Tag Archives: brain trauma

Submitter’s Note:

I am sharing this information in the spirit of promoting greater awareness of head (or brain) injury, as well as helping and hopefully encouraging “victims of the hidden handicap” to realise their full potentials and be all that they are capable of achieving and being.

Craig Lock
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Introduction

It is generally accepted that people working with individuals who have any type of handicap, should have a certain amount of empathy with their clients and should strive to understand how their clients feel and think. People working with those who are brain damaged have a particularly hard time doing so. One can have some understanding of what it means to be blind by simply closing one?s eyes; yet how can a normal person understand what it feels like to be brain damaged?

I am in the unusual position of being a trained clinical psychologist who suffered brain damage and who has slowly recovered most of my facilities. In other words, I have been on the outside looking in, and also, on the inside looking out at the world of the brain damaged person. At this point in my recovery, I have a foot in both worlds, for I can remember what it felt like to be completely normal intellectually, and also what it felt like when loss of function was at its worst.

Perhaps this informal and very subjective narrative may be of some help in assisting normal people to empathize a little better with the brain damaged individual. For, unfortunately, most brain damaged people are unable to explain precisely how they feel; those who have been brain damaged since birth, of course, have never had the experience of functioning normally and thus have no standard of comparison of their present state with that of others.

At the age of thirty-nine, I was an exceptionally healthy male with a keen interest in outdoor sports such as skiing, canoeing, and swimming. I had been a clinical psychologist for sixteen years and was married to a social worker; we had three children. I was active intellectually, reading a great deal both in and outside my field, and enjoyed classical music and playing the piano
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