In OT school, we spend one third of our education on psychology, more than any of the other rehabilitation disciplines. OTs actually started out in many psych hospitals, and it is a rich part of our history. I think it helps us in the day to day of our work, because we use a holistic approach. Yes, we want you to be able to put your shirt on and use your affected hand, but if that isn’t meaningful to you, then it isn’t a focus today.

Recently, I have been reading about mindfulness and meditation for brain injury survivors. Unsurprisingly, experts say it is good for this population. Well duh! It is good for everyone; why wouldn’t it be good for the strokies and TBIs of this world? I know this deep in my gut, but I hadn’t tried it yet with any of my clients.

To be honest, I hadn’t been doing it for myself, and I know that I respond well to it. I was struggling at yoga a couple weeks ago, and I forced myself to meditate.

Backstory: I live in a college town. When I go to yoga, it is full of tight-bodied coeds just living their best life and showing off without even trying. EYE ROLL to myself, because it is NOT a competition, but I am human, and I have to work on loving my body like anyone else. I have found that I am super unkind to my postpartum body. My thoughts toward myself are appalling, and I recognize this habit in my clients. How many of you have called your affected hand a bad name, called yourself stupid for having aphasia, or cursed your leg for having foot drop?

It’s an epidemic. Even something like calling your affected hand your “bad hand” is setting it up for failure. There I was, sitting on the mat, thinking about how I cannot contort my body the same way that my twenty-year-old stick-figure classmate can, instead of focusing on what I can do. I realized that I was just so damn mean to myself. I saw the faces of a couple of my long term clients and thought of one particular person who could not get over this plateau, and I remember thinking that if he wasn’t so hard on himself, then he would be free to find other avenues and move forward. I decided to try it for myself.

I started imagining the word “kindness”. I pretended that “kindness” was entering every cell of my body from my toes to the top of my head. When I couldn’t hold my leg as high as the girl next to me, my thoughts went to all the “things I could not do.” I replaced it with “kindness.” Then my mind began to drift toward the things that I could do, and I began to cheer for myself. Before I knew it, I was doing more than I had ever done in a class before. It was not objectively as good as my classmates, but it was the best I had ever done and I ALLOWED myself to enjoy that.

This week I brought what I learned to the clinic. Recovery is such a hard journey-- mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I have seen survivors get through it gracefully and survivors give up. The difference is resilience, but I had no idea how to foster it.

Then I found this article and it was the quintessential opening of the clouds with the choir of angels singing “AWWW” and a light bulb shining brightly over my head. This qualitative study observed people who have experienced trauma and how they developed resilience.

This was my take away:

Mindfulness and compassion to ourselves, as well as acceptance of what happened (trauma), lead to resilience. In fact, developing a habit of mindful self-compassion helps to process the trauma. Apparently, these things overlap.

“Mindfulness and acceptance appear to be overlapping constructs. Mindfulness meditation emphasizes a nonjudgmental, accepting attitude toward present experience” Bishop et al., 2004;

When we are present, we cannot be mean to ourselves or think of where our recovery should be. If we are present, we cannot relive or obsess over where we are going. We can only move forward and focus on that one movement, one finger, or one toe.

The triggers will happen. The frustration with not being able to tell off your partner, run with your kids, or flip someone the bird appropriately, will happen. Here is the difference: instead of a trigger throwing you into a six month plateau, you will respond with kindness to yourself. Your trauma won’t become the beginning of your “new normal,” --a term I hate, BTW--but an event that is integrated into your life story. Your stroke stops defining you, and it becomes your choice as to how big a part of your life you want it to be.

This practice of self compassion is revolutionary. I see on facebook groups for brain injury survivors all this information on gratitude practices. Gratitude is great, but when I have been having a really shitty time, don’t ask me to be grateful. I sure as hell am not going to sit here, an able-bodied woman, and tell someone who has just had a massive brain bleed to practice gratitude. Gratitude for what? The hardest time in his or her life? Also, somehow when my clients hear gratitude it goes into this crazy cycle of beating themselves up again, “I know I SHOULD be grateful, because it could have been WORSE (meaning death).”

No. This is not the point. Gratitude is hard and kindness is harder, but at least kindness makes sense. Self-compassion and kindness that is where the process begins. This is the launching pad to living fully and wholeheartedly with pride for your visible and invisible scars.

Study Mentioned:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1029.497&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Mindful Self-Compassion the Road to Resilience