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Barbara Stahura and Susan B. Schuster, MA, CCC-SLP, Lash & Associates Publishing Page 1 of 5
Introduction
“ ‘What is your medicine?’ I was asked.
“‘Story. Story is my medicine,’ I answered.”
— Deena Metzger, Entering the Ghost River
Telling Your Story
As a person with a brain injury, you have been hurt and traumatized by something most people haven’t experienced and can’t understand. Whether your brain injury is the result of an accident, surgery, military service, violence, infection, medical emergency, or any other cause, you now must deal with a number of challenges you never expected or imagined. One major challenge you face is making sense of a life disrupted and perhaps altered forever. Another is being accepted as a person who still has value and whose life still holds meaning and purpose. Yet another is revealing a new self to people, perhaps even your loved ones, who don’t realize or understand the changes the injury caused in you (changes you may not understand, either). And, since every brain injury is as unique as the person who experienced it, you will face your own individual hurdles.
However, no matter how many challenges your brain injury has created for you, one thing is certain: You have a new story to tell.
Being natural-born storytellers, we humans assign meaning to everything. So, usually without realizing it, we build our lives from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Like weavers, we combine ordinary and significant events alike into stories that tell us who we are and where we belong in our world. When we answer the question, “What did you do at work/school/home today?” we are telling our story. When we describe our honeymoon in Hawaii or how we watched the polar bears at the nearby zoo, that’s a story. So is writing a letter that reveals our sorrow over death of a baby son or the quiet joy of a long-lasting love. When we dream of a desired future or struggle to understand our past, we are using storytelling to shape our lives. We also hold many unspoken stories in the deepest chambers of our hearts and spirits, some of which can embrace us like a lullaby or burn us like acid.
Creating a New Story
An injury to the magnificent, mysterious brain can upset the familiar story of a life in ways no other injury or illness can. You may face not only challenges with your physical abilities but, more essentially, you may find yourself wrestling with difficult mental and emotional changes. So much you knew about yourself — the wealth of information you depended upon to lead your life — can blur or disappear, leaving you stranded and struggling in an unknown place. You can feel as though you’ve been kidnapped to an alien planet where nothing is familiar, where you feel threatened and lost. You might even feel as though you have disappeared.
Fortunately, story can be your medicine, as Deena Metzger says. Creating a new story after your injury can allow a measure of healing (even years later), help rebuild your life, and offer much-needed hope. Like laying stones to form a path, you can use your own words and insights to guide you through a now unfamiliar world. By giving voice to your deepest self after the trauma of a brain injury, to whatever extent you are able, you can forge a new understanding.
Journaling to Tell Your Story
One powerful method of telling your own story is a simple writing technique called journaling. It allows you to express your innermost thoughts on the page, free of judgment from anyone else — and without any requirement to correct and revise your writing (journaling is not a test!). You can journal in only minutes a day, several times a week or a month, or you can spend more time. You can keep your writing private or later share it with others. You can write while you’re alone or as part of a group.
In a journaling group, participants often choose to read their entries aloud. In the small journaling groups the authors have led, we have found that this kind of sharing opens the door to companionship among the participants, whose brain injuries have often left them feeling isolated. They have told us how much more connected and valuable they feel after sharing their journal entries, since other survivors of brain injury can identify with the obstacles, challenges, and hard-won successes they write about. In addition, since the participants have reached various levels of recovery, the support also encourages the more recently injured members to keep up the good fight for recovering as much as they can.
However, whether you write on your own or in a group and whether you share your journal entries or keep them private, the important thing is that you give yourself permission to write them. Without that, your story will remain undiscovered.
The Importance of Story
"Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.”
—Roger C. Shank, cognitive scientist
“We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited,according to the interpretation of life that is our story.”
— Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story
What is a Story?
This book is titled After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story. What is story? Why is it important?
Often, “story” means pieces of writing such as science fiction or fairy tales or romance novels. But in this book, it means the story of your life, all those millions of pieces, large and small, that have gathered together to become “You.” That huge, complex story begins with the basic facts of your life: for instance, where and when you were born, your gender and ethnicity, the age of your parents and their marital status at that time, whether they died young or lived into old age, the number and ages of your siblings, whether you have a religious faith, where and when you attended school, and illnesses and injuries.
On the day you were born, you began the lifelong process of collecting and creating stories about yourself and the world. Especially in the youngest years, this is mostly an unconscious process, since your young brain basically soaks up whatever happens to and around you.
Stories of your Life
Later, you understand yourself through the filter of what you unknowingly absorbed. Far more important than the “facts” or outward events and experiences of your life are the ways your mind, heart, and spirit interpret them. Your interpretations are the stories you live by.
From After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook by Barbara Stahura and Susan B. Schuster, MA, CCC-SLP. © Lash & Associates Publishing, 2009. Used with permission. www.lapublishing.com. Learn more about Barbara Stahura and her journaling after brain injury blog.
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