Whether you are right at the start of your journey of living with a brain injury, or you are years down the line, it's so important to know and understand the possible behavioural and speech difficulties that you may come across following a brain injury, and how you can manage these. How you may have reacted to certain situations before may look very different to how you react now, and the way you communicate may have also changed. There are good reasons for this!
There are times when I am really aware that I have missed a word out of my sentence and the word won't come out, or I've said the wrong word and I can't go back to saying the right word. There was something that happened years ago and I remember it being the first time I was ever aware of it, I was trying to say "I need to close the curtains" but I said "I need to close the door". I was really really aware that I just could not say the word curtains, it just would not come out, and it's a word that I am obviously very familiar with. ~ Mark
Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties
It can sometimes be hard to pinpoint exactly what can cause these difficulties, these emotional and behavioural changes can feel like they come out of nowhere, but quite often are caused by
damage to the parts of your brain that control your emotions and behaviour. These can
also be impacted by a variety of other things such as:
Fatigue
Fatigue is one of the biggest challenges after a brain injury, and this can definitely be a contributing factor as to why your mood can suddenly take a downturn. A person living with brain injury has to use much more of their brain to do tasks that someone without a brain injury would find easy, so it's no surprise that this can sometimes trigger negative emotions in a survivor. It’s important to make sure that, as someone with a brain injury, you allow yourself plenty of time to rest. It's equally as important, as a family member or partner to a survivor, to encourage and support your loved one to rest when they are showing signs of fatigue, too. Rest really is the best medicine for this and can help to reset these emotions and behaviours.
Upcoming Events
You may not even realise it, but upcoming events that you may be worried about subconsciously can also have a huge impact on your emotions and behaviours. Whether that is an upcoming meeting, a key date, or even just doing something outside of your normal routine; all of these things can trigger behavioural and emotional difficulties for everyone, brain injury or not. However, what you will notice is that survivors of brain injuries quite often will have a much harder time dealing with these stresses, which can in turn lead to a rollercoaster of emotions.
Nothing at all!
Yes, that's right! For brain injury survivors, there doesn't necessarily even need to be a trigger for this, which can feel confusing and frustrating. The most important thing to remember here is that we don't always need a reason; we know that this is a difficulty that comes with sustaining a brain injury and as long as we can recognise it, we can allow ourselves time to understand and develop coping mechanisms to deal with them appropriately. As a partner or family member of someone with a brain injury, it is important to recognise when our loved one is not quite being themselves, and try our best to support them. Quite often, as humans, we want to retaliate to someone snapping at us out of the blue, but with brain injury survivors it's more productive to simply make them aware of the behaviour, and support them through it - rather than add fuel to the fire.
It can often be quite tricky navigating these emotional difficulties after brain injury. We talk about these difficulties with fellow brain injury survivor Aidan Price in our latest webinar, where Aidan shares his own experiences and his advice on how to cope with these changes. You can watch the webinar here!
Speech Difficulties
One of the disorders that can come from brain injury is Aphasia, which affects how you communicate. Around 32% of brain injury survivors suffer with this, and it affects people have injured the part of the brain called the language centre. There are two different types of Aphasia:
Receptive Aphasia
- Difficulty: Trouble understanding spoken or written words and sentences.
- Speech: Speech may be fluent but doesn't make sense, with difficulty finding the right words or making sense of what others are saying.
- Comprehension: Understanding of spoken and written language is impaired.
Expressive Aphasia
- Difficulty: Having trouble finding the right words, forming sentences, or expressing thoughts.
- Speech: Speech may be slow or slurred, with key words missed out the sentence.
- Comprehension: Typically, understanding spoken language is relatively preserved.
People who suffer with Aphasia may have one of, or both types of this disorder. Either way, this is a condition that is really difficult for the person suffering from it, because their ability to communicate is really affected.
How These Difficulties Link
When you are unable to communicate properly, whether that be that you can't fully understand what someone else is saying, or you can't find the words to say something yourself; this can quite often lead to feeling incredibly frustrated and agitated, which directly links to the behavioural changes you may see as a brain injury survivor. Difficulties with speech and behavioural and emotional difficulties most definitely go hand in hand, and can be very triggering for each other. It's important to be able to recognise this, and allow yourself time to rest and/or reset if you are having a bad day. Not every day will look like this, some days you will find communicating really easy and feel really positive emotions, and others you may struggle. But that's okay.
Learning to live with a brain injury can be an emotional rollercoaster, especially at the beginning of your journey. We talk more on how behavioural and speech difficulties link in our latest podcast and share some personal examples that we have found have affected us on our journey.