Compensation

Compensation is a healthy acknowledgement that a certain limitation or weakness does ipso facto exist and therefore we work around that limitation or weakness.  The unfortunate reality of brain damage-- traumatic brain injury in politer society-- is that some things will not get better, improve, or disappear no matter how much of an effort we put into making it so.  Some things do improve.  And some things don't.

We don't like to hear those words.  The trouble with the phrase "permanent damage" is inherent in both the word "permanent" and in the word "damage."  Permanent implies permeance.  In spite of my determination and my best efforts, the double vision in my left eye is permanent.  In spite of my determination and my best efforts, my brain may improve in some areas of functioning however she [I named her Briella: still brilliant, just a bit sideways now is all] will never ever be the same as or similar to my pre-accident brain.



Here are some things that I am sick of hearing in no particular order:

The brain re-wires itself. 
Yes, but not in the same way.  Where we used to have freeways we now have dirt roads and dead ends.  The dead ends are when regenerating dendrites don't find another one to hook up with.  I have a central nervous system tremor as a result of that.

There is nothing wrong with you. 
 I hope you never have to live through anything like this.  Your denial is a luxury that can kill me.  Bunches of professionals have told me exactly "what is wrong" with me.  I have a list of diagnoses now.  Bottom line is that most of the things on the list are a complication of my brain damage.

You had those difficulties before. 
My brain damage made a few of my pre-existing difficulties worse and one pre-existing difficulty easier.  It's easier for me to throw stuff out now because I don't remember where or when I got it or why I wanted it.  Since when did you get a PhD in Neurology or something related?

I know what you mean.  Sometimes I can't ___________ either.
Jealous much?  You really do not know what I mean.  I have these difficulties day after day, every day.  Your "sometimes" is meaningless to me.  Almost nothing is automatic for me now.  Wrap your undamaged brain around that one.

Yoga [or ______________ ] will fix it.
No, it will not.  The stiffness that I have is from cerebellar damage.  Look it up.  There is no magic pill.  There is no magic drug.  There is no magic guru.  There is no magic exercise.  There is no magic anything.



But some things have gotten better.  I have learned to tell people to hang on a minute while I am engaged in a task, to rest on demand, to challenge myself, to keep moving, to write in meaningful, grammatical constructions called sentences, to ask my friend "Who is that?"

I have learned to remember to look to the left at a stop sign.  I affixed a brightly colored sticker to the windshield at the spot that I kept neglecting to look at.  Now, remembering to look there is almost automatic.  For the first two years, it was not.

I have learned to curtail my night driving in the name of safety and photophobia.

I have learned to substitute a similar sounding word when I cannot make my mouth say the word that I want to say.  Or when I cannot make my brain retrieve the word that I do want.

I have learned to curse less.  I do not substitute words like "heck" or "darn" for the words that I want to say.  I can stop myself almost all of the time now from cursing.

I have learned to ask for help when I need it.

And I have learned to compensate for the weaknesses that I have due to my brain damage.  A sticker on the windshield is a compensation.  Not driving at night is a compensation.  Word substitution is a compensation.  Stopping myself instead of cursing is a compensation.  Asking for help is a compensation.



Here are a few things that do not work for me:

Modeling "appropriate" behavior and expecting me to catch on does not work.  Unless you point it out to me with words, I will not get what you are doing.  Unless I decide that I want to change something [like my cursing], I will tell you where you can stick your "appropriate" behavior.

Demanding that I do stuff that I cannot do safely does not work.  You can expect me to shovel the snow all that you want to.  Believe me, I want to help you shovel the snow.  I have spinal damage.  I can move snow around with my old beat-up car.  I cannot safely shovel show.  Hire someone to do it.  Get a plow.  Use the snowblower.  Piss on it.  Whatever.  I will not shovel the snow.  I have been advised of my physical limitations.  That I cannot safely shovel the snow should not be a newsflash.  I am not interested in what you think about this.  It's called self-preservation.

Not telling me why you are angry or exasperated with me or with something I am doing does not work.  It's a guarantee that I don't know why you are exasperated with me.  Sometimes I may not even be aware that you are exasperated.  Saying, "I'm sick of this," and ending a friendship and not telling me what you are sick of does not offer me any feedback whatsoever.  Expecting me to be more than civil to you when you run into me in a public place several years later is unreasonable.  I've been through too much to be interested in playing that particular kind of game.  I've lost better friends than you due to the aftermath of my brain damage.  What's one more?

Expecting me to believe in your belief system does not work.  Preaching at me will cause me to tune you out.  Telling me that life is meaningless without your particular flavor of philosophy or "spirituality" just makes me say, "Huh?"  Expounding on the false notion that there is no morality without your particular god will cause laughter and merriment.  And you are going to argue a finer point of theology or recovery or even neurology with me, please construct a logical argument without any cognitive fallacies.  I don't have time to waste on mental masturbation.

And finally, trolling without any real skillz does not work.  If you are a troll, then be an epic troll.  If you can't hang with the 4chan crowd, then don't co-opt the vocabulary.



I have brain damage.  I am not brain dead.  I continue to do brain game type stuff and visual training and physical therapy exercises.  I know who I am and I know what I am.  I keep striving in spite of.  There is no room in my life for the willfully ignorant.  I have learned how to compensate for many of my difficulties.  If you aren't going to help me, then get out of my way.

sapphoq on healing t.b.i.

Toxic People after a Brain Burst

My car accident was akin to a sudden bursting of my brain and subsequent rearrangement of my life into something that was very different from what I had been used to.  My recovery has been described as being "remarkable albeit slow...from a serious brain injury" by one neurodoc.  I prefer the words of the Grateful Dead.  Because it certainly has been a long strange trip.

One of the things that I struggled with after my brain injury was a renewed sense of vulnerability and indeed outright gullability.  I was fortunate that I had people around me who helped me sort through these things.  And also fortunate that I had found recovery from addiction some years before the crash.

A few months after a young woman was (allegedly) murdered during her vacation to Aruba, a radio announcer said there was a contest on a nearby ski mountain.  He said that weekend there would be cardboard box races down mountain.  The winner would get a free trip to Aruba.  I didn't realize that his words were intended to be humorous.  The chiropractor intervened in my brain-injured enthusiam and informed me that my back was in no shape to go sliding in the snow period.

It is not my intention to pick on internet trolls.  Trolls can be toxic, annoying, humorous, fun, on a mission to fulfill  a specific consciousness enlightening reason, or have no reason except perhaps for the LULZ.

There is another kind of troll that I will talk about here-- the dreaded toxic troll of real face to face life.  More polite terms range from "toxic person" to "installed our buttons" to "family members who don't get it/us" to "personality-disordered co-workers."  Toxic trolls, much like their internet counterpart, spread mischief and mayhem wherever they roam.  Toxic trolls may or may not realize that they are infested.  Those who do may not care, or they may be in a sort of talking therapy in order to study the reasons why they are toxic trolls.

Maybe you who are still working or remember working can recall a co-worker or a boss who stood out.  Said person might have gotten along with everyone in a superficial manner but was quick with the tongue to provoke those he said she said fights.  Or perhaps they destroyed records because they wanted to create work for you the unfortunate one who got promoted into their last position which they either got promoted from or were fired from.  In short, you are left to clean up their messes or deal with the fallout of their misdeeds or their words.

Or maybe you have a family troll who doesn't really lie but is wreckless with the truth.  Said family member pretends innocence.  The family troll is deceitful as a way of life, demanding that you join in the game or cutting you off from their affection and mercy.  When you try to alert other family members to the existence of the family troll, you may be met with total resistance.  Because the family troll is an established infection.  People agree to be trolled on some level.  After all, it is painful to admit that good ol' Aunt Jane is a drunken hoarder who beat on your cousins or good ol' Uncle John is a member of a drug cartel who has a meth lab in the basement.  The family troll may not be flamboyant at all.  They may also blend in the woodwork, looking to the world like an average Joe while you suffer from the toxins of their fangs.

But why do they do this?  Why do they pretend that they are perfect parents with perfect kids [who may have felt the rage of their perfect fists behind closed doors] and that the perfect kids are crazy when they mention what happened a few years later?  It is too easy to ascribe the trolliness of others to personality disorders or to hatefulness.  The truth is often complex but quite frankly, while in the clutches of trolls one only cares about getting out.  Even if we educate ourselves about the past history of the troll, it really doesn't help us avoid becoming a victim.

There is no simple solution.  From my own experience, I recommend an old book which can often be picked up for cheap at garage sales or borrowed from a local library.  That book is called, "When I Say No, I Feel Guilty" by Manual J. Smith.  Although the information on bargaining was quite good, what I found to be supremely helpful was the techniques for preventing arguments.  I read this book again after my accident and I highly recommend it.
Trolls can be brought up short using things like the-broken-record that the book talks about.  What troll can continue an argument with someone who says things like, "I understand that you want me in your clutches, however I am not taking responsibility for your life..."?

sapphoq healing tbi says: There are three kinds of people in the world-- the troll, the troll baited, and those who have been on both sides of the troll bridge.  A brain injury is not an excuse for becoming a victim nor for being the victimizer.  Read, educate yourselves, ask for help. 

sapphoq also healing tbi says: did you count the "bad words" in this post that appear in the Analyst Desktop Binder on pages 21-23 ?

http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED.pdf

On T.B.I., Trolls, and Threats

The pagan community on the internet is not united by any means. There are various factions and splinter groups. That is an average thing. A bunch of pagans together in one room can certainly fight like liberals and fundamentalists. Or, like frogs and snakes. That is probably average also. No biggie. I've been on the internet long enough to have my own opinions about cyberbullies and even to have acquired my very own cute little chicken trollette. That is no great woop either. I became interested in the study of cyberpsychology as a result of interpersonal conflicts on the web. And as I continued to force my brain to think in my own process of healing t.b.i., I grokked a few things about my own behavior and decisions:

1. I have acted like an ass at times on the interwebs. Oh well.
2. I made my apologies and amends. To the best of my ability, I endeavored to offer no excuses for my poor behavior.
3. I moved on.

I don't begrudge my detractors since I certainly have acted like an ass at times. In one instance, I was playing the part of an undercover reporter and that was the height of stupidity. I was deceptive. I was dishonest. People from various sides of that particular dispute were pissed at me for good reason.

In that particular scenario, I took responsibility for what I had done and endured the fallout. I learned from it. And I have to thank my good friend Jer for helping me think about the situation with clarity. Folks displayed various levels of acceptance as is their right. There are still snarks thrown in my general direction from time to time. To that I say, "Whatever." If I am going to champion freedom of electronic expression, I have to be willing to risk running into some expression that I don't approve of. Oh well. I don't have to engage in mental masturbation today. I know how to use the back button. I can put on my big girl panties and move on.

Unlike a few pathological relatives of my childhood who did their best to infest my being with the soul-sickness of not-good-enough, I do not intend to live out the rest of my life apologizing for my own stupidity of a year or two ago. I don't trouble myself with the notion that I am somehow not good enough for or less than any particular person or group of people. It is rather meaningless to me. I have moved on. I am writing about this today because I am making some connections within my own self about my own self.

* * *

Lest any of you misunderstand, the assumptions about me and the snarks do not fall under the category of cyber-bullying. People can fight, disagree, blow up at each other, call each other names, and all sorts of other stuff without that falling under pretend labels and pretend diagnoses. People do not always understand or approve of my choices. I don't have to explain a damn thing to anyone. I am free to associate with the people that I choose to associate with. I am free to go where I go and to do what I do as long as I don't impinge upon the rights of others. Others are free to do the same. Not everyone wishes me well and I don't give a damn about that anyway. The stuff of conflict is not automatically classified as cyberbullying.

The encyclopedia at P.C. magazine defines a cyberbully as "A person who uses the Internet to harass or intimidate someone else." Someone who calls me a troll or stupid or insane or a toxic fluffbunny or a fucktard is expressing an opinion. Their opinion may or may not have some validity. I am free to engage them in some ritualized name-calling or to respond or not respond in any legal way that I choose to.

The folks at tech target add the word "threatening" to the definition of a cyberbully. Sameer at the Cyberbullying Blog points out that the behavior is repetitive. There is a pattern. It is more than one occurrence. Someone e-mailed three requests to me to close her e-mail box on one of my domains. I have an off-line life. I hadn't checked my e-mail box there in a while so I only got the messages yesterday.

The first e-mail (dated June 29) states that there will be mythological salt pits in my future if I contact the young woman again. The second (dated July1) makes an unflattering inference about either my size or some quality of mine. She asks me in the second e-mail to delete her and in the third (dated July 2) to remove her. I know she meant for me to close her e-mail box but the choice of words was amusing to me. I did as requested. I have no intention of contacting her again. As long as the young woman does not continue to threaten me with mythological salt pits in my future or other stuff, we are both free to carry on in the absence of the well-wishes of the other.

The above example falls short on the repeated part of threat inherent in the definitions of cyberbullying. Here are some things that do qualify as cyberbullying:
cyberstalking,
maintaining a website that is designed to harass someone or threaten them,
posts on a website or forum or journal or blog that tell someone to watch out because the poster or friends of the poster may show up at any time,
making up lies about someone and publishing them on the web (e.g. the teen who killed herself on account of some stuff that was posted about her on MySpace and the teen who killed himself after being harassed on Bebo more recently),
texting someone for the purpose of intimidation,
making repeated fun of someone with social difficulties brought on by Asperger's on internet forums,
provoking someone in an e-group into rages and then mocking the rages,
sending someone tons of spam or bogus e-mails,
repeated racial slurs used in a chatroom against another participant.

The thing about traumatic brain injury, as well as many other disabilities, is that we are more vulnerable whether we want to acknowledge that or not. We may be more vulnerable to cyberbullying because of errors in our judgment. We may be too quick to trust others on-line, too eager to expose personal information, too fast to offer up our struggles. We can participate in flame wars without understanding what we are getting into. We can become too casual about what we publish on our websites or blogs. We may wind up communicating via instant messenger with folks who do not wish us well. (In the early days after my brain injury, a woman began to call me every day. Mate was baffled by the sudden appearance of a new close friend in my life and did not understand the almost daily lengthy phone conversations. I didn't remember who this woman was or where I knew her from. Eventually, I discovered that the woman was the daughter-in-law of a friend who just liked to talk to people on the phone).

Below are a few websites referenced in this post and a bunch that aren't. I recommend the "Are you a cyberbully? Quiz," the cyberethics site for those who like academic stuff, the Donna Williams poem, and the "Shrink the Cyberbully Game" by virtue of their being different than the usual offerings.

The other stuff may help you decide what to do if you are being cyberbullied. Inclusion of the links do not imply the endorsement of any of the websites endorsing this post nor does it imply that I totally agree with every freaking thing said.

sapphoq healing t.b.i.

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=cyberbully&i=40624,00.asp
Definition.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1023061,00.html
Definition.

http://www.cyberbullying.ca/examples.html
Examples of cyberbullying.

http://www.cyberbullying.ca/info.html
Suggestions on handling cyberbullying.

http://cyberbullying.us/blog/?cat=13
A blog noting laws being passed in the United States.

http://www.wrcbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8706000
Suggestions for parents.

http://groups.msn.com/stayingsafeonline/cyberbullies.msnw
Acknowledges that cyberbullying happens to adults too. Some simple advice.

http://deathby1000papercuts.com/2007/12/cyber-bully-quiz-are-you-a-cyber-bully-3/
Are you a cyberbully? Quiz.

http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/attent.htm
Attention seekers from Bully-Online.

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html
Cyberculture-- pretty cool stuff here.

http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/mason2/
Privacy from a cyber-business perspective.

http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/
Various links about cyberethics.

http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
Identities, trolls, etc on usenet groups.

http://www.copyscape.com/
Search for copies of your pages on the web.

http://adequacy.org/
Archives of a site where trolls gathered proudly.

http://www.urban75.com/Mag/troll.html
Writing: an excellent troll how to.

https://groups.google.com/group/alt.troll/msg/bc2e71e19c590d8e?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_umsgid=36a7593e.22750214@ruble.net&lr=&hl=en-us
Usenet trolls.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mtroll.html
Definition.

http://www.jfo.org.uk/info/new/troll.htm
Classification.

http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/posts/list.m?topic_id=12200012985
More extensive classifications of trolls.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN0343424320070705
Griefers. [They are on Second Life also].

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/
Classifications of flame warriors *the pictures are priceless.

http://blog.donnawilliams.net/2008/01/21/cyber-bully/
Poem by Donna Williams.

http://curezone.com/forums/troll.asp
Trolls on the Curezone forums [original aol article not on aol anymore.]

http://rkcsi.indiana.edu/archive/CSI/WP/WP02-03B.html
Study on trolls in a feminist forum.

http://www.emoderators.com/papers/flames.html
Flaming, 1992.

http://www.searchlores.org/trolls.htm
More on usenet trolls, attacking in waves, use of the word "sockpuppets" to mean one person
posting to a board under different names in order to agree with themselves!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/bot_herder_profile/
smurfs and bots

http://www.mcgruff.org/Games/cyberbully.php
shrink the cyberbully game