"Life after brain injury chains bad news with worsening health, brief moments of feeling better, lost opportunities, increasing psychic pain, and despair ascending when medicine fails to heal, families blame us, and friends leave. Yet messaging bombards us to feel grateful, look at the bright side, and think of others. The messaging is like flinging mud at our brain injury grief, grief from having died while remaining physically alive, grief from loss upon loss upon loss."
"How can we feel when brain injury has killed off our affect? How can we feel happy when reality teaches that whatever we imagine, it'll be worse? How can we experience the emotion of joy when despair clings like gloppy mud? We can't. But joy can drive our lives. As long as we don't expect to feel joy. "Joy is not about feeling happy; it's about seeing beauty and the good, taking the next step in healing in the midst of raw pain and despair." From Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief."
Brain injury survivors endure chains of bad news: worsening health, fleeting improvements, lost opportunities, mounting psychic pain, and despair when medicine cannot heal. Families may blame survivors and friends may leave, while cultural messaging demands gratitude, positivity, and thinking of others, which intensifies grief. The grief feels like dying while physically alive, a succession of losses that blunts affect and makes authentic feeling impossible. Religious and nonreligious people share profound despair and psychic pain. Healthcare professionals often barely acknowledge this grief, so survivors must rely on self-directed strategies that are hard to implement. Joy is a state that enables seeing beauty and taking next healing steps amid raw pain.
Read at Psychology Today
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