Category Archives: Assess

Approach to Life

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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.

 

 

 

 

Running Out of Steam

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I feel myself giving up. I am not sure how to address this.

Before I go to see one of my Doctors, I will write out an “inventory” of the issues I wish to discuss. When I read through the past list of issues, and the dates, I observe a sequence of events, and discoveries, each of which has had a significant impact.

Since posting on the Blog Hiatus, I have experienced a series of small psychic detonations, a slow cascade of revelation, and insight. This insight provided the motive and the trigger for the subsequent extended series of blog posts.

What I now sense is that I am running out of steam. I once held the belief that insight would open a pathway to recovery, that insight itself might have curative properties. That simply gaining an understanding of the issues would be sufficient to dispel them, diminish them, vanquish them.

I am losing that belief.

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Update June 15th 2014
This post was heavily edited and rewritten. My poor state of mind was evident in the writing.

 

 

 

 

Struggle

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My experience of life has become a daily struggle. There is little sense of “winning,” of accomplishment, of fruition. Every day becomes another confrontation with the same issues. No matter how I exert myself, I make no headway.

This is a bleak, but realistic statement of the facts. Yes, there have been some minor improvements. But these positive changes are the same as a year spent learning to bake chocolate chip cookies. After a year’s dedicated effort, you stand proudly in the kitchen and announce only 97% of the latest batch were burned black. An improvement? Certainly! It is better than burning 100% of the batch. But given the amount of time spent (years) and the focus (daily, hour by hour) it seems a little rich to announce any improvement at all. It is similar to making the claim  “This year I am drowning, but I’m drowning 2% slower than I was last year.”  And I am nowhere near being able to get out of the water. The true message is  Never get out of the boat!  But I was pushed.

There are other aspects of struggle. These include the following:

  • Fear of slipping back into vacancy
  • Problems with learning
  • Problems with effective functioning
  • Learned behaviour issues
  • Looming financial disaster

I intend to examine each of these in future posts. The one topic I wish to address here is the fear of slipping back into vacancy.

I do not know exactly how to describe the vacancy. In my reading on TBI (which is not extensive and which suffers all the faults associated with poor comprehension), I have not come across any mention of anything similar. Perhaps this item should be subsumed under a general fear of the unknown, of being knocked out of regular life patterns, and habits, and being unable to easily resume them. When we talk about “knowing” we are really speaking to the fact that major elements of our life constantly repeat. We know where we work – we go there almost every day. We know what we do – our work typically does not change very much. We know our friends – by definition friends are a constant presence in our lives. We know where we live – unless we are young adults we tend to remain in one location for extended periods since moving causes such disruption in our normal patterns. We know our daily routine – our diet tends toward the habitual, as does our choice of garment, hairstyle, and all the rest.

We think of ourselves as being engaged in constant change. When it comes to cellphones and service plans this may be true. But, for the most part, we are deeply embedded in a series of long term, unvarying routines. It is not until you are injured, and unable to continue with the routine, that you realize the degree to which you have come to depend on constant repetition to ease your way through life. We speak of brain injury rehabilitation but we might more accurately speak of a process involving involuntary loss of old routines and being forced into the acquisition of new ones.

Exactly how the vacant state fits in with this pattern I do not know. I do know that becoming aware of myself sitting, staring blankly into space, was key in forcing me into a daily struggle to recover.