Trauma occurs along with brain damage. How not to do it when the brain is damaged destroys almost every part of human life? I have researched and dedicated part of my book, Brain damage, trauma and Grief: How you heal when you’re aloneabout the trauma, especially the nexttraumatic stress disorder associated with brain damage. Below is an adapted excerpt from my book on the subject.
The injuries and traumas that preceded the brain injury are relived
Like what happened to me, your brain injury may have disconnected your pre-injury memories from your emotions, thus undoing any trauma work you did before your injury. When the emotions come back, the memories that are no longer healed create a tsunami of trauma that you haven’t thought about in years. They challenge your thinking and rob you of time. Confusion accumulates and results in chaos.
Acknowledge that the injuries have not healed
To rehabilitate pre-traumatic wounds, you and your therapist need to acknowledge this strange unhealability and work together to reconnect memories with emotions. There will be no strategies, no drugs and no rest restore your influence so you can do this. Only neurostimulation therapy possible When these are broken memory–feeling nervous networks are reconnected, and you embark on a chaotic journey toward integrating memory and emotion, which requires cognitive empathy on the part of the therapist and determination and courage on your part.
Cognitive empathy allows the healthcare professional to put themselves in your shoes and respond to your grief with compassion.
Memories that appear and disappear, like moles or black holes that open and close in memory banks, complicate efforts to reconstruct pre-injury trauma. Although neurostimulation therapy can reactivate areas responsible for long-term autobiographical memory, grief work may be necessary before trauma memories stabilize enough to reconnect emotionally. Frustration can do this without you even realizing it.
I have found that this “trauma treatment” is not discussed during neurorehabilitation. Ten years passed before neuroscientists discovered this. my gamma brain wave enhancement training brought this issue to the agenda. It would be pioneering to guide me to reconnect my memories with their emotional decisions. I found that you can’t do it yourself. Some healing work requires another person, someone willing to learn, listen lovingly, and guide you toward that goal. I manage the absence of such a person in my life through some of the things I describe in step four.
Trauma after injury
Trauma is followed by social trauma. Denials, judgmentsbranding and exploitation. Those charged with healing—neurologists and psychiatrists—tout their methods as the most relevant, yet helpful, tools to help you deal with the devastating cognitive, emotional, and metabolic effects of brain damage. Theirs abandonment is traumatizing. Being alone creates its own permanent trauma.
I believe that these three sources of trauma worsen brain damage and increase dysfunction.
The mental pain of trauma stabs every cell and bleeds into every aspect of life.
Fiction depicts the perverse death grip of trauma
Jean-Guy Beauvoir is a fictional character in Louise Penny’s Detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series. He’s a 30-something inspector in the Sûreté du Québec, once married, loyal to his boss, shot in the line of duty, and addicted to OxyContin. Through Beauvoir we descend into mental anguish; causing her trauma paranoia and angerturns it into a despicable use. Evil hero How light enters uses it to find and destroy Gamache.
“Beauvoir did not ask why they wanted to go to the Three Pines and why the unknown Surete van was following them.
He didn’t care.
He was just a driver. He would do as he was told. There is no other argument. As she cared, she learned that she was hurt and couldn’t take any more pain. Even the pills couldn’t make him bored anymore.”
Although Beauvoir was injured without a brain injury, Penny accurately describes the emotional state we share with him. But how much try to imagine living with an unhealed brain injury and experiencing mental pain and squirming to live up to people’s expectations of being functional? This is impossible!
Personal perspectives are important readings
The medicine is not enough
At some point, the emotional pain after brain damage and abandonment becomes so wide and deep drug cannot apply to him.
Primitive trauma therapy
I think one big obstacle is that we don’t know what trauma does to the brain. We are learning the role of microgliahow early trauma changes the way we see the world, about using therapeutic doses to treat such trauma. But how does continued forced isolation compound brain damage? Is this a specific type of brain injury?
Forced isolation destroys trust; atrophy of social skills. Without trust, we cannot create or maintain healthy relationships.
Brain damage already interferes with this process by damaging it concentrationmemory, communication skills, etc. These losses create a different kind of thing distrust: understanding social interactions, feeling who is trustworthy and who is not, and distrusting our ability to express ourselves.
Knowing that people are a threat to healing, combined with a lack of confidence in our ability to know who to trust, shuts us down. We avoid talking about our sorrows; we are wary of accusations or symptoms of negative thinking boredom or rolling their eyes or making excuses to change the subject or hearing, “Look, can’t you talk about something else?”
I think trauma mostly comes from broken relationships between loved ones or trusted professionals and their clients.
So I believe in the best injury therapy aimed at creating experiences with people that strengthen connections, build trust, support and encourage.
Copyright ©2022, 2024 and 2026 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy
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