Yesterday I wrote and published Traumatic Brain Injury and Defining Success. In that article I discussed several notions that I believe undermine and undercut our ability to define and experience success for ourselves as individuals living with brain injuries. I would invite you to listen to and watch this video presentation of the article. Below is a brief excerpt from the article.
“In my experience I have found that there are several traps that can leave you and I feeling like we are failures. We can be led to believe that because of our brain injuries that we are failures, because of what happened to us. Consequently, we may find ourselves focusing on what we can not change (what happened to us), instead of making peace with what happened to us and getting on with our lives. As a result, we may find ourselves feeling trapped by the notion that we are now helpless, hopeless and contained within a model of recovery that fosters secondary gains, secondary dependencies and seeks to control and contain us.
In response, we may find ourselves buying into the notion that we are victims of our circumstances, subservient to a patriarchal system that communicates to us that we are unable to make empowering choices, for ourselves; to express our capabilities to create and enhance our lives as individuals living with brain injuries as well as the lives of those with in the brain injury community.
Another trap that we may find ourselves falling into is believing that we are failures because our lives are not marked by opulence. That we are failures because our station in life, be it disabled by societies standards; does not give us the means to be able to acquire or possess what society considers to be measures of success. In response, we may have people in our lives who, subsequently; patronize who we are as individuals and by their attitudes minimize, marginalize, dismiss and discount who we are as individuals. We may subsequently find ourselves buying into the notion that our lives are of little significance and value, beyond the ability to acquire societal measures of success. We may subsequently find ourselves undercut by notion that we can not be successful.”
To listen to and watch the video presentation of the article, you may click on the following link: Traumatic Brain Injury and Defining Success Video Presentation
To read the article from which this video presentation is made, you may click on the following link: Traumatic Brain Injury and Defining Success
You have my permission to share my articles and or video presentations with anyone you believe could benefit, however please attribute me as being the author of the article (s) video presentation (s), and provide a link back to the article (s) on Second Chance to Live. In the event that you have questions, please send those questions to me. All questions are good questions. Thank you. I look forward to hearing from you.Copyright 2007-2015.
Leave a Reply