10 Things Brain Injury Survivors Can Teach The World About Transformation
We all have areas we need to change, but if I had a choice I don’t want to change I want to transform. Change implies something that happens like turning on a switch and making a room light up or fill with darkness. Change isn’t always good. Transformation; however, is life altering, deliberate, and almost always better than what you thought was good enough.
1. Brain Injury Survivors endure unfathomable change. When I say unfathomable, I mean wake up and cannot move your body, talk, or think kind of change. That is just the beginning. Brain injury survivors learn that the change just keeps coming like waves of unwelcome guests. Change in this context is exhausting, talkative, and relentlessly unaware of how much energy it is consuming. Like that one crazy aunt, who just cannot help herself. How do these remarkable human beings deal with this change?
They set up firm and flexible boundaries with their uninvited guest and befriend it. They wake up every day and face it. Then they begin to understand that change is like a small child. It needs to be tended to and nurtured into transformation.
2. Brain Injury Survivors are experts at acceptance.
This is the number one indicator that a person is developing resilience and that their unexpected change is turning into transformation. It’s kind of like after you have a baby and you are getting your ass handed to you night after night. Then you decide you are still you, and become who you are plus a mother or a father. You accept that nothing in this life truly eradicates the you that matters and you transform into a person plus. Survivors emerge as themselves plus the wisdom and role of survivor.
3. Brain Injury Survivors are ninja level Mari Kondo purgers.
Survivors have to let go of a lot and there is grief that comes with that. They have to let go of the life that they had previously envisioned to adopt a new life with new roles and new challenges. The art of letting go is at the center of this new life and what they hang on to is faith in the process. They have faith in this constant shedding of their previous life. They understand that letting go has unweighted them in order to reveal a life they could not have imagined. They create an understanding of a process rather than one single choice and embrace this evolution.
4. Brain Injury Survivors know how to take it day by day or moment by moment.
Being minutes from dying and waking up less most of your faculties, is a like a huge PAUSE button. Life gets DVR’d and put on a list for a while. This is the hardest part of the whole experience. From the moment consciousness retakes a person post a stroke or a major brain surgery or both, they are trying to move back to their old life. With the future very uncertain, we are talking no one on this earth can predict the level of recovery post brain injury. Survivors learn to look no farther than this moment or even this second on any particular day.
5. Brain Injury Survivors understand the mind body connection. This may go without saying, but the level to which this is true is fascinating post brain injury. Most all of my treatments are through facilitated movement wherein I put a client’s body in an advantageous position and then put my hand on a muscle belly and move with them through a full arc of movement. During this movement, I will ask my client to breath or to pause. They pause, because I want their mind relaxed in order to soak up the motor map we are creating. It’s very exciting when a client starts to figure out this feedback loop. They start to realize that they are slowly recreating pathways. They understand that the body learns as the mind learns.
7. Priorities are top on a Survivor’s list.
This is a second chance at life situation. A survivor knows that they were seconds away from no more chances. Survivors lean into life and care for themselves in a way that inspires awe and wonder. I do not know how some of these people get through those first challenging months. Months, where getting dressed is a two-hour affair and showering is exercise that induces marathon style fatigue. Survivors learn to prioritize their care and the people they love. Love gets more people through brain injuries than anything else. Love for themselves and love for others takes survivors from doctor’s appointments, to therapy, to facing challenges at home, and through pain or mind blowing fatigue.
8. Mind over matter is less a cliché and more a motto to a Survivor. Despite all evidence to the contrary, brain injury survivors put faith in the process of recovery and believe in their future. The challenge in this act cannot be underestimated. The unknowns outweigh the knowns by infinite proportions, but still they carry on to a future of their imagining.
9. Gratitude isn’t lost in a journal or a running tally at the end of the day for Brain Injury Survivors they breathe it in and exhale it out.
I love this description, because it has been transformative for my life. This group of incredible human beings have hard days and excellent days, but nothing shakes their relationship with gratitude. Working closely with this population has shifted my view of gratitude from a hum drum note on a to do list in the very far reaches of my mind to front and center the first thing I think of when I open my eyes and the last thing I focus on before I close them.
10. Survivors are brave every minute every day. This is a requisite to survival post brain injury. If every time they couldn’t find a word, could not open their hand, or lost their balance, they worried about what someone thought of them, the shame would be paralyzing.
Survivors are made vulnerable by their condition, when they lean into this Brene Brown style, they find their courage. They understand that nothing, not their speech, their body, or their mind, can inhibit the power of the human spirit. They know that a broken brain does not equal death but signals new life.
