After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook

After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook

Barbara Stahura and Susan B. Schuster, M.A., CCC-SLP
This workbook guides survivors of brain injury and blast injury through the powerful healing experience of telling their own stories with simple journaling techniques. By writing short journal entries, survivors explore the challenges, losses, changes, emotions, adjustments, stresses, and milestones as they rebuild their lives. By Barbara Stahura and Susan Schuster.
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Full Description

This workbook has been developed specifically for survivors of brain injury and blast injury. Based on journaling workshops for survivors of traumatic brain injury, it is filled with journaling exercises that guide the user through examining and expressing the many ways that the brain injury has affected and altered their lives. Vignettes by individuals give it a personal touch and also serve as examples of journaling. Users may go through the workbook from front to back or they may select chapters and activities most relevant to their lives and stage of recovery.

Breaking it down into sections, users explore…

• changing sense of self

• loss, memory and resilience

• altered relationships with family and friends

• anger and emotions

• grief and loss

• facing the future

• building hope

• moving forward

Journaling is a proven therapeutic tool used to explore one’s inner self by expressing emotions, confronting fears, relieving anxiety, coping with stress, celebrating successes, and preparing for new challenges. By writing for only a few minutes at a time, journalers can heal and cope with crises due to illness, death, or any life-altering event.

This is the first journaling workbook developed specially for adults with acquired brain injuries, and it can be used by individuals or facilitated groups. Families will find it helpful as an outlet and coping mechanism for survivors. Clinicians will find it a useful cognitive tool for building communication skills of reading, writing and comprehension. Both families and clinicians will find it helpful for promoting insight, self-awareness and goal setting.

Details
Item JOUR
ISBN# 9781931117524
Pages 120 pages, 8½ x 11, perfect bound
Year 2009

Authors

Barbara Stahura began her writing career in 1987 and became a freelance writer in 1994. She is also a certified instructor of Journal to the Self®. Her favorite subject for articles, personal essays, and books is transformative approaches to everyday life. After her husband, Ken Willingham, sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2003, she created a journaling workshop for people with brain injury and began co-facilitating it with Susan B. Schuster. Those workshops were the basis for After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story. Barbara and Ken live in Tucson. Her Web site is www.barbarastahura.com.

Susan B. Schuster, M.A., CCC-SLP, has nearly twenty years of experience as a speech-language pathologist, the majority being a provider of communication-cognitive services to people with brain injury in varied settings including an adult day program and rehabilitation hospitals. She has a special interest in combining traditional speech therapy with the latest technological advances in the field, including the Interactive Metronome. She co-facilitates a journaling workshop for people with brain injury with Barbara Stahura. Susan lives in Tucson with her husband, Steve Latham.

Contents

About the Authors

Introduction

The Importance of Story

What is Journaling?

Journaling Tips

Relax Before a Journaling Session

 

Chapter 1 After Brain Injury: What Happened? What Can I Discover?

1-1 How My Injury Happened

1-2 How It Feels to be Me

1-3 The Worst Part

1-4 Making Metaphor

1-5 Talking with Your Brain

1-6 Map to My True Self

1-7 Kindred Spirits, or Not

1-8 What Else Happened to Me?

 

Chapter 2 Loss and Change: Brain Power, Memory, and More

2-1 Loss List

2-2 Empty Spaces

2-3 Unnamed Losses

2-4 Glued Together

2-5 Off-Balance

2-6 Memory

2-7 Memory Lists

2-8 Improving Memory

2-9 Other Functions Lost

2-10 Because of Those Losses…

2-11 Resilience

2-12 I Still Have This

2-13 Using the Senses to Remember

 

Chapter 3 Relationships: Family, Friends, and Others

3-1 Once Upon a Time

3-2 Once Upon a Time, Part 2

3-3 Explaining My Injury

3-4 Understanding

3-5 Writing a Letter

3-6 What I Really Need

3-7 Confusing Changes

3-8 Loneliness

3-9 Overcoming Loneliness

3-10 Asking for Help

3-11 Asking for Help, Part 2

 

Chapter 4 Adjustments: Anger and Grief

4-1 Telling the Story of My Anger

4-2 Feeling the Anger

4-3 Grieving the Losses

4-4 Feeling the Grief

4-5 Comfort

4-6 Awareness, Acceptance, Acknowledgement, Accommodation

 

Chapter 5 Back Into the Community: Moving Forward With Hope

5-1 What Your Life Means

5-2 Hope in Your Future

5-3 Nurturing Hope

5-4 Asking Others to Hope With You

5-5 Your Home

5-6 A Letter from Home

5-7 New People

5-8 Making Your Way Around

5-9 Work Issues

5-10 Back at Work

5-11 Back to School

5-12 Social Activities

5-13 Giving of Yourself

 

Chapter 6 Later On: Any Positives?

6-1 Your “Sports Pages”

6-2 Your Better Stories

6-3 Love Letters

6-4 Time Capsule Treasures, Part 1

6-5 Time Capsule Treasures, Part 2

6-6 No One Can Take This Away From Me

6-7 Invitation

6-8 RSVP

6-9 Learning From Your “Teachers”

6-10 Being a Teacher

 

Chapter 7 Miscellaneous Prompts Brain Injury Resources

Excerpts

See Barbara Stahura interview on Arizona Public Media


http://tv.azpm.org/kuat/segments/2009/10/19/kuat-author-barbara-stahura

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