My approach to life was set at a time when I was forced to deal with bullies and being ostracized by my peers. My response to these events was to analyze my social environment and seek to develop insights that might assist in responding to conflict, or otherwise help to master my social environment. I was unaware I was acting in this analytic fashion. Since I lacked awareness of other people’s thoughts, I made the false assumption that my analytic approach was the conventional one, the “normal” approach to life. But I have since learned that most people were shaped by a very different, much more benign, set of circumstances. Conventional wisdom lay well outside my sphere of experience.

With the TBI injury, my response followed a similar pattern. My approach has been to seek analytic insight into the injury. The motivation was the tacit, unstated belief, that such analysis would assist in surmounting the various deficits associated with the injury. I responded to the injury in the same way I had dealt with every other life obstacle I had faced. But this analytic approach does not work with TBI.

No degree of awareness of the deficits provoked by the injury serves to reduce, or eliminate, those deficits. An intellectual awareness of the problem does not mitigate the problem. My entire mode of interacting with the world, a mode which served well in addressing past problems, has almost no application to the problems I am now facing.

Awareness of the disconnect between my life strategy, and the problems posed by the injury, triggered the latest depressive event. Increased understanding illuminates, but does not directly resolve the problem. It is like waking in the night and detecting a faint strange odour. After a period of investigation, you determine the house is on fire. This insight does little to protect you from the flame. If you are trapped on the 3rd floor that insight may deliver no benefit at all.

Update 16/06/14

This was a scheduled post from last night. I laboured over the text as an exercise in recovery from the tailspin. It has required considerable revision.