Notice how he has been brainwashed by his stroke staff into only talking about survival NOT RECOVERY!
Surviving My Stroke Recovery by Karl J. Forehand blog
I believe I have several advantages coming into this process. Some of them I can take credit for and some of them I cannot. I’m certainly not going to offload it all onto God and give him the credit or even blame. The things that have helped me and my stroke recovery should be useful for anyone in all different challenges of life.
Shadow Work
In my book, Being, I talked about my experience with how the things that we ignore and push down essentially come back to haunt us later. Through a process called focusing, I’ve been able to face some of these emotions from past experiences and heal the trauma that I had been living with.
Overall, shadow work makes me less reactive and more responsive to situations and helps me pause and make better decisions. In a way, I’m not using mechanisms of the past to deal with the present. Both Laura and I communicate more authentically because of this hard work that we have done in the area.
There is no avoiding the hard work. Ad the saying goes, “pay me now or pay me later.” Because we did the hard work a few years ago, we are better equipped to handle this current situation.
Being Present
The tea shop experience was probably my first introduction to the value of being present. Too much time spent in the future can bring fear and worry and too much time in the past can bring regret. But most often the best place to be is where we are.
When they ask me to try to move my finger, it takes all my focus and all my attention and all my energy. If I am anywhere else besides where I am, I am wasting a lot of people’s time including my own.
Being present doesn’t mean that I’m not doing anything, and I’m often doing really, really hard work. Being present also means that sometimes I have overwhelming emotions like sadness, and anger. My best move seems to be to sit with those emotions and have compassion for them instead of trying to get past them.
My Spouse
It’s hard to express how close Laura and I have been over the past few weeks. I remember when she looked at me and said, “I just want to grow old with you.” It was her way of saying that she wanted me to take this serious and work hard.
We will not survive this if we don’t have authentic communication. When we are sad, we have to admit it, when we are frustrated we have to speak it, and when we need something we have to be clear about what it is. It’s almost a childlike experience when I move my finger just a little and look over at her for approval.
When we got married, there was an unspoken promise to sacrifice for each other. The trouble was we didn’t know exactly what that meant and what that would involve. Now, here we are facing maybe the toughest challenge of our life.
It’s 6:47 in the morning and I can’t wait for her to arrive at 8:00. There are times in life when I didn’t know whether we were going to stay married, but here we are after 33 years facing this new adventure.
