Staying in the Moment with Author Diane Grimard Wilson
Show Notes:
For many of us who have suffered brain injuries, overcoming the feeling of wanting to be who you were before your concussion can be a real challenge and strain on your mental health.
Today’s guest Diane Grimard Wilson has discovered that the best way to deal with this is to stay in the moment. Diane is a peak performance coach, a licensed clinical professional counselor, and has a board certification as a fellow in neurofeedback. Her clients include physicians, leaders, executives, and creatives. Diane is the host of the podcast The Genius: Sciencing Our Human Potential where she interviews leaders and other personalities for their human stories on resilience, change, and coping with the global pandemic. She is also the author of the bestselling book, Brain Dance: My Journey with Invisible Illness, Second Chances, and the Wonders of Applied Neuroscience.
Today she joins us to talk about how she sustained her brain injury, how it led to her book, and her mission to help people understand their brains and how to care for them. Tuning in today, you’ll hear about the role of benchmarking to assess your capabilities and track your progress, how neurofeedback made such a huge difference in Diane’s recovery, and why she believes so strongly in staying in the ‘now’. Tune in today for this inspiring and insightful conversation.
Key Points From This Episode:
• An introduction to Diane Grimard Wilson and her professional career.
• The car accident that caused Diane’s brain injury and inspired her book Brain Dance.
• Diane’s mission to help people understand their brains and how to care for them.
• Diane and Bella discuss the challenges of writing a book and trying to reconstruct a timeline after suffering a brain injury.
• How Diane’s injury reduced her capacity for the complexity of her life before the injury.
• The support she received from her husband and family.
• The role of benchmarking to assess your capabilities and track your progress.
• How neurofeedback made a huge difference in Diane’s recovery.
• Thoughts on how you don’t always notice your own progress.
• How Diane overcame the feeling of wanting to be who she was before her injury by staying in the present.
• Tips on assertiveness and getting over the invisible aspects of the injury.
Connect with Diane:
Contact Diane directly: diane.g.wilson@gmail.com
Check out her book Brain Dance
Follow her on Instagram @braincoach333
Listen to her podcast GENIUS by clicking here
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.0] BP: Hi, I’m your host Bella Paige and welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast. All about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussions and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Diane Grimard Wilson. Diane is a Chicago peak performance coach, licensed clinical professional counselor, and has board certification as a fellow in neurofeedback. Her clients include physicians, leaders, executives, and creatives. Diane is host of The Genius: Sciencing Our Human Potential Podcast where she interviews leaders and other personalities for their human stories on resilience, change, and coping with the global pandemic. She recently released her second book, Brain Dance: My Journey with Invisible Illness, Second Chances, and the Wonders of Applied Neuroscience, which hit bestselling status in the first week.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:46.9] BP: Welcome to the show, Diane.
[0:01:47.8] DW: Thank you so much.
[0:01:49.7] BP: To start, do you want to tell everyone about your injuries and what happened?
[0:01:54.6] DW: We’re starting with the hard stuff. What happened? The reason I wrote Brain Dance is that I needed to put words around what happened because I felt like that there were many people out there that didn’t have words to describe it and so, as a writer, I just felt like I needed to do this. What happened is I was sitting at a stoplight where I sat hundreds of – probably thousands of times in my car, waiting to take a left turn and a car took a wide turn, it was misty out, he didn’t apply the brake when he should have and he drove into me and so from there, then, what unfolded was a lot of complexity.
Having an injury that wasn’t diagnosed, having an injury that was invisible, not knowing what to do, not being able to talk about it because having a brain injury doesn’t really fit into many conversations and –
[0:02:52.4] BP: Really doesn’t.
[0:02:53.8] DW: No, it doesn’t. I think what’s come through is I felt really fortunate with all the care I eventually got and I think that’s the hope and I think that’s the hope for all the people like us that have had injuries, brain trauma that they couldn’t understand.
Even the pandemic is bringing its own brain trauma without the stress that trauma acts like an injury to our brain. My whole mission at this point is on brain awareness, understanding our brain and how to care for it and realizing that it will make a significant difference in our mood, how we function, our relationships, everything. So thanks for having me on today.
[0:03:35.1] BP: Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for joining. I read your book, Brain Dance and quite enjoyed it. Do you want to tell us about writing it? I just know you mentioned having a paper storm and it reminded me, right now, I’m in the middle of writing a book about my story and the timeline is so hard because my memory at the time was not good.
That’s been something that was kind of funny when I read your book and you mentioned trying to figure out when you did everything and the timeline of events. How as writing Brain Dance and can you tell us a little bit more about the book?
[0:04:08.4] DW: Well, first of all, if you’re doing this, good. It’s a good thing but be patient with yourself, it’s really something and at least for me. I think that we don’t necessarily record things that are negative that happen to us or that we don’t understand at all at the time but I ended up signing up for this class that was seven days to get back in writing and that was in January and then it was followed by five weeks to do a book outline and so I did that. Then, it was 12 weeks to write a book and so I procrastinated for eight of those 12 weeks.
I think it was like composting the book inside or it was growing or that lattice to guns. I went through all my photos, I went through all my old emails. My husband and I would regularly go, “Did this happen then? Were we – let’s see— Could I drive when…” just trying to piece the whole thing together. I mean, I worked with one editor who said, it’s a story, just write whatever, in the end, we write what we know, that’s what you’ll do and I think that’s kind of comforting but to me, it had to make sense and I hadn’t laid it out before, not quite like that. Different color stick on, big paper, a process across time, checking emails, photos, calendars, it was good. I’m glad I did it but be gentle with yourself if it’s not easy.
[0:05:41.1] BP: No, I actually ordered my – all my medical records the other day because I was trying to figure out when I did things, I was like, “I don’t actually know but they know,” so I ordered them all. I have a timeline for that, that’s been helping.
[0:05:55.4] DW: That’s brilliant. Very good. Although, I think it’s – you might want to brace yourself for reading about it in black and white or –
[0:06:03.4] BP: Yeah, for sure. Different perspective for sure. What have you tried to help in your recovery?
[0:06:09.8] DW: Well, the first phase of my recovery was just about the whiplash and head and neck injury and that’s what people could understand as what the diagnosis was, moderate concussion and whiplash. I had a lot of physical therapy. I was very lucky to end up in a really nice clinic, lots of good people but all they knew was head and neck and no one really understood what was going on in my life. Why I was still dizzy after months and months, and in fact, they never really solved that or, I mean, of course, it’s almost perfect but I had a dizziness and the other thing is that my life wasn’t going back together, I just didn’t talk very much about what was going on. Just try to keep in a good mood and I think I was hoping someday that it would just be like, I would be normal, back to normal and feel like going back to my life but it didn’t really happen.
I also took up day trading of retirement funds, which was a complete shift of my energy, I had all this really obsessive energy, so that was like actually a pretty scary and funny sort of series.
I mean, people look at brain injury and it’s like, it’s very sad but it’s not— sometimes your brain just does different things that you didn’t do before that it’s like if you approach it from just being curious, if you’re aware of what’s happening. I wasn’t all that aware but you know, just to try to stay open that this is a chapter of your life where your brain is going to work different and maybe that’s not all bad, you can do different things.
For me, it was a different life. I just didn’t do very – I didn’t see people I saw before, I didn’t – my life was just different. I didn’t have the capacity for the complexity in my life had before the injury.
[0:07:58.2] BP: Yeah, that can be really common. Something else that you mentioned that I really liked because in my personal story, my family was like a huge support system, despite how much I probably didn’t treat them very well. When my head pain was really bad because when it was bad, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. But support and family made a huge difference for me and it seemed like it made a really big difference for you. You want to talk about that a bit?
[0:08:23.7] DW: My husband made a really significant difference but my siblings and my parents did not know very much about it at all, there was just no way my family. I live in a different city and so I just really couldn’t imagine explaining to my mom what was happening, she would be like, “Wait, you should just go— whatever.”
I mean, I don’t think there was a way for her to understand that, it’s like, “Why aren’t you doing what you need to be doing?” It would be like, “I don’t know, my awareness of what was going on was very low, the deficits,” and so now as a neurotherapist, I benchmark everything, I have people do tests on their memory and their reaction time, their fluency, their verbal fluency, all those things so they can see where they’re at, compared to normative samples and so that they can see a chance across time.
[0:09:18.0] BP: Yeah, that’s so important. It’s so important to compare you to you. I never liked being compared to the general sample or things like that a lot of the time. When I did a lot of testing it was, well, you’re around here compared to the general population of age or whatever. It always bugged me because I was like, “Well, I used to be like way up there. Now, I’m still not happy about where you’re putting me on the list.” So the benchmarking is really nice because then you’re comparing yourself to yourself and you're not trying to compare yourself to –
Everyone thinks different and I had an insanely good memory. Telling me that my memory is now midrange at one point, actually made me mad because they were like, “Oh, well, it’s good,” but it wasn’t good enough for me, I want it to be back to where I was. Like you said, it’s something that you also gotten quite into and something you talk a lot about in your book is neurofeedback. Do you want to talk and explain what that is?
[0:10:15.5] DW: It was generally speaking, a tool that helped me a great deal. I had no way of understanding, like we’re just talking about, what was going on and so it started with the brain scan, being able to look at sort of under the hood, how my brain was working. How the brain waves were distributed and what was too high, too low, unequal. Then, through a series of sessions over, it was almost two years with Dr. Bear, I was able to really turn a lot of corners, that helped my brain function, my attention was better, my life was better.
It’s a very interesting thing to change your brain that we don’t really – many of us have that awareness. It’s like, how am I doing today but I remember coming back from something and telling Elsa about, that’s my neurotherapist, Dr. Elsa Bear, How books I read and, you know, I wanted her to know that I was going to be done, I didn’t want to always do this. I read books and stuff and she goes, “Well, that’s interesting. How many books did you read when you first came here?” And I said, “You’re right. None.”
I always had this lingering sense of, “This isn’t working, this isn’t working” I just am doing this and you should know this. That’s the story is that, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t reading, that didn’t kind of sink in and then when I was reading, it was the product of just doing neurofeedback that really changed the fogginess that I had and my focus.
[0:11:45.0] BP: I’m so glad it helped you, it’s so great when people find something that works for them because everyone is different and I like that you mentioned – you don’t always notice your own progress. Sometimes even myself like where I am no, it’s so different. While writing my book, I write about the past and I go, “Whoa, I’ve actually come really far.”
[0:12:06.7] DW: So great.
[0:12:07.2] BP: Because the odd day doesn’t feel like I’m going anywhere. It’s like you feel like you’ve had a setback like say I have a bad headache day. I’m like, “Oh wow, how did I deal with this before?” and I just remember, you dealt with this every day before, everyday all day. Sometimes it’s like a realization like, “Oh, I don’t forget things all the time” and my memory is a lot better than it used to. I read your book and I have a rule where I read and I put a sticky of where I have to stop so that I don’t over read because then I find I burn out and I actually could read it.
It was like, “Look at me go” I couldn’t a few years ago I was in university, I could barely read, so this kind of shows much you can improve and even though it is small improvements and I think sometimes we don’t realize it because you are improving back to what you used to be able to do, so you don’t really realize that all of a sudden this isn’t normal because you used to be able to read all the time so reading again just seems like a normal step in your day. I used to read so now I read, but you missed the whole giant section where you couldn’t read.
[0:13:06.6] DW: Yes.
[0:13:08.4] BP: I’m glad that the neurofeedback has helped so much, that’s great. I always tell everyone to try because try it out, if it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, try something else because every brain is different.
Everyone, you can find out more about Brain Dance at braindancebook.com, which you can also find in today’s episode description and shownotes but with that, we’re going to take a break.
[BREAK]
[0:13:34.8] BP: I just wanted to say thank you. The podcast is just over six months old and I couldn’t be happier with the response. If you truly love the podcast, please consider leaving a tip in our support the podcast tip jar down at the bottom of our episode description. All tips are greatly appreciated and help cover cost of the show.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:14:00.1] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Diane Grimard Wilson. Something that is, you kind of mentioned already, is how you were going out less and how our world shrinks essentially. As you had mentioned in your book, you had a smaller plate in life, so how did you overcome that feeling of wanting to be who you were before your injuries?
[0:14:25.4] DW: Let’s see, I watched at that time over every day at 11 and I read a lot of Eckhart Tolle because it was I couldn’t go there. It’s like life gives you things and so it doesn’t create energy to go back and go, “Oh, if I were on that same path—”, it’s just not an option. So I didn’t do that or did very little because it was too painful.
I went from I had 35 interviews the year after my first book and it was a year after a year and then some months after my first book that I was in the accident and everything stopped but I was on CNN, ABC. I did all of these different things and then my life – I sent out my Christmas cards or read my Christmas cards months later and there was just – I don’t know. Life is not necessarily the straight vertical line of doing and being more. Life is what we have today and so that’s where I try to stay a lot, is just like what’s this moment? What’s this year? Because the other stuff, it didn’t give me anything. I probably lacked that kind of awareness to be able to futurize and go into the past. I was just pretty much in the moment.
I listened to Eckhart Tolle a lot about the power of now and being in the now and I think there’s no now that’s better than another now, so this is what we have. In this moment, we can be all we can be without struggling and to accept the beauty of our life, the mission that we’ve been given, the circumstances that come through nowhere, I mean a thousand times I sat at that stop light and no one ever drove into me.
It’s like there’s just a part of life that I don’t understand and I don’t think debating in my head gets me much, so that may seem very passive but it definitely worked for me and actually, I still try to do that a lot even now in the pandemic, it’s really bad right now in the US and I think all the rancor that we develop in our thinking doesn’t serve us and blaming at all. It’s like staying in the moment really does give us more energy and competence.
[0:16:48.9] BP: For sure and I really like that because now is important and sometimes when you are dealing with a brain injury, concussion injury, it’s really hard to not overthink. I find spiraling is way easier for a lot of individuals where you just start thinking about the future, of what you can’t do, and why this happened to me, and if you can kind of tune a lot of that out and just live in the moment as you said, it can be really beneficial to things like your mental health and even your symptoms as well because mental health definitely affects them.
[0:17:22.2] DW: Yes. It’s like you’re this beautiful human.
[0:17:25.7] BP: Something else that I really liked that you talked about, looking healthy and put together and something that we all dealt with it and I dealt with it in school, I dealt with it at doctors, I dealt with it with family. So do you have any tips on getting over the invisible aspects of the injury because it is one of the hardest parts of all of this is that no one can see that there is something as you said, you didn’t tell your parents so that’s really hard to explain to people but I have an invisible injury and then they just look at you like, “What?”
[0:18:02.7] DW: I know and in my case was very generational with my parents. I’m sure that people had a knock on the head or saw stars or all those other expressions that they would use and people would never be the same but people wrote it off in a different way and that wasn’t my life. I got to have treatment.
[0:18:21.4] BP: Well and there’s always that you see that cover of the book and of the whole story or you read the first chapter and that’s how you know about someone like even, you mentioned, when you sprained your ankle, people would help you but when you had a brain injury, no one noticed and I thought that was really something I dealt with. I actually went – I get blood work very often actually and I was getting blood work and it was someone new.
If you look at me, I don’t look sick. I don’t look ill, it doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with me and I remember going, “You need to use a specific needle or my veins collapse” and he looked at me and goes, “You look very healthy.” I was like, “Okay but I am telling you that this what my situation is, just listen to me,” and he didn’t and then I got pricked with two large needles, the same thing happened, the veins collapsed and then they brought someone else and I was like, “Are you going to listen to me or am I going to stand up and leave?” because, “Look, are you okay?”
I was like, “No, I’m mad because you are not listening because you’re looking at me as who I am on the outside but you have no idea what is actually going on health wise for me” and I just reminded me of all the other times where invisible injury I’d say something and I’m like, “Oh wait, they can’t see that I have a headache right now” you know? Things like that.
[0:19:38.1] DW: Yes, so in terms of dealing with an invisible injury, I applaud your assertiveness and being able to say and to insist and all because that’s not easy, and for my mother’s generation, it would be like, “You should trust doctors, they know better than you so how can you possibly say that to them?” but I think we’re in a different time and we have a different kind of injury and we’re educating people as we go along that, you know, what we need and how it works.
I think in the process, especially with the brain injury part, that there are a lot of people like us that have gone through things that in variations, in different sizes and shapes that we’re at the result of brain impact of different types. On The Genius Podcast yesterday, I interviewed Julie Stan, who wrote on head injuries on kids in sports and just how early that happens like how they can have degenerative diseases from the brain, evidence of that early on from not even concussions but from different kinds of impacts.
We are not the zebras alone and we are now, people can learn from us but there are variations of horses and creatures out there and the more we can talk about our stories, the more people will be able to see the differences into which we’re really healthy brain.
It seems like this is unusual that we have unusual stories but I think there are probably more people like veterans who come back from military service, blast injuries experiencing trauma, [pudalism 0:21:14.4]. We have a long way to go in terms understanding brain injuries and so I could easily see someone looking at you and going, “Wow, you really do look healthy, like what could you possibly think or know about this? You’re perfect.” So be brave. You are brave in asserting your needs.
[0:21:34.9] BP: Well, it takes time to get there. I wasn’t like that at first and I just started getting to the point where I know what I need at some point, for dealing with my health and stuff, I’ve been doing this for 10 years now almost, and I just don’t also have the patience for it anymore sometimes. I told you what I needed and now you’re doing the opposite, now it’s causing problems. I think it’s so important that we voice for ourselves and like you said, share stories.
I talked with an individual just yesterday and he has really high anxiety about his head being touched after his concussions and I remember feeling the same way and it just shows how far I’ve come, but also how there is so many people out there struggling. If you look at him, you would have no idea that he was scared to walk out of his front door because someone could touch his head and it just shows that invisible illnesses are real and it is so important to continue to give them a voice and share stories about them. Is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:22:38.3] DW: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this and to talk about Brain Dance because I think the more we know in books, like mine and like yours, this developing it gives people more courage and it gives people the sense of the nuances of human experience that are affected by the brain. It helps all of us I think to read more about the human story, we are hard-wired to learn from stories and so I look forward to more people sharing their stories on brain health. Thanks for the opportunity today.
[0:23:10.8] BP: Yeah, thank you so much for joining and sharing your story and Brain Dance with us.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:23:18.7] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussion by giving us a share and to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
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