Dealing with Grief as a Brain Injury Survivor with Dr. Jen Blanchette
Show Notes:
Oftentimes, the aftermath of a brain injury is filled with loss. Loss of relationships, loss of mental and physical abilities, and loss of one's sense of self. Losses like these are usually associated with grief, but unfortunately, people who experience brain injuries often don’t receive the help that they need to manage this kind of suffering. Today’s guest, Dr. Jen Blanchette, is a therapist who specializes in concussion recovery. Through her 12 years of working with brain injury survivors, Jen has cultivated a vast range of knowledge on the best coping mechanisms for grief, and she shares some of the most important ones with us in this episode!
Key Points From This Episode:
Introducing today’s guest, concussion recovery specialist, Dr. Jen Blanchette.
The early days of Jen’s 12-year (and counting) journey of working with brain injury survivors.
Barriers that prevent brain injury survivors from attending therapy.
The link between mental health issues and concussion.
Examples of the major losses that can be experienced as a result of a brain injury.
Exploring the concept of ambiguous loss.
The benefits of survivor groups.
Bella shares the strategies that she uses when she experiences memory loss.
The importance of acknowledging your losses.
What it looks like to attend to your grief in a healthy way.
Why grief becomes stuck in our bodies.
The value in not rushing through our feelings.
How to cultivate joy while holding sadness.
The power of expressing appreciation.
Why Jen recommends spending time outdoors and moving as much as possible.
The importance of finding your community.
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[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.2] BP: Hi everyone, I’m your host Bella Paige and after suffering from post-concussion syndrome for years, it was time to do something about it. So welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast, where we dig deep into life when it doesn’t go back to normal. Be sure to share the podcast and join our support network, Concussion Connect. Let’s make this invisible injury become visible.
[DISCLAIMER]
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 concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:14.7] BP: Welcome to today’s episode, number 91, of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Jen Blanchette. Dr. Jen is the host of the TBI Therapist Podcast. She is a therapist turned burnout and concussion recovery specialist and speaker. For the past 10 years, she has specialized in therapy after head injury, neuropsychological evaluation, trauma and spiritual concerns in mental health. Welcome to the show Jen.
[0:01:45.0] JB: Thanks for having me, I’m excited to talk with you again.
[0:01:48.1] BP: Just to give some background again, what led you to working with brain injury survivors?
[0:01:54.2] JB: I always call it serendipity because I think the work found me. So I don’t have a survivor story, I don’t have necessarily a family member in my own family, although, later on, I do. My aunt actually sustained a concussion. But I call it serendipity because I needed the work and the work found me. So I needed a post-doctoral placement and I cold-called the local neuro rehab, hoping, because I was between jobs, I had lost my job due to the last economic downturn.
I really wanted a place where I could feel like I could do really great work and sitting with the pain of brain injury and concussion, I really found something that was so unique and I felt grossly under prepared as a therapist and a psychologist to understand the problem, first of all.
And second, I leaned heavily on, you know, my supervisor and the survivors to educate me on what they’re going through. So it really was me going into the program, being curious and learning from survivors, learning from people who have come before me, other psychologists and neuropsychologists to understand what was going on.
So that’s a little bit into kind of why. So I’ve been working with survivors now for the past 10 years. Well, I think 12, now that I add it up. I think, like, what year is it? It’s been 12 years, I think, yeah.
[0:03:24.1] BP: That’s so funny because I often say, “I’ve been a survivor for 10 years, nine years? 11? Eight?” Like, all the time I’m like, “Which number did I say last? What number is it really?” Then I’m like, “Okay, let’s start it here,” and then I go through all the years to try to figure it out and it actually happens pretty often.
And so we are going to talk about grief today but I just kind of wanted to go over, what do you think really prevents survivors from going to therapy? Because I really recommend talk therapy all the time here on the show and I find some people, I’ll mention therapy and they go, “Well, I’ll be okay,” and it’s like, “But why don’t you just go to therapy?” Because I’m such a therapy proactive person. So what do you think, can we break down some of the barriers of what causes people to go into therapy or even try it?
[0:04:15.8] JB: So one of those barriers I think is a lack of coordination in our medical career system. So a lot of people will be seen in the ER or they’ll just call their doctor or be seen by primary care and they’ll be given that diagnosis of concussion, unless they’ve been, you know, unless it’s more of a moderate to severe TBI, then maybe they will have integrative mental health services but sometimes not.
You know, even my moderate to severe folks haven’t had mental health integrated into their rehab. So I think the number one is lack of coordination. You know, from the get-go, you know, you have a discharge paper from the ER and it says, “You know, pretty much, watch your symptoms.” In the past, it was like, “Wait in a dark room.” We don’t do that anymore but it’s kind of a wait and see approach which actually doesn’t work.
So we need to be more proactive. If you have symptoms, seek care quickly. And I think mental health wise, having mental health incorporated into your care early is really helpful because as we’re learning, a lot of mental health symptoms are a part of the concussion. They’re not separate from the concussion, they are part of the concussion and I think the treatment of those symptoms is going to help your trajectory of recovery improve more quickly.
So I think the medical system needs to kind of catch up to that and I think there’s also lack of coordination here in the US. So you know, in other countries that might be different, where they’re more coordinated, they have more of a coordinated approach. So that’s one, lack of coordination.
I think second, I would say there’s still stigma, you know, associated with seeking mental health treatment. I think with concussion, they’re thinking, “Hey, I had a blow to the head, I had this thing happen, it’s not mental health related, it’s a physical issue or concern issue or concern that happened to me.” And so I think looking at mental health as just part of our bodies is really important. So for example, like if we had diabetes, we wouldn’t say, “Um, maybe I just don’t need help with that, like, I could manage that stuff on my own.”
No, we go to a doctor, we make sure that we understand our blood sugars and what to do and I think the same thing applies to mental health concerns. So if we’re struggling with depression, there’s times where you cannot manage that on your own. If it’s a low grade depression, maybe you get it just in the winter and it’s kind of, “Oh yeah, I know what to do. I need to, you know, be around my friends or do these things that help me out of that depressive slump.”
But if it’s something you’ve never experienced before, like anxiety after a brain injury, a lot of people have seen me and they say, “I don’t even know what this is, I’ve never had anxiety, what is this?” What were you going to say, Bella?
[0:07:01.8] BP: Yeah, no, it’s true. A lot of people are like, “I never had depression or I never felt like I was afraid or questioning my decisions all the time,” and that’s where a lot of times I like to really express that mental health and when you hit a certain point, it’s an illness. Like your brain is ill and you have to treat it like you said, like you would treat anything else and I didn’t understand that at the beginning at all.
I very often would just kind of shrug off my mental illness. I knew I was depressed and I was really struggling but I’d kind of just go, “You know, like, I’ll try something else,” like, “I’ll color more or I’ll go for more walks,” but there is a point, like you said, that that’s not enough and it wasn’t enough for me and once I learned that and actually started going to therapy and being open to therapy.
I think one of the problems for myself a lot of the time going to therapy was, I was very against it because I felt like I didn’t need it. So I would go, my parents would send me to a therapist and then I’d just feel so, like, anti-therapy. So like, “This isn’t what I need, like, why am I here? I don’t want to talk about my problems with a stranger,” and then it wouldn’t be productive because I was just so in a pessimistic mood the entire time that I didn’t get any benefit out of it.
So you do really have to go with an open mind of like, “How can this help me? Hopefully it can help me,” and together, we can come up with solutions to some of your mental illness problems but it does take a long time. It’s definitely not something that happens overnight.
And something we also don’t get through overnight is grief. Now, we’ve mentioned grief on the podcast a little bit but not a ton and do you want to kind of take us through like the types of grief that people might get after a concussion or brain injury?
[0:08:54.6] JB: Yeah, I always kind of tell people that in becoming a therapist who specializes in brain injury, I had to become a grief therapist, I had to become a trauma therapist because those were the issues that were facing me even though I didn’t know that from the beginning, right? I didn’t know that I needed the training in those areas to be able to help folks after a brain injury.
What I kept seeing was people feeling senses of loss around their roles. That’s one type of loss, so feeling like I lost myself in my type of role, whether that be, “I was a provider of my family and now I’m not the provider,” or “I was a teacher and now I’m not a teacher.” “I was a doctor,” I just interviewed someone recently on my podcast who, you know, was a physician and they’re not working as a physician anymore.
So that’s one type of loss. Other types of losses could be physical ability. So perhaps I was able to do, I know you talk about sports a lot Bella, “So I was able to do my sport in this way and can no longer do that anymore,” that’s another type of loss, loss of a physical ability and then mental ability. So being able to again, I know you talk about this a lot in the podcast, being able to remember certain things.
You know, that's a big sense of loss actually that I touch on with a lot of people is that they don't remember actual experiences. So other people, I remember one of my folks would say, someone would come up to them and they had zero memory of any experience with them and they would tell them stories about things that happened and they just had zero memory of that.
So those are a few and I kind of encompass those into what we call ambiguous loss. So Pauline Boss is a researcher who coined the term ambiguous loss and she founded that model from working with 9/11 victims, who have lost family members, who were missing but didn’t have a body. They had no way of having closure for that loss and then it became about you know, part of that I talk about TBI in there, in that book that she has.
But those losses that no one’s going to necessarily bring you a lasagna after the… maybe if you had a major concussion and you were hospitalized, someone brought you that lasagna but if you had you know, a “minor TBI,” or a bump to the head and you were, I’m putting in quotes, “okay at the time” no one really knows what to do with that and if you have symptoms longer than the normal kind of timeframe of a couple of weeks, people don’t really get it. They don’t understand you’re struggling.
So they don’t know how to handle that loss. If you lost a role, if you’ve had a divorce, another consequence sometimes of long-term symptoms of concussion is loss of relationship. So people really don’t know what to do with that. There’s no social script for that loss and how they help you through that loss contrasting to losses like, you lost your grandmother or your uncle passed away. Okay, there is a witnessing of grief in that, where we go to a ceremony and other people see our sadness. We see their sadness and there’s healing in that, in that witnessing.
So that’s why I think survivor groups are actually wonderful because other people come witness your grief and witness your loss in ways that other people can’t, other people can’t get it.
[0:12:28.8] BP: We do have a support group on Concussion Connect every week and I do love seeing everyone get together and kind of understand each other so much more than anyone else would and I do like the three types of loss. For myself, I had all three because my sense of self did go, like you said, I talk about sports a lot with my show jumping career because that’s who I was.
I didn’t know who I was outside of that, that was big thing for me. And memory is really hard for sure. Things like that, your ability. I know for myself, school all of a sudden became hard and I never had a problem in school before. I used to kind of get mad with myself for not remembering things when people would bring up like a memory. Or for example, just the other day I got a message on social media from someone who listens to the podcast talking about how their partner keeps getting mad at them for not having a memory.
And those things can be really frustrating in your day-to-day life, like you said, in relationships and trying to keep up with all that can be really tough on top of all your other symptoms. I know for me, there’s been instances, like you said, where somebody would come and shake my hand or give me a hug and they’re like, “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you, how are you?” and I’m just like, “I don’t know who this is. Like, who are you?”
Like I knew, like maybe when and I’m trying to figure out like, when I would have met them and like what part of my life they were and if they were in those four years where my headaches were really bad, I don’t remember a lot of it. So it’s like, “Hi, nice to see you too. I don’t know your name, you know my name, you know all about me, I know nothing,” and it’s kind of like, you freeze.
[0:14:20.8] JB: So many people that I’ve worked with where that memory thing happens, they freeze and then they judge themselves for the freeze and that’s your body’s reaction to stress. It feels like, you know, and we want our memory to work really hard and that’s the worst thing for memory, really, is that freeze response and our body’s doing it and we can’t do anything about it.
So I kind of talk with people about muscle memory like, “What do I do when that happens?” Sometimes you can’t do anything, like, sometimes you just fumble through it and you feel like a mess and that’s normal for brain injury. I always say this, it’s normal for brain injury and people are like, “It’s not normal.” I know it’s not normal but from what you're telling me, a lot of folks deal with this who have struggled with concussion.
So sometimes, you can get a strategy around that where you can say like, “Hey, you know, I had a concussion,” but sometimes you don’t want to go through the whole story of like, “I had a concussion, I have memory issues,” and so maybe I’ll ask you, Bella. Like, what works the best for that, what strategy do you use when you have that happen?
[0:15:26.6] BP: So it kind of depends on who I’m with. For example, if I’m with someone that knows me, I would just be honest and be like, “Honestly, I don’t remember what we’re talking about.” My two best friends, they know. They’ve been around me for kind of, not all of this but almost all of it and they kind of know that my memory is not good and a few of my other friends know too.
Like my memory has improved a lot but for example, my girlfriend asked me to pick up scarfs for her wedding, for the wedding party because I live closer to town than she does and I forgot four weeks in a row and that can sometimes just be because I’m super busy and also because my memory’s not great and one of the best things about that friendship is she’s like, “I know your memory’s not good, like, I’m not mad at you. I would probably be mad at somebody else but I’m not mad at you.”
And so I think having that open communication with your friends that are around you is really important, so that they don’t judge you when you do forget all the time. But when it’s people that you don’t know that’s where it kind of gets harder because it’s like, do you want to ask their name and be like, “I don’t actually remember who you are.” So sometimes, just like not getting so angry with yourself. I know just forgiving myself a lot really helped.
Like, “I don’t know you, you know who I am and you know what? That’s okay because we’re just going to talk and maybe I could figure some things out about you.” I’d be like, “How have you been? Like, how has everything going on?” and maybe they’ll give you some information that you can like, jump in on. Like I find sometimes, the more people talk, the more I remember them.
Like they’ll throw in something in a conversation and I’m like, “Oh,” then my brain clicks. It’s like, “I got it now, like, I put it together, the puzzle pieces are forming.” Really not beating myself up is probably one of the biggest things for almost all of this because I found I used to get really frustrated and angry all the time especially the first few years to the point that I couldn’t function because my anger was so severe and I was either mad at people around me, mad at myself, mad at healthcare workers.
The anger inside me was so extreme that I really struggled to interact with a lot of people without lashing out or either I’d lash out if I was close to them or I was so nice that they had no idea anything was going wrong. So there was always like that 50-50 split of like, “Oh, I didn’t even know you were going through anything,” or “Oh, I know you’re going through something because you’re not you right now, like where is the real you?”
I think it took a few years until my mom finally said that like, “You know, it is kind of nice to see you again,” and I was like, “Oh, damn, like I guess it’s true. I haven’t been around for a long time.” And I felt that too, I was like, “I kind of feel like me again,” and that’s where that loss and grief kind of comes into that like who am I now. So we are going to get into some coping methods for grief and things like that but before that, we’re going to take a quick break.
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[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:19:45.6] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Jen Blanchette. So we’re going to get more into grief and coping mechanisms for grief or how to accept it, those types of things. So do you have any tips for really handling all this grief, as we’ve talked about just before the break how there are so many different types of grief that can occur after a concussion?
[0:20:10.4] JB: They’re really are and I think it’s giving yourself space first, so kind of recognizing that your feelings are valid. A lot of times, there’s this kind of initial push really in concussion recovery to really like, “What can we do? How can we get better? Keep on going, keep going, keep going.”
And then around the one to two year mark, sometimes it’s later for some people, things settle where they settle and it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get better. But there is a settling I find and emotionally it is like there’s a realization of loss and that you know, whatever the role was that you lost, you may not get that role back. So I think it is really like noticing and feeling that loss and feeling that pain and taking breaks through that too. So a lot of times, the only way to get there is through, yes, but you also don’t have to do it all at once. I like the practice of rhythms of attending to your grief.
So by attending to our grief or I like to think of people, people even like growing a garden to tend to their grief and they have like this grief garden where they have flowers that grow. So there is like this newness that happens but they kind of have that experience where they are physically tending to grief. I love grief walks, doing something physical, even lighting a candle. So if you can’t walk, you can’t tend to a garden because it’s winter, you can light a candle, write some feelings down, write your thoughts down, blow out the candle.
It is not really woo-woo, it’s just like feelings have a beginning, middle and end and when grief gets stuck, it’s because we don’t allow ourselves to move through those phases of our feelings. So being able to say like, “Yes, I am feeling lost, shame,” whatever it is, “I don’t know what to do,” and maybe whatever comes to your mind during that time on the grief walk or the grief journal or tending to your grief plants, whatever it is, you have a beginning, middle and end of that experience and then you put it away.
So I like to think of rhythms of attending to your grief and I really think that is helpful because in society we don’t really do this. We try to push past feelings to say like, “Oh,” if someone tells you like, “Oh my gosh, I am feeling so awful,” the tendency for most people is to, “What can I do? Okay, well, maybe it’s not so bad and we can work through it.” There’s this rushing to that.
So after years and years of being a therapist, it’s weird for me to be like, “I love feelings.” “Let us just open them up and then when we’re done, we can close them but we don’t need to rush,” because a lot of people, as a therapist I noticed, they’ll start crying and then they want the tissues, they want to stop it and I say, “Can you sit with it for a little bit longer?” and they’ll say yes. You know, “Yes, I can. It is not comfortable but I can do that,” and so it does take a certain amount of support to do that.
So it could be sitting with your therapist in that time or sitting with a close friend. A lot of people have used animals that I’ve worked with. So sitting with your pet, where you can pet them when you are experiencing those feelings but I think the important point is having a beginning, middle and end, then putting that experience away for the moment until you have more resources or time to kind of attend to those emotions, so that’s one thing. Any questions on that or feedback, thoughts?
[0:23:44.1] BP: No, I think it’s really great and I kind of like that you mentioned that you might not get your role back because it is something that is hard to accept. It is something that you kind of have to get through and work through and like you said, in stages. It is not just like, “I’m just going to be okay tomorrow,” or let it all out and be good the next day. It might not always work that way and I always think it’s really important to remind people that you might not get that role back but you will get a role.
You will find another passion and there are other things out there that you’ll find that you love or another alternative to what you did before. It’s just not rushing to find that even though I know I have been in that place where I have been like, “Okay, what can I do next?” I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got all this energy in my brain but not with my body, like it is really opposite, I want to get going but my body is telling me no.”
I’m like, “How can I find something to occupy my time, my brain and all these things after getting rid of those roles?” So I think really taking, like you said, those rhythms and kind of just letting yourself process things and not getting mad at yourself is really, really important when getting through grief or any parts of post-concussion symptoms and things.
[0:25:00.0] JB: This always sits with me, one of my supervisor in my post-doc program would tell me, “If there is not sadness after a brain injury, something’s wrong.” Either the person isn’t aware of their brain injury symptoms and, you know, that’s a symptom of a brain injury. It’s called Agnosia, you don’t realize really what is happening and especially early in the recovery process, you may not be aware fully of your losses, that is really normal.
So I think allowing yourself to have that realization is an unfolding. There is a song, I wish I could have think of the song but the words are something like, “I am not breaking. I am not broken. I am unfolding,” and allow that unfolding to happen to what’s next after brain injury is a process and I think kind of the way there and to see what’s next is attending to that grief and then trying to cultivate joy.
So that’s the renewing emotion that I think is on the other end of grief and you can do that today. So because we’re holding sadness, we can still cultivate joy at the same time and that might sound contradictory but it’s possible. It’s possible to say, “Well, I do have appreciation and thankfulness for a warm home,” something very simple. We can start to cultivate some joy around that.
Maybe you’re able to have lunch with a friend. It was a really great lunch and it was a good symptom day for you and it was awesome. So really digging into that appreciation because the brain is like Teflon for positive experiences, they go in and they go out. We don’t use Teflon anymore, I need a different word, but people used to get that. So like the coating of a non-stick pan, I will say, like those positive experiences don’t stick in our memory but the negative ones do.
So we’re really meant to remember difficult and distressing events for survival. So it’s tied to our nervous system, it’s tied to survival because basically we remember pain to avoid it but we don’t remember and hold onto positive experiences or renewing experiences. So I really have people write down a journal of things that went well today. Did anything go well today? Did you enjoy anything even if it was a glimmer?
[0:27:18.0] BP: I really like that, appreciating like the small things and finding the little things that you can enjoy can really help boost a lot of your mood and how you’re feeling all the time. When you do start to recognize those things or even recognize the tiny improvements in your recovery. Just before we were recording this I posted about going skiing and I was talking about how wonderful it was to ski and I used to, I grew up a lot doing it.
Then I had stopped and I had taken a few years off, one, because the fear of getting hurt again was a big thing for me after my concussions and the other was because I couldn’t do it. Ski hills are extremely bright with all the snow, even with goggles. And then dizziness, like I’d get really dizzy coming down a hill or I’d like stand over an edge, I’m like, “I am seeing too many things” like my brain, like the overstimulation of going down the hill was never good.
So recognizing that I can ski again is a big win but at the same time, it’s like it is something I was already able to do. So just appreciating that I can do it again and reminding myself of that really helped me because sometimes I get hard on myself. Nowadays, I don’t really deal with any symptoms. I still have my headaches, the odd time, but usually I can prevent them. But other than that, I don’t deal with any symptoms.
I get cluster headaches, which I don’t even know if they are related to my head injury anymore but other than that, everything is pretty much gone. So it is still nice to notice that my health has improved so much that I am now enjoying life like I probably would have all those years ago.
[0:29:01.1] JB: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, and one of the models I’m trained in, which is HeartMath biofeedback, their research tells us that the easiest renewing emotion to generate is appreciation. So if we can have appreciation whether that be for the small things, for people in our life, for animals, for warmth, sunny days, a plant, plants make me very happy. I’ve become a plant mom in the pandemic, so anything all that.
[0:29:28.9] BP: I’m a horrible plant mom.
[0:29:30.4] JB: You’re horrible, you can work with that. I was too.
[0:29:34.1] BP: All of them die, it’s horrible. It’s so funny.
[0:29:38.1] JB: Yeah, I think you just keep trying. You know, sometimes it’s like this challenge I present to myself. I’m like, “Okay, that one died but you know, we’ll just get a new one at the store, hope for the best.”
[0:29:49.5] BP: I do like, plants are a good thing because like if you feel like you can’t take care of anything, sometimes an easy plant is really good like something you have to water once a week because you can like remind yourself that you are still capable of things even if it is small things and I like that appreciating thing. I find going for walks, especially with my dog because I find dogs love life so much that being around her energy outdoors, especially when going for a walk through the woods is just like kind of really lightening because it is like, “You know what? Things are okay like look how excited she is just to walk out here and so if she’s that excited, I can be that happy too.” So it is like a good way to find a balance on hard days.
[0:30:35.2] JB: Yeah and just thinking of that nervous system regulation, all that, all those tools are really important. So being outside in nature is a tool for our nervous system regulation. Doing many things. Usually, I like physical things, so movement, walks and if that’s kind of an issue to you, there is always other tools that you can use, whether it is like, most people can march in place for a minute.
So doing that, most people can do that. Core workouts, sometimes you can do some core exercises and floor work if the up to down is really tough for you. So thinking of, I always say, you know, you gotta move a muscle to change a thought. It really does help because our brain needs that reset and thinking more and staying stuck where you are physically is also keeping yourself stuck emotionally.
So I often turn to thinking with those grounding skills first to help kind of get yourself out of it and then hopefully transition to the next thing, whatever it is for you in the day.
[0:31:37.5] BP: Yeah, that’s great and so we’ve talked a little bit about grief and kind of getting through it, the types of grief and kind of just getting through some of the hard days of this because there can be a lot of hard days and so is there anything else you would like to add before we end today’s episode?
[0:31:55.9] JB: Yeah, I mean I can’t talk enough about the community aspect. So, you know there is a study on mortality and it found that one of the most predictive longevity measures is belonging. And that’s different than knowing people. Feeling like you belong somewhere is super important. So finding your people and I think for folks that are struggling with their brain injury or concussion, it’s finding a support group.
It is finding a group of people who you can connect with on a weekly basis or biweekly basis, I think that frequency and that rhythm is really important because if you are feeling alone, you’re not going to feel less alone by staying in the room by yourself and the isolation that I find that’s inherent with concussion recovery, it keeps you isolated. So it does take that energy to get yourself around other survivors but it is so important.
I always hear people saying like the payback on the other end from feeling seen and known and having those relationships goes beyond the fatigue that they experienced. I don’t know if you would echo any of that as a survivor.
[0:33:07.4] BP: No, I love it. That is why I’ve talked lots on the podcast now that I created Concussion Connect, like the support community, because it’s what I needed when I was going through it and I really did need it. I felt like I was kind of like the only person on the planet going through this and obviously now social media can help you with that but I just felt like I just wanted to tell someone I wasn’t okay and I didn’t want them to get mad at me.
Because a lot of the time, my mom would ask how I’m doing, I’d be like, “You know I am not okay, stop asking,” because I was kind of a really mean teenager. It is really hard because it is like I just want to tell someone that I am actually kind of over all of this. I want them to be like, “Yeah, me too.” I don’t want them to be like, “Oh, it’s okay.”
[0:33:54.4] JB: You get burned out. You know, you get burned out from – so many people have told me, “I’m burned out from recovering. Like I am tired of going to the doctors.”
[0:34:03.2] BP: Tired of being ill.
[0:34:04.7] JB: One of my clients would tell me like, “I like you but I don’t like coming here,” and I am like, “It’s totally cool, I get it.”
[0:34:10.0] BP: Yeah. I talk about that lots too and in the support groups, we talk about that, lots of just being tired of being ill, like the exhaustion of being a patient is another exhaustion on top of brain injury and fatigue and all the types of things that come with it. So it does take a little bit. Make sure you reach out and try to find one of those communities.
Concussion Connect is always here or a local community in your area, it is always a good idea too but I just wanted to thank you so much for joining today and sharing some of your insight on grief post-concussion.
[0:34:45.5] JB: Thank you so much for having me, it was awesome.
END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:34:51.4] BP: Need more than just this podcast? Be sure to check out our website, postconcussioninc.com, to see how we can help you in your post-concussion life. From a support network to one-on-one coaching, I believe life can get better because I’ve lived through it. Make sure you take it one day at a time.
[END]
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