The course is very good, well structured and run by a psychoanalyst and a psychologist. It's not what I thought it would be and still hav'nt figured out what's going on. I am the only BI on the course.
There are a number of exercises that we have learnt so far which includes focusing attention in a variety of ways, in quiet non thought, quiet thought and in focused thought. You practice the exercises over a week and come back and discuss whats happening and are there any changes in life that has been noticed.
Over the weeks so far I have seen that I can get into a 'state' that's good, blocking out all the chaos, the so called ground state. So during the day now when everything gets jumbled and I'm trying to remember what I'm doing I just stop and adopt this state. Then try to continue what I was doing but in a more focused way. It lasts for a while then the chaos returns without noticing. Apparently if you continue, the focused state gets neurally imprinted and then becomes the norm over a period of time.
The next exercise is called the body scan where you go through the body focusing on various aspects. The same scan every time, as one member of the group said it drives you mad because it's so boring. It is boring and does drive you mad and makes the mind wander. There seems to be no logic behind this scan it's excruciating and does twist the mind. Anyway last week doing this exercise a memory popped into my head from the early days after my BI, I'm screaming inside my head, there's pressure over my head like a vice, everything is so bright and I'm turning round and round in a tight circle over and over, there's no thought about it just round and round with a head full of terror. So I bring this up in the group last night and no one says a word just stares at me. Lead Balloon.
The psychologist had a chat with me later, I said that I was fine and that I have had other memories in a similar vein and it's now quite normal and walking into my house can feel like entering a house of horrors. She said that the exercise was designed to be uncomfortable to bring thoughts to the surface. She said a BI can be traumatising, however she said, can you just e.mail me if you continue to have them and not bring them up in the group.
I'm sort of wondering if maybe I'm having some kind of melt down. This is happening quite a lot but I'm also having really lucid good feeling times as well. Another member of the group spoke to me later and said he works in psyciatric services, he's doing the course to assess it's effectiveness, he asked if I was getting psychological help with the BI. I said I'm not, but have asked the brain injury unit to talk about some of the experiences. I've had one session where nothing was really said and I was given loads of sheets of information on tip of how to find your keys etc.
Do other people here get a chance to talk through their experiences of BI with their BI service?
While reading your post, on a subject that interests me, mindfulness, I nearly choked. The sentence I read was "She said a BI can be traumatising, however she said, can you just e.mail me if you continue to have them and not bring them up in the group."
Did she really tell you not to bring up your experiences in the group, or was that your conclusion from what she said? The purpose of the group is to share and support ALL attendees (and not just those without a BI), that is what surprised me when I read this sentence.
Background to why she said it
The reason mindfulness teachers are taught to treat with caution expressions of mania are because of the strict 'heath and safety' laws in the UK otherwise known as covering their backsides in case a condition was deemed to be made permanently worse by following mindfulness practice and that person sues the mindfulness teacher.
There was a study published by Graeme Yorston ( Yorston, G. (2001). Mania precipitated by meditation: a case report and literature review. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 4(2), 209-213). It discussed a case report where a young lassie of 25 years old attended a weekend yoga course that encouraged psychological release. She telephoned her instructor frequently, often in the middle of the night, offering undying love. After she pushed her arm through a window and had minor lacerations.
She had been associated with a Zen Buddhist retreat for two years. Two months after entering a Zen Buddhist retreat (often not talking and spent in silence), she exhibited "distorted" behaviour and was given all the drugs for manic episodes. Her mental state settled over 8 weeks and she re-entered the Buddhist retreat.
I can only conclude that she personally did not feel that meditation was detrimental to her health otherwise she would not have re-entered the retreat. Yet psychiatrists (sceptical of eastern approaches and indeed any approach other than their own) concluded that all meditation must carry a high risk of mania in some individuals.
The depth this lassie was embracing of the mindfulness experience was a 24/7 for months in an austere (probably sleeping on a wooden plank for a bed to induce sleeplessness), luxury deprived, sound deprived, talking deprived environment.
And NOT a one night per week mindfulness session for a couple of hours.
If anyone knows of another case where meditation precipitated mania, I'd be grateful to read it.
Pink Visions experience
Pink Vision wrote "The next exercise is called the body scan where you go through the body focusing on various aspects. The same scan every time, as one member of the group said it drives you mad because it's so boring. It is boring and does drive you mad and makes the mind wander. There seems to be no logic behind this scan it's excruciating and does twist the mind. Anyway last week doing this exercise a memory popped into my head from the early days after my BI, I'm screaming inside my head, there's pressure over my head like a vice, everything is so bright and I'm turning round and round in a tight circle over and over, there's no thought about it just round and round with a head full of terror. So I bring this up in the group last night and no one says a word just stares at me. Lead Balloon."
The purpose of body scan is to bring into conscious awareness that which our autonomic nervous system usually manages on a day to day basis within the subconscious experience without the conscious daily routine having to deal with 100% sensory input.
You have 5 sense inputs and 2 sensory integration facilities which the brain cleverly transposes into communicable memories.
The 5 are: Sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch.
The 2 are: Vestibular (perception of gravity, movement and balance) and Proprioception (sense of position of neighbouring parts of the body employed in movement).
During body scan, you found a stored memory. The reason it revealed itself to you is because when you experienced it, you did not synthesize it but boxed it to deal with it later. It is a normal human coping mechanism often associated with grief, shock and loss. I hope they advised you how to let it go. There are various methods. If not, message me.
Pink Vision wrote "She said that the exercise was designed to be uncomfortable to bring thoughts to the surface."
The exercise is designed to bring awareness of all the locked down areas we have boxed during our lifetimes and as an adult without a BI, an average normal human being has many. These boxed areas steal our energy resilience, otherwise known as baggage, and once released, can make a person more confident with a greater self knowledge, understanding and acceptance.
I was a meditation teacher before my BI so I naturally used it as a tool to heal my BI once my memory remembered I was a meditation teacher!!!
There have been many on the headway forum here who have benefit from talking about their BI in a counselling environment, either privately or through a recognised provider. May I add the Samaritans are most excellent at just listening and using a "clean language" approach to feed back to you what you said to help with acknowledgement of the newly realised shock of unpacking a box of sensory input post BI.
Each person has a personal preference for the best approach for them in dealing with emotions related to a BI. Some do art, others poems, some talk, some sing, some walk, some meditate. We are all beautiful individuals discovering the awesomeness of the human brain despite the surprises that life hands us.
Pink Vision I hope this has been of some help and that you continue to regularly breathe into a return to 'that state' where peace and calm reside and make it a habit so that "all suffering in you ceases".
Youtube : The Great Bell Chant (The End Of Suffering) | 1hour
Hi Thanks for your response, I think the 'teacher' would have liked to have had the chance of discussing it with me first, for my benefit rather than me just blurt it out. The group was definitely stunned by it and I did feel very embarrassed after. I expressed to the teacher today that for me it was a good experience. I realised that It had been such a hard battle to get a medical diagnosis and that up to that time I had become obsessed in understanding what was happening to me and how I could recover. I never took time to process the actual events in the first year after the accident. My NHS authority is in a bad state and I did'nt get to see anyone for a long time and I never had a chance to talk the bad experiences through. I think there is a lot of stored up trauma / angst and at some point it's going to come out. The post is not a critisism of the teacher at all, it's more about how things come out and as was experienced was like a lead balloon. I, we need to remember (as it has hit home for me today) that other people may find the experiences of brain injury disturbing, because I had become obsessed I only saw myself and did not consider other people and also what kind of pressure I put on the teacher.
It was good for me because I realised my obsession and now I must make an effort to stop grinding and grinding on and on and look around me, live life a little. I have been so stressed and anxious lately, everything has been getting to me and it seems to just keep piling up. This experience has said to me 'just stop', draw a line, 'TAKE A BREATH' and let it all go.
I need to do something to help with my cognitive skills, i've started a uni course in September and am finding that this had been affected with my Subrachniod Haemorrage i had in November 2018. Physically im mended but now relising mentally i'm struggling.
Hi Chrissy I think this problem is greatly over-looked or misunderstood. There does not seem to be much discussion on this forum about neural regeneration, either in thoughts on it or methods of how to 'reprogram' yourself.
Many people hint on the idea of it via discussions on 'loss of the old self'. This precisely highlights the issue because the 'old self' is the accumulation of experience stored in neural networks. This is formed throughout a persons life. A person is the accumulation of experience in effect (consciousness is a totally different subject) and a brain injury damages the neural networks either physically or functionally. A person can never re-experience exactly their previous life so that old life is subsequently lost. It has been scientifically shown on many occasions that meditative techniques coupled with new experience followed by practice, practice, practice physically alters the structure of the brain via the generation of new neural networks. So in effect if you target your meditation and practice of experiences you can regenerate the areas you feel have been lost. You can also add desired functions through the same process. That is what learning is all about, it is hard and takes time.
This is the view I have had and have obsessively been building myself back up. The first thing I tried was improving my 3D vision and spacial awareness. With this I leaned at the same time focused and attention based meditation. The technique was to visualise meditatively an action that I was going to do (in my case it was to learn to balance and walk along an old railway line, in effect tightrope walking). The visualisation itself stimulates a rudimentary neural network and the action of the 'tightrope walking hardens that network, then after re-visualise the process to cement it in even more. Then keep repeating this process. I started with 3 steps and now can walk hundreds of metres on a good day. I have 3D vision and my spacial awareness is normal again. So it works.
I also then applied this to written communication by learning to type on a keyboard and keep journaling my day to day thoughts and memories and what my future events were. I did this everyday for 8 weeks and found it improved attention, concentration, memory, written structure, context, organisation etc. It also filtered out into other areas of daily activity.
There seems to be a side effect to doing this and that is when you start doing it you get tired and crash and it takes about 3-5 days to recover properly but when you do recover you notice that you are 'better' in brain activity than you were before, this cycle goes on and on and on but the recovery also goes on and on and on. You also feel that you improve throuout your whole system.
Another thing to mention here and it is very important, these processes become obsessive and you fight on and on and on and at some point you start having melt-downs regularly. I have been going through this and it affects your behaviour and thinking and you don't understand what is happening. I learned through a mindfulness course recently that I had driven myself so much to recover that I had forgot the psychological effects of the BI itself and of the obsessive behaviour. I am now dealing with that.
Hope this has not been too long, I can say that these methods have worked for me but you have to put the effort in and stay focused on the end result. It may be a good idea, if you are going to try some of this, to remember the psychological aspect. Another thing to point out is that people in general don't understand brain injury and if you go to an organised meditation group you may horrify other people and the organiser may think you are having some kind of traumatic break drown but you know you are not. They can have an over reaction. But I say do it, sod them, think about yourself and recovery. (oooo so that's what I really think!) HaHa.
Dear Pinkvision, hope you are well, thanks very much for sharing your experience; "Inspirable , could you please let me know; "where+how could I enjoy this group +do I need a medical refferal? ??,which the fully address please! !!really need it! !!
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Vision after TBI, ABI, Stroke etc explained.
