USING YOUR MIND TO CHANGE YOUR BRAIN

The Power of Self-Directed Neuroplasticity and Meaningful Goals

Imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and not be able to move half of your body. On the
Saturday before Easter in 2001, Connie Smiley experienced that firsthand. An engaging, lively sixtyfive-
year-old outreach coordinator at the Cincinnati Zoo, Connie was driving to the zoo for a Safari pre-trip meeting. As an avid animal lover and former grade school teacher, Connie couldn’t wait for this trip to Africa, which would be her fourth. This time she was going to visit the cheetah sanctuary —a lifelong dream—and tour parts of Africa she had never seen.

As she was driving to the zoo that day, she noticed that something was wrong. “I began to realize that I was having trouble keeping my car from going left,” she says. A little later, while walking on the zoo grounds, she was dragging her left foot slightly and it felt like her left arm was “made out of a ton of bricks.” She met her daughter there, who correctly identified that she was having a stroke and insisted she go to the hospital. Both she and her daughter knew the signs of stroke well because Connie’s husband had a massive stroke ten years prior and lived out his days in a nursing home, unable to care for himself.


Connie was admitted to the hospital and at first her symptoms did not seem that bad. However, by Monday morning—three days after her symptoms began—she could not move the left side of her body at all. “Not a finger, not a toe, nothing,” she recalls. When you have a stroke like that, you lose half of all your muscles, including those muscles involved in chewing, breathing, and speaking loudly. Connie didn’t want to believe what was happening to her and was incredibly disappointed that she was about to miss this amazing opportunity to see her favorite animal in its natural habitat. “Things went downhill from there,” she remembers. Her physicians believed that her stroke was severe and that she would not recover the use of her left arm or leg. They certainly were not sugarcoating her prognosis, as Connie recalls: “My own doctor came in to see me and said, ‘Well, you’ll never walk again.’” Another doctor said she would pray for her. Images of Connie’s husband flashed before her eyes. Would she end up like him, stuck in a nursing home for the rest of her life? Despite what the doctors were telling her, Connie did not give up hope: “I made a decision right then and there, knowing it might not be possible. If there was any way I could keep from ending up like that, I was going to do whatever it took.” Unbelievably, seven weeks after her first symptoms began, the woman whose left side had been completely paralyzed was able to walk with assistance and go
home.

Since her stroke, Connie has made incredible progress. Some of her abilities, such as walking, came back very quickly, whereas others, like holding heavy objects in her left hand, have yet to fully return. Throughout it all, she used Self-Directed Neuroplasticity powered by her meaningful goals to guide and fuel her recovery.
Why introduce you to Connie and her stroke, a physical problem, when we are focusing on overcoming deceptive brain messages? There are several reasons. First, physical struggles and the emotional toll they take often are easier to understand than purely emotional ones. You can see part of the struggle with your eyes and understand it in a more universal way. Second, Self-Directed Neuroplasticity—the underpinning of Connie’s recovery and yours—works in exactly the same way for the physical maladies Connie experienced and the psychological distress caused by deceptive brain messages. This means that everything Connie learned and did can be applied to you. Finally, the challenges Connie faced emotionally and the motivation she had to muster to achieve her goals are similar to what you will face as you work with the Four Steps.

Labeling Physical and Emotional Sensations
Connie’s road to recovery was anything but easy. She spent a week in the hospital and then transferred to Drake Center, an acute rehabilitation facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. There she spent three weeks in the acute inpatient unit and another three weeks at their assisted living center. The days were long and intense. She was making progress every day, but she was not improving as fast as she had wanted or expected. As she remembers, “I think I originally thought I would be back to the way I was before. It took me a while to accept that, no, that’s never going to be.”

The discrepancy between her expectations and reality led to considerable frustration and anger— two emotional sensations that became Connie’s biggest obstacles during her stay at Drake. Often, if she could not achieve what she wanted, she says her frustration would get “to the point where I would start throwing things and losing it.” Her deceptive brain messages were telling her that she was not working hard enough and that she should be able to complete the task. As these negative messages took hold, Connie would be consumed with strong physical sensations—the surging heat of anger— and her thoughts would become clouded. No longer able to focus on the task at hand because her emotional sensations were taking over, she would become stuck.

Rather than stewing in the uncomfortable sensations of rising anger and frustration, Connie labeled her emotions so that they no longer held power over her. “By simply saying ‘I’m mad,’” she recalls, “I wasn’t mad anymore . . . it took care of the problem.” Once she stated what was happening—by making mental notes—Connie was able to get outside of the sensations. Instead of being consumed with anger, frustration, and the powerful physical sensations that accompanied them, Connie would focus her attention toward the task at hand.


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