So many couples struggle with their relationship when one of the partners involved has survived a brain injury. Often times, the ability to read others’ emotions or express their own can be damaged after a traumatic (e.g. car accident) or non-traumatic (e.g. stroke) injury. While it seems like that would be easy to recognize in your significant other, it is not so easy when you are trying to communicate your own emotions with that person or trying to get them to see your side.
This brings us to “The Theory of Mind”. The Theory of Mind refers to our ability to make inferences about someone else’s mental status or beliefs and use them to understand and predict their behaviors. For example, in the case of a fighting couple, it would be the ability of the husband to think “My wife is really angry at me and if she gets too upset then she will leave. My actions are making her think I don’t love her anymore”.
Here’s the hard part:
How do you make predictions about someone else’s behavior if your brain no longer has full recognition of emotion and/or is unable to predict consequences (e.g. cause and effect – because I didn’t acknowledge my wife’s feelings she is leaving me)?
There is SO much abstract thought and reasoning behind understanding what someone else is feeling.
I know I sound like a broken record and I stand by this being the NUMBER ONE place to start when dealing with changes in your life because of a brain injury:
Communication!
You have to open up and talk about it! For something like feelings, when feelings are often an area that someone with a brain injury does not know how to interpret or even know where to start, we have to take great care in how we go about the business of working through relationship conflicts.
Here are a few ideas to get you started and things to remember while you’re figuring out the best way to communicate within your relationship after a brain injury:
1. Use direct and simple language to define your emotions to the other person. Use terms like:
Sad
Angry/Mad
Happy
Scared
Start from a place where there is little to no room for interpretation.
2. Be as upfront and open as possible. It is never safe to assume that another person understands what you are feeling and the same is true when you are trying to communicate with someone after a brain injury. They are not always able to reason through why you would be upset or how YOU feel because their own self-regulation or ability to evaluate how they are feeling or how their emotions correlate to their actions has been injured.
If we can’t identify feelings within ourselves or how an action makes us feel, our brains do not have the social awareness to understand those things outside of us.
The further away from “me”, the more abstract the concept. It can be helpful to walk them through how it might make THEM feel and then begin to expand to your own current emotional state.
Because the brain can often be egocentric after a brain injury, it can be important to start from a concrete standpoint and then relate it to something or someone outside of the person with the injury.
3. Start slow and walk away when you need to. Often, trying not to get upset when you are feeling upset will only make things worse.
Tell them: “I want to keep talking about this with you, but I need some time to calm down”.
Humans are not perfect and sometimes, regardless of having a brain injury or not, it is hard to regulate our reactions and that’s ok.
Agree on a time when you will talk about it together, that way your partner has a clear idea of when it will be addressed and you will be ready to have the patience to help them reason through it.
You don’t have to be perfect all the time - we talk a lot about how to make a good environment for the person living with the injury, but it is just as important to set yourself up for success.
4. Remember, they aren’t doing it on purpose. It can be difficult because you probably knew the person they were before their injury and often families forget that things are different now. While it is understandable to get frustrated – caregiver burden is real – it is not ok to take out your frustration on the person who is trying to navigate their new life after brain injury. Chances are, they are even angrier at the loss of who they were before their injury than you are.
You’re a team, you just need to learn a new playbook.
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