Something that both brain injury survivors and their loved ones learn all too quickly; when our brains are tired, we can’t process well and lose our ability to communicate effectively. There are times when my day has reached a saturation point for my emotional stability and my overall ability to communicate effectively. Such an event happened to us recently, and it produced hurt feelings from my wife (we weren’t married then, but we’re married now!) and, at the time it happened, left me feeling mistreated.
The reality is that I wasn’t being treated poorly, I was simply being engaged in conversation…but that’s how it felt to me at the time. Let’s back up to the start of this story…
My Current Reality
Here’s the reality, I am one of the very blessed TBI survivors. Yes, I went through many changes in the first few years, but at this point I feel like I’ve stabilized and even regained some of what was lost. Not all of it, but some of it.
I’m not who I was before my injury, but I’m greatly improved over where I was four years ago. While certain stimuli can occasionally connect me to bits and pieces of lost long-term memories, I still have very little memory of my life before this TBI. My working memory now allows me to hold on to passwords and number sequences long enough to type them in without having to double-check (most of the time). My emotional stability is greatly improved, but I still have my moments that can be impacted by high-demand requirements or over-stimulation.
A Tough Friday
The week before my wedding was a very challenging week at work. I’ve been assigned a number of high-priority, high-visibility projects. I’m expected to keep my leadership teams apprised of project status throughout the week, all the way up to the executive level, with reports, meetings, and email communications. This type of demand on my brain isn’t met without cost, and by the end of that week I was completely exhausted.
As I sat down with Marcie, she was excited and engaged in our home remodeling project and was talking with me about requirements, scheduling, and decisions that we needed to start finalizing – and I simply couldn’t keep up. I was overwhelmed and because of my overwhelmed state I was unable to recognize what was happening in my mind. I quickly became agitated and defensive, so I wasn’t able to respond to her in the ways that I should have. As I saw her hurt response to me, I started to take inventory of the situation and realized what was happening. At this point, both of us were upset, so me asking if we could please postpone discussions until the next day was poorly delivered and not well accepted.
What Happened?
Here’s what happened… I didn’t recognize the state I was in and I failed to give her fair warning. If I had taken stock in my own mental state before I sat down to talk with her, I could have shared this with her before I hurt her feelings. Marcie knows me very well, and when I’m struggling with brain fatigue, she limits her level of engagement with me to avoid overwhelming me. But this is where the understanding that this is an invisible injury really comes into play.
I walked into the room smiling and hugged her. We sat down in front of the fire and started talking. She had, at that point, received zero indicators that I was experiencing a high level of brain fatigue, so she engaged me with all the energy and excitement she was feeling inside. I tried to keep up, but we were about ten minutes into our talk before my struggle was evidenced by mild stuttering and the dreaded aphasia (inability to find words we know). By this time, I was getting agitated and defensive, and I took it out on her. It wasn’t until I saw the hurt in her eyes that I was able to look past my own struggle to see what was actually happening.
That’s when I apologized, tried to coherently explain the situation in my brain, and asked her if we could please continue the discussion in the morning. This is a wonderful thing about Marcie: she immediately reassessed all that was happening and agreed to wait for this talk. That’s not to say her feelings hadn’t been hurt, they had – and even that evening, I realized it could have been avoided so easily.
What Should Have Happened
As the saying goes…hindsight is 20/20. I’m now able to clearly see how I could have avoided the whole situation and the resulting hurt feelings: by telling her about he brain fatigue I was feeling that wasn’t visible through the smile on my face when we first sat down.
If I’d started out by telling her how I was feeling and warning her that I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with anything too engaging, she’d have felt some disappointment about postponing the things she wanted to discuss and we’d have just had casual conversations for the rest of that evening. But I wouldn’t have hurt her feelings with unjustified defensive behaviors.
My Takeaway
My takeaway here is that giving my wife fair warning when I’m feeling a high level of brain fatigue is an absolute requirement in our relationship. I do not want to hurt her feelings just because my brain is exhausted, and I can’t process an engaging conversation. Instead, I want to practice being cognizant of how I’m feeling and keep in mind that I don’t have a sign on my forehead showing my mental state. If I walk into the room with the smile that she always seems to inspire, give her a hug, and tell her that I love her – how can she possibly know that I’m suffering from brain fatigue?
It’s my responsibility to let her know before my behavior results in hurt feelings.
Hi Rod. I am enjoying your blog very much. I am a survivor, TBI was 2005. I really enjoyed this post. Sometimes, reading a fellow survivors testimony is liking reading my own journal. Nice Work.
Thank you, Andrew, for your comments and for reading this blog. I know just what you mean, as I read other blogs and articles that sometimes feel like I could have written about the very same experiences.
I wish you all the best, and a hope your experience is full of healing and recovery.