Wisdoms

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Welcome to the Wisdoms folder

In this folder you will find stories by and about individuals and families who have been to The Bouverie Family Centre.  These stories were given to the Wisdoms’ folder as a gift to people like you, in the hope that they will either bring inspiration or hope or just a feeling that you are not alone.

Included are stories from children, adolescents, mothers, fathers, families, people who have experienced abuse (sexual, emotional, physical), families experiencing a member with an acquired brain injury or a mental illness and so on. 

These stories were sometimes co-written with the therapist and sometimes written by the family or individual on their won.

We hope that this collection of experiences will grow and grow! We believe families who have had to deal with and resolve significant problems, whatever these may be, are in a good position to help others struggling with similar difficulties.

Perhaps after reading a story in this folder, and because you too have something to tell another family or individual in a similar position to yourself, you will want to include your story.  If you do feel you have a story to tell, please talk to your family counsellor.  They will be most willing to help you in any way you may wish. 

Here are some questions you might consider as you read the stories:
1.    In what way, if any, does this story touch you?
2.    What, if anything, might you take away with you that you could try to do or think about in relation to your own life?
3.    What questions, if any, does this story raise for you?

Warm Regards,

The Bouverie Staff


 

Table of contents

Table of Contents [hide]
    1. Love means being able to let go
    2. Shattered lives
    3. The monster in my head is a contast battle to keep under control
    4. My Journey

 

Love means being able to let go

My husband, Jack decided to re pursue an interest in motorbikes after a lapse of many decades. He had scrabbled bikes in his hey day.

One beautiful summer day, our peaceful farm was disturbed when Jack was riding back to our picnic spot on his bike.  My three children and I saw my husband and his bike launch into the air like a catapult and land on the ground. I ran to him with my baby in my arms fearing that he was dead. I knew that he had to have been hurt- no one could survive that kind of launch, unscathed. That event will be imprinted in my life forever and has significantly impacted on our lives. My husband is alive but he is brain damaged, he has an acquired brain injury. It has been such a great tragedy.

I have had to follow my gut instincts. I have had to hang in there and believe in myself. Mostly, getting practical help sorted out has been important. Communication with professionals, educating people about ABI while learning more about it myself. I have accessed support systems to reduce stress and pressure., to learn about ABI, about suicidality, about carer's stress. I have had to make sure I can allow time to spend with my family. I have learned to ask questions and keep asking questions. Look , ask , listen, learn until you know. Nobody else knows what your situation is, they just think they do.  I now avoid "small brains and long tongues"-I have no time for them anyway. I have to keep going.

Yes life is tough. Tragic things happen. I see events as challenges and try to negotiate and overcome them, try to anticipate. It has also meant learning to let go. This I have done, to plan and protect myself, my children my future. I try to stay positive. I know that life will never be the same again. I aim for a win/win situation. I try to find a way that this tragedy will enrich all in the long term. I try to look at the big picture, sit back and view the short term as well as medium and long term.

To others that might find themselves in a similar situation, keep knocking on doors, don't bang your head on the brick wall, but even bricks can be moved in time. Take time out for yourself, learn stress management, learn to go into neutral when dealing with a crisis. Watch and learn. Keep up with your children in their different ages and stages to help them move through the trauma and struggles.

Be aware that ABI's network of friends will change-so be ready to have to LET GO of many different things and people.

 

Shattered lives

Accident: a misfortune or mishap, especially one causing injury or death…

Elaine: Age 17
However it wasn’t quite that simple in my case. For me, the ‘accident’ resulted in my parents’ divorce and an ongoing battle for a normal life.

The period of time between the accident and the divorce was equal to, if not more traumatic than, the time succeeding the divorce. ‘Family’ life comprised of years of both physical and emotional abuse. The accident affected three children and both parents and commenced in December 1986.

The weekend before my younger sister’s fourth birthday, my mother was involved in a severe road accident. A semi-trailer ploughed directly into the driver’s side of the door of the van she was driving. The accident resulted in 6 1/2 weeks of a coma, what’s now called a brain injury, 5 1/2 months of hospitalisation, intensive physiotherapy and a lifetime of change for five people.

My father and my older brother did not handle the accident very well. My brother didn’t even visit Mom in hospital.

The resulting divorce came after four years of compromise from all parties involved. Dad needed help looking after us kids so my Aunt and Uncle moved on with us. Even though Dad knew he needed the help he resented being dependent on others. After 6 years my brother, at the age of 16, moved out. He was unable to cope with the immense change, not only in Mom but in the whole family situation. My brother’s attitude to the change made Dad very angry and I think because my brother was the eldest, Dad thought it was alright to take his anger out on him, both physically, verbally and emotionally.

I was the middle child, which made me next in line. My brother had learned that abuse was alright, even acceptable, so I became his point of release. I’ve tried hard to control my anger around my sister, although it has been difficult. I have never hit her. I have only recently been able to admit that what dad and my brother did was wrong- and that it was NOT my fault.

For ten years I have blamed myself for everything that has happened since the accident- everything has to be someone’s fault……right?I think blame has been a big issue for my family since the accident. A lot of the bad feelings between families, as in my experience, comes from everybody blaming each other for things that cannot be controlled. I must admit though, learning not to blame is very difficult.

My relationship with Mom has suffered severely as a result of the blame I placed on her for having the accident, which started the whole snowball effect. Dad left because she ‘changed’. The last thing he said to her before he left was, ‘you’ve changed too much, I can’t live with you anymore.’

My brother and I blame each other for a lot of things. My low self-esteem and low self-confidence are partly a result of his emotional abuse. I think he was jealous of the relationship between Dad and I and for this reason he put me down constantly.
I was either ‘dumb’ or ‘ugly’. When you are told things like that all of your life you start to believe them.

Most of all I blame myself for not being able to handle everything. I know I shouldn’t but I still believe that I must have done something wrong to deserve this kind of punishment.

It’s been six years since I have spoken to Dad- longer since I have spoken to the rest of his family. Dad’s sister has since had a son whom I have never met. Dad now lives somewhere else. He bought a caravan park with his new fiance and her two daughters. I have just contacted him for the first time and that is causing all the old scars to resurface.

I have had an ‘on again, off again’ type of relationship with my brother. At the moment he lives in my suburb with his girlfriend. We don’t speak very often.

I left home late January and since then my relationship with Mom and my sister has entered a new phase, a good phase I hope.

I tried to hurt myself when Dad left. I thought if I wasn’t around then no one could hurt me anymore. It’s a little different now. I still cry myself to sleep at night sometimes, but now my boyfriend’s there to console me. Having someone to love ME is invaluable. But my experiences make it hard to trust my boyfriend. Sometimes I think he’ll leave too. I’m learning not to talk about my feelings and to trust the people who care about me, but it’s a slow process.

Things are still changing, the pain will probably never cease entirely. Ten years later and it still affects my life. A simple mishap or misfortune, resulting in an injury. Believe me it does not stop there.

Elaine, Age: 22
 It got worse before it got better! But now I have a beautiful daughter, Amy, age 3 and a loving partner. I talk to my mum everyday (pathetic, I know). My sister and I take turns to call each other almost every week and my brother drops by whenever he gets a break from work. I spent the holidays with Dad and we are having somewhat of a family Christmas this year.

It still hurts to think about things too much and don’t get me wrong it will never be perfect but whose life is? Things get better, situations change. All I can say is hang in there for as long as it takes and stay open to new possibilities.

The monster in my head is a contast battle to keep under control

1982
I remember looking in the mirror that night and thinking "Well you look as good as you can look. Great eyes!" Age 22.

BANG BANG BANG
I remember bits of the accident. I still see the car. When I woke up, I woke up a different person. It wasn't just the way I looked. That was hard enough. It was something inside. The pain was unbearable.
For years and years and years I asked my mum if I was insane or just mental. Did I have something wrong inside my head? Did the doctors say to anybody that my head had been damaged on the inside. Spinal injuries, loss of one eye, massive facial injuries. I didn't realise until after how close I came to losing my freedom.

1997
Here I am at the hospital again. Another sad attempt on my sanity and life. This time I am locked up with people with mental illnesses. Here, in the psychiatric hospital, I was diagnosed with acquired brain injury (ABI)-15 years after my accident. I was shocked and relieved. Finally, after all these years of just thinking I was just mental. Finally they could tell me why! My mother to this day blames herself for my ABI not being diagnosed. My teenage daughter finds it hard to understand my ABI. She says I am just a psycho. My husband left me and my youngest daughter was six years old at the time. He could not live with the fact that I had ABI.  He preferred to think of me as a bit mad. I look at 1997 as my year of hard knocks. I needed help and thanks to some wonderful organisations that exist to help us (all of us with ABI) I got the help and support that I needed.

Life now for us is completely different. I am off all medication at last and I have started to discover that although I have an ABI I can do so much to help myself.  A big one still for me is to try not to act on my impulses.  My youngest daughter and I have a good relationship and we find it easy to be together.  To me this is a very new thing.
We were lucky enough to be involved in a program called Journeys. It gave us a chance to meet and get to know other ABI sufferers and their families. I learnt a lot by hearing and seeing that I wasn't the only one who had problems keeping and maintaining a relationship with anyone.

Each day is a little less painful as I learn to use strategies to get through the day. I try and stay busy. I have even started to do a bit of voluntary work in an office. Luckily the other girls who work there have endless patience and when I make a mistake I ask for help. I would never have asked before. I would have sat there until somebody noticed and then I would have been too embarrassed and probably never gone back.

ABI doesn't mean idiocy, stupidity or that the sufferers need to be treated like children. I believe that we all remember WHO we were before ABI and WHAT we were before ABI.  ABI may have robbed us of the best years of life but we survived.

For me I would also like to think that although life instantly changes, take time to get to know the new person and try not to confuse old and new. Fifteen years I spent trying to be the "me" I grew up with. Now I realise she is gone and now I can survive.

ABI affects every facet of your own and family's life for ever- in a million huge and little ways.

My Journey

I still remember quite clearly the words that changed our lives. We were sitting in the office of a neurosurgeon and he was looking at the brain scan my husband had the previous day. He studied it only briefly and then pointed to a huge white area on the film “see that mass......it shouldn’t be there”.
 
From that moment on, we were thrown into a whirlpool of hospitals, specialists and MRI scans. Our lives were no longer our own as we were at the mercy of when doctors could fit us in and when hospital rooms became available. Of course this was a frightening time for us. I was six months pregnant with our first child and was planning to finish work in a few months.
 
Over the next three months we went from surgery to intensive care to a normal hospital room then rehab. We had our setbacks and huge worries however tried to stay as positive as we could manage. I remember my husband getting one particular visitor who couldn’t stop crying at the sight of him looking so sick and frail in bed. I was very impressed that he summoned up the energy to tell them that if they couldn’t stop crying, could they please leave. 
 
 Within six months of the operation, he was back at work full-time. The medication he was on made him tired and his thinking was a little slow but he seemed to be on the road to a full recovery.   However, as time went on it became apparent that things really weren’t okay. He was getting increasingly stressed at work, finding difficulty in getting certain tasks completed and feeling tired constantly.
 
It was about one year after his operation that it was obvious he could no longer work in his current job. The stress level was too high and it also seemed that he was under scrutiny for his work performance as if others considered him to be “brain deficient” in some way. Whilst the sympathy we received after the diagnosis and immediate recovery seemed quite genuine, the long term reaction of many colleagues was very different. If he made any mistake, no matter how small, his performance was questioned immediately.
 
I wasn’t prepared for what unfolded over the next two years. He had a few job changes and I started to notice that he wasn’t as happy as usual. At the time I put it down to the pressures of work and the part-time university course he had started. The low mood continued and I was getting increasingly frustrated at the silence I had to endure and his constant tiredness. We had just had our second child and I was finding it much more difficult to deal with two babies and a non-responsive husband.
 
There were days when he said he was just too tired to get out of bed and we thought again it was medication affecting him. It was only when I saw something on TV about depression that it occurred to me we might be dealing with something more serious. The day I found him sitting at his computer in a daze, unable to put words on a page to complete his uni assignment was when I knew we had a problem. Our local GP referred him to a psychologist and this started our journey of psychologists, psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals.
 
Depression has been far worse than the brain tumor. With the tumor, there was an end in sight and a known recovery phase. The depression we have experienced has been a cycling depression that means he has periods of seemingly “normal mood” then periods of depression. Sometimes the mood swings last months, sometimes days and sometimes weeks. Just when there seems to be a pattern to it all, it will change again. There seems to be no real trigger for it and there is no way of knowing when the good/bad cycles are going to switch. Unfortunately due to his brain surgery, this is not a typical bipolar depression or anything the specialists can put a name to. We are just told that it will eventually be managed with counselling and medication.
 
The effect this has had on our family has been enormous – putting tremendous strain on our relationship. On more than one occasion I have thought it would be better for everyone if I left with the children so they didn’t have to experience their father’s moods.
 
I struggled for many months and started to feel that I too was heading towards depression. We attended counselling sessions together and separately and I found these an incredibly liberating way to vent frustrations and feelings without the associated guilt that you often put on yourself for feeling a particular way. I relinquished simple tasks that I resented doing and I felt a sense of freedom to not have them in my life any more. From this point on, my husband was in charge of his own medication, his own doctor’s appointments and his own schedule. I was surprised by how willingly he took on these tasks and how able he was to do them. I had been thinking that unless I did everything, things would fall apart but it just wasn’t the case.
 
The next major change I decided to make was to start to try to look on the bright side of things. Depression affects everyone in close proximity in such a negative way. When you are with a depressed person it is very easy to get drawn into the frustration and despair they display without actually realising it. My response each time my husband got depressed again was generally anger. I was so angry at the situation – angry at him, angry at the disease and angry that I was stuck in such a relentless situation.
 
So I changed. I figured I could go through the rest of my life angry or I could try something different. From that point on, every time I felt angry I thought to myself “is this really how I want to feel?” and made a conscious decision to cheer up. I would wake each morning thankful that I had a husband who loved and cared for me as much as he did. I would thank God for my beautiful children and my own good health. Rather than focus on the negatives like “we have no money to fix the house” I would be thankful for the fact that we had a house to live in. And so it would go on. It was hard to start with but the more I did this, the easier it became.
 
We still have our good and bad days. The bad days are getting less severe and it does get easier to see the bright side of things once you really try. Exercise, time away on my own and spending time on my hobbies have helped me through the really bad times. Friends and family are generally very willing to help out when things are tough and I now take advantage of this whenever I can so I can have some “me time”. I love just getting out on my own, having a coffee or sitting in a park and meditating for a while. Sometimes all I need is half an hour to reset myself and I come back home feeling much better.
 
I am forever hopeful that given time, my husband won’t suffer the depressive episodes at all. As time goes on, he seems to be managing his health better but I think it is something we will always have to be conscious of. He will always need to be mindful of his nutrition and exercise as these two things definitely seem to contribute to his overall state of mind.
 
We are lucky to have been given this important lesson so early in our lives. Many people don’t realise until it’s too late. Life is very short and you have to value every precious moment that you are given. We have reassessed our life and health in ways we would not have done otherwise. We have our vegetable garden in the backyard, shop at farmer’s markets, eat organic food and ensure we get regular exercise and incorporate meditation in our lives. Our lives prior to the brain tumor and depression were very stressed and included much more fast food and minimal exercise. I am thankful that our situation has taught us to value our health and we can pass this lifestyle on to our children. It has made us realise that we have a lot to be thankful for and you really don’t have to look too hard to find it.