As a society, we recognize 2 types of disabilities; visible physical disabilities and intellectual disabilities. While some people who suffer a chronic TBI do end up with one of these kinds of disabilities, I do not. Yet, I do still have a disability, one that is very hard to explain. Or at least that's what I said to my speech therapist a couple weeks ago (speech therapists do more than just help with dictation). But he said, "no, it's not!" He proceeded to explain that intellect is about knowledge and cognition is about processing of that knowledge. Or in other words, I don't have a problem with information, I have a problem with processing. To prove it, I'll insert a quippy line I thought of while writing this post: I'm still sharp as a tack, but no longer quick as a whip. :)
My understanding of processing has evolved - it has had to. Originally, I thought processing, at least in regards to this, was about understanding information. And while that is definitely a part of it, and yes, learning does take much longer and is such a strenuous effort now, that is far from all of what it means to process information. Processing also involves how you go about organizing and completing a task or project. This is key. I'll talk more about this later on. But even with these 2 explanations, I didn't feel quite satisfied that it explained everything that I experience. So, I went looking for more definitions across the internet. I came across many different definitions, such as: the act of mentally or emotionally absorbing and making sense of what one has experienced or perceived; the act of ... making decisions and following up with appropriate action. Things started becoming clearer (especially with my dad's explanation that I'll write later on). Then, while writing this post, I realized that I knew what processing disorders are when they are associated with a single sense, such as an auditory processing disorder, a visual processing disorder, or even a sensory processing disorder! But I had yet to integrate all of these different senses (including smells, touch, taste, and just plain thinking) into my understanding of what a "cognitive processing disorder" is.
The organizing and completing a task is the part that I think is most extreme with an injured brain. Let me illustrate by using an obvious example, but think of it applied to every aspect of life. You're making cookies. There are multiple steps. A "normal" person doesn't have to even think about these steps. But someone with a head injury not only has to think about them but will get the sequence out of order and will end up frustrated, confused, feeling stupid, and belittled. Furthermore, (my speech therapist says) we can't hold more than 1-3 tasks in our brains at a time. Someone with a head injury could, in theory, throw all the flour on the cookie sheet, preheat the oven, crack an egg on top of the flour, then get out a bowl, put sugar in the bowl, and a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon of salt, mix that up, throw that on top of the egg on top of the flour, then put some baking soda on top and then top it all off with chocolate chips before putting it in the oven to cook. Do you think cookies will come from that? This is broken processing in action.
While this example is extreme, it illustrates the disjointed way that the processing can occur in everyday activities, which is where the disability really applies. The simple, monotonous tasks like getting ready, picking things up, hanging up clothes, putting dishes away from the dishwasher, etc. It's not like I don't know how to do these things. It is because the ability to use that knowledge has been disrupted due to the broken brain. These extra difficulties cause the brain to become frustrated. When the brain is frustrated, the person understandably gets irritable and angry. Which, among other things, is why a person can seem so irate, irrational, and mean after a head injury. It takes time and a lot of work to accept that this is the way life just is (aka radical acceptance) and stop letting your brain's frustration show. It takes so many resources to do these every day simple tasks, especially while managing the fire in your brain, that in order to preserve these resources, it is far easier to avoid doing these tasks completely than waste them on stupid things that we should be able to do no sweat.
I'll talk about ways that my speech therapist has suggested to deal with this in a future post, but for now, I thought it was important to help others understand what I am just beginning to process. ;)
