Trainging Ourselves to Live

by Sheila Coonerty

In the last months of her life, my strong 93-year-old mother’s body began to betray her; blood clots in her brain caused small strokes that altered her ability to stand and walk. After each stroke, she would soon announce that it was time for her to walk again. Struggling to balance her still-numb body while leaning on a walker, she would stare at her leg and yell, “Damn it, move now! It is time to move!” A tense minute or two would pass and, to my amazement, the paralyzed limb would begin to move again. One or two faltering steps and off she would go to the kitchen for tea, cheerful and pleased with herself.

Watching Mom use her mind and her will to undo the damage caused by oxygen loss in her brain had a profound effect on me. I began to read the new research on our ability to recover from trauma. But, while scientific findings in this area are fascinating, I found that two first-person accounts of blazing new trails through a damaged brain and body gave me the strongest sense of how we heal and how healing changes us.

In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist herself, describes in astonishing detail the experience of having a massive left-hemisphere stroke. Her description of trying to figure out how to get help when she could no longer relate to the spoken word or to numbers on the phone is enough to give you a few nightmares, while you find yourself desperately reworking your own emergency-alert plans. But even more astonishing is her detailed account of how she learned to heal her own brain, and forge other paths to speaking, reading, and thinking that bypassed the massively damaged hemisphere normally in charge of such tasks, in much the same way that my mother told her brain to make walking possible again.

While for Jill the damage was to her brain, in Learning to Breathe, Alison Wright finds herself alone in Laos with a severely damaged body after a head-on collision on a mountain road. Barely able to breathe and with injuries that should have killed her, Alison struggles to survive. She uses mindfulness meditation and pure will power to ignore unbelievable pain as she moves toward healing. As she succeeds in helping one part of her body heal, another succumbs to damage, yet Alison never gives up.

Throughout it all she has an image of herself walking again, climbing Kilimanjaro, and working as a photographer, exploring the remote cultures of the world. That image helps her to focus her mind on healing and to ignore her searing pain. The trauma to her body brings back memories of the many earlier small traumas and utter joys that her life has brought to her. Although Alison focused on being able to meet physical challenges that would return her to the sense of adventure that she always loved, in these books the focus is not on returning to who these women used to be.

Trauma changes us: It changes our bodies, our minds, and our very spirits. We cannot ignore or completely overcome the damage that has been done, but we can work to heal and follow new pathways, learning to love the new, itself. My mother’s brain and her legs did eventually fail her for good, but not before she learned that she was loved for so much more than her independence, and not before she learned how to let people care for her.

Alison saw that she needed to change her compulsively moving lifestyle to learn how to stop and experience the life around her. And, quite literally, to learn to breathe again—breathing in meditation as well as valuing the act of breathing that was almost lost to her. But it is Jill, in My Stroke of Insight, who describes so clearly how utterly changed she was by her trauma. In finding new ways to think, to read, and to speak, she found that she had to use her right brain to replace the logical functions of the left. In so doing, she was astounded to discover that her view of the world was utterly changed and that the way that she thought, spoke, and read were never the same again. Healing is often not a process of going back to who you used to be but rather the process of finding new ways of being and recognizing them as your own.

As I read these incredible accounts of trauma and recovery, I began to look differently at my own struggle with the traumatic loss of strength and functioning that my post-polio brings. I find myself trying to learn to welcome the new ways of living that come with losing the old ways, and I look now at what I can no longer do as a pathway to things I never even dreamed of. Reading these stories reminded me that life is more than defeating challenges: It is recognizing how many ways it is possible to live.

Sheila Coonerty, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice as well as for Santa Cruz city schools. When not working, she is writing about her post-polio adventure while learning new ways to walk, to breathe, and to live.