After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook

A brain injury is a sudden, discombobulating, life-altering experience. The survivor faces a mix of intractable physical, cognitive, communication, emotional, behavioral, and/or social challenges. She easily can be overwhelmed with anger, grief, and/or depression. These negative emotions can delay or prevent the resourcefulness and resolve the survivor needs to create a full and rewarding new life.

One healthy way to address these negative emotions is through journaling. As described by Barbara Stahura and Susan B. Schuster in their book After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, journaling is a way to “explore all aspects of your life and the emotions connected to them.” Journaling, they write, can lead to “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing, change, and growth.”

After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook

By Barbara Stahura & Susan B. Schuster

Lash & Associates Publishing/Training Inc., 2009

ISBN: 978-1-931-11752-4

In this book, Stahura and Schuster clearly explain how both survivors of a brain injury and their caregivers can use journaling to better understand themselves and to propel their recovery to new heights.

Journaling appears to be a simple task. Sit down with a pencil and paper or with a keyboard and let the words flow, without interruption, without censor, without stopping, and without the fear of what others may think. The insights you can gain from this self-examination, however, are far from simple. This stream of consciousness form of writing can reveal invaluable insights that will allow you to better understand yourself and to guide you toward a more rewarding life.

To get you started, Stahura and Schuster provide a comprehensive, well-constructed set of prompts that guide you through the processes of understanding your brain injury, coping with the significant loss and changes you’ve experienced, exploring your relationships with family and friends, overcoming the anger and grief that may be holding you back, examining your efforts to reenter the community, and living the rest of your life with a brain injury.

Following the authors’ instructions and prompts, I spent a few hours journaling and was surprised and pleased with the results. It can be scary to allow yourself to let your emotions overflow onto paper. But, as the authors explain, keeping these emotions trapped inside is unhealthy. Releasing them can be a tremendous relief.

Finally, I often am asked by survivors how they can begin to tell their story. Usually, I refer them to a few of my favorite survivor memoirs. Now, I’ll also refer them to After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story. I also will encourage anyone who is struggling to cope with their brain injury to get a copy of this valuable resource and start writing.

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