in the PTSD department. And ultimately that’s got to be dealt with constructively, or it can — and will — drag you down in the long run.

Is post-traumatic stress contagious?

What goes around...

I’ve been thinking a lot about pts (post-traumatic stress) lately. Especially in conjunction with traumatic brain injury, which I’ve said a number of times is an ongoing traumatic experience, and not only at the time of the initial injury.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the effect my TBIs have had on the people around me, and I can definitely see how my own trauma led to their trauma, too. The jumpiness that people who love and/or care for someone who has experienced TBI, is a common thing — and I think it’s directly related to their own traumatic stress.

‘Cause traumatic stress is, in fact, contagious. (And so I’ve answered my question.)

From the ever-handy Wikipedia:

(PTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma.^[1][2][3] This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one’s own or someone else’s physical, sexual, or psychological integrity,^[1] overwhelming the individual’s ability to cope.

Think about it… Someone sees someone they love and care for experiencing this traumatic experience, and they themselves are traumatized. And when the person who experiences TBI is a close part of that person’s life, then their injury can in fact represent a threat to their “physical, sexual, or psychological integrity, overwhelming the individual’s ability to cope.”

When you’re in the midst of your post-injury haze, and things are starting to fall apart — whether or not you know why it is or what to possibly do about it — you can say and do things that seriously threaten the people around you. It can threaten them on physical levels — like when your temper becomes violent and unpredictable. It can threaten them sexually — like if you lose all desire to have sex, or you become more sexually assertive. It can threaten them psychologically — like when you’re not acting like the person they know, and your behavior is so bizarre and unpredictable that they start to feel like they’re losing their mind and they doubt their own sanity.

Yes, post-traumatic stress — especially with TBI — is definitely contagious.

And that seems to me to be one of the missed pieces in TBI recovery — addressing the PTS of caretakers and partners of TBI survivors. It doesn’t even need to be moderate or severe TBI. I think mild TBI makes for an even likelier candidate for PTS, because it’s so insidious and can sneak up on you in subtle ways that make you — more than anything — feel like your psychological state is threatened.

Everybody feels like they’re going crazy, and when you don’t understand the underlying causes of it, well then, you’re totally screwed.

Until you get help.

This is where I can see some trauma therapy really helping — for the caregivers and partners and family members of TBI survivors. You get a really good trauma therapist who can work with those “TBI satellite participants”, and you help them sort things out, help them come to terms with their own individual trauma, and you get them on their feet, realizing that they are safe, that they are okay, and that they can deal with everything that comes up.

It’s one way that therapists can occupy themselves — while acknowledging that talk therapy probably isn’t the best thing for someone who is neurologically compromised. Everybody gets their place, but talk therapy and TBI can be a recipe for disaster, which can create even more trauma after the fact.

The more I think about it, the more surprised/dismayed I am that more sensible approaches to TBI and PTS haven’t been developed. There seems to be a sort of territorial overlap between the two, that doesn’t need to exist. Traumatic Brain Injury comes with a full compliment of neurological issues that can be as physiological as psychological. And those issues can — and often do — lead to traumatic stress. That traumatic stress then compromises the cognitive processes of TBI survivors, thus short-circuiting their recovery in the period after the initial injury… which then compromises their long-term prospects for restoration of their quality of life. I really believe the trauma piece is why TBI survivors — especially “mild” traumatic brain injury survivors — have poor long-term outcome prognoses.

There’s the trauma overlap that biochemically shorts out the adaptive nature of the brain, so the brain doesn’t get a chance to adapt in the ways it needs to, in order to effect actual recovery.

And countless people are suffering needlessly, because psychotherapists and neuropsychologists and neurologists are all battling over their respective territories, causing needless pain and suffering as a result.

But if people could put their own individual needs and wants aside and collaborate in a meaningful and respectful and productive way, who knows how many people could be helped?

Who knows? It’s maddening to think about all the suffering that’s taking place, because therapists are saying “You don’t have TBI/brain damage, you’re experiencing trauma,” and neurology folks are saying, “You don’t have trauma, you’ve had a TBI.” The two are inextricably interconnected, but nobody seems to have either the courage or the insight or the will to team up and come up with a common-sense approach that can mitigate both.

Simply put:

• TBI leads to disrupted neurological function
• Disrupted neurological function leads unanticipated changes in thought and behavior
• Unanticipated changes in thought and behavior leads to trauma
• Trauma biochemically prevents neurological adaptiveness.
• Lack of adaptiveness feeds into yet more trauma.
• And the cycle continues.

Each “arm” of the therapeutic/rehab community could easily find a complimentary place where they could constructively collaborate with each other.

But they’re so accustomed to marking off and defending their territory, that they fail to live up to their full potential. And countless people suffer as a result. AND they decide that it’s “impossible to recover” from TBI. What a terrible, inhumane thing to tell people. That they are irreparably damaged and have no hope of true recovery. Please.

The solution? Well, our “experts” could start talking to each other and start collaborating on a win-win situation for everyone.

Or those of us who have been neglected and abandoned and misguided by the therapy/rehab establishment can take matters into our own hands and address the most fundamental underlying basis for our ongoing issues — constant fight-flight sympathetic activity in our autonomic nervous system, which feeds the traumatic stress dysfunction and short-circuits our ability to recover and rehabilitate.

In a way it might just be possible for TBI survivors to take their recovery into their own hands — especially mild TBI sufferers. And the therapists and neuro people might be put out of a job. Because I suspect that countless people who have been sitting in therapy for years and years actually have underlying neurological issues that no amount of talking will fix — it only makes it worse and perpetuates the therapeutic relationship — and ongoing billing for the therapist and the insurance companies.

If we just got some exercise and learned to balance our nervous systems with slow, steady breathing, and we ate decent food at regular intervals, how much less “therapy” would we need? (There are always those who need to have someone to talk to just to check in regularly, but I’m talking critically about psychotherapists who insist on digging around and raking up all the muck inside you to “release it for healing”. All that stirring up will do a neurologically compromised individual more harm than good, trust me.)

Anyway, it’s a beautiful day and I’ve got a lot on my plate before the weekend is up. If only the weekends were three days instead of two. I feel like I’m just getting started, but I’ve got less than 12 hours till I start working again.

Oh, well. I guess the main thing is that we see where there are opportunities for positive change — stemming from seeing where things are not working as well as they could. If we can piece things together and understand the origins of post-traumatic stress and how it affects the people around us, we might be able to do something about it.

But as long as we keep separate and alienated and territorial, the suffering will continue.

And that’s a damn’ shame.

Truly encouraging. Truly amazing.

chill

So far, so good. I am still managing to get up and get into my day first with sitting and breathing, then with some exercise before breakfast.

The results have been pretty amazing. I knew it helped me before, when I would do my exercise, first thing, but I think the thing that was missing was the sitting piece — breathing regularly to balance out my autonomic nervous system, so that I’m neither exclusively in fight-flight mode nor in rest-digest mode, but I can move freely between the two.

In years past, I have found myself either all jazzed up when I got up — I’d leap out of bed and race into the day. Or I would be sluggish and cold and numb. Nowadays, even when I am tired, I am still relatively alert. And even when I am well-rested, I am still pretty calm and balanced.

That calm and balance is priceless to me. It eluded me for so many years — pretty much all my life, actually. Now, with some simple, relatively minor changes, I have a way to start out the day on that note. And that’s pretty encouraging.

In the past week or so, I have not woken up angry or pumped up. I have not started my day on sour notes. I have been able to keep steady and clear-headed, even when I was sick and was really very tired.

This is good. It’s very good.

Because the times when I have had the hardest time of all, has been when my fight-flight impulse was dialed up to a deafening level — when I was so jazzed, so charged up, that I couldn’t settle down. It was like I was stuck on ALWAYS-ON and couldn’t find a way to turn it down. I didn’t even want to turn it down, because it was familiar and I thought that was what worked for me.

Untrue.

This is better.

I’ve been reading Training the Samurai Mind: A Bushido Sourcebook, gleaning what I can from the online version. I’m short on cash, so I can’t afford to buy the book, and I can’t find it at the library, but I can read bits and pieces on Google Books, so I have been. (It’s better that way, too, because it forces me to read only portions of the book and focus on and them and digest them over time, rather than rushing through, willy-nilly, and not really digesting any of it.) I have long been an avid reader about Samurai and Bushido, and it makes sense to me — the life path of warriors who very likely sustained their share of TBIs in the course of battle… a life path which enabled them to restore their faculties and remain viable warriors… that is very useful to me, and I learn a lot from reading those kinds of books.

One thing that strikes me in Samurai-related literature is the focus on self-lessness. Getting rid of thoughts of the self. Focusing on an certain ethic, a certain way of life, to the exclusion of the self. And I have to say, I feel so much freer, when I get my mind off my SELF, than when I focus on my “own” self.

The difference I feel in myself when I read Samurai writings, compared to how I felt when I was seeing a therapist who was intent on getting me to think more and more about mySELF is remarkable. It’s amazing. And when I think back to when I was in therapy, I realized that although the therapist meant well, they were actually leading me down a path that was completely wrong for me. They wanted me to focus on mySELF more, but what I really needed to do, was focus on my “self” less.

It’s been several years since I was last in therapy, and it’s taken me this long to get back to a way that suits me much better than those SELF-absorbed conversations that used to plunge me into confusion and chaos on a weekly basis.

I have no words to describe the sense of calm I have, that comes from simply sitting and letting all the crap go… that comes from refusing to get caught up in the drama that churns inside my head… that comes from balancing my nervous system with steady focus on my in-breath and out-breath.

There is another way for me to find peace. There is a genuinely reliable way for me to chill. This is truly encouraging. It’s truly amazing.

Trauma + TBI = Trouble

I am writing this after several conversations and some reading — one conversation with a former soldier who was in Iraq during the first Gulf War, several conversations with a friend of mine who sustained a brain injury about three years ago, but has never gotten help for their injury — and is making increasingly poor choices about their life, their relationships, etc… all the while saying they need to find a therapist to help them deal with childhood trauma. They need a neuropsychologist, more like… As for the reading, check this out: Two Must Reads: The struggle for comprehensive PTSD and TBI treatment. I skimmed through it quickly, but I’ll have to go back to it. And I recommend you check it out, as well.

In thinking about the conversation I had with the ex-Marine, what struck me is how he talked about dealing with the incredible challenge of having to do things that were against his own morality, like kill people and destroy things. I was reminded of my post a while back about how war damages the souls of soldiers when I was talking to him, and he said there were several things that he and other military members of his family have done to cope.

The first is talk to somebody who understands — veterans in the family with whom he and other soldiers in his family can talk, have been so critical. The other is to find a way to make peace with things. Find a way to make it okay, on some level, that this is happening. Through faith. Or some sort of belief system.

In thinking about the conversations with my BI friend, I am starting to take notice that all their talk about trauma and dealing with it, is set against a backdrop of the BI they sustained five years ago. We have mutual friends who are therapists who are convinced that a lot of people are walking around with suppressed memories of terrible abuse in their childhoods, and that those repressed memories are making them do the things they do. With my BI friend, I suspect that they have been getting the “party line” that they are dealing with old memories coming up, and they don’t know how to emotionally deal with them. Now, I know for a fact that this friend didn’t just sustain a BI three years ago… Back around 1999, they also slipped on some ice, fell and hit their head pretty badly. They were dizzy and disoriented after it, and I noticed them being more volatile afterwards. Then they seemed to get better (although their marriage has been a bit rocky over the years). In the past three years, they’ve made an amazing recovery, and if you didn’t know them before, you probably would never guess that they have this going on with them. But I can tell. Maybe because I’m more sensitive to it — and better educated.

Anyway, this friend of mine is in pretty bad shape, financially, yet they don’t quite seem to get it. They have serious impulse control issues with money, and their spouse doesn’t actively monitor what they are spending on, how much, and how often. So, they have ended up in a jam that might cost them their car or their house. But they keep going along just doing what they do. Whenever I suggest that they might want to take a look at their spending, they get defensive, aggressive, combative. Not pretty. They just blow up like crazy. So, I stopped talking to them about it. They think they’ve found a good therapist, but like the others they have gone to in the past, they may end up not mentioning the BIs, and they may start treating their symptoms as purely psychological or emotional ones.

I really need to say something more to them about this. I think I need to discuss it with my neuropsych. My NP is probably not going to be able to say much, but I do need to ask them if they know anyone like them who has the same orientation towards healing and recovery. I suspect that along with my friend’s childhood trauma, there are some neuropsychological issues that need to be addressed — and it could be that by simply changing a few of the ways they go about doing things, they could benefit immensely.

I just need to find a good way to bring up the subject. They know about my recovery, and they have said many times that they are amazed by how far I’ve come. And, come to think of it, they have also said they wished they could find someone who is like my NP for themself. The thing they have going for them, is they have documented medical evidence of their most recent brain injury. It’s all there, complete with MRI showing the places where they have lesions. So they could get medical coverage to help them defray the costs. That’s huge, considering they have almost no money. Maybe getting some help will help them change that.

So yes, I do need to bring up the possibility of them seeing a neuropsychologist. They can get pretty paranoid, so I need to be careful how I phrase things. But I at least need to try. They need help. And I might be able to help/support them.

One of the things I hear them say is that they’re “too old”. They’re in their 60s and they feel like they’re getting old. But I really believe that they can turn things around. With some basic logistical changes similar to what I’ve done, I suspect they can revitalize their life and not only add years to their life, but add life to their years.

I just hope they don’t end up with a therapist who stirs everything up, tries to get them to “feel their feelings” (trust me, they have no problem doing that), and disregards their TBI history, because they are convinced that all their problems are trauma related.  They might only be partly right — trauma includes traumatic brain injury, and I would hate to see that piece of their puzzle ignored.

Therapy + TBI = Disaster

"My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake. I feel better already"

I’d like to propose something controversial here that probably won’t be well-received in psychotherapeutic circles. I’ve said it before, I believe, but I’m going to say it more emphatically now. Someone recently commented on another one of my posts, right when I’ve been thinking about it a lot, so I’ll say it again:

Therapists/mental health counselors (without a strong grounding in neurological information) are about the last people who are able to effectively deal with mTBI. And in the early stages of recovery, seeing a therapist to “figure things out” can do more harm than good. Much more harm than good.

It’s unfortunate, and I hate to say it, but I believe it to be true, based on personal experience with therapists and with friends/acquaintances who are therapists. What I’m about to say comes from years and years of observation, and no matter how seriously therapists may question my point of view (after all, I might be mentally impaired), I still believe it and I stand by it.

See, here’s the thing — TBI seriously screws with the functioning of your brain. Even a “minor” concussion and shear and shred axons and synapses and all those connectors that you’ve built up over the years to learn to live your life. Plus, it releases interesting chemicals into the brain that kill cells. Don’t be alarmed – the brain is a marvelously resilient organ that ingeniously figures out how to re-route connections, recruit other parts of the brain to do the jobs of parts that can’t do it anymore, and generally adapts to changing conditions in ways we are only beginning to recognize and understand.

The thing is, in the early stages of injury (and by early, I also mean the first couple of years after the incident — TBI is a gift that keeps on giving 😉 ) your brain is still trying to figure things out and it is organizing itself around a new way of needing to live your life. Generally folks with TBI don’t have a full and complete understanding of how they’ve been impacted and how it’s affecting their life – we just thing that the world has suddenly gotten all screwed up for no apparent reason. So, our brains are floundering and confused and not quite sure how to find their way out of the messes we’ve gotten into.

And the reorganization that normally takes place as a natural part of recovering from an injury — the reorganization of our brains along certain lines, so that we can resume some level of functionality — can be a bit haywire. The “plastic” brain is a lot like modeling clay. If you press it into a certain mold and leave it there, it will assume that shape and become like its environment. If you leave a lump of it lying on a table and walk away, when you come back a week later, it will be hardened into a chunk that may shatter if you drop it. If you stretch it into lots of thin, haphazard shapes and you leave it that way, it will harden into those thin and haphazard shapes.

So, when your brain is coming back from an injury and it’s looking for different ways to reshape itself, it can get all pulled in a gazillion different directions, because in the aftermath of TBI, things can be crazy and confusing, and we can come up with all sorts of skewed perceptions of ourselves. And if those perceptions are not questioned, challenged and corrected, they can harden into “truth” — which leads us even further down an erring path — into yet more trouble.

Hm. So, the crazier things get, the crazier you feel, and you wonder if you’re just plain losing your mind. You feel depressed and confused and out of sorts, and you don’t know why. So, you do the “logical” thing and you seek professional help. Your friends and family applaud you, because you’ve been getting harder and harder to deal with, and it seems like you have “emotional problems”. (Well, duh – emotional lability and impulse control are often “bundled” with TBI, as a neat little package of insult, injury, and humiliation for everyone involved.)

The only problem is, the therapist you start to see doesn’t know jack about TBI, and they come from the camp of “repressed memory” and how an unhappy childhood marked by long-forgotten/denied/overlooked abuse and neglect is to blame for adult issues. They believe with all their professional soul that most people are walking around in life cut off from their emotions, and that the true path to happiness is to connect with your inner hurt, name your pain, confront the things you are avoiding, and learn to love your demons.

There’s only one problem — none of what they say actually applies to you. The issues you have didn’t start until after your traumatic brain injury, and prior to that head injury, you were a reasonably happy and functional person with their share of troubles, but no “ticking time bomb” of forgotten abuse and neglect to throw you off course. They think that like certain childhood abuse survivors, you have been in denial most of your life, until you reached a certain point in your life when you had “advanced” enough to confront the challenges of resolving a difficult childhood… and they’re going to help you do just that — get in touch with your repressed memories, love the shadow, dance with your demons, and ultimately come to accept and love yourself, no matter what.

Great.

What they don’t realize, however, is that your brain is still recovering, still changing, still modifying itself to the world as it now is (rather than as it was before your injury). It’s volatile and highly subject to suggestion, and you’ve been wrestling for so long with not knowing for sure what’s going on with you or how best to deal with it, that your system is highly tweaked and on an emotional hair trigger. They think you’re in need of emotional “tough love” — but what you really need is some good regular exercise, a daily routine to take the guesswork out of your life, and extra patience and rest.

So, they push you. They challenge you. They test your limits. They try to get you to open up to them… pushing and pushing to get you to “admit” what’s going on inside of you, when internally, you’re in storm of emotion that’s neurologically based and totally inexplicable from a purely psychological point of view. They think you’re in denial and resisting necessary change, and you’re sitting there, week after week, looking at them like they’re from another planet, wondering “What’s wrong with me?!” and getting more and more confused and depressed by the week. You take it out on your friends and family, who have really had it with you, by now, and pull even farther away from you than before, thinking you’re just not trying hard enough.

Your therapist thinks you’re making great progress, getting in touch with your feelings and emotions, letting them come up and processing them. But you’re sinking farther and farther into a morass of emotional confusion, volatility, self-doubt, even desperation. Of course, this is all helping to create repeat business for the therapist who is “helping” you, and they can add even more diagnoses to the insurance bill, so what do they care? (Okay, in fairness, I’m sure that not all therapists are interested in creating repeat business, but any time you combine “care” with making a living, you get into gray areas and tricky territory.)

You’re increasingly worried about your emotional and mental health, and that’s keeping you stressed. You’re not sleeping well, which is taking a toll on your ability to self-regulate — your ability to do, well, everything. You’ve got all of the following TBI after-effects in abundance:

emotions, moods, agitated, can’t settle down, anger, anxiety, feeling vague fear, worry, anticipation of doom, depression, feeling down, excitability, everything feels like an effort, feeling unsure of yourself, feelings of dread, feeling like you’re observing yourself from afar, feelings of well-being, feeling guilty, feeling hostile towards others, impatience, irritability, no desire to talk or  move, feeling lonely, nervousness, feelings of panic, rapid mood swings, restlessness, tearfulness, crying spells, feeling tense, feeling vague longing/yearning, etc…

And according to your therapist, it’s all due to mental health issues. Not brain issues. Emotional ones. It’s not your body that’s the problem. It’s your soul. You’re screwed.

Your brain is getting a steady stream of messages from your therapist and from yourself about “the way things are” — which is that you’re screwed up and in need of some serious intervention — and it’s causing your very plastic brain to re-form itself along the lines they’re suggesting. You feel like you’re getting worse, so your therapist dials up the intensity … and tells you all the drama is good — you’re “feeling things for the first time” (which is total, utter crap) and you’re acknowledging the difficult-to-handle aspects of your life (which really only emerged after your TBI). It throws you into even more of a tailspin, and before you know it, you’re planning on breaking up with your partner/spouse/lover, you’re riding the roller-coaster of withdrawal on one hand and aggression on the other, and you’re more and more convinced that you can’t live without your therapist, who is the one person who will sit in a room with you for more than a few minutes, as you’ve effectively chased everyone else away.

Anybody else have this happen to them? It happened to me, and looking back, all the advice from my friends and family about getting professional help from a licensed psychotherapist, was about the worst I could have gotten — and followed. It almost cost me my marriage, it turned my life into an extended experience in chaos, and the only reason I managed to escape the bogus-psychotherapy merry go round, was that I ended up seeing a truly well-meaning but neurologically clueless psychotherapist who scared the crap out of me because they had connections at a local mental hospital who could have me committed (against my will) at their say-so. A narrow escape, but an escape no less.

In fairness, I do believe that a lot of therapists are well-meaning and they are acting on the information and the training they have. But too often that training does NOT include a neurological element, and/or they decide that the awful ills of the world have psychological roots.

Another thing that makes it difficult is that a lot of therapists have mental health issues of their own. A lot of my therapist friends got into therapy because they were helped by counselors, themselves. While I applaud their eagerness to help others, it puts up a huge red flag for me. Because the nature of their mental health issues — incest or eating disorders or some other awful trauma — caused them to distance themselves from their bodies at a fairly early age, and they have grown up living outside their bodies. My therapist friends are by and large antagonistic towards their own bodies. They don’t really exercise, and if they do, it’s “gentle stretching” or yoga or something really non-challenging. They are not on friendly terms with their own physical selves, which closes their minds when I suggest that exercise and taking care of your body (as if your life depends on it, which it does) is key to mental health.

It’s all “mind over matter” for them — and I’ve witnessed the same mindset in other psychologists and therapists I’ve met. Not physically vigorous. Not physically healthy. Sitting all day in small rooms, gaining weight, losing muscle tone, planning on knee and shoulder replacements to repair the damage that their sedentary lifestyles have done to their bodies. And complaining all the while about stupid little things that a little exercise would make seem inconsequential.

Good grief.

Anyway, I’ll quit ranting, now. It’s a beautiful day, and thank heaven I remembered I need to move money into my bank account to cover a monthly autobill. Just to wrap up, when it comes to deciding whether or not you really need therapy, consider your neuropsychological state, and make sure you don’t get stuck with someone who doesn’t have a clue about how neurology can make you a little crazy… but that passes with time, and with the proper training and reinforcement for what your life can really be like.

‘Cuz if you aren’t crazy when you start seeing them, regular visits can make sure you really get there.

Caveat emptor.

The things we do to heal

I just learned about the movie Marwencol. Check out the trailer video and visit the site. Fascinating.

This kind of reminds me of my own retreat from the rest of the world, over the course of my life. Although my own withdrawal from the world where I got hurt on a regular basis was not nearly as labor intensive as Marwencol, it was in fact my own private Idaho. It was a place where I could pull back and experience my own life on my own terms without danger of being hurt or mistreated or dismissed. I have that place boxed up in tens of journals I’ve kept over the years, and stashed on bookshelves filled with subjects of  “study” that never came to anything.

My own removal from the world started when I was around seven or eight years old. And it stopped 35 years later. I can’t wait to see this movie, Marwencol — I’d like to see how someone else did it. And how it turned out for them.

It makes me wonder how many people are actually walking around with one foot in one world and one foot in the other.