Personal Perspectives
Brain Injury May Reverse Pre-Injury Trauma Work
Personal Perspective: How do you heal pre-existing PTSD after brain injury?
Posted April 11, 2026 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Trauma seems to co-occur with brain injury. How can it not when brain injury devastates almost every part of one’s life? I researched and devoted a portion of my book, Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone, to discussing trauma, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, in relation to brain injury. The following is an adapted excerpt on this topic from my book.
Pre-Brain Injury Wounds and Traumas Reanimate
Like what happened with me, your brain injury may have disconnected your pre-injury memories from your emotions, and thus undone any trauma work you may have done before your injury. When emotions return, the now-unhealed memories upthrust a tsunami of traumas that you hadn’t thought about in years. They lash against your mind, making you feel out of time. Confusion piles on top of flashbacks, and chaos results.
Acknowledge Traumas Being Unhealed
To re-heal these pre-injury wounds, you and your therapist will need to acknowledge this strange unhealing and work together to reconnect the memories with the emotions. Strategies, medications, and rest will not restore your affect so you can do this work but neurostimulation therapies can. When those broken memory-emotion neural networks reconnect, you embark on a chaotic road towards unifying memory and emotion, one that requires cognitive empathy from the therapist and perseverance and courage from you.
Cognitive empathy allows a healthcare professional to put themselves in your shoes and respond to your distress with kindness.
Memories that appear and disappear, like whack-a-mole or black holes opening and closing in your memory banks, complicate the effort to re-heal pre-injury traumas. Although neurostimulation therapies may regenerate the regions responsible for long-term autobiographical memory, working through grief may become necessary before trauma memories stabilize enough to reconnect to emotions. Grieving may do that work without you realizing it.
I found that this "trauma unhealing" is not discussed during neuro-rehab. A decade passed before my neurodoc identified it. My gamma brainwave enhancement training brought this issue to the fore. Guiding me to reconnect my memories to their emotional resolution would’ve been pioneering. I discovered you can’t really do it on your own. Some healing work requires another person, someone willing to learn, listen compassionately, and guide you towards this goal. I manage the lack of such a person in my life through some of the work I outline in Step Four.
Trauma After Injury
After the injury come the social traumas—rejections, judgments, labeling, and exploitation. Those tasked to heal—neurologists and psychiatrists—present their methods as the most up-to-date, yet leave you struggling with brain injury’s catastrophic cognitive, emotional, and metabolic effects. Their abandonment traumatizes. Being alone creates its own continuing trauma.
I believe these three sources of trauma worsen brain injury and exacerbate dysfunction.
Trauma’s psychic pain knifes every cell and bleeds into every facet of life.
Fiction Depicts Trauma’s Distorting Death Grip
Jean-Guy Beauvoir is a fictional character in Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series. He’s a 30-something inspector in the Sûreté du Québec, once married, loyal to his boss, shot in the line of duty, and addicted to OxyContin. Through Beauvoir, we descend into psychic pain; his trauma creates paranoia and rage, making him exploitable for nefarious ends. The evil character in How the Light Gets In uses him to find and eradicate Gamache.
Beauvoir hadn’t asked why they wanted to go to Three Pines, or why the unmarked Sûreté van was following them.
He didn’t care.
He was just a chauffeur. He’d do as he was told. No more debate. He’d learned that when he cared, he got hurt, and he couldn’t take any more pain. Even the pills couldn’t dull it anymore.
Even though Beauvoir experienced trauma without brain injury, Penny aptly describes the emotional state we share with him. But how many endeavour to imagine being in psychic pain while living with unhealed brain injury and floundering to live up to people’s expectations to be functional? It’s impossible.
Medication Isn’t Enough
At some point, psychic pain after brain injury and abandonment becomes so vast and entrenched that medication cannot address it.
Primitive Trauma Therapy
I think one enormous obstacle is that we don’t actually know what trauma does to the brain. We’re learning about the role of microglia, about how early trauma changes the way we see the world, about using therapeutic doses to treat that kind of trauma. But how does continuing trauma of forced aloneness complicate brain injury? Is it its own kind of brain injury?
Forced isolation destroys trust; social skills atrophy. Without trust, we cannot create or maintain healthy relationships.
Brain injury already interferes with that process through damage to concentration, memory, communication abilities, and so on. Those losses create another kind of mistrust: mistrusting our own ability to understand social interactions, to sense who’s trustworthy and who’s not, and to express what we’re thinking.
Learning that people can endanger healing, combined with mistrusting our ability to know who to trust, closes us down. We avoid talking about our grief; we become alert to accusations of thinking negatively or signs of boredom or rolling eyes or finding an excuse to change the subject or hearing, “There you go again. Can’t you talk about anything else?”
I believe trauma fundamentally arises from broken bonds between loved ones or trusted professionals and their clients—and so I believe the best trauma therapy centers on creating experiences with humans that strengthen bonds, build trust, and support and encourage.
Copyright ©2022, 2024, and 2026 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy
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