Recovery After Stroke

“I’ll start again when I’m ready.” If a stroke has split your life into before and after, you’ve probably said some version of that sentence, maybe not out loud. It sounds responsible. Heal first, then live. But what if readiness isn’t a feeling that shows up first? What if it’s something you build, often while you’re still struggling? That question sits at the centre of a growing body of research on post-traumatic growth after stroke, and it’s the subject of this week’s mini-episode.

In 2012, Bill Gasiamis had a bleed in his brain at thirty-seven. A month later, he had another one. He looked fine, people kept telling him so, and he spent weeks quietly waiting for the morning he’d wake up feeling like himself again. That morning didn’t come. For most people recovering from a stroke, it doesn’t. And the longer you wait for it, the smaller your world tends to get: fewer plans, fewer risks, more of life organised around the fear of another setback.

What breaks that waiting pattern usually isn’t a feeling. It’s a small, unglamorous action. For Bill, it was a search bar: a drug prescribed to reduce brain swelling was causing sleepless nights and other side effects, and one quiet morning he opened his laptop and looked up how to reduce inflammation through diet. He didn’t feel ready. He felt terrible. But that one change gave him a bit of evidence that he wasn’t helpless, and that evidence built momentum toward the next step.

A personal story isn’t proof of a pattern, so what does the research say? In the 1990s, psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun named this experience post-traumatic growth (PTG) and, in 1996, published the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory to measure it (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). In 2019, a systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 26 of those studies. Across them, just over half of participants, about 53%, reported moderate-to-high growth after a traumatic event (Wu et al., 2019). Growth after a life-altering event is a documented, common outcome, not a rare exception.

Here’s where it gets counterintuitive. A reasonable assumption is that growth only arrives once the pain has passed. A 2014 meta-analysis of 42 studies and more than 11,000 people found the opposite: post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic distress symptoms tend to co-occur, and the relationship between them is curvilinear rather than a straight line, with the highest growth often reported by people who were still, in some sense, in the middle of their struggle (Shakespeare-Finch & Lurie-Beck, 2014). In other words, you don’t have to be finished hurting before you’re allowed to start growing.

Bill’s own recovery wasn’t a straight line either. In November 2014, a third brain bleed led to brain surgery, two weeks after his mother-in-law passed away. He woke up unable to walk, spent a month in inpatient rehabilitation, and took roughly seven years before returning to meaningful work. He wasn’t “ready” at any single point in that process. What changed was that he stopped waiting for readiness and learned to take the next step from wherever he was standing that day.

Does the pattern hold for stroke survivors specifically, not just trauma survivors generally? A 2026 systematic review and meta-regression pooled 10 studies covering 1,046 stroke survivors and found a significant, gradual increase in PTG scores with each month after discharge. The strongest correlates of growth were active cognitive processing (deliberately making sense of what happened) and social support (Klass et al., 2026). A related meta-analysis of post-traumatic growth after acquired brain injury found similar patterns: growth was associated with more time since injury, social connection, and lower depression (Grace et al., 2015). And when researchers tested structured psychosocial programs rather than waiting for growth to happen on its own, a meta-analysis of 12 randomised controlled trials found a modest but real increase in PTG (Hedges’ g = 0.36) (Roepke, 2015). Modest and real beats waiting and hoping.

Honesty matters here as much as hope. Post-traumatic growth is common, but it isn’t universal or owed to anyone; close to half of people in these studies did not report moderate-to-high growth, and that doesn’t mean they’re doing recovery wrong. Growth is not the same as being grateful for a stroke, and it doesn’t erase grief or distress; the two can coexist. Most PTG research relies on self-report, often collected well after the event, so it tells us what people believe changed, not necessarily what changed on an objective measure. The link between social support or active coping and growth is a correlation, not proof that one causes the other. And the intervention evidence is modest, across a small number of trials, so it supports “may help,” not “will fix this.” None of this replaces professional care, particularly if distress is persistent or severe.

If the research has a practical edge, it’s this: small, concrete action seems to matter more than waiting for the right internal state. Two places to start: name one specific area of your life where you’re currently waiting to feel ready before acting, and choose one step so small it feels almost silly, then take it today rather than waiting for tomorrow’s version of yourself.

If you want to take this further with your own care team, useful questions to raise include: what kind of structured support (psychological, peer, or rehabilitation-based) is available to help with “making sense of what happened,” and what social supports in your own life could be strengthened now rather than later.

Bill explores this idea at length in his new book, Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small: A Practical Guide to Rebuilding Your Life After Trauma, Even When You’re Not Ready, available at mybook.to/yourworld. If stroke is your story specifically, his first book goes deeper into one survivor’s path through post-traumatic growth after stroke, and you can read more at https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book. For listeners who want to support this work directly, you can also do that at https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post Why Waiting to Feel Ready Is Keeping Your World Small appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

The night his stroke happened, Ramandeep “Bobby” Chaggar didn’t feel what he expected to feel. No pins and needles. No dramatic collapse. Just a left arm that wouldn’t answer him anymore.

 He limped to the kitchen anyway, poured a glass of water, and brought one back for his wife because that’s what you do, even when your body has just stopped taking instructions from half of itself. It wasn’t until the ambulance service ran him through the BFAST test over the phone that the word “stroke” entered the room. A right ischaemic pontine stroke, in December 2023. He was, by his own account, in the best health of his life at the time: no blood pressure issues, no diabetes, cycling a hundred kilometres most weekends.

Bobby grew up in an era and a family where a stroke wasn’t something you researched; it was something you heard about secondhand. “That particular cousin’s father’s grandfather had a stroke, and he’s gone,” is how the news used to travel. Nobody around him distinguished a stroke in the brain from a stroke in the heart. There was no internet to check, only the flat, final verdict that passed between relatives: he’s done for.

 It’s a belief he carried into his own stroke, even as his medical training Bobby spent years as a veterinary surgeon in India before qualifying in Australia told him something else was happening. That veterinary background is exactly why he recognised what was going on in his own body faster than most people would. It didn’t make the belief disappear. It just meant he was fighting it from the inside while everyone around him was still catching up.

In those first disorienting hours, Bobby was convinced his arm had started moving again. He filmed it and sent the video to his sister as proof, he thought, that he was already turning a corner. By morning, the movement was gone. “It was like a bad dream,” he says. “I was like, what was that?”

 What he was seeing wasn’t recovery. Doctors later explained that in the earliest hours after a stroke, the body can still fire off remnant spinal reflexes old movement patterns held in the spinal cord that can briefly activate on their own, independent of the brain damage that’s actually occurred. It’s a strange, almost cruel mechanism: the body offering a flicker of hope before the real work of recovery has even started.

Bobby spent 45 days in rehabilitation at Parkville, six months in a wheelchair overall, and credits one moment above almost everything else: his first physiotherapist he calls her Hannah sitting on the floor, moving his foot, and telling him he would walk again. It mattered enough that his book was originally going to be titled Walking with Hannah, before privacy considerations changed the plan. His son, who narrates the audiobook, still opens the acknowledgements by thanking her directly.

This is the part of Bobby’s story that speaks most directly to what so many stroke survivors go through and rarely say out loud. In his culture, and in his family, showing emotion, especially for the men expected to be providers and caretakers, wasn’t really an option. When his father died in 1997, he was told to be strong for his mother and sister. When his mother died in 2013, he was told the same thing again.

“I’ve been told that stroke is a part of grief, and you should not suppress your feelings.”

It took his brother-in-law showing up every day to help him with basic care showering, dressing, the things that felt hardest to accept before something shifted. His own psychologist eventually gave him the instruction that reframed everything: put on your own life jacket first, before you try to save anyone else. It’s advice Bobby now extends to every caregiver he talks to: the person supporting a stroke survivor needs their own support too, or they burn out trying to hold everything together.

He isn’t alone in this. Bill has spoken openly on the podcast about his own experience with unexpected, involuntary crying after a neurological injury, and how much energy goes into reassuring the people around you that the tears don’t mean something is wrong. For Bobby, permission to cry didn’t erase the culture he was raised in. It just meant he stopped fighting it.

Bobby’s recovery is full of small, deliberate acts of reclaiming identity. He got his first tattoo not long after his stroke, partly, he says, because people notice ink before they notice a limp. He’s spent years slowly making peace with not tying a turban the way he used to, calling himself, with real affection, a recovering “turbanator.” He built his own incline-and-decline walking circuit near his home and quietly upped the difficulty every fortnight, the same instinct that now has him choosing stairs over the lift at the allied health course he’s completing.

Running, he says flatly, is overrated. He can’t do it anymore, and he’s decided that’s fine. It’s the same acceptance that let him and his family move to Perth just one month after his stroke, and then move back again when isolation made the recovery harder than the geography ever was. 

None of it looks like the version of recovery he grew up believing in, the one where a stroke simply meant a story was over. Bobby’s version has a motorbike with a sidecar he now rides himself, a book he wrote one voice note at a time because typing with one hand wasn’t fast enough, and a fairly simple message for anyone who asked him to just think positively: some things are still hard, and that’s allowed to be true at the same time as everything else. 

If you’re navigating your own recovery or supporting someone who is, Bill’s book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened (recoveryafterstroke.com/book), walks through ten practical tools for rebuilding after a stroke. And if trauma has made your world feel smaller than it used to be, Bill’s newest book, Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small, is written for exactly that. 

If this episode helped you, you can support the show directly at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

He was taught a stroke meant you were gone. Bobby Chaggar’s story proves otherwise and shows why crying after a stroke is nothing to hide.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction

Transcript:

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (00:00)

in the hospital, I thought my arm started moving.

And the doctors, and when I got up in the morning, it was like a bad dream. No, it was not moving again. So I was like, what was that?

Bill Gasiamis (00:19)

Physiotherapist whose promise

changed the course of recovery and what it actually took for him as a man raised to be the strong one to let himself cry.

Before we get into it, if trauma has made your world feel smaller than it used to be, my new book, Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small, is exactly what it’s about. Search for it on Amazon or tap the link in the show notes to grab your copy today.

And one more thing, this show exists because listeners decide it’s worth keeping going. There’s no other funding behind it. If an episode like this one has ever helped you or helped someone you love, even a few dollars a month on Patreon is what keeps these conversations free for the next person who finds themselves Googling this stuff alone at two in the morning, scared, looking for someone who’s actually been through it. That’s all.

patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.. A small amount every month makes a massive difference.

But now let’s get into it. Here’s my conversation with Bobby.

Bill Gasiamis (01:56)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (01:58)

Bill Gasiamis (02:00)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (02:10)

Bill Gasiamis (02:11)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (02:14)

So I I specifically remember this number because my mom had fallen and broken her shoulder once while walking in Labrador. So that day we counted the animals and we said, okay, no, after this, no more. That’s it. And the parrot was trilingual because the kids would play with him, so he wouldn’t know nursery rhymes, he would know the whistles, and then my grandmom’s dialect was Punjabi, so he could he could swear in Punjabi, and he could swear in Hindi because my mom was Hindi. So that’s why trilingual.

Bill Gasiamis (03:08)

love that. That’s an awesome way to grow up.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (03:09)

Bill Gasiamis (03:12)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (03:22)

And I was so excited because my son’s school was only five minutes away. So I was always looking forward that I’m gonna drop him off in school in the sidecar. It’s gonna be such a big thing for him. So it was quite cool. So that’s the reason we were expecting it. It took almost two months for it to come via ship. And you know, once a ship leaves the country, there’s no way of live tracking it. There they must must be ways for the guys who are doing it, but for the clients, they have no way. They have no clue. They just talk to the customer care.

And you have no idea what’s happening. And suddenly one day it just pops up and they say, Yeah, it’s in customs. Here you go and you have to do this, this and this and come and pick it up. So that’s the excitement.

Bill Gasiamis (04:23)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (04:26)

We were just looking forward for the bike. Yep.

Bill Gasiamis (04:29)

In your book, you wrote about your culture that when somebody

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (04:34)

Bill Gasiamis (04:35)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (04:47)

So you know a few things like that. But there are families who’ve been through stroke. Now I’ve realized and also met them. So they know stroke one could recover from the stroke and one also forgets about it over time. I’ve heard that. But mostly the thought process was because it was not too kind of a disease. And we also did not know what is a stroke in the heart. Some would someone would say he had a stroke in the heart, someone would say he had a stroke in the brain. So we had no idea what that meant.

We could just as kids, as growing up people, we just knew that he had a stroke and he’s done for, he’s gone. That’s one. And because of my medical background, my veterinary background, I realized that I was having a stroke. because it was not their usual pins and needles and there was no sensation. I couldn’t move my arm. I managed to limp. I went all the way to the kitchen. I trudged a little to the kitchen. I had a glass of water, brought a glass for my wife.

And I’ve also realized, learnt from doctors here that there are remnant spinal reflexes which work for some time. So those reflexes help you I think, navigate the initial few hours. It’s just that’s how we are made. Because I, you know, in the hospital, I thought my arm started moving. And the doctors, and when I got up in the morning, it was like a bad dream. No, it was not moving again. So I was like, what was that? And I have a video of that. I was sending it to my sister.

Look, my arm is started to move. Wow, I’m so happy. So they told me that was just a part of the spinal reflex. So maybe that’s what made me go to the kitchen and back. So we called the Ambos and they did the BFAST test. It was FAST initially, but now the acronym has changed to BFAST. so they did that over the phone and they confirmed it was a stroke. And they were they said they’ll be at my place in two minutes. And then we made the second phone call to my brother in law who

works with neurointerventional surgeons all over Australia. He’s also vet by education. So I thought he might be the best person to give me advice. And he always used to share his stories of patients, aneurysms, brain things, strokes. So I thought that, you know, he he will fix me, man.

So we called

Bill Gasiamis (07:10)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (07:11)

So they drove me to Royal Melbourne and that’s where my journey started. Yep.

Bill Gasiamis (07:27)

My journey started at the Austin hospital, ended up at the Royal Melbourne as well. And I had my surgery there and I learned to walk again at the Royal Melbourne hospital and at their Parkville facility where the rehab was done.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (07:42)

Bill Gasiamis (07:43)

experience. Really helpful. So you are also a vet. Okay. A surgeon as well. Are all

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (07:52)

Bill Gasiamis (07:53)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (07:56)

When we used to technically pass out in those years, we were supposed to take take care of everything surgeries, medicine, prevention for all these species throughout. And obviously it was a it was a big experience learning practically as we went. Because when my father became a vet, my my grandparents were like, I don’t know whether anybody’s gonna get married to him or not. They they got worried. It was looked so down upon though that profession, you know. So he bought clamor to it. He showed everybody that passion.

Can happen. It can happen in bed science also. In India. It must be good in other countries, but that’s all I know about India. Only the rich class had the dogs. The Britishers, they’re the people who were connected to the Britishers when they had gone, when they had left the country. Only that rich class was able to afford dogs because you know it was a poor country. So that’s where he started. Yep, yep. Yep. And now you have specializations

Bill Gasiamis (09:05)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (09:08)

So things like that. Yep.

Bill Gasiamis (09:17)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (09:19)

Bill Gasiamis (09:20)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (09:28)

Bill Gasiamis (09:30)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (09:42)

Bill Gasiamis (10:06)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (10:07)

So the single stomach animals are mostly similar, and how the physiology of the body works, how the brain works, how the conduction works, all the diseases, they have things like MS, they have things like diabetes. We used to treat them all the time. So yeah, yes, it helps. It does. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (10:22)

so give me a little bit of an idea of you’ve gone to hospital. you realize that your arm is moving and now it’s no longer moving. And then how long were you in hospital for? And what was that, experience like what, what was your hospital stay like?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (10:43)

Bill Gasiamis (11:09)

left side your whole left side was gone.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (11:11)

Bill Gasiamis (11:18)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (11:18)

And they can just reverse the stroke instantly. But I did not know the concept. So those injections basically work and dissolve the clot which is in the brain. But if if if the stroke is of a bleeder’s type, it can also kill the person. So we were waiting for the MRI. We are waiting for the MRI when’s that gonna happen. And it was unfortunately a Saturday night, Sunday morning. So everything were lined up. You know how the systems are in Melbourne. So all the emergency patients who are dying are first, people who are not dying are second, people who just

Got normal things, they’re third. So things like that. So probably that took a little while. So I had my MRI on Monday. So I was in the hospital till Monday. I just had nurses coming in assessing me if I could stand, if I could step forward, step backwards. I mean, obviously they were doing my cognition tests and everything. I got tested for a drug which was is which is called clopedrogel, I think. that is the one which dissolves clots.

So they give that as an oral thing to you and they test the blood in the body that whether it responds to that or not. So they are ready for it. As soon as they have the result, they just shoot you with injections. But it was unfortunate that I got diagnosed only in about twenty four hours. And then they moved me to the rehab. I was lucky to get a room and this amazing partner in my room, and that’s that’s when my rehab started.

Bill Gasiamis (12:47)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (12:48)

People were literally telling me that you’re eating like a Labrador, man. What happened? What’s happening? I was just like this. And the food in Royal Melbourne rehab is really good. They come to you with a menu and they ask you what you want. And so I was ordering everything I loved. So and I was hearing in one of your podcasts before, it it was literally like that. I had the I’ve had the best time of life in the last two years.

Different realization, it’s changed me, and I’ve just had the best time. I always liked exercising. I’ve exercised

Bill Gasiamis (13:39)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (13:42)

Bill Gasiamis (13:51)

on the day that you noticed some movement, like in rehab, I think was that on day 28 or something like that, there was a little bit of, first

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (14:26)

Bill Gasiamis (14:28)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (14:30)

I still have that video. I remember there was this friend of mine who used to come to the hospital and she used to massage my arm. So that is also called I think it’s called passive passive stretching. And she would really press my arm and she will caught cause me pain. And I’ve been told that I’ve got a good pain threshold. Maybe that’s because of my martial arts training when I was younger.

Bill Gasiamis (14:52)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (14:53)

And I remember my roommate, he he had a problem with his arm, and they had to give him Botox injections to paralyze those muscles. So he could move and the muscles could be pain free. So that’s a that’s a routine thing which they do. So Botox is basically bottleneum toxin, which causes paralysis. and they give it in the muscle which is spas spas which is spasming for the person and it it releases the muscle and they feel better. So I was fortunate that she was there and I remember after her

Three, four weeks of massaging my hand, and my wife used to be sitting beside my bed and she used to be pressing on my left leg, I remember. So that particular day I could see my foot move a little like this, b which I could. So that was that was a big one for me. I just cried and I didn’t know what to what to expect. my God. Yep.

Bill Gasiamis (15:41)

that is all often a very good sign. And then, a lot of people kind of built from that.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (15:52)

Bill Gasiamis (15:53)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (16:06)

Bill Gasiamis (16:11)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (16:13)

So I had no clue what was going on. But then over time I realized there was a diabetic ward. So those were guys was ob obviously coming in because of their neuropathies. They’ve lost some limbs. Some people were lucky, they only lost fingers, some people unlucky, they lost legs, arms sometimes. But it can be it can be quite challenging for them also, you know, certainly because it’s too quick. I I think stroke is still slow. It gets you ready, it gets you going, but it’s it’s slow paced. And now I’m an expert, I know what is gonna work. So I’m still completing three years in December. So

With an exercise, I I know the stress and I know the difficulty and and and I can feel it. I can feel it that this will work. So in their in their case they don’t have time. They just lose a limb and they just have to learn in three, four days. Fortunately their brain is okay, so they are more you know, neuroplastic, I would say, but as compared to us.

Bill Gasiamis (17:17)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (17:26)

So this does happen in diabetic patients, very common. So it I kept thinking of those those days, you know, when I would I would hear of him, we would go and visit him in hospital. So it’s very different. They are

Bill Gasiamis (18:02)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (18:03)

Bill Gasiamis (18:18)

I’m to make a few huge assumptions. You’re a male, you’re Indian and your culture probably makes it difficult to accept care, especially when it comes to physical care. you know, being treated as stroke survivor in a rehabilitation hospital, when your left side’s not working means that people have to shower you and, help you at the bathroom and all that kind of stuff. What was that like for you?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (18:47)

That the elder people or the boys are more looked from a perspective of as providers and caretakers. So I remember when my father passed on in 97, I was told that be strong for your mom, be strong for your sister. And then when my mom passed on in 2013, I was told the same thing: be strong for your sister. But there was one of my friends, one of my uncles, who told me that, you know, you need to do something, you need to have a couple of drinks, go to a corner and just cry it out, man. It’s important.

So now I know that grief is important. and I was I’ve been told that stroke is a part of a grief and you should not suppress your feelings. Like I can do with that box of tissues right now. I can go all out. No problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (19:50)

was just talking about my situation a few days ago. This happened to me in 2013. Brain surgery was in 2014 and I cry all the time. It’s not really like it’s strange. Have you heard of the super pseudo bulb affect?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (20:06)

Bill Gasiamis (20:07)

condition. It’s a condition where people who with neurological injuries tend to cry, or laugh

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (20:14)

Bill Gasiamis (20:15)

sorry, what neurosurgery meant to me, you know, like, I’m only standing there because of neurosurgery without it, I wouldn’t be standing there. My surgeon was in the room. It was 400 people in the room. And I got up and I didn’t make it to the front lectern before I started crying. And then when I got up to say the speech, I was holding on to the lectern, just waiting for the crying to stop just so that I can start the speech. And then through the speech, I had to stop a couple of times.

Now I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t sad. was, I was excited, but the 400 people and the, situation talking about me, my family, et cetera, and having to describe what neurosurgery meant to me made it impossible to get through that speech. I got through it, but it was,

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (21:16)

Bill Gasiamis (21:20)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (21:25)

Bill Gasiamis (21:28)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (21:30)

Bill Gasiamis (21:34)

not in a, not in a situation where I have to talk about something that’s emotional, that’s about me, my experience. And if my family involved, forget about it. can’t stay out kind of the poker face. No way. Yeah. But I can in a poker game when we’re trying to take somebody else’s money.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (21:52)

Bill Gasiamis (21:59)

used to cry with the cat tripping over or something

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (22:05)

Bill Gasiamis (22:06)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (22:12)

Bill Gasiamis (22:15)

what’s today today we’re recording on Saturday on Thursday night. I was in Melbourne at Marvel stadium. there was an electronic dance music festival, 60,000 people in a stadium for a DJ. It

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (22:39)

Bill Gasiamis (22:39)

But it wasn’t big cries, it was just tears and excitement and something else happening that made me cry. And I was moved by the fact that I was A, at the event, B, it was such an amazing event that all the people there were having a great time. Like, it was moving rather than sad or upsetting or,

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (23:14)

Bill Gasiamis (23:16)

that’s what’s happening. That was the hard part because you know, we’re from a Greek family. They see you cry. Everything’s terrible. Everything’s bad. You know, they don’t know. They don’t know how to deal with it. You know, so you’ve got to reeducate people. That was the hardest part of that experience for me. That’s all it was.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (23:37)

I keep thinking that since I was always in sales and I enjoyed my sales, I don’t know if that’s gonna settle down ever with me, my emotions.

Bill Gasiamis (23:47)

know, and he needed to continue, continue his fluids so that he doesn’t dehydrate. It was.

We laughed about it like you and I are laughing. Cause that’s he’s got to that stage where it’s like, wow, you know, it is what it is. Like no big deal. He was totally moved by the fact that he was a alive, able to be at the wedding, get married to the person that he loved. and then, and then later on they had a kid and it was down all downhill again from there, you know, more tears, more crazy stuff.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (24:33)

Bill Gasiamis (24:34)

That’s just how it is. Many cultures are like that. So who’s Hannah?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (25:05)

I c we couldn’t see them because you know it was post COVID so everybody was still using masks. But I could just see the eyes. And she was so beautiful.

So she sat on the floor and she was moving my foot.

So it was quite moving for me, even now. Sorry for that.

Bill Gasiamis (25:41)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (25:42)

Bill Gasiamis (26:03)

And I think at the same time, that’s kind of when you had the realization that you should write a book. how did that come about? What was the, why did that carry so much weight that situation?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (26:33)

Bill Gasiamis (26:39)

yeah, yeah. yeah, it’s okay. And yes, they have. Yeah.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (26:43)

For me, only that one promise coming from a physio was a big deal.

I wanted to share with my friends, I wanted to share with my clients. I’ve got a lot of good people in my book, and vice versa. So I I wanted to share with all of them what I’m going through. So I was constantly taking pictures, recording voice notes. I was not so good at typing because you know I just had gone from two hands to one hand. So I just couldn’t type. So I was I was doing a lot of voice to text notes, I was writing notes, I was taking pictures, I was taking videos. We are very audiovisual. I am very audiovisual rather. So

I was really doing a lot. And then I also have a habit of listening to audiobooks. And I was doing prayers and I was listening to audiobooks. I don’t even remember what book I was listening to. maybe I think it was Andrea Gossi the one. I was listening to that one. Moving story. Good story. So I thought, hey, why why don’t why can’t I convert all this what I’m writing into a book? So and I had ample time.

So I thought

Bill Gasiamis (27:41)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (27:42)

Bill Gasiamis (27:45)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (27:45)

Bill Gasiamis (27:48)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (27:48)

Bill Gasiamis (27:55)

I know that I know that feeling like same same here when I wrote the first book,

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (28:01)

Bill Gasiamis (28:01)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (28:14)

Bill Gasiamis (28:14)

then that would be a bonus. So it was the idea was about that. And then, of course, when you have a book, you may as well have the best book, and you may as well sell as many copies as possible. Well, what’s the point of having a book otherwise, you know, you want to make sure that it gets sold. So I really relate to what you’re saying about that. My book idea came in hospital as well. So no, the podcast came in hospital as well. I was getting wheeled transferred from the Royal Melbourne.

to Parkville and I was waiting in the transit lounge and that is when I had the idea to start the podcast, but I was never going to do it. I don’t think I was going to do it. A friend of mine put the idea in my head later on again. And because of that, the podcast emerged. I had the idea, he reinforced it. And then I went ahead and did it. And the book again was an idea from another friend. You’ve learned all this stuff, know, you know, how, are you going to do with it? You how are you going to…

tell other people about it. The podcast was one way and then the book was another way. And of course, then it’s not just about me, it’s about other people as well. Now, if I understood correctly, are you from the religion, the Sikh religion? Did

you seek right?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (29:37)

Bill Gasiamis (29:40)

How is dealing with that situation where your left side doesn’t work and the use or the need to have a turban on your head, do you kind of deal with that?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (29:57)

And I was very proud of my turban because people used to tell me that your turban looks fantastic, man. You’re the best looking Sikh we’ve we’ve seen around, you know. So I was quite proud of it. And I was I used to feel on top of the world with my turban. So every every trip of mine, every travel of mine, I had to pack a couple of turbans and and I’m I think I am O C D. So I used to match it with my shirt. Sometimes I used to match it with my ties. It should should be the same color. Sometimes I’ll match it with my jeans. So you know it was it was quite a task.

Every time I’m traveling. But I loved it. Having said that, I decided that my son is not gonna be a turbanator. I called myself a turbanator because of the same reason. I said that’s one thing less to take care of. It’s not that I don’t w want him to be a Sikh. He he realizes he’s a Sikh. He’s a good Sikh. He does what I do in the Sikh Sikh temple as well, which is serve. But from a religious perspective, he’s okay. He you don’t have to have a turban on your head to be that religion. You know, you can be a good person from that religion perspective also.

So I was very proud of it and not being able to do it initially was a big blow to my ego or my you know image in my own brain. I lost I lost my identity, I I thought, and and my my prayer consisted of that that you know I hope I can go back to tying a turban. Even you can see I still don’t dye a turban. A lot of my friends tell me that I look good like this. The man bun suits me. But you know, I’m like, okay, go with the flow. Well, let’s see, let’s see.

Bill Gasiamis (31:37)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (31:38)

Bill Gasiamis (31:39)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (32:00)

Bill Gasiamis (32:03)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (32:03)

Bill Gasiamis (32:06)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (32:06)

Bill Gasiamis (32:25)

it personal shame or is it or back in the day was a shame within the community from other people?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (32:33)

Since they are warriors, they’re supposed to be a warrior race. It was just said that you don’t do any kind of bad thing to your body, just take care of yourself, be healthy. So if if if someone saw a Sikh smoking in public, they will definitely go up to them and tell them that if you are a Sikh, why you smoking, man? You should cut your hair. Just take it easy. So things like

Bill Gasiamis (33:10)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (33:10)

Personally ashamed of not being able to do it.

Bill Gasiamis (33:23)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (33:24)

Bill Gasiamis (33:34)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (33:36)

Bill Gasiamis (33:38)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (33:39)

Bill Gasiamis (33:40)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (33:43)

This one for example And it’s got my son’s name here. is it? It’s here. That’s Raj, Raj, yeah, that’s his name. So

Bill Gasiamis (33:55)

that the impact that arm that, the arm that was impacted by the stroke?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (34:00)

my first nurse who sat with me and she told me that, you know, you’ll be fine. And she held my hand. So she had a few. So maybe that had my had an effect. And then my brother in law said, he said, just don’t worry, man. When he’s when he saw me upset, he just told me, he You don’t have to be upset, you’re alive. Just just get okay, get a few tattoos, just travel around the world, do that. So, you know, that was that’s just got stuck in me. That okay, I want to do this. So I did it. Got it done. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (34:52)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (34:54)

Bill Gasiamis (34:54)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (35:03)

Look at the car, he’s come in. So he was quite polished. So and still he had tattoos. So the it broke the s the usual stereotype, you know? Everything that’s stereotypical. So I thought, yeah, I think this is the right time for me if I want to do it, because people will not notice my little limp. Because I was still limping and I was in a bad way for for at least a year. I was quite negative in my mind. I mean, and especially when I was 120 kilos, I don’t know what to do about do about it because I could not exercise, I could not cycle.

Just didn’t know what to do about it. And I could not fast at that time because I I was having so many medicines morning and evening. So it it would call a cause acidity. So I was quite negative end of the spectrum. But that’s the time when I realized when I then I thought that I don’t care about anybody else. I am just doing this, man. So I looked up a few people and this lovely girl who used to come to drive for me, she took me around we were in Perth at that time. So she took me around

my house and we went we visited a few places and then there was this lovely gentleman who was coming to Perth and he was apparently from Melbourne. So that was my turning point. So this happened in December. I booked him for for my appointment for for my tattoo in Perth. But then he told me that he he said, look, if you want to move back, if you are moving back eventually, because I had that in my mind. I wanted to move back. So he said if you’re moving back, I’m based out of Melbourne, just come to me there. So that’s when it happened.

That was my new year gift to myself. And everybody was so, you know, amazed with my the the thing which I had done on one leg. And they were like, Wow, that’s a good one. Man, where do you do it? I was like, there’s a special guy who does this. So I was just end up talking of that and not of anything else. I was so happy. I think,

Bill Gasiamis (37:00)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (37:00)

Bill Gasiamis (37:02)

of the things my wife says to me every so often, she says, we should go live in a different location for a little bit, know, try the beach or whatever. And I’m thinking, well, you know, that sounds like a great idea. But in my immediately in my mind and in my body, I tense up and I just find that thinking about moving.

emptying a house, filling another house, doing all that stuff just fills me with like dread. And I don’t know why it’s her idea is a great idea, but I just feel kind of comfortable or whatever. But I wouldn’t think of moving. You moved your family back to Perth. And what was that like? Because.

I can’t imagine leaving Melbourne and going to Perth and packing up the whole family, the whole house and all that kind of stuff and doing that. Not because I can’t do them. I can’t live in another location because I can’t do all the work that comes with that before and all the work after. It feels like it’s going to take up way too much of my attention, time, energy. What was the move like for you?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (38:10)

We had no friends, we had no support system there. Although we were in a very good place, we were very central as compared to the country here. Because we were st always struggling to get physios in, OTs in. So it was, you know, a constant struggle. So over there we were central, so everything was okay, we’ll do this. It was just bang on. And I spent a good time just learning I mean, getting myself stronger, walking every day in the morning. So that was the positive. But I was quite negative, in here. Physically I was positive, but mentally I was quite I was a goner.

Bill Gasiamis (39:03)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (39:03)

Bill Gasiamis (39:04)

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Bill Gasiamis (39:07)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (39:14)

Not let you come back. I mean, so we had the discussion and they almost fired me, but they were happy to take me back when I was back in Melbourne, but they still let go of me. So I don’t know where what happened. I don’t have a job.

Bill Gasiamis (39:36)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (39:36)

yep. So I think that was a very silly decision. But that whole year I spent like that in December, I moved for my son’s holidays to my sister’s house in Melbourne. She’s also in Melbourne, and we were there for about two months. she’s in the Bay side. So after spending that quality time with family and people who were familiar, I had friends visiting me, I had people visiting me, I had so many doctors, I had these doctors’ support system from RMH.

supportive stride strides workshop, which was happening, things like that. So it was it just helped me recover. And I thought that this is it, man, that this is what I should do. And and then I was, you know, I was still talking to my psychologist over the phone, and she in the book by mistake, I I just wrote a he. I think I missed the S because of this bloody autocorrect. She told me that look, you need to wear your seat your life jacket first. You know, that was one statement.

Ha ha.

made me calculate and rethink.

So that’s when we decided, okay, let’s come back. So twice, twice in here. Yep,

Bill Gasiamis (40:38)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (40:39)

Bill Gasiamis (40:40)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (40:42)

Bill Gasiamis (40:44)

kind of motivated to help their loved one. Often they end up becoming sick and passing away before the stroke survivor. So everyone needs to put on their life raft, their own life jacket first. Once they’re stable and everything is okay, then they need to assess what they can do for the other person. I love that. Such a profound statement. I can see why it moved you so much.

Often stroke survivors also complain, not complain, but they mention when somebody says, just think positively. what was it like for you to hear that? Just think positively

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (41:43)

Bill Gasiamis (41:44)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (41:44)

Sorry.

So it was quite common to hear that all the time. And I wouldn’t even tell anybody that I’ve had a stroke. I wouldn’t tell them. I will just talk to them. I will try to hide my walk. I don’t know, I was a little shameful. I don’t know why. For example, I’m reskilling to be an allied health assistant at the moment in Boxhill Institute. So it took me about six months before I disclosed to my class that, you know, I walk funny sometimes because of my stroke. Because I just didn’t want to tell anybody. I was a little apprehensive.

And when I warmed up when everybody got to know me and I was I’m like probably the friendliest in the class. So everybody likes me. So then I told everybody, they’re friends. I said this is this is what has happened, that’s my book. Please read it. See if it helps someone. And I don’t know if this book is gonna actually help someone or not. I don’t know if there’s no scientific information in that. There’s no medical information. But what is gonna help in that book, I’m not sure. But the idea was just if even it can help one person.

Bill Gasiamis (42:46)

the timeline that they’re in in their recovery, whether it’s emotional, mental or physical is unique to them. So that one word might be overlooked by you and me, but then somebody else goes, that’s just the word I needed to hear. And that’s why 400 episodes of the podcast are really good because there’s something in at least one of those episodes for everybody, you know, so it will, it will help. It will make it so that people

maybe even if they just realized that they can write a book, maybe if they realize that they could just share their story, that’s all, that’s good enough.

So, how about this whole new normal statement? Now some people are told that they have to adjust to their new normal. And I kind of, I see why people say that it helps with acceptance in some situations when you have to let go of how you went about the past, how you did your life previously.

when you were more physically able-bodied or more cognitively able. So how did you handle the new normal comment statement?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (44:20)

But then, you know, the whole religious part and how we’ve been brought up, it’s with a lot of acceptance. So which is, I think, important for a child sitting next to someone who’s a nobody, or for a child who’s sitting next to someone who’s super duper rich. Maybe he’s a prime minister of the country, but they are sitting on the same level and having food, for example, on the floor. Someone who’s sitting next to you who’s who cleans houses on the floor. They’re humans.

So I think that probably got me ready for the acceptance. I mean, that that primed me for the level of expect acceptance we had. I had to work less towards accepting things. and yeah, for example, I can’t run at the moment. But then what I say to people about that, that it’s overrated, I don’t care. You know, for example, so that’s it. That’s my acceptance. That’s what I do. Make a joke of it, man. That’s it. You can’t do it, you can’t do it.

What do you do?

Bill Gasiamis (45:11)

is overrated. That’s the I’m going to use that now as well.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (45:16)

yep.

Bill Gasiamis (45:18)

couple of weeks, I’m going to go and spend some time away with a friend of mine. I’ve got a really amazing friend. We grew up together. He used to work at the Royal Melbourne hospital when I was there. He was a radiographer and he would come and see me when I was admitted. He would do my scans. Amazing. Like I’ve known this guy my entire life since I was about four years old. And we’re going to go and spend eight days just away from the whole family, the wives, everybody. We’re just going to go to Hawaii for a little bit.

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left leg, my left leg goes down a little bit differently from my right leg. And because I have proprioception issues and the feeling is not correct, I never know when it’s exactly in the right position. And I risk injuring my knee because sometimes I can overextend, hyper extend. And, and

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (46:15)

Bill Gasiamis (46:17)

the foot going down and my ankle being solid. So I don’t want to run. I can run across the road to make sure that I’m safe and there’s no car coming too fast or injuring me, but I’m not running two kilometers or a marathon or anything like that.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (46:37)

Bill Gasiamis (46:38)

it makes it more fatiguing, more exhausting.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (46:44)

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Bill Gasiamis (46:52)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (46:56)

Bill Gasiamis (46:57)

When I say it’s fine, I look fine, but my leg is still tightening. is fatiguing. is, you know, it’s not the same as my right side. So I always choose the stairs going up. And the reason is because I want to make sure that I don’t lose that skill of climbing the elevation on the steps. And if I go to somewhere where there’s an elevator or, you know, one of those travel elevators, you know,

the travel escalators. Yeah.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (47:43)

Bill Gasiamis (47:46)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (47:50)

Bill Gasiamis (47:51)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (47:53)

same same habit. So Boxell Institute, my classes are usually on the fourth floor. And on most times I’m not using the lift. I’m just walking.

Bill Gasiamis (48:02)

Yep. And

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (48:03)

Bill Gasiamis (48:03)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (48:18)

Bill Gasiamis (48:20)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (48:24)

Bill Gasiamis (48:28)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (48:28)

You the flora and fauna rather than the just the

Bill Gasiamis (48:46)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (48:47)

Big deal for me. So that was my thing to do. So that was my two hours, three hours in the morning. I would do that circuit. And in fact, this friend of mine who you might read about in my book also, who was my Sunday walking partner, I encouraged him also to do the same. But you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s I don’t know, it’s it’s putting someone at risk. It’s risky behavior. That’s what I’m learning at my institute also. So they teach us about risk that this these things can put you at risk and you try not to get hurt first.

And then you’d work on the things. So I don’t know why I was doing it. I’ve always been pushing myself all the time. And I like it. So

Bill Gasiamis (49:45)

Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with that. I wish stroke survivors will push themselves beyond their limits to test

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (49:51)

Bill Gasiamis (49:51)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (50:00)

Bill Gasiamis (50:01)

If it’s hanging over, you know how sometimes people walk down the stairs and half their foot is hanging over the edge of the step, the step

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (50:20)

Bill Gasiamis (50:21)

healthy and you don’t fall down and injure yourself even more and make your recovery even harder or even worse. So I would encourage people to listen to their OTs, especially in the early days of their recovery, as they get better and things

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (50:53)

Bill Gasiamis (50:54)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (51:09)

Bill Gasiamis (51:11)

Well, we’ll put an image of the book up for this segment where I’m chatting now just so people can get to see it. Tell me about the back cover, the back cover photo, getting back on the bike.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (51:21)

Bill Gasiamis (51:43)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (51:44)

And three of us, we sat there with our helmets on and I just sat on the motorcycle like this. I didn’t have a license at that time. I mean now I do, but that was just photo op. You know, we like audio visual, I told you. That’s what it was.

Bill Gasiamis (51:57)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (52:00)

Yep. That’s the lock that’s a back image, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (52:18)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (52:37)

Bill Gasiamis (52:38)

the clutch to get my foot into the right position and move it up, especially up down, I could probably do but up. I would always, I’m always thinking that I’m gonna, I’m gonna miss the gear.

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (52:52)

It’s nothing that nothing that emotional, you know, actually. So I and I used to press the clutch. I used to try and press press the clutch. I remember that day the first time when I pressed the clutch. So I’ll give you a perspective. So the first day I had gone to the Pilates studio for my recovery and rehab and my exercises when I started. So there’s an assessment. So she’d made me do the grip test. I was pushing 75 kilos on my right hand, for example, which is solid.

She said she hasn’t seen seventy five kilos ever in her life. And with my right hand, it was only half a kilo. So imagine the difference.

So I could press the clutch only once the first day. And the second day, I mean and I I was also undergoing this clinical trial, which is called CIMT, constraint induced movement therapy. So what they do is they they they used to deliberately ask me to wear a mitten or a mat or something or hold something in my strong hand so that my weak hand is forced to do other stuff, which was very, very annoying, you know, deliberately doing stuff, deliberately doing stuff.

But this is what I’ve learned over time. That if something is not working, if you constantly work on it, it’ll it’ll eventually start working. You know, it’ll work more, a little more next time. I remember when I I used to clean I’m I’m a stickler and I’m crazy for cleaning. I think I’m OCD. I’m I’m literally undiagnosed, ADHD,

Bill Gasiamis (54:31)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (54:32)

You know, towards the towards the wall, towards the splashboard. But now I can. Because you know, this is what I tried that. Okay, let me do it with this. It was very annoying because it was leave streaks and it was not perfect. And having those things which which won’t you know, which should be perfect. There should be no spot here. There should be no line here. It is crazy. So you work on it, you work on it, work on it, works. So now I can sit on my bike and it’s a trike, it’s a trike, you know, it’s with a sidecar. Yeah. So it’s with a

Bill Gasiamis (55:02)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:04)

Bill Gasiamis (55:06)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:07)

And now I can sit on a bike and I can ride it for about for example, we shifted. So I rode my bike. I didn’t put send it in a truck. I rode it.

go onto the highway.

Bill Gasiamis (55:41)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:41)

Bill Gasiamis (55:44)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:45)

Bill Gasiamis (55:48)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:50)

Bill Gasiamis (55:53)

Where can people connect with you if they want to get a copy of the book? Where can they go?

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (55:58)

Bill Gasiamis (56:02)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (56:03)

Bill Gasiamis (56:14)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (56:14)

Because my friend, my friend had trouble. I had to send him a few books. But they can just order on Amazon, they can listen to it on Spotify, they can listen to it on Audible. It’s on all platforms.

Bill Gasiamis (56:33)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (56:33)

This is one shot. So

Bill Gasiamis (56:53)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (56:53)

Bill Gasiamis (56:59)

Ramandeep (bobby) chaggar (57:06)

Bill Gasiamis (57:09)

And it’ll point you to the right store for your country to purchase the book. If this episode meant something to you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. That’s genuinely the biggest thing you can do to help the podcast grow. My own book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became, the best thing that happened, is available now at recoveryafterstroke.com/book And if you’re finding some of what Bobby talked about today,

The grief, the identity questions, working out who you are now, hard to navigate on your own. I offer one-on-one coaching built on my own lived experience of stroke recovery. It’s not therapy, it’s not medical treatment. But if you want someone in your corner who’s actually been through it, you can find out more at recoveryafterstroke/momentum Thanks again for listening. I’m Bill Gasiamis. This is the Recovery After Stroke.

Podcast.

The post Learning to Cry After Stroke – Bobby Chaggar appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

Benjamin Miller was 16 years old and playing football in Texas when a carotid artery dissection changed the course of his life on September 22, 2017. He didn’t know what a stroke was. He didn’t know that the word would come to define the years that followed not because of what it took from his body, but because of what it took from his sense of who he was.

Teenage stroke recovery is not what most people picture. The standard narrative runs like this: young brain, high neuroplasticity, rapid recovery, inspirational outcome. And in some ways, that’s true. The motor and language systems that stroke damages can rebuild quickly in an adolescent brain. But there’s a part of recovery that neuroplasticity doesn’t touch, and that’s identity.

He was a football player. In Texas, that means something. It means a community, a future, a sense of place in the social architecture of a town. When the stroke took that away, it didn’t just end a sport. It ended a version of himself that he hadn’t finished becoming.

“My soul was torn in half,” Benjamin said in this conversation with Bill Gasiamis. It’s one of those phrases that stops you not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s accurate.

“My soul was torn in half.” — Benjamin Miller, EP422

The stroke forced him to grieve something most 16-year-olds don’t have language for: the future self they were building toward. When that future collapsed overnight, he was left with a present he didn’t recognise and a past that no longer pointed toward anything.

Teenage stroke recovery carries a layer of complexity that adult stroke recovery doesn’t always share. Adolescence is the developmental period in which identity is actively constructed; it’s not a fixed thing waiting to be restored. When stroke interrupts that process mid-construction, the survivor isn’t returning to who they were. They’re trying to become someone they haven’t yet figured out how to be.

Benjamin’s experience of turning to substance use during his recovery wasn’t a character failure. It was, as he articulates in this episode, an attempt to manage an identity fracture that nobody around him had the vocabulary to name. When the pain doesn’t have a name, people find their own ways to survive it.

This is one reason teenage stroke recovery deserves its own conversation separate from paediatric stroke outcome data, and separate from the adult recovery narrative. The emotional, psychological, and social dimensions are specific to this life stage.

You might also recognise elements of this in other episodes: the identity rupture that follows sudden stroke in a young person surfaces in Young Stroke Survivor Recovery and Identity Loss After Stroke. Benjamin’s story adds a dimension that’s less often named: what happens when the loss of identity happens before you’ve finished building one.

Here’s something worth naming a phenomenon the clinical literature notes but rarely centres in recovery conversations.

Adolescent neuroplasticity is real. Benjamin’s brain had the capacity to rebuild physical and linguistic function faster than an older adult’s would. But neuroplasticity is a structural property of the brain. It doesn’t extend to the psychological work of integrating a traumatic experience into a developing sense of self.

The result is a gap, sometimes a wide one, between the physical recovery that others can see and the internal recovery that isn’t visible at all. Benjamin appeared to be “doing well” in many respects while internally carrying a fracture that hadn’t been addressed.

This gap is one of the least-discussed aspects of teenage stroke recovery. If you’ve experienced it, or watched someone you love experience it, it may be the most important thing in this episode.

Benjamin’s memoir, Ed and I, available on YouTube, traces this journey. What comes through clearly in his conversation with Bill is that the path forward required him to walk through the things he’d been managing around the grief, the identity loss, the fracture itself.

Recovery, in his telling, doesn’t take you back to who you were. It takes you through who you are now.

That reframe from restoration to transformation is one that many stroke survivors eventually arrive at. Bill’s book The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened documents ten tools for exactly that kind of recovery.

For more episodes touching on identity and recovery: Emotional Recovery After Stroke Mistakes, Identity After Stroke — Cassie Jewell, Stroke With No Warning Signs — Tom Ballo, Losing Confidence After Stroke, and Stroke Brain Healing Neuroplasticity.

This episode doesn’t pretend that recovery is a clean arc or that there’s a single turning point you can point to. What it offers instead is something more honest: the lived texture of finding yourself again when you’re not sure who you’re finding your way back to.

Listen to EP422 of the Recovery After Stroke podcast wherever you listen.

If a stroke or any trauma has made your world feel smaller, Bill’s new book Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small is a practical guide to rebuilding your life, even when you’re not ready. Find it on Amazon at mybook.to/yourworld.

If this show has helped you, you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

“My soul was torn in half.” Benjamin Miller had a stroke at 16 and lost more than football here’s how he found his way back.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction – Teenage Stroke
09:01 The Day of the Stroke
11:56 The Loss of Identity
17:12 Coping Mechanisms: Alcohol and Escapism
22:37 COVID-19: A Blessing in Disguise
28:57 The Journey of Healing Begins
32:40 Facing Uncomfortable Emotions
38:45 Spiritual Awakening Through Adversity
42:34 The Power of Breath and Movement
47:35 Building Community in Recovery
55:39 Finding Belonging and Understanding
59:12 Creating a Path for Self-Healing

Transcript:

Benjamin Miller (00:00)
when I was told that by my father that. It felt like my soul was torn in half, because like I always saw myself as a student athlete and the bigger part of that was the athlete. And now I lost half of my identity and. I just didn’t know how to as a.

17 year old now like how to move forward with life and I didn’t know who I was and the only thing I defined myself as was taken away from me

So now I was just like in this weird place where I felt like I was drowning on a day-to-day basis.

Bill Gasiamis (00:33)
hello, everybody. Welcome back to Recovery After Stroke. I’m Bill Gasciamas. My guest today had a stroke at just 16 years old, a carotid artery dissection that ended his football career and cracked his sense of who he was, right at the age when most people are just beginning to figure that out. Before we get into it, if you’ve been finding value in this podcast, my new book is out now. It’s called Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small.

A practical guide to rebuilding your life after trauma even when you’re not ready. You can find it on Amazon by searching my name or you can click the link in the show notes. Now it’s on to the episode.

Bill Gasiamis (01:14)
Benjamin Miller, welcome to the podcast.

Benjamin Miller (01:16)
Sir, thank you for having me.

Bill Gasiamis (01:19)
Tell me what’s regular life like for you before the stroke?

Benjamin Miller (01:26)
Yeah, I mean, when I had my stroke, I was 16 years old and I was in my third year of high school. So it was really comprised of just school, going to school every day and then playing sports after school. Like through the school, would play American football. I played baseball earlier in my life. And then towards the end of my high school, I just continued to play American football because I had the goal of following in my two older brother’s footsteps.

for playing football, American football, in college at that time. So I just saw myself as following their path and going to play college football. And that’s what I was chasing throughout high school.

Bill Gasiamis (02:09)
How long ago was that? The stroke?

Benjamin Miller (02:12)
It was 2017,

the fall of 2017. So

Bill Gasiamis (02:16)
Okay.

Benjamin Miller (02:16)
coming up on nine years on the 22nd of September.

Bill Gasiamis (02:23)
I I expect that stroke is the last thing going through the mind of a sixteen year old and the family of a sixteen year old. So

Benjamin Miller (02:34)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (02:34)
w do you have any recollection of what it was like on the day of the stroke? Was there some kind of sign, was there anything that gave you an inkling of something being wrong before everything happened?

Benjamin Miller (02:53)
maybe like right before, because just playing American football, you’re always hear about head trauma and just CTE and concussions. And that’s always the biggest worry for playing football. But it was during the game that Friday night, it was the second game of our football season. And it was in between the first quarter and second quarter. And I came over to the bench and like in between going back on the field, our coach like brings the

offense or defensive units together and we like talk about any in-game adjustments and I came over and sat down on the bench and I just noticed my balance like start to tip like I was having to stare down at my feet in order to stop myself from falling over and Yeah, just from there like I like grew up in a

Society like especially in football. It’s I don’t know if I surround football is the same but just no pain no gain so

Bill Gasiamis (03:51)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (03:51)
you’re always pushing yourself to your limits and That was like a saying that I grew up in if you’re hurt you can walk off the field if you’re injured you can so unfortunately, I played until I go back on the field and The first or second play of the next series I

help my teammates make a tackle. get back up to my feet and then I collapsed face first and at the ground. And from there, I, I’m able to like the trainers obviously come on the field and help me to the sideline and they’re running concussion tests, asked me, what’s your name? Where are you? What are you doing? And I’m answering every question. But even at that early stage, I mean, it was just like, that’s like when the initial carotid dissection happened.

It was probably in the guy, my teammate I was playing next to actually, he went on to study pre-med and he saw my aphasia on my face and he’s told our other teammates that Ben is having a stroke, but who’s going to listen to a 17 year old kid? And like we had a team doctor on the sideline, the trainers, no one really knew what was wrong with me. They just thought it was a severe concussion. So that’s what it was treated as.

So I spent probably 20 to 30 more minutes on the sideline. And before I was, yeah, it was just like a, just a failure on the part of the adults around me at that time. And yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (05:28)
Yeah, rough. The dissection that happened do you think it might have been from a collision during the game or what what’s the thinking behind the cause of the stroke?

Benjamin Miller (05:42)
Yeah, that’s something like a question that I’ve like both my parents and myself as I’ve always had, but it just never could be answered. Whether it was just from like one hit. saw a chiropractor for the first time at the beginning of that week, like the Monday before the injury. So maybe like a neck adjustment caused it or maybe like it could have been genetic.

So like that’s what my parents’ biggest concern was, was having my two older brothers still playing college football at that time. That if it’s genetic, is there a chance that it can happen to our two other sons? But they

Bill Gasiamis (06:19)
Yeah.

Benjamin Miller (06:20)
just…

Bill Gasiamis (06:21)
Sorry, Ben, I was gonna say yeah, it I know what you mean about genetic in that sometimes people’s carotid arteries for no reason do dissect. and sometimes I’ve heard the connection with chiropractic, there’s been a few well, it’s very well documented people going for adjustments. The thing about the adjustment is it’s never known whether or not

the person was feeling something in their neck because of a dissection. They went to the chiropractor, they had an adjustment, and then it caused the situation to get worse, or do you know what I mean? Like it may not have totally been linked, but I get that. I’ve met people who have had dissections who had no injury, had no adjustment,

They just had a dissection. So that’s a thing. when you went to the chiropractor for the neck adjustment the week before, was it because you had an issue that you needed to deal with? Was there some kind of pain that you were experiencing?

Benjamin Miller (07:29)
Yeah, I mean, I was actually dealing with lower back pain. So one of my teammates recommended me to a chiropractic, but he adjusted my whole back all the way up to my neck. So it wasn’t like, I wasn’t going there for a neck adjustment, but he just happened to do one while I was in there.

Bill Gasiamis (07:47)
Yeah, which is pretty standard procedure for a chiropractor. If you go there, you get your neck adjusted. Okay. so then you’re sitting on the sideline for another twenty or thirty minutes, and then what happens? How do they finally decide something’s not right?

Benjamin Miller (08:06)
Yeah, so just after that time period, the team doctor called my parents down to like in Texas, like we play in like massive stadiums even as kids. So he called my parents down to like the railing of the stands to the field and told my parents to bring our family car so they could take me to a local clinic. And as I’m walking out of the stadium, I

Like there’s like a incline up to get out of the stadium because it’s kind of like a bowl shaped and I can’t walk up like a 15 degree incline. Like I started like tipping over to my right side. So then they have to bring a athletic cart. They sit me in the cart and there’s like a trainer sitting behind me, holding me upright so I don’t slump out the side of the cart. And it was probably like a 15 meter ride to my parents’ car. And my parents saw me from there and drove me straight to the emergency room at a bigger hospital.

And from there I was, I would say in the emergency room prior for like two, three hours and they were running CT scans of my like base of my skull up. So they didn’t see the actual carotid.

Bill Gasiamis (09:16)
What

Benjamin Miller (09:17)
Yeah. So it was like with everything, how everything happened, like I’m so lucky to be here and be able to move and be able to speak and. But yeah. So then probably I probably got hurt around.

8 p.m. and it was around 12 a.m. where they finally called downtown to the bigger hospital in Houston, downtown Houston and a neurosurgeon on call that night said he’s having a he had a carotid artery dissection so then they life flighted me down and on the life flight down to Houston to downtown that’s when I lost consciousness in the helicopter so

Bill Gasiamis (09:54)
Mm.

And then at some point you wake up in hospital,

Benjamin Miller (10:00)
Yeah, I

woke up in the ICU probably, this happened Friday night, I would say maybe Monday morning. So I was unconscious for a couple days.

Bill Gasiamis (10:11)
Mm-hmm. And then after that, what are you dealing with? You wake up, you’re told you’ve had a dissection, a stroke, and then what are you dealing with physically? What’s not happening for your body?

Benjamin Miller (10:28)
lost all use of the right side of my body. So it was just immediately starting rehab, rehab. And

Bill Gasiamis (10:36)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (10:37)
yeah, I mean, I was just going from like being on the verge of being a higher level athlete to my right side, going back to like, I was always describing it as like a newborn.

Bill Gasiamis (10:49)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (10:49)
I didn’t know how as a 16 year old to really handle that. I mean, it took like

In the beginning, it was easy because I was so focused. Like I believed I was going to play American football again. So I was just like so committed to the rehab and doing therapy multiple times a day and just really just with that goal of getting back on the field. So the really the early days are really driven by that want to get back on the football field.

Bill Gasiamis (11:20)
Was there a moment you had the realisation that it’s not going to happen and what was that like?

Benjamin Miller (11:27)
Yeah, probably in June of 2018, I had a follow up with my neurosurgeon and before we went in to go see him, because I was supposed to, I got hurt September of 2017. So about nine months later and my parents sat me down and told me, Ben, when we go see your neurosurgeon tomorrow, he’s going to tell you after retire. And that was, yeah, that was like a very, I didn’t know how to deal with that as a 17 year old.

Like very soon after that I fell into alcohol use and then, yeah, just progressed from there.

Bill Gasiamis (12:04)
Got it. And by nine months later, were you up on your feet? Had you recovered the deficits or were they still there?

Benjamin Miller (12:15)
Yeah, I mean, I was lucky that I was 16. So my brain was still very plastic and I recovered like really I was in a wheelchair for the first day. Like September 23rd, I was in a wheelchair. I mean, like probably like just one day after. And then I was up and walking on day two and just like my strike pattern of the ground wasn’t correct. Like I would swing my leg and have drop foot as many stroke people patients suffer with.

but I wasn’t gonna let the stroke, like the people around me seeing me as still struggling from the stroke. So even like the early days in the hospital, I just hide it from everyone. Anytime my parents or my friends or anybody, my brothers would ask, how am I doing? I just tell them, I’m okay, I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me. Which then led to me needing to find a release in alcohol later on the line, so.

Bill Gasiamis (13:10)
The whole I’m fine, you don’t need to worry about me was so that you can convince yourself perhaps and them that you’re good to go, you’re ready to just slide back into life exactly the way that you were.

Benjamin Miller (13:24)
That’s definitely it.

Bill Gasiamis (13:27)
Yeah. But you clearly weren’t okay if you’re we’ll talk about the alcohol in a moment, but you’re clearly not okay. What are you experiencing psychologically or emotionally that you’re hiding from them? Like what’s actually happening in that moment?

Benjamin Miller (13:44)
Yeah, Maybe just. It was more so from the retirement from football. It felt like when I was told that by my father that. It felt like my soul was torn in half, because like I always saw myself as a student athlete and the bigger part of that was the athlete. And now I lost half of my identity and. I just didn’t know how to as a.

17 year old now like how to move forward with life and I didn’t know who I was and the only thing I defined myself as was taken away from me and along

Bill Gasiamis (14:21)
Mm.

Benjamin Miller (14:22)
with like missing a whole semester of school. It was just like I just stopped caring about school too. So now I was just like in this weird place where I felt like I was drowning on a day-to-day basis.

Bill Gasiamis (14:36)
Setback after setback. It’s not that you become unwell and then you wake up in the morning and you just can’t play football. It’s also you’ve missed school, so you’re gonna go back and probably repeat that. Your friends have moved on. They’re doing what you know, seventeen year olds do, playing football, going out, doing their studies, who knows what they’re doing. You’re

You have to pick up the pieces and there’s a lot of pieces to pick up, right? There’s so much. The alcohol did it was it something that you did before this incident in in that had you as a sixteen year old had alcohol before? I know most kids would have at some point in America, in Australia, by the time they’re sixteen, they’ve had a drink. Had you had a drink before that?

Benjamin Miller (15:29)
I didn’t actually just with the role models that my brothers were, were very straight edge guys, like just focused on the goal of

Bill Gasiamis (15:38)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (15:39)
college football. And so like I was very much the same way, but after just the injury, being around my friends and not having like those same like level of role models in the same house that I fell into the, just down the wrong path. I won’t.

say it’s my friend’s fault because it was…

Bill Gasiamis (15:59)
Yeah.

Benjamin Miller (16:00)
yeah, but it was…

Bill Gasiamis (16:03)
Sounds like it’s still tough talking about it.

Benjamin Miller (16:07)
Yeah, at times. Like sometimes it’s easier, sometimes…

Bill Gasiamis (16:12)
Hmm.

With the I’m not sure. I’ve never I’ve drank and I’ve drank a lot to be drunk and I’ve drank too much where I’m completely gone and I don’t drink since the stroke. What’s the what’s it helping you do when you have a drink? Is it helping you forget? Is it helping the emotional part of it? What is it kind of putting a cloud over or

And kind of stopping from coming forward.

Benjamin Miller (16:46)
Yeah, it was just, I mean, I would drink to escape, to be honest. It was just like my way to stop feeling the stress of how much I have to recover, the stress of how do I get back? How do I show people that I’m fine, that the stroke didn’t affect me? And it was just like a couple hours out of the night where I could just not feel any of the stress of me trying to hide the…

Just the emotional pain of not knowing who I was and not knowing how to move forward with my life without football, without sports, without like the level of a student I used to be because I was just very, I was a perfectionist growing up and had to make the best grades in class, had to be the best on the football field, had to be just the strongest in the weight room. So I just didn’t know how to move forward without.

trying to show everyone I’m still this perfect version of myself and just as Ben, the not perfect kid, the one who’s still fighting from what

Bill Gasiamis (17:51)
Mm.

Benjamin Miller (17:51)
he’s been through, but he’s not perfect anymore, even though.

Bill Gasiamis (17:55)
You never were perfect, but you at least were more capable of pulling off the facade, you know, because you did have good grades, because you were an athlete, because you always worked on improving things. So the th the the time that you were drinking gave you a little bit of relief from all the things that were kind of happening.

in your head that you needed to kind of quieten down. And then did that escalate? Did it go from a small amount to a larger amount and then and then kind of how bad did it get?

Benjamin Miller (18:38)
Yeah, I mean, over my senior year of high school, it did escalate to abuse. I go solely on the weekends, like Friday night, Saturday night. But then beginning university and the fall of 2019, it was five, six nights a week. I would be drinking till I would be most nights just blocking out. So I didn’t remember what happened the night before. And then even waking up in the morning, it was.

That’s the only thing I could think about was just making it back, getting through class, making it back to the nights where I could drink till I wouldn’t feel anything. And that continued through the end of 2019 and into the beginning of 2020, I joined a fraternity. And that’s when I noticed myself like really start to spiral, started to get into, like tried cocaine a couple of times, like was still drinking every night. And like that’s why COVID was like a lifesaver for me.

that I could go home and, you know, because like I was on a very bad path at school.

Bill Gasiamis (19:45)
So you’re already heavy drinker, then you join a fraternity.

Benjamin Miller (19:50)
you

Bill Gasiamis (19:51)
You’re the perfect candidate for being in an in a fraternity, right? And you

Benjamin Miller (19:55)
Yeah, it was a mess.

Bill Gasiamis (19:57)
can yeah, you can see why that would escalate it because already the culture is about drinking, about partying, about being loose or crazy or whatever. And it makes sense that it would escalate and get

really bad and get worse and then you try other things. And then COVID happens.

And then that gives it the opportunity to have a bit of a break in the cycle.

Benjamin Miller (20:27)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (20:28)
Your studies up until COVID, even though you were drinking heavily and probably parting too hard, were the studies being affected or were you still able to put out good work?

Benjamin Miller (20:42)
I won’t say good work, but just grades that were good enough. Like not failing classes, but not excelling. just like

Bill Gasiamis (20:49)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (20:50)
B’s and C’s, maybe one or two A’s. just like for like the stand, like my perfection standards that I used to have, like just like kind of skating by.

Bill Gasiamis (21:02)
I l I love the sound B’s and C’s skating by. Dude, if I was getting B’s and C’s when I was at school, my God, that would be amazing. but I it gives me a good insight into like what the expectation of yourself is. I totally get it. Okay. So you’re skating by, you’re getting your grades. Does anyone n realize how bad things are? Like people in your periphery, your family going

Ben, we’re concerned about you. We think we need to talk. Was it any of that stuff or were you hiding it?

Benjamin Miller (21:36)
I was very good at hiding it from everybody. really like, I didn’t let anybody at that point, like that early on in the journey, like anybody see what was going on underneath. Cause I didn’t understand it I didn’t have the ability to verbalize what I was going through emotionally, what I was going through mentally. So it’s like at that point I was even hidden from myself. I’d go that far.

Bill Gasiamis (22:02)
Wow. You had to saved yourself in thinking that everything is normal, perhaps.

Benjamin Miller (22:07)
Yeah, I just thought like the more time that goes by like Everything will be okay without me having to do anything especially like at that time

Bill Gasiamis (22:17)
Mm-hmm. And then COVID happens. Why is that a blessing in disguise? How did it change things for you? And then we’ll talk about what what you have to deal with after that. But at the ma in that moment COVID comes along and it changes something for the better.

Benjamin Miller (22:37)
Yeah, in March of 2020, I go back to Houston from I was at school in Chicago, Illinois. And from there, it’s just like just being at home with my both my brothers are back at home and in our old house. It was just nice the first time since like 2016 since my oldest brother left for school. That we’re all together again, and I could just

get out of that environment that I knew I was spiraling and I still wasn’t in a better place at home. I’ll still.

struggling with like I started using performance-answersing drugs at the beginning of that year too. Just to, I thought that if I big, like built my muscle and strong, like really strong, that my effects from the stroke would also heal. So I just spent like two, an hour to two hours every day in the gym just, yeah, just like over that period of time from March of 2022, December of 2020.

just going to the gym every day and just trying to put on as much muscle as possible because I thought that would help me heal. And yeah, it didn’t.

Bill Gasiamis (23:52)
It didn’t Did you get bigger?

Benjamin Miller (23:56)
Yeah, I mean, I was I don’t know. And I would say I got up to like 100 kilos, like 220

Bill Gasiamis (24:02)
Okay.

Benjamin Miller (24:02)
pounds.

Bill Gasiamis (24:04)
Yeah. So you got bigger you achieved that thing, so visually it may have looked like you were achieving something, but you didn’t feel better.

So

Benjamin Miller (24:15)
So.

Bill Gasiamis (24:16)
what what did it feel like still? What does it feel like in your body when you’re gone back home, everyone’s together, you’re hitting the gym, you’re using performance enhancing drugs. What does that feel like? Does it feel like a letdown, a disappointment, or I’m not quite there yet? What what does it feel like?

Benjamin Miller (24:37)
I would say like, I’m not quite there yet. Like just always chasing a ever moving goal that like, as soon as it got closer, just like move further away. But I never like step back to like actually look at what I was chasing and realize that’s not what I’m supposed to be chasing. I need to be just turning around to my internal world and focus on healing myself from the inside out versus trying to do all this, put on another mask.

do another substance, put another thing in my body, chase another goal, external goal, to try to heal versus turning around and looking inside. So that took many years.

Bill Gasiamis (25:19)
Hmm. I love that flip that you said healing from the inside out instead of putting on another mask. And that’s really profound to get to that stage where you when you realize that. and at the same time when you were hitting the gym, getting bigger, your right side, is that feeling different? Do you have deficits on that side still?

Benjamin Miller (25:47)
Yeah, I would say at that time, yes, I was still very tight through my whole right arm and right leg. Still, like anytime I went up a stair, I got hit my right foot on the top of the step. So it was like, and I just thought the more like just being a no pain, no gain mindset stuff, I’m in pain

Bill Gasiamis (26:08)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (26:08)
and I’m going to be recovering. I’m going to be gaining. And yeah, it just was.

And like the more muscle I put on the tighter it became because just the range of motion wasn’t right through my shoulder and through my hip. I was still swinging my leg, still shoulder hiked forward versus like pulling it back and letting gravity work, like working with gravity instead of fighting it. So that was.

Bill Gasiamis (26:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. I know what you mean because when I’ve been to the gym after the stroke, it’s I I tend to kinda achieve one thing and then the muscles get so tight that I’ve got to go and have a massage and try and loosen them up and try and get them moving again. And then it’s like that one two day recovery after you do your arms, for example, and your chest takes four or five days and it’s like back at the gym already.

And I still haven’t overcome or recovered from four days ago. And it’s really challenging and frustrating. It kind of makes it kind of makes it harder to go back to the gym. You’re all I’m always thinking about, I’m gonna go there and it’s I’m gonna just tighten everything up and I’m gonna put myself in that situation and it’s not gonna recover. And I’m gonna have to get massage again. And it’s just this whole loop of.

It’s very it’s very helpful, but it’s also something that has to be managed completely differently than it used to when you go to the gym and you recovered for two days and then you’re back again. and before we move on to the kind of the next phase of the conversation, I also wanna kinda understand this perfectionism in you on the field, off the field field, at school. Where did that come from? What

Do you have like a sense of how that started and why it was a thing that you adopted and ran with?

Benjamin Miller (28:12)
I would say that just watching my two older brothers grow up and seeing like in my like kid eyes, they were like the perfect human being, like the perfect role models. Like I just tried to be like them in every way. And I always thought that they were like so up here and like, didn’t know like, I was three years and two years younger than them. So they hit puberty before me. just at the time that my oldest brother, Alex left for school, I would still be like,

at his like chest level, always like looking up to them. So they were just like gods in my head. And I always would ask myself, how do I measure up to them? And because they were perfect in my eyes. So was like, I to be above perfect

to

Bill Gasiamis (28:57)
Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Miller (28:57)
be recognized as like their brothers. I got, it’s like always the bar I was chasing and yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (29:08)
And now you know they weren’t perfect, they were just bigger and older than you by three years and two years. Yeah. so then you have this realization that the healing has to start from the inside, but that’s gotta

Benjamin Miller (29:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (29:26)
be is that a relief that you work that out? Is that what what am I gonna do now? How how do you gr grapple with that?

Benjamin Miller (29:37)
Yeah, I’d say like, I had the, I know if I hit rock bottom, but I had to go even lower before I came to that realization. So I mean, yeah, like 2021 was probably the one of the lower lowest points. So it’s a, so like going back to school in January of 2021, I got into stimulant use at the same time as the performance enhancing drugs at the same time as alcohol and then marijuana came into the picture too. So I was just using like

a cocktail of drugs just to get through a day. And I ended up that winter quarter, I did make the Dean’s List at school. was like the top performer, but I remember just like looking at that email and like, I have like all the external achievement again. And I was even more, like I was lower. I got a lower place emotionally and mentally and like felt so empty inside that I knew that this isn’t

what I’m supposed to be doing at this point in time. So I went on medical leave from school like pretty soon after that. And that’s where I would say where the healing process really began was in the summer of 2021. And yeah, I mean, it’s been, I thought it’d take like in the beginning, the healing process would be like six months, but it’s been around five years that it’s taken me to be honest. So four years of just.

sliding down and I would say like I might have like and like the healing process too has been like trying to make it up and then still falling and going back up. So it’s never a straight line for

Bill Gasiamis (31:19)
Never linear.

Benjamin Miller (31:20)
me a long time to recognize that let’s focus on the trend.

Bill Gasiamis (31:25)
Never linear man, far out. you you still make it on the Dean’s list, that’s cool. But I I get like it even under duress, you know, you still make it on the Dean’s list. And then you have this realization and it’s like you hear that analogy, you know, things are gotta get worse before they get better.

Benjamin Miller (31:48)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (31:50)
Dude, like how much worse can they get? Why should they get worse? Why can’t we just start improving from here? But is it’s for you the worst part? Was it about reconstructing from the beginning and then you therefore you have to get to the bottom because you can’t kind of reconstruct from b you know, above the bottom?

Benjamin Miller (32:13)
Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I would say in a way like I would say like the first over that summer of 2021, I just focused on like I was doing a lot like yoga almost every day, and that was the first time I started meditating in my life and working on like that’s really where my rehab started was just a lot of breath work, a lot of meditation, a lot of yoga, just to.

begin to be able to sit with the emotions and the mental states that I couldn’t tolerate. And like at that early point in time, I still couldn’t tolerate it. still like so uncomfortable that I still had to go use marijuana just to get through the days. But it was just the beginning of that process of being able to tolerate what I had been running from through alcohol, through stimulants, through performance enhancing drugs for so long that like I was still inputting a substance into my body, but

I could begin that process of sitting with it, even if it was for a minute. And those early days, two minutes, three minutes became 10, 15, 20, which then continued to expand longer. And the more just times I came back to sitting with those uncomfortable states.

Bill Gasiamis (33:26)
Yeah, wha what is it about being uncomfortable that people can’t handle? Do you think maybe you can tell me from your perspective? because you hear that, it’s almost ridiculous to hear somebody saying, I have a thought, it’s making me uncomfortable, I have to get that thought out. Yeah, I’ve b I’ve been there, so I’m not saying that

Benjamin Miller (33:47)
Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis (33:49)
people shouldn’t be doing that, but it almost does feel crazy, doesn’t it? Because it’s a feeling and a thought

that makes you uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily put you in danger. But

Benjamin Miller (34:01)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (34:02)
we can’t do that. Like, do you have a any inkling as to why why philosophically that might be the case?

Benjamin Miller (34:13)
I mean, would just like our autonomic nervous system, a danger, like a physical danger versus a mental danger. can’t, our physical body can’t tell a difference. So they’re treated the same. And I would say like this.

Yeah, so like just like uncomfortable, like state of mind or uncomfortable thought. just as humans, we prefer to be in a place of comfort, a place of safety. And so anytime something is uncomfortable, we tend to run in the opposite direction back towards what is known, what is comfortable, what is safe. And it’s like, that’s something I always like ask myself, like, how do I make my, what can I do today? That’s uncomfortable, but not

like to the point that I lose myself and I just go off the deep end and where I’ve been. So just like a weird and like, feel like that place changes every day. It’s just like a balance that’s always, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (35:16)
I get what you’re saying. So a a thing that is scary and dangerous, a physical thing, a bear, a tiger, you run. You can run away from that. If you’re lucky, you’ll outrun it, right? And then

Benjamin Miller (35:30)
Thank

Bill Gasiamis (35:30)
you’re safe. And then there’s no bear around and there’s no tiger around. So you’re good. You’re good to go. You can just move on with life. But when the body is confusing thoughts and feelings with the same type of

Imminent danger, and you can’t run away from it, and it’s still there. You have to find a way to either escape it, which is short-lived because we’re harming ourselves to escape it, or you have to remind your body and yourself, your mind, that in fact you’re not in imminent danger. There’s nothing to run away from. This is

An obstacle that I can tackle and overcome. Like it might just be on the path to, you know, that walk in the wilderness instead of a bear, it’s actually just a fallen log. A tree fowl, it’s an obstacle. I’ve just got to find a way around it, under it, over it, whatever. And if you’ve never used that muscle, then you don’t know how to do it.

And then you get stuck behind something like a log that

should not be as debilitating as it is. It should be something that you can find a way over. At 16, that’s understandable that, you know, most people haven’t dealt with real exponential life problems, you know, that just keep getting worse and worse. That changes your identity. They haven’t dealt with that. So they haven’t developed the skill. So could it just have been a case of you were a little premature?

just from age an age perspective that y all you needed to worry about was playing football and and and studying and now you’ve got to deal with these existential issues, you know, that most people aren’t equipped to deal with at sixteen.

Benjamin Miller (37:38)
Yeah, mean, yeah, that’s like one thing in March of 2018. So about six months after my stroke, my mom took me to a neurosurgeon and he said, the good thing is that Ben is young and the bad thing is that Ben is young. And both of us didn’t really understand what he meant at that point in time, but just like the spiritual and existential journey that the stroke has taken me on.

It’s that’s like been like both like the scariest and most comforting piece of the journey. Just because like I was never a spiritual person and not like in terms of religion, but just like believing in something higher, something bigger than me, some energy source that’s larger than us as human beings. And that’s been like the most like the biggest part of the journey, like the emotional side, the mental side, the physical side, we’re all.

And like, I’m still on those journeys, but just like the spiritual side of it has been, yeah, just something I wasn’t expecting.

Bill Gasiamis (38:45)
Yeah. It is kinda good that you discovered it early, but the path to discovering it is, man, so hard to have to go through what you went through to to have these learnings and understandings. and then to learn that if you tackle the thing that you’re most afraid of, you can actually conquer it. You can overcome it.

Benjamin Miller (39:10)
Mm-mm.

Bill Gasiamis (39:11)
And

If you get good at doing that, you can overcome most things. And you can also recognise when it’s time to live in the pain and discomfort, the suffering, whatever it is, to live in it temporarily and then

Benjamin Miller (39:27)
Thank

Bill Gasiamis (39:29)
r find a way through. What other than yoga and meditation, what else was it that helped you go on this other journey, this recovery or

growth journey.

Benjamin Miller (39:45)
I would say there were a couple things. I don’t know if you ever heard about internal family systems. It’s

Bill Gasiamis (39:50)
No, tell

Benjamin Miller (39:54)
a theory from Dr. Richard Schwartz. He wrote the book, No Bad Parts. And that was in 2022 after going on another medical leave from school when I first discovered that book. And it was just talking about the different parts of the mind, like, and how different we get stuck through our history at different points in our life.

And we have to like there are parts of our brain like different voices like speaking to each other and they are some are trying to protect us some are trying to move us forward some are trying to keep us where we are and it just like developing a conversation between those parts because there was a lot of traumas I suffered from the stroke and being in the hospital and then just like post stroke to just like trying to hide my spasticity.

from everyone, not showing my parents, not showing my friends, not showing anybody I was struggling at all. And just starting to understand the different voices in my head and even the young perfectionist Ben could always be trying to push me to be beyond perfect and just beginning to have a conversation between those different voices in my head and allowing them to speak instead of just repressing emotions, repressing, repressing until they’re like.

bubble up and I need to go get drunk or high or need to use something just to survive during the day. And the biggest other big piece for me was I started to practice Tai Chi in 2022 and that was as big of it physically was for me. It was just as big spiritually. Just that’s what I, when I first learned just like the…

how to start being like water and going with what is today and not trying to force. Yeah, just like force myself to be able to do every single Tai Chi movement and, but yeah, and that’s like still a thing I struggle with is like this past month, I pushed myself too hard in the gym and now have tendonitis in my right ankle. So I haven’t been able to train for the past two weeks and it’s frustrating, but it’s just like, I can look at it as a frustration or just something to learn from.

And I can recognize I wasn’t being like water over the past month. Instead of resting immediately, I just let the injury build and build and build day by day until now I can’t train. So yeah, but the Tai Chi, like the breathing, the Tai Chi breathing technique. So that was like another thing. It’s like yogic breathing. You inhale and expand your belly. Then when you exhale, you contract. But in Tai Chi, it was as you inhale, you contract.

And as you exhale, expand. So that was like something I was never aware of. So like whenever I’m meditating now or just like trying to relax, I’ll do a yogic breathing. And whenever I’m like doing something active, working out on a walk or just like moving around, like I’ll be like Tai Chi breathing. So that’s something I got to work with stroke patients in 2023 than last year and earlier this year. And I got something like I always stress with them was

learning how to breathe because like I feel like as we never actually learn how to breathe it’s just like something we do unconsciously from the time we’re born and just like going back to that most basic step of being a living being of learning how to breathe I was like

Bill Gasiamis (43:24)
I

it sounds like it was real insightful. A lot of people breathe incorrectly as well, and they haven’t realized that shallow breathing, you know, or the opposite of shallow breathing and therefore it puts them into a different physiological state. You know, shallow breathing can create anxious experiences and then and then the opposite can

create hyperventilation, those types of experiences. So it’s like you can alter how you feel, even if your goal is to not worry about the thinking, or even if your goal is not about what you’ve been suppressing, even if you just get rid of all of the things that we could possibly help us resolve or overcome or grow from or be like water, even if we get rid of all of that and you just change your breath.

And jumped on a YouTube video and found somebody that was doing a calm meditation for whatever purpose. And even if you just did that and you had no other agenda other than to just experience a different breath right, you

Benjamin Miller (44:39)
Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis (44:40)
some people will have a profound experience from doing that, wouldn’t they?

Benjamin Miller (44:45)
Yeah, I 100 % agree. I just, I know to this like, yeah, I say that’s just like where it started was just like the recovery journey for me started with my breath work and relearning how to breathe and just like learning a bunch of different techniques of breathing and just like seeing what worked best at what times and it’s just like a trial and error type.

Just as like life after a stroke is, feels like you’re just trying things out and see what sticks, see what doesn’t. And tomorrow’s a new day. We’ll see if this still works today. And then if it doesn’t, we’ll find something else that just.

Bill Gasiamis (45:24)
Yeah. Curiosity seems to be a massive

Benjamin Miller (45:28)
Mm.

Bill Gasiamis (45:29)
thing for you right now. Is we’ll try this, see what happens, try this, see what happens, see what sticks. If it doesn’t stick, well then we’ll just move on. Tai Chi, how did you stumble across that? Like what made you start trying it?

Benjamin Miller (45:44)
I was seeing an acupuncturist in Houston actually when I came home on a medical leave and he recommended me to his Sifu or teacher and his teacher had from chemotherapy because he had cancer but he would get like the toast plasticity and he like so I knew he understood like the first time I walked in to meet him we were at a coffee shop and he told me you look calm cool and collected but I can tell you’re a raging fire on the inside.

I’m like, okay, he just walked past every mask, everything I tried to show to the public and he could see what, how I actually feel. So it was just like that instant connection. And from there he started to train me. Like I could go to his house and we train in a private session twice a week for like a year really.

Like I still practice every day by myself, but he just was the first person that I didn’t have to wear like this fake face to. And I could like go in and like, it was like more like talk therapy. Like we’d be doing Tai Chi, but I could just like tell him I was really feeling that I was still struggling with marijuana at that time. This was around 2023. And that was like the biggest thing like in my substance recovery journey was what he told me. He’s like, I don’t care what you do outside of.

this training, but the fact that you’re showing up here today shows me that you’re trying to move in the right direction. And I know that the fact that you’re still showing up, that you will be eventually moving in the right direction. Don’t worry about where you are today. Just focus on where you’re going and the trend of months, years, and especially in substance use. you get, I mean, in stroke too, you get so caught up in the day today.

Bill Gasiamis (47:35)
Yeah.

Benjamin Miller (47:35)
How am I gonna survive today? And just to start looking more long-term was a very, it’s a very hard.

Yeah, it’s so hard.

Bill Gasiamis (47:46)
I love

I love the acknowledgement of right now you’re in Tai Chi. Everything’s fine. You’re doing great. It shows me that you’re moving forward. And people forget to do that to themselves as well. Like how far have I come? Six months ago, I wasn’t walk walking. Six months ago, I couldn’t speak the way I’m speaking now. Even if it’s not perfect, it has changed. There’s signs of improvement.

And all that kind of thing. It’s kind of the same conversation that you had with your trainer who was just saying, Yeah, we’re here, we’re doing it. And that’s another rep that is going to benefit you down the track. If it doesn’t feel like it’s benefiting you now, that doesn’t matter. It matters that you’re here and that you’re putting the work in and you’re turning up and the whole lot matters.

one of the interesting funny things that came up in my head about Tai Chi, it’s a martial art, right? And

Benjamin Miller (48:50)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (48:52)
and there was a meme on one of the socials where somebody was walking down the street and they were mugged and during the mugging they broke out into Tai Chi you know, to defend themselves or to stop the person stealing their bag. It was the

epitome of you know like it’s probably not useful to stop the guy but calming

Benjamin Miller (49:19)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (49:21)
and getting yourself grounded and being okay about it was just a real cool thing to sort of to sort of see in that in that moment in that in that time it is a it’s a it’s a it’s a martial art but for a different purpose. It’s not

for defending yourself or taking somebody down. It’s the exact opposite of what you were doing on the field as well.

Benjamin Miller (49:53)
just felt like refinding yourself in like the chaos of everyday life. That’s like how I describe it. Like it just allows you to come back to like your center line and just, just be. like, it’s like thinking of the Tai Chi versus a robber. Like that’s why I continued like from Tai Chi. started to go, I lived in Thailand in 2024 for a couple of months and train Muay Thai.

as like the next stage to go from like super slow to start speeding everything up. And I was lucky enough to go live in up in Northern Thailand and Chiang Mai and train Muay Thai for a couple of months and have been back. And yeah, I’m actually going, my mom and I are to Bhutan where my mom is from at the end of October. And then I’ll go spend a little bit of time in Thailand before I come back home. So.

Yeah, life is…

Bill Gasiamis (50:51)
I

I I think about people going in practicing getting in the ring, MMA, Muay Thai, all that kind of stuff. It’s like, dude, how can you do it? How can you get in the ring and know that you’re going to get hurt?

Benjamin Miller (51:09)
I don’t,

I won’t fight. just like, sparring is like very like just tap sparring. So it gets like all timing and rhythm, but

Bill Gasiamis (51:17)
Yeah.

Benjamin Miller (51:17)
like I had to retire from contact sports. So it’s just like more of like a therapeutic, like

Bill Gasiamis (51:22)
Okay.

Benjamin Miller (51:23)
beating my body up and learning how to throw kicks with both my right leg and left leg, throwing

Bill Gasiamis (51:27)
Okay.

Benjamin Miller (51:28)
punches. So yeah, I’m not going to go fight.

Bill Gasiamis (51:31)
I

okay, good. That’s fine. I mean, even if you did, that’s fine as well. But that’s immediately when I what I went to when you said Moi Toy, like I’ve seen those dudes, they’re mental and amazing athletes, but they hurt themselves. And I saw how can you put yourself in that kind of danger? Even though that’s what you’re training to do. It my mind doesn’t go there, you know, it can’t physically make me do that. Of course I’ve defended myself in fights before if I’ve needed to.

not as a fifty year old, but I probably still could, but getting in the ring is a completely different thing. So you’re not getting in the ring. That’s cool. so you worked with stroke survivors. How did that come about? Why did that come about?

Benjamin Miller (52:19)
Yeah.

I was, like a guinea pig, like early patient at a stroke clinic in the Netherlands. And I, my, one of my mentors who’s co-owner of this clinic, Linda Radezdad, she wrote two books now, Stroke Rebell,

Bill Gasiamis (52:37)
Yeah.

Benjamin Miller (52:38)
Stroke Rebell 2, and just had the ability to go there and attend the clinic. And while I was there, I mean, they treated me like family.

It was the first time, this was in 2022, so about four and a half years since my stroke, the first time I ran in four and a half years. And they just wanted me to come back and volunteer at their clinic. Cause I opened another one in Cyprus and that they just did last year one in South Carolina in the U S and then earlier this year in Florida.

So I got to go out to Cyprus in 2023, then South Carolina last year, then Florida at the beginning of this year. And they just, mean, they just always treated me like family. And I’ve been so grateful for her and her partner, our young Kipers. Both of them have treated me like their own son, invited me into their house. I stayed with them after Cyprus, going back where they live in Germany and got to go to the clinic with them every day for two weeks while I stayed with them.

And yeah, I I don’t know what I’d

Bill Gasiamis (53:45)
Yeah. How amazing.

Benjamin Miller (53:47)
do, but.

Bill Gasiamis (53:48)
I’ve heard of Linda and her partner. I’ve heard of them for many years and I don’t really understand what they do. Linda had a stroke, is that right?

Benjamin Miller (53:58)
She had two strokes in 2017 and at the beginning of 2018 I want to Drunk.

Bill Gasiamis (54:03)
Uhhuh. Okay.

And now they run is it retreats? Are these clinics full time? and d do they see only stroke survivors or do they see all sorts of people?

Benjamin Miller (54:16)
I know Arjan when he ran his chiropractic clinic in Zutphen, the Netherlands, it was like he would see people with TBIs and strokes and just anything brain related. But now I think they’re focused on strokes and they host like two week retreats multiple times a year. I don’t know their website, but

Yeah, they do them in Cyprus and Sweden in the summer. And then now they’re starting in the U S so it’s. Yeah, I don’t know what their end goal is, like how like what’s next for them, but I know they’re retreat. Like at least when I went in 2022, it was like. The amount of attention I got for. 14 days straight was nothing I’d ever experienced in any hospital or any.

outpatient or inpatient rehab. It was something that I’ll forever be grateful for them for. But Arjan

Bill Gasiamis (55:16)
What’s the

Benjamin Miller (55:18)
just wrote his book. I couldn’t tell you the name of it, but Arjan Kuyper’s. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (55:25)
Yeah, we’ll look it up.

what did you gain from it, that first r retreat that you attended after fourteen days? W when you left, what did you feel like you left with?

Benjamin Miller (55:39)
I’d say the biggest thing was just like the mental and emotional piece that I didn’t feel alone for the first time in five years. I felt like I could walk into that clinic and just be Benjamin the stroke patient and not Ben this other guy that Ben this party kid and college Ben this wannabe bodybuilder. But I could just be the stroke patient who doesn’t know what he’s doing and just wants to recover further, but doesn’t know how to move forward.

Yeah, that was like the biggest thing for me was just finding like a group of people for the first time in four and a half years.

Bill Gasiamis (56:19)
Yeah. I know that feeling of almost like belonging, but being understood and not needing to pretend and all that. That’s so good when you go into a room where people have been through what you’ve been through. It’s completely different because they get it and you don’t even have to talk. You just know that they get it and they know you. and it’s interesting that you said like what you got out of it was

Like all

emotional and

kind of more more along the lines of things that are unspoken rather than I walked out better or I my muscle was better or this was better or that was better. That’s definitely a goal. That’s definitely something to work towards and always find a way to try and optimize. But you’re talking about I I left feeling better, thinking better, clearly more understood, more all these things. People don’t realize that the

gravity of that experience and how profound li i it can change their life and put it on a different trajectory in a good way.

Benjamin Miller (57:35)
Yeah, I would say like even going back and volunteering, like helping work with stroke patients. It was the first time many of them would be around a group of people who they could just be themselves. could just like, they could struggle together. They could celebrate their wins, little wins together. Cause like, just like watching people walk for the first time. And I don’t know how like probably since their stroke and it was just, yeah. And like, they like just felt like,

the level of community that they’d build and even though they’d known each other for one week, two weeks, so it was a really beautiful thing just to watch humans, like human beings in that way. Just like how I, I know how isolating at post stroke it can feel that no one understands like why me? And then just seeing people who feel the way that we felt and then finding that same level of community and home.

Bill Gasiamis (58:31)
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. so it’s twenty twenty six, we’re near the end of twenty twenty six. How are you these days? How are you feeling?

Benjamin Miller (58:42)
Yeah, doing, I mean, been really well, to be honest. Had a great summer, great spring, just really on a upward trajectory right now. I wrote my memoir, Ed and I, available on YouTube and am working on self-publishing my workbook that I kind of built over these years called Self-Healing.

Just like a, I want it to be like a pocket size guide that can take anywhere. And just for anybody who just after for myself being through too many psychologists and psychiatrists to count on my hands and toes, that I just wanted to create a all inclusive guide to what helped me recover mentally and emotionally and be able to integrate. Like, I don’t think recovery is just like.

You’re not recovered, you’re broken, then you’re healed. It’s just like a constant every day, check, check, check in, check in, check in, check in. Sometimes we start off the path, then we come back. We refine our center and it just, I don’t think it’s ever just a end journey. So just kind of created a workbook off that and I’m working on a website right now to have that. And we’d like to start public speaking, least around the United States right now. And I just see where we go.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:11)
Yeah, man. It’s such a good place to find yourself. And I know the feeling of leaving the psychologists behind, you know, and the counselors behind and everyone behind and saying, Well, I don’t I think I’m good. I don’t need you now. I was probably seeing a counselor from the age of about twenty seven and still do, but there are lots of gaps in between

sessions now where there previously wasn’t. There needed to be more regular sessions, sometimes weekly, and then every two weeks and then monthly. and then once or twice a year. But now I’m kind of back into the regular monthly.

Benjamin Miller (1:01:00)
you

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:01)
And it’s been like that for about a year. And it’s just because life has changed. Things are different and I’m

reassessing and changing direction and all that type of thing. And I need somebody who’s got my back. Not not

Benjamin Miller (1:01:20)
Enough.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:21)
that everyone around me doesn’t have my back. They do, all my family, my wife, everyone, they’re amazing. It’s just not their job to take go on the journey with me. Like they’re doing their own thing. It’s their own journey. So I I sort of seek out support.

from an independent person to just be fully even though they’re getting paid to be fully on my journey with me to support me through that. And it’s so good to be able to go back to something like that, to reach out to somebody that has been left behind for a little bit. I’m gonna venture on my own, you know, I’m a big boy now. I’m gonna go and

see what the world’s like. the world has thrown me a curveball. Okay. I’m gonna manage that, but also I’m gonna reach out and get some support, guidance, be it a Tai Chi coach, be it a Mutai coach, be it Linda on one of the events. There’s always a need for people to be

Involved in supporting us overcome and grow. But your pocket book is that as well, right? Somebody is on their own journey, but they pick up a book that you wrote because you’ve got some things to share with them that helped you and that might help them. And to self-heal is such

Benjamin Miller (1:02:57)
Thank

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:57)
a gift to be able to self-heal.

I love the idea that you can get better at self healing.

Benjamin Miller (1:03:10)
Yeah.

And I do fully agree that we always need someone like that. We can just fully disclose everything and just like let it all out. And that’s like one thing I want to tell your listeners is like if they ever need someone to just vent to just like an open ear to listen to, they can reach out to me on email, Benjamin Miller, zero one one seven at gmail.com or if they have Instagram at Ben shoe B and CHU Miller.com.

Miller. And I just like, I know what it feels like to not be able to vent to anybody, just not be able to just let it all out to someone who like, especially with family, like they want to help you so bad that they try to fix you try to fix you try to fix you. And you just sometimes just need someone just to vent and just get it out of your body so you can like have a little bit clearer of like a mental headspace. But yeah, so like if anybody ever needs like, I’m always happy just to be

This is an open ear.

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:13)
Yeah.

We’ll have the links in the show notes. I won’t publish your email address publicly, but we’ll have all the other links in the show notes and if somebody wants to reach out specific I’ll give them the email address. I’ve done that for heaps of people. but it just opens it up for spammers and all that kind of stuff. the family thing’s cool as well, like because they all want to fix the thing.

It’s such an instinct to just fix it and make everything better for the person rather than give them.

space to just sit with the thing that’s challenging them and that’s the problem and vent. I’ve got better. Like I promise, as you get older, you get better at just listening to somebody talk. My wife did that last night and I actually found myself thinking while she was just bloody talking, no, shut up. Don’t say anything. I don’t know what she’s on about. I don’t know why she’s saying what she’s saying. Just don’t

Say anything, just acknowledge her, acknowledge her, acknowledge her. And then she finished, and then we had a couple of words about it just at the very end, and then she was done. It was fine. And I didn’t step in, I didn’t fix it, I didn’t try and change it, I didn’t tell her what to do. All I did was just uh-huh, and help her and help her get through it. And it seems to be so

Counterintuitive, but it is better sometimes to say less.

Benjamin Miller (1:05:57)
It’s skill, most definitely something that’s hard learned.

Bill Gasiamis (1:06:05)
Sounds like you’re getting better at learning new skills. I really appreciate you reaching out, man, and sharing your story, being so open and transparent with everything that you had to go through to get to where you are today. And I actually look forward to hearing the book is complete because then we can have a discussion about the book and we can promote the book on the podcast as well.

Benjamin Miller (1:06:34)
Thank you for having me on Bill. It’s my pleasure and thank you again.

Bill Gasiamis (1:06:40)
Well, that’s another episode Done and Dusted. What a fantastic guest Benjamin was. I really learnt a lot from his resilience and perseverance and the way he goes about thinking about his continued journey to recovery from everything that has ailed him. If this episode moved you, pick up a copy of my book, Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small, a practical guide to rebuilding your life after trauma, even when you’re not ready. It’s available on Amazon.

Search for my name, Bill Gassiamas, or click the link in the description so you can find it. And if this show has helped you and you would like to help me get to a thousand episodes so that every stroke survivor can find this podcast and feel better about their stroke recovery journey, you can support the show on Patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. From as little as six dollars a month, you’ll be helping me cover the costs of hosting, recording, editing,

publishing and paying the person that helps me to put this episode out every week. Just visit patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. I’ll see you on the next episode.

The post He Was 16 When a Stroke Ended His Football Career – Benjamin Miller on Identity, Substances, and Finding His Way Back appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

Cassie Jewell got back from Iceland on a Monday. On Wednesday, she was demoted from the job she had built her life around. On Friday, she was in an ambulance with a stroke.

She was 42, a licensed counsellor supervising behavioural health programs inside a US jail. She loved working with inmates and took two or three extra hours of work home most nights. “My entire identity was my career,” she told me. Within a single week, she lost the role and nearly lost her life.

Her story shows something many survivors struggle to name: identity after stroke isn’t only about what your body can still do. It’s about who you are when the roles you relied on are gone.

On the Thursday night after the demotion, Cassie stayed up writing a book, determined to prove she still mattered. As she typed, her left hand stopped working. She put it down to tiredness and went to bed.

She woke the next afternoon knowing something was wrong but not what. She decided it was a panic attack. Then she remembered her hand. She texted her mum, a nurse practitioner, who told her to call 911 and ask for a hospital with a stroke centre.

When the paramedics arrived asking for the stroke patient, Cassie was the one who had answered the door. One side of her face was drooping and her left side was weakening. The diagnosis was an ischaemic stroke in the right basal ganglia, a deep brain region involved in movement, balance and, as she discovered, emotional regulation. If you want to understand this area of the brain better, our episode on lower basal ganglia stroke (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/lower-basal-ganglia-stroke/) goes deeper.

Her doctors told her stress contributes to stroke rather than causing it directly, and her cardiologist is still monitoring her heart rhythm. Cassie has her own view: “I was literally burning myself to the ground… and then my brain was like, okay, we’ve had enough. We’re gonna stop you.” It’s a theme we’ve explored before in stroke and stress (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/stroke-and-stress-darren-walker/).

The day after her stroke, Cassie tried to go to work. Her mum stopped her. Later, before she was cleared to drive, she got behind the wheel and bumped another car on her first day out.

There’s a name for part of what was happening: anosognosia. It describes reduced awareness of your own deficits after a brain injury, and it’s more often associated with right-hemisphere strokes like Cassie’s. It isn’t stubbornness or denial; it’s a symptom of the injury itself, which is why a survivor can sincerely insist they’re okay while the people around them can see otherwise.

Cassie summed up that period in one line: “It’s fine, it’s gonna be fine, even though it clearly, you know, wasn’t fine.” For families, understanding it can turn an argument into patience.

Identity is built from what we do, the roles we hold, and the stories we tell about ourselves, and a stroke can remove several at once. The more tightly your sense of self is tied to a single role, the larger the gap it leaves.

“I lost my career and myself at the same time,” Cassie said. Her first job after returning to work didn’t last. She found she wasn’t as quick as she used to be, and that raised a harder question: “When you measure your self-worth in the things that you do… and then all of a sudden you don’t have your career anymore, who are you?”

I recognised that question. Before my own strokes, I was a business owner and a dad, and I couldn’t have told you anything about myself beyond those labels. I didn’t have the vocabulary for identity loss. Guests such as Adam Wolfers (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/cerebral-vasculitis-stroke-identity-change-adam-wolfers/) have described the same collision between who they were and who they now are, and anyone weighing up work decisions may find our episode on changing career after stroke (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/change-career-after-stroke/) useful.

The emotional side can catch even a professional off guard. “You’d think as a therapist I would be good with it,” Cassie said, “but I’d prefer to deal with other people’s emotions, not my own.” Our conversation about emotional changes after stroke (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/emotional-changes-after-stroke-sam-hanes/) explores this further.

Eighteen months on, Cassie doesn’t have an elevator pitch for who she is. She’s clearer about who she isn’t: someone driven by work. She values free time, her partner, and her dogs. She works full time doing intake assessments and sees private clients, and she describes herself this way: “I’m not as sharp as I was before, but I think I’m kinder.”

A stroke, she says, “strips away everything else so you have nothing left but yourself,” and then “you can also choose what your new identity is gonna be.”

That choice matters most. For most of my life I did what I’d been trained to do; it took a stroke to show me I could choose differently. Researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun called this post-traumatic growth: positive change that comes from the struggle with a traumatic event, not from the event itself. Cassie put it in her own words: “It’s not about the stroke. It’s about, okay, what am I gonna choose to do now?” It’s the idea at the centre of my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book).

Drawing on Cassie’s story, here are a few starting points:

Watch or listen to the full conversation with Cassie Jewell. You can find more of her work at cassie-jewell.com (https://cassie-jewell.com).

If a stroke has left your world feeling smaller, my new book, Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small (https://mybook.to/yourworld), is a practical guide to rebuilding your life after trauma, even when you’re not ready.

If this show has helped you, you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

A stroke at 42 took Cassie Jewell’s career and the identity built on it. What she found underneath changed how she works, loves, and travels.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction – Cassie’s Identity After Stroke
01:08 Life Before the Stroke
09:35 The Day of the Stroke
23:02 Aftermath and Recovery
28:41 Hospitalization and Rehabilitation Journey
32:04 Dissociation and Identity Post-Stroke
38:12 Life After Stroke: Adjusting to New Realities
50:32 How Stroke Forced Me to Discover Who I Really Am
01:02:14 The Dual Nature of Stroke Experiences

Transcript:

Bill Gasiamis (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome back to Recovery After Stroke. I’m Bill Gassiamis. My guest today is Cassie Jewell, a counselor and author from the United States, who in February of 2025 at 42 had an ischemic stroke in the right basal ganglia. In the same week, she was moved out of the role she had built her whole identity around. We talk about perfectionism and the overwork loop that’s so hard to step out of.

Why she tried to go back to work the day after her stroke, a condition called anosognosia. And the question at the heart of this episode: who are you when your career is gone? Now, if stroke has made your world feel smaller, my book is written for you. It’s called Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small: A Practical Guide to Rebuilding Your Life After Trauma, Even When You’re Not Ready. Search for it on Amazon or tap the link in the show notes.

And if this show has helped you, you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. And a massive thank you to everyone who already supports the show. You’re the reason these conversations keep happening.

And now it’s time for the interview.

Bill Gasiamis (01:08)
Cassie Jewell, welcome to the podcast.

Cassie (01:10)
Hi, how are you?

Bill Gasiamis (01:12)
I’m well. Thank you. Great to see you here. I really appreciate you joining me. I want to ask you a little bit about what your life was like before the stroke. What did you get up to? How did you occupy your time?

Cassie (01:26)
So my life was out of control before the stroke. I was working at a jail and it was a super stressful position. it was just stress all the time. I had a really bad supervisor too, a micromanager.

but I also that wasn’t the only part of my life. I traveled a lot.

I don’t know.

It’s hard to even think about it now, honestly.

Bill Gasiamis (01:54)
How long ago was the stroke?

Cassie (01:57)
So the stroke was it’s been about a year and a half. It was February twenty first, twenty twenty five.

Bill Gasiamis (02:02)
Mm-hmm.

w were you in a relationship? Were what’s the living arrangements like? What were you doing like personally?

Cassie (02:12)
Yes, I was in a relationship. I’m still in the same relationship. but I guess I was talking about work first because that was my entire life. It like revolved around my job. And I actually loved my job. It was just

some of the stress part that I didn’t love.

Bill Gasiamis (02:29)
You loved your job, so you’re working in a jail with inmates?

Cassie (02:33)
Yes, I’m a therapist.

Bill Gasiamis (02:36)
okay.

Cassie (02:38)
And so

I was working as a behavioral health supervisor at the jail. I didn’t have a lot of client contact, but when I did, those were the good days. But a lot of it was just inputting data, which was not fun.

Bill Gasiamis (02:54)
just all about reporting things to the bodies governing the jails or to

Cassie (03:00)
Yes. So specifically I worked with the when I say MAT, do you know what I mean by that? Medication

Bill Gasiamis (03:06)
No.

Cassie (03:07)
assisted treatment. So for the inmates who had opioid use disorders, they would start taking medication to help with that. It’s called Suboxone or buprenorfin is the name of the medication. Suboxon is the brand name.

Bill Gasiamis (03:24)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie (03:25)
But it helps

with cravings, so a lot of the inmates were on the medication. My role was to track all of the inmates who were on medication.

And so that was the data piece, like spreadsheets and just that was a lot. I kind of

Bill Gasiamis (03:42)
So you

Cassie (03:43)
sorry, go ahead.

Bill Gasiamis (03:44)
I was gonna say you became a counsellor or a therapist to have one-on-one contact with people, but you’re finding

Cassie (03:53)
Right.

Bill Gasiamis (03:53)
yourself in a situation where it’s all about statistics, data and a whole bunch of other things that you really w didn’t sign up for when you first started out to be a therapist.

Cassie (04:03)
Exactly. Like it was a good day if I got to spend time with clients or inmates. And a bad day would be me just at my desk, like hunched over till my neck was aching and just like I said, spreadsheets and data.

Bill Gasiamis (04:18)
Your world kind of revolved around work. How many hours a a week did you work?

Cassie (04:24)
I mean technically I was supposed to work forty hours, but I would stay late and I would work from home. So like that’s the worst thing about, you know, since the pandemic everybody works from home. I was able to bring it home with me, so if I didn’t finish something at work, I would just I’d be sitting on my couch make

Bill Gasiamis (04:45)
Is it that the

workload was too too high or was it just the nature of the job?

Cassie (04:51)
So to be honest, well the workload was definitely too high and I I’m sharp enough to know like if it was or wasn’t and it definitely was, but at the same time I’m a perfectionist and I wanted things to be perfect and so that played a lot into it. And this is what I realized in hindsight, ’cause at the time I would have told you that the workload was ridiculous and like I didn’t play any role in it, but I did.

Bill Gasiamis (05:20)
Wow. So that’s an awareness

Cassie (05:21)
I wanted it.

Bill Gasiamis (05:22)
you’ve had recently. The perfectionism thing is a real what is it like a real barrier?

Cassie (05:30)
Yeah, it’s I’ve dealt with it my entire life. But when it comes to employment with certain things, you can’t be a perfectionist ’cause it’s just going to kill you eventually. And for me it almost did. Like I believe my stroke was in part caused by stress because that was the only thing in my life that was like different. I’m a pretty healthy person.

Bill Gasiamis (05:56)
Yeah. At home, when you were working at home, how many additional hours would you be doing if you had a regular day at work and then came home? How much additional time would you be spending?

Cassie (06:06)
Like two or three.

Bill Gasiamis (06:08)
Yeah. Okay. And then are your employers noticing? Are they going, Well, congratulations, you’ve got the best notes in the world or the best statistics or data?

Cassie (06:17)
Nope, nobody noticed. My manager also worked from home and I know this because she would send emails like at ten PM and be like she’s doing the same thing because I think it’s probably in America like jails are not well staffed and not well run. And it’s probably just widespread. You have people who are overworking and no wonder nobody wants to work in a jail.

I loved it though. I loved the like I said, I loved working with the inmates. I like people.

Bill Gasiamis (06:49)
Yeah.

Cassie (06:50)
I like working with people. Doesn’t matter if they’re an inmate or not an inmate, like that’s why I became a therapist.

Bill Gasiamis (06:57)
Yeah. Ideal candidates for support therapy,

Cassie (07:00)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (07:01)
learning new skills, understanding how their behavior impacts their life and other people and all that type of thing. And maybe some of the first times that they’ve ever come across a therapist, would you say for s for a lot of the people that end up in jail?

Cassie (07:17)
Possibly.

And a lot of the people who were addicted to opiates or they maybe h not b have been addicted, but who used opiates didn’t even recognize how deadly it was. They

Bill Gasiamis (07:30)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie (07:30)
had just been like they were young, like I said, children is how I see it. Like I’m in my forties now, but so everybody’s a child to me, but you know, eighteen, nineteen year olds in jail because

Bill Gasiamis (07:42)
Yeah, they yell.

Cassie (07:43)
they were using with a friend or something and they didn’t

know what they were getting themselves into.

Bill Gasiamis (07:47)
No, that’s perfectly fine. They’re children. in my mind as well, I know they’re technically an adult, but it’s such a small gap between childhood and adulthood when you’re eighteen. Like I

Cassie (08:01)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (08:02)
mean, as if there’s a a year when it’s definitely an adult now. I know that the law is a little more kind of restri harsh on that definition, but

The truth

Cassie (08:15)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (08:15)
is is this is very hard to kind of fit people into.

Cassie (08:18)
Their brains are still developing.

Bill Gasiamis (08:19)
Yeah, till twenty five or something, like many

Cassie (08:22)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (08:23)
of the lobes haven’t come one of the lobes at least hasn’t come online. I think it’s the frontal lobe.

Cassie (08:27)
That I don’t know, but I’m sure

Bill Gasiamis (08:28)
Yeah.

Yeah. I might be wrong, but that’s okay. so life was pretty hectic, pretty full on, lots of work at home as well as at the office or in the jail. And then

Cassie (08:41)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (08:42)
how is that impacting kind of your just regular life in that switching off part, that doing things that you loved, or going out with your partner, or taking the dogs for a walk? How did it affect that part of it? Did it eat into that?

Cassie (08:57)
It did. I was not a great person to be around ’cause I was cranky all the time. I was tired all the time and thinking about work all the time. But I’ve always traveled and so I made a point to travel still. So I was still traveling the world. so that piece was good.

Bill Gasiamis (09:14)
Like the circuit breaker that you at least always did for a period of time. How long would those trips last?

Cassie (09:22)
I travel whenever I can, so sometimes it would be like a three day trip, sometimes it would be like a ten day trip.

Bill Gasiamis (09:29)
Uhhuh. So squeeze in whatever you can just to get out and about.

Cassie (09:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Bill Gasiamis (09:35)
So what happened on the day of the stroke? Do you have any recollection of that, any awareness of the lead up to that?

Cassie (09:43)
So I can tell you the story. There’s not like a anything that seemed to lead up to it. It was just living my life as normal. I had just gotten back from Iceland, but you know, like I said, that was travel was my norm. And

So this is still hard for me to talk about. This was like a horrible thing that happened to me. This is like sometimes I think it’s worse than the stroke. I don’t know.

If it is or not, but I was demoted from my position. And so this position is, you know, it’s everything. And then at the same time, it’s like the worst thing in the world because I’m so I’m overworked. I’m exhausted. I have a a manager who’s not supportive. And I could almost see it coming, but I was still still shocked and like.

I put my like everything into my career. Like that’s who I am. Like my entire identity was my career. And so being demoted was was is maybe the worst thing that has ever happened to me. And so that happened on a Wednesday and then the stroke happened on a Friday. So it was a very busy week for me. And I had gotten back from Iceland on a Monday. So it was in one week that all these things happened.

Bill Gasiamis (11:07)
Intense so you’re back at work after traveling, jet lag, you know, holiday mode, all those things. Then two days later you get called into the office, you get demoted from the role that you’re in into a different position. You take

Cassie (11:22)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (11:22)
a bad lib by the sound of things.

Cassie (11:25)
I think I was very professional when it happened but it was absolutely like devastating. It’s

Bill Gasiamis (11:31)
Yeah.

Cassie (11:32)
not something I talk about because it’s still like very painful.

Bill Gasiamis (11:35)
Raw.

Yeah. And then two days later, what happens on the Friday? How does that play out?

Cassie (11:43)
So it was Thursday night and I was I had just stayed up and been writing. I was working on a a book that I never ended up publishing, but it was a book that I was working on. And it was kind of like a well, let me show that I still matter, that I’m still worth something by I’m gonna write this book and so I was just driven by like spite and like my whatever, who knows.

So I hadn’t gone to sleep at all, and it’s Thursday night, and I’m still up and I’m still writing, and I’m drinking wine and I’m on the couch.

so leading up to it was the demotion, and had been traveling, and then I’m typing, and as I’m typing, like my left hand just stops working, and I didn’t think anything of it. I was like, that’s

Weird. This is weird. And I was like, I’m gonna go to bed. I’ve had too much to drink. And so like I get up and just kinda stumble to bed. And it’s not until the next morning, well it’s a afternoon by then, when I finally wake up or I get up and I know that something’s like wrong and I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m just like I can tell that something is off with me.

And I’m saying this to my partner. He’s like in the other room, but I’m still in bed. I’m like, something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with me. And I just keep on repeating that over and over again. And I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. And I was like, I decided that I was having a panic attack because I’m familiar with that. And it fit because I felt like I was dying, but I knew I wasn’t actually dying. And then I remembered, I was like, wait a minute. Last night was weird. That was weird. That thing happened. And so

I don’t call 911. I text my mom. And I’m like, mom, this happened to me. My mom is a nurse practitioner, so it makes sense that I texted her instead of calling 911. And she was like, Those are stroke symptoms. Call 911 now and ask me to take you to a stroke center or to a hospital with a stroke center. So my partner ends up calling. He makes the phone call. I don’t know what I’m doing at that point. And he’s like,

Yeah, maybe you should get ready. And I don’t know how I did because apparently I’m paralyzed on my left side. I don’t know when that actually s like settled in, but I was able to function enough until the ambulance arrived. And they’re like, Where’s the victim? Where’s the stroke victim? And I’m like, it’s it’s me. Cause I’m still standing, I answered the door and everything. But my

Bill Gasiamis (14:21)
Wow.

Cassie (14:24)
And I don’t know this of course, but like later I’m told one half of my face is drooping. So it was obvious, even though I’m still like walking and talking.

Bill Gasiamis (14:34)
And there

Cassie (14:34)
And I

had I had pictures of it, like how bad it was, like how pronounced it was, but I deleted them all because I’m very vain and I don’t want anybody to ever see how awful it looked.

Bill Gasiamis (14:44)
Wow.

Cassie (14:44)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (14:45)
Do you prefer that you hadn’t deleted that now or are you happy that they’re gone?

Cassie (14:51)
I have there’s one picture left. Somebody else took the picture actually. And like looking back on it’s just I mean, I probably it probably would be good to have those pictures because I would be able to like remind myself of how far I’ve come, but it’s also like really d uncomfortable and disorienting to see yourself look like that. I don’t know if you

Bill Gasiamis (15:13)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Cassie (15:15)
if

you have that experience if there were pictures taken of you after your stroke.

Bill Gasiamis (15:20)
There was, not a lot of them, only because it wasn’t the first thing on our mind.

Cassie (15:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (15:27)
but I had pictures taken when I was in the rehab facility where w I was strapped in and I was attached to the ceiling and I was walking along trying to rehabilitate my leg

Cassie (15:39)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (15:40)
like like a marionette. so that’s about it. And I’ve got some pictures of my scar, which were pretty epic.

The surgery scar was pretty epic.

Cassie (15:52)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (15:54)
and and then that’s about it. and they’re

Cassie (15:58)
So how do you feel

when you look at those pictures?

Bill Gasiamis (16:01)
The thing, Cassie, with me is I don’t relive the experience when I talk about it. Whereas I know people who have had something challenging happen to them that th when they’re re expi when they’re talking about it, it’s like they’re reliving it. So I kind of really understand why it’s difficult for them to talk about it or to see a photo.

And when I talk about that, there’s a disassociation with it. And it’s not a disassociation that I’ve made from the perspective of I don’t want to think or remember or etc. It’s just that I I’ve spoken about it so much that it’s like I’m telling a story about somebody else. Now,

Cassie (16:44)
Yeah, that’s healthy.

Bill Gasiamis (16:45)
yeah, it’s me, but it’s not really.

Cassie (16:48)
Right.

Bill Gasiamis (16:48)
I see the pictures, but it’s 12 years since brain surgery. Like I don’t connect me to that.

day, even though it’s definitely me and I have the deficits and I live with the, you know, injury and all the things that it did to me. Like, I don’t know, like I I don’t get triggered by in a negative way, but I understand when I’ve seen people talk about experiences that they get triggered by, it’s because they’re reliving it and that somehow they haven’t separated their current self to the the self that went through that part of the experience.

Cassie (17:25)
I also think that just the passage of time helps with it, like ’cause you’re so far removed from it. It’s

Bill Gasiamis (17:30)
Indeed.

Cassie (17:31)
like I believe that people change, like almost every decade we become new people. Not like every decade on the, you know, like at right at thirty and then forty, but like approximately every decade we become relatively

Bill Gasiamis (17:44)
Yeah.

Cassie (17:44)
different people than we were before. And so it’s like looking back

Bill Gasiamis (17:49)
I agree.

Cassie (17:49)
at a different person almost when you see that.

Bill Gasiamis (17:52)
I I agree. And a different person in many ways. Like not a podcaster, not an author, you know, not a speaker. a very different person, you know, and

That one that the person that I was was just basically a guy not dissimilar to what you described, just getting through, you know, like working as much as possible, at home, at work, too many hours, the phone always on, people reaching me any time of the day. It was mental. and it was the best time and the worst time. I’m gonna interrupt you for a second ’cause I’m expecting a phone call.

From my dad’s appointment at the hospital. One moment, please. Hello. Hey, is that Bill? Yes.

Yeah, he’s done with that injunction. He’s ready to be collected. Okay. well we’ll get there as soon as we can if that’s all right. Yeah, sure. Shouldn’t be too late. Okay, no worries. I’ll just organise someone. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

My dad had a little procedure.

Cassie (18:58)
Si okay.

Bill Gasiamis (18:59)
Yeah. And he just needs to get picked up.

And of course

I bet you’ve his grandson who was meant to pick him up has forgotten.

And we’ll edit all this out anyway, so

Let’s see what it says.

All right. let’s see what it says.

Awesome, he’s going now.

yeah, so as I was saying, so I

I I I put a lot of work into being a different person as well. Like that was important. I couldn’t be the same guy that came out of all of that stroke stuff because that guy was not heading in the right direction. He was gonna be unwell again. Right. And and what you said kind of reminds me of how I was. perfectionism might not have been my thing, but it was there was a thing, you know, that I

bought into that I needed to do that I couldn’t do any other way, that if it didn’t happen like that it was gonna be wrong. You know? And it was for me it was I can’t outsource it to anyone else because nobody’s ever gonna do what I do, how I do it, make the customer happy so we can get paid. It yeah, it’s kind of it kind

Cassie (20:08)
That’s perfectionism, maybe. In a sense.

Bill Gasiamis (20:11)
of is. Yeah. I see perfectionism in my wife differently ’cause she described what you described at her cause she’s a she’s studying and just finished her

masters in psychology. Yeah, and she does

Cassie (20:27)
good. It’s awesome.

Bill Gasiamis (20:28)
case notes and my gosh. It’s like you’ve done a day’s work. Yeah, I honestly like she does a day’s work. And then I’m like, how long did it does it need to take to do case notes after a day’s work? And she’s like, as long as it takes. And I’m like, Well, it as an outsider, somebody who doesn’t understand what you’re doing.

It seems like it’s taking way too long after the session with your client to d to do the case notes. It’s it’s what it seems like to me. And and she’s not denying it, but she is kind of saying, Well, I’m early on in my career and I have to make sure that the case notes are done well, et cetera. And I’m like, How have you ever compared them to other people’s case notes to know what’s good enough or acceptable?

And that’s kind of what I didn’t do either. Like I never understood that when you’re delivering a painting project to a client, ninety percent is good enough. If the client says it’s a pass, it’s a pass. And then you get paid. Trying to overdeliver to ensure payment, because I was concerned. I think it it was more for me, it was about getting paid rather than me being a stickler for perfection. It was about if I don’t do it.

To the client’s expectation, then I won’t get paid. And that was kind of what it was. But it’s a similar ailment, you know, like it gets in the way of spare time and hours for me to do something other than work, but I I didn’t know it at the time. It was just the way that it was.

Cassie (22:10)
Yeah. Well it’s hard to know when you’re in the middle of it also. And my partner would point it out like how insane I was being and I didn’t see it. Like I said at the time I just I didn’t well

Bill Gasiamis (22:26)
Yeah.

Cassie (22:27)
I did to an extent, but not enough to make me stop.

Bill Gasiamis (22:33)
Yeah. And you then have maybe the exit part of the loop. Like, where do I get off the loop? You know, like how do I jump out of here? I know he’s told me, and I know somebody else might have mentioned it. And I know I’m working too many hours, but like how do I get out of it? Like what’s the the exit? I get that too. That’s kind of how I was. The stroke became that for me. Is that how you kind of experienced your stroke afterwards? Was it a circuit breaker as well as this illness?

Cassie (23:02)
Yeah, I feel like that, like the way you said it. Like I feel like I was literally burning myself to the ground, like I was burnt out and just wasn’t gonna stop and was gonna keep on going and going and going. And then my brain was like, Okay, we’ve had enough. We’re gonna stop you. And I had a stroke.

Bill Gasiamis (23:21)
Mm.

Cassie (23:22)
And they say that stress doesn’t directly cause strokes, like it contributes to it. But like I mentioned, like I’m pretty healthy.

And I was I’m forty three now. I was only forty two. And that’s not normal. Like it’s usually age sixty five and older that have the strokes. Definitely

Bill Gasiamis (23:42)
Yeah.

Cassie (23:42)
wasn’t expecting it.

Bill Gasiamis (23:44)
What kind of a stroke was it?

Cassie (23:46)
It was an ischemic stroke. It was a right hemisphere stroke in the basal ganglia, which I didn’t know what they were. I learned about it after my stroke.

Bill Gasiamis (23:55)
And did they have

Cassie (23:55)
They apparently do a

lot with like has to do with your motion and balance, but also emotional regulation, which that was a huge thing when I was recovering, like having to deal with emotions. You’d think as a therapist

Bill Gasiamis (24:10)
Just crying.

Cassie (24:11)
I would be good with it, but I’d prefer to deal with other people’s emotions, not my own.

Bill Gasiamis (24:16)
And you’re human as well, right? So yeah. Just because you

Cassie (24:17)
yeah, I forgot about that. Yes. That too.

Bill Gasiamis (24:20)
learnt about it doesn’t mean that you’re the epitome of the perfectly emotionally regulated human just because you learned about it or studied it.

Cassie (24:28)
Yeah, absolutely not.

Bill Gasiamis (24:31)
Yeah. and do they know what the underlying cause of the ischemic stroke was? Was there an underlying cause?

Cassie (24:40)
They still I have like a little heart thing in still. It’s they’re like, maybe it was AFib and I told my cardiologist I was like, it’s not, it’s stress. I know it was stress. And he was like, it might be AFib. We’re gonna still check for this. So it’s like it can stay in for up to four years. I don’t know when they’re gonna take it out. but so far no AFib, which kind of doesn’t mean that my theory is correct, but it seems more plausible that there was they can’t figure out

Anything else? I probably drank too much. I was drinking the night of my stroke, but they said that didn’t cause it.

Who knows? Combination of

Bill Gasiamis (25:16)
Hmm. What

Cassie (25:18)
alcohol and stress.

Bill Gasiamis (25:20)
Yeah. Or when you say you drink too much as in what are you doing, a bottle a day or just a couple of glasses or

Cassie (25:28)
So before my stroke I was probably drinking more than a bottle of wine a day.

Bill Gasiamis (25:33)
Okay. Yeah, that’s too much.

Cassie (25:34)
So that’s like

four to five drinks. And for women, you shouldn’t have more than one drink of alcohol per day.

Bill Gasiamis (25:43)
Yeah, it is too much for any person really. Yeah.

Cassie (25:46)
It is. That

was my way of coping with stress.

Bill Gasiamis (25:51)
Yeah, takes the edge off, right?

Cassie (25:53)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (25:53)
Yeah. It’s not uncommon. Like it’s so many I’m not hearing anything new here, you know, like it’s

Cassie (26:00)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (26:00)
we’re all the same pretty much everywhere. It doesn’t matter where you live. And everyone needs a way to cope. And sometimes the easiest thing is whatever’s at arm’s reach. And it could be for it could be a piece of bread. It could be a piece of you know, sweet cake or whatever, it could be alcohol. There’s so many ways that we

Cope and it’s really useful, especially if you can cope. Yeah. If you Yeah. Yeah. The problem

Cassie (26:25)
It works so well it just kills you at the same time.

Bill Gasiamis (26:30)
is it’s short lived coping and it’s not learning or teaching you how to cope ongoing and without it. And that’s the the challenge, right? Is how do we cope with that? I used to smoke. And I would tell you still today that I loved smoking. It was one of the most amazing, most enjoyable things to do.

It also came with alcohol and it came after a meal and it came with a coffee. Like all the things I loved to do happened together and smoking was one of them. And I’m sure, I’m certain it was, you know, the nicotine hit and all the things that you get from a cigarette, good, bad, were all contributing to my coping mechanism. But I also was creating the perfect storm for being unwell and

Cassie (27:17)
Right.

Bill Gasiamis (27:18)
stress at work,

Not enough me time, always thinking about the job, the phone always being on, all that kind of stuff. And then it’s like, okay, well, what do I need? What do I need? What do you I know what I need? I need another coffee and a cigarette. Let me go and grab one. That’s gonna make things better. And it did, like just for that small amount of time. But not enough to be use supportive or not enough to be healthy. It was not healthy, but that’s okay. I learnt and

I don’t do that anymore. I don’t smoke anymore. Although I love walking past people who are smoking.

Cassie (27:57)
That’s funny. I hate the smell of I think a lot of people do, the smell of cigarettes.

Bill Gasiamis (28:01)
Yeah.

I love the smell of cigarettes. Not in the ashtray part, just in the air, kind of wafting around. You know, there was nothing better than being at a really smoky club or whatever. I don’t like the smell in my clothes the next day. But I’m old enough that when we were smok when we were going out to nightclubs and dancing and all that kind stuff, smoking was still allowed indoors in Australia. Whereas now it’s not. it was so cool. man.

so how long did you end up in hospital for and how did you manage to deal with the deficits that it was causing before you went home?

Cassie (28:41)
So I was in the like the actual hospital, like in the hospital on the stroke unit for a week. And then they moved me to inpatient rehab for a little over a week. So altogether it was a little over two weeks, so not that long. I was paralyzed for about a week, although it’s crazy, I barely remember it. you’d think like something huge like that you would remember, but I just remember the doctors coming in and being like, Okay

pull on my hands, now push on my hands or do this, do that and like I just remember my left hand wasn’t working as well, but it didn’t it didn’t feel like being paralyzed, but I don’t guess I don’t know who would know what that feels like if you’ve never been paralyzed, or you wouldn’t

Bill Gasiamis (29:23)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie (29:24)
feel anything, I guess.

Bill Gasiamis (29:25)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie (29:26)
And I was able to walk, so my rehab wasn’t that like intensive. It was focusing on I had this weird like kind of like lean where I would like lean left and like veer off to the left. Like if there was nobody to direct me, I would have just like walked off into the walls.

so two weeks and then for a month I did like outpatient OT and PT. But I also like I took a look at my drinking and I was like, I need to stop drinking. And so I went to treatment like a month after my stroke, or it was like six weeks after my stroke. So that interrupted my OT and PT. But two weeks to answer your question about

two weeks in the hospital and in rehab, which was they

were basically the same thing. I was in a bed, an alarmed bed, because I was a fall risk.

Which was awful ’cause I’m super independent, so having that taken away from me was like I couldn’t I wasn’t even allowed to get up. I would get scolded like a naughty child when I did. It didn’t stop me from getting up, but I got some scoldings. The nurses I was not a favorite among the nurses, I suspect.

Bill Gasiamis (30:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, they were looking up for you.

Yeah. They were they were looking out for you but they needed to get the point across as much as possible. I

I kinda get it, but yeah, it’s also not nice to be told you shouldn’t do something. but when you can’t do it and it’s a risk

to your health, then maybe it’s maybe it’s all right to be told don’t do that

in no uncertain terms.

Cassie (31:13)
They so they taught my partner how to like unarm the bed. And I have to give him credit here because I like begged him to teach me the trick to unarm it and he never did. Yeah. Which was I didn’t care for it at the time, but he realized that maybe I might hurt myself, so

Bill Gasiamis (31:26)
Ha ha ha.

Cassie (31:35)
didn’t let me have my way on that.

Bill Gasiamis (31:38)
I’m gonna have to interrupt us again, my dad’s calling.

Cassie (31:41)
Okay.

Bill Gasiamis (31:44)
I don’t like cancelling appointments when we’ve made a a appointment for a podcast. So anyhow I’ll get this

Bill Gasiamis (32:03)
to that.

Bill Gasiamis (32:12)
Is

He’s just went in for a little procedure where they injected some cortisol into his back ’cause he’s got some pain. And they put him under so they need him to be picked up. And he’s getting picked up, but he just doesn’t know it and w now

we’re going backwards and forwards between

between us and the nurses, but I did tell

him and he does know but he’s eighty two and he doesn’t listen. If he rings back I’ll just interrupt us again. I’m so sorry.

Cassie (32:46)
No, it’s fine.

Bill Gasiamis (32:49)
so

Your

time in

hospital other than being scolded. How do you come to terms with what has happened? Do you come to terms with it? Are you thinking about what this means for you now?

Cassie (33:06)
Not once. It didn’t even cross my mind. My world like when I look back on it, like my world shrank just to like the hospital bed in the room that I was in. And it just that was the only thing that existed. I didn’t think about, well, how is this gonna impact me long term? Am I gonna be able to go back to work? Like they gave me they told me I couldn’t go back for four months. But I actually tried to go back to work. I was

Bill Gasiamis (33:19)
at work,

Cassie (33:34)
working overtime, I was also working at a different

location, doing like some overnight shifts. And the day after my stroke I tried to go to work. I was going to just go

and not tell anybody and then come back. But they found out my mom was there. She found out. She’s like, Cassie, you can’t you can’t go. You can’t work. You can’t even walk. And I was like, I mostly would just sit at a desk. It should be fine. I’m sure it will be fine. That was kind of my

motto the entire time, like,

it’s fine, it’s gonna be fine, even though it clearly, you know, wasn’t fine.

Bill Gasiamis (34:09)
just there was that stroke

brain? N like normal Cassie wouldn’t do that. You would know not to do that normally,

would wouldn’t you? Like somebody is unwell, that’s not what we do when we’re unwell. Or was it just

Cassie (34:21)
I don’t

Bill Gasiamis (34:21)
the stroke playing up on you?

Cassie (34:24)
So it’s both. Like I didn’t feel unwell for one

thing. Like I felt or I thought that I was normal. I thought I was still myself then. But then with right brain stroke especially, there’s I forget the word for it, but you become overconfident in your abilities and you think

that you can do things that you can’t do. And so

Bill Gasiamis (34:47)
Wow.

Cassie (34:47)
that was a part of it too. I do you know the word for that?

Bill Gasiamis (34:51)
I don’t.

Cassie (34:52)
There’s like a very specific word for it. It also happens to people with severe mental illness where they think that they’re okay when they’re not. But it’s specific to right

brainstroke. And so I thought it was fine. And then also like me, I’m pretty stubborn and think

Bill Gasiamis (35:06)
Yeah.

Cassie (35:13)
I know better than doctors. So there was that too.

Bill Gasiamis (35:20)
I’m gonna check what it is. I wonder if I can ask Chat GPT what it is, w what is it when somebody’s overconfident after a brain injury or a

stroke, right? Is that’s kind of what the search will be. Let’s see what

Cassie (35:32)
Probably starts

with an A.

Bill Gasiamis (35:36)
wonder what Chat GPT’s got to say about it. Yeah.

Cassie (35:39)
But it’s being completely unaware of your

Bill Gasiamis (35:44)
Anosognosia. Anosognosia. It’s a Greek word by the sound of it. from my background. And it is the

Cassie (35:45)
That sounds familiar.

Bill Gasiamis (36:00)
Anosognosia is impaired awareness of one’s neurological deficits following brain injury or a stroke. A person may genuinely not recognize or may substantially underestimate.

their problems with movement, cognition, communication, behavior, or other abilities. Does that sound like it was your thing? Yeah, wow.

Cassie (36:19)
That’s exactly what it was. And

But then that kind of like followed me after

my stroke. Like I was like, wait a minute, am I completely like disabled and I just have no idea? Like so that was difficult. That piece of it, like where I felt like I was doing okay. I mean I was walking and talking still, you know, after my stroke.

Bill Gasiamis (36:37)
Mm-hmm.

See?

So you have cognitive awareness of the deficit, but yet the deficit still plays out. This overconfidence

in your ability still played out, but you’re still kind of have awareness of it somehow.

Cassie (37:06)
Yeah, but I don’t know like to this day, like I don’t know, maybe I was completely not functioning at all and I have a memory that I was, who knows. It’s really weird, it kinda messes with your head.

Bill Gasiamis (37:18)
Yeah. How we it is it’s so weird. I know. I I remember being in all s sort of weird

out of brain spaces and experiences and trying to work out w is this actually happening or am I imagining this happening? Is this reality or is it a dream? Like what is it? had a lot of those moments and then people observing me doing that was the most interesting part ’cause then I had to explain to them what I

Cassie (37:35)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (37:47)
what I was ha happening to me and I was like I was unable to even you know verbalize that like how do I explain that to them when I don’t even know what’s going on. It was just really freaky. and then you ended up going home at some point

and what was that like? What was the transition from rehab and care like when you ended up home? How do you

manage that?

Cassie (38:12)
It was really underwhelming. Like I had to

do training beforehand. They’re like, Okay, you have to learn how to get in and out of the shower and in and out of a car. So I had to do like training for that, which was silly because

Well, like I said, I thought I was functioning fine. But I’ve never fallen once, not once, which I think says that maybe I was functioning to

an extent. The physical disability was never really that big of an issue. It was more like the the cognitive stuff and then like the emotional piece. That was what was my big struggle. But yeah, they

I had to they had to put

me in a wheelchair to leave the hospital, even though I insisted I was fine. They were like, No, we don’t just let people get up and go, you have to do this. So they wheeled me out and my sister picked me up and took me home and that was it. And then I was home and I expected life to go back to normal, but it did not.

Like that was probably I guess being

home was like the wake up call when I was like, my life is gonna be different now. Very different.

Bill Gasiamis (39:25)
Yeah. Cybering.

Cassie (39:28)
Exactly.

Bill Gasiamis (39:30)
Hm. You weren’t working. Were you allowed to drive or go out and about were you up to that?

Cassie (39:36)
You know what? I was really, really, really tired for I’m still tired all the time, but like so I wasn’t like really up to doing anything. I wasn’t allowed to drive for six months, but I did. I got into an accident, I think, my first my first day behind the wheel. It was just a tiny little accident. I just tapped somebody’s bumper and they got very upset about it. They were overreacting, I think.

Bill Gasiamis (40:07)
People tend to do that with car.

Cassie (40:09)
They

do.

Bill Gasiamis (40:10)
Yeah. I don’t know why.

Cassie (40:12)
Yeah, she was upset.

Bill Gasiamis (40:14)
you wouldn’t it how how we act in a car when we’re in the car, when somebody

Cassie (40:21)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (40:22)
does something minor on the road, we would never act outside of the car in the real world in public when somebody crossed our

Cassie (40:29)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (40:30)
path or bumped into us or whatever. It’s just strange what happens when people get in a car. Yeah.

Cassie (40:34)
wild. Same thing online,

people act w in ways they never would in real life.

Bill Gasiamis (40:40)
Yeah, it’s a little bubble of false sort of bravado or security or something, I don’t know what,

and people just change their behavior. I’ve become aware of that recently and I’ve made a massive effort to not be that way. And I did a lot of work around actually not

reacting when I’m in the car to

Cassie (41:00)
That’s amazing.

Bill Gasiamis (41:01)
yeah, incidences that are so insignificant because every time you drive

there is an insignificant incident and if you’re just freaking out about it all the time, all you’re doing is making yourself unwell. It’s just another negative

Cassie (41:13)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (41:13)
thing that you do, right? So I’ve made a concerted

effort about a year ago to make sure that I do not react by yelling and screaming to people in a car when they’re just driving on the road. I’m doing exactly the same thing. I don’t know where I get off being the guy.

who thinks that my driving is so much better that that I I am if within my rights to be aggressive or act out or yelling or screaming at the person

in the other car who actually can’t hear me anyway and doesn’t even know what they did wrong.

Cassie (41:56)
That’s so one thing that like I could be a bit of a jerk before when driving. Not that anybody would know. I was just in my car yelling and cursing, but you know But since the stroke I’ve actually I have more patience because I’m much I’m slower and that’s just in like life in general, but also behind the wheel. I’m I’m much slower. And

Bill Gasiamis (42:07)
Yeah.

Cassie (42:21)
so then when somebody starts tailing me, I get super frustrated with it, but I’m like

when I think somebody’s going too slow, now I’m like, Well, there’s probably a reason for that so I can chill and just drive slow. I probably need to anyway. So

Bill Gasiamis (42:36)
awareness, yeah. Like it’s like maybe they’re recovering from something, maybe they’re just more careful. Maybe they have a you know, more more kind of anxiousness about them and they want to make sure that they’re paying more attention, you know, it’s

all all sorts of things going on. And judging people without having any idea was s so getting in the way of my just five minute trip down the road, you know, to pick up something. What’s the point of going for a drive and being angry for no reason? Like it’s ridiculous.

Cassie (43:05)
Yeah. The wild thing is is I had all these skills before my stroke. Like I could have I’m a therapist, you know. I understand these things. I empathize with people, but I would get so mad at other drivers. But now I

I’m just like, somebody they’re probably like me. And that’s in not just

in driving, in like all areas of my life. I’m more empathetic. I think I’m a better therapist in some ways. I’m not as

sharp as I was before, but I think I’m kinder.

Bill Gasiamis (43:40)
You have more insight.

Cassie (43:42)
More insight, yes, for sure.

Bill Gasiamis (43:43)
more life experience.

Cassie (43:47)
Yeah. Exactly.

Bill Gasiamis (43:50)
Yeah. so did you kind of find a way back to work? Are you working again?

Cassie (44:00)
I’m working I’m

working at a very different like paced job. I’m doing

intake assessments now, so it’s

Bill Gasiamis (44:08)
manage to deal with the deficits that it was causing before you went home?

Cassie (44:12)
I get more like FaceTime, which is nice, but it’s also it’s not a very challenging job. And before it was the work was very challenging. So it’s different pace of life. But I’m back to work. I’m working full time.

And then I see clients on the side and my and it’s not my practice, it’s a group practice, so private practice clients too.

Bill Gasiamis (44:36)
Sounds like it’s more alig aligned with the whole intention of becoming a counsellor, a therapist, like at the beginning.

Cassie (44:42)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (44:44)
Yeah. Less statistically based and more client focused.

Cassie (44:49)
Yeah.

I do miss the population ’cause like I really liked working with the inmates. But

Bill Gasiamis (44:55)
Yeah.

Cassie (44:56)
I just I wouldn’t go back into that environment.

Bill Gasiamis (45:00)
Yeah. E especially when you’re you know, the people you’re reporting to are also maybe, you know, a bit difficult to handle as well or highly, you know, tense or whatever. They’re we’ve got to also understand like they’re living in a environment where they’re working in a jail as well and God knows

Cassie (45:18)
Yes.

Bill Gasiamis (45:19)
what they’re dealing with and putting up with as well and how they’re able to personally manage it. And if everyone’s kind of dysfunctional, you wanna not

Cassie (45:27)
Mm.

Bill Gasiamis (45:28)
be there, even though

that’s where people are needed, you need to kind of do your time and get out.

Cassie (45:35)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (45:36)
’cause ongoing dysfunction just becomes traumatic for everybody who’s involved, even though you’re going there to do good work, you’re coming out and then you’re not well, you’re not healthy, and it leads to illness and what’s the point of that? your website is cassiejewell.com and there’s a couple of things on there that you talk about and promote and

There’s a very cool photo of you on the home page. Like I love that photo. It’s

Cassie (46:03)
Hello, thanks.

Bill Gasiamis (46:05)
so cool. and it says Cassie Jewell is a counselor and an author exploring psychology of change, resilience, regret, and identity.

Cassie (46:14)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (46:15)
Change, resilience, regret, and identity. Huge.

Cassie (46:18)
That’s all from my stroke.

Bill Gasiamis (46:20)
Huge words. Okay. I was gonna ask you whether that may have been on there previously or whether that is the new thing that you’re interested in.

Cassie (46:28)
That is something I’ve definitely focused on more since the stroke, especially identity. because before I identified just completely like with my career, or more so with my job, not my career, but my job. But that I was just completely wrapped up in that. And now I’ve had to well, I went through I had another job

when I first started back to work, that didn’t work out. It’s ’cause I’m not as competent as I used to be. It’s really hard. I’m still dealing with that. But when you measure your self-worth in the things that you do, like in your career, and then all of a sudden you don’t have your career anymore, who are you? I had to figure that out. And I like who I am now. I think

Or I I don’t know if I’m the same person or if I’m a different person. It’s hard to gauge that. I think I it took me some time, but I think I finally just adjusted to who I am now and I’m choosing to like who I am now. I’m a

Bill Gasiamis (47:37)
Yeah.

Cassie (47:37)
different person, probably, but I’m the only you know, this brain is the only one I’ve got, so I might as well invest in it and like it. Don’t

Bill Gasiamis (47:47)
Yeah.

Cassie (47:48)
have any other choice.

Bill Gasiamis (47:50)
No. and yet i your

your identity, like do you i if I was to ask you what it is or how would you like what how do you identify? Like how can do you have a elevator pitch? Can you say that to to me now?

Cassie (48:10)
I do not

have an elevator pitch. I have no idea. I don’t know how to describe it. I just I know more what I’m not and I’m not driven by work. Like I value free time more in my personal life and my loved ones, my dogs. I don’t have kids, I have dogs. They’re my kids.

Bill Gasiamis (48:30)
Yeah.

Yep.

Cassie (48:34)
and like I would be okay if I didn’t have my career. I would still know who I was without my career. Where before I didn’t, and so losing that was like losing everything. That’s why the stroke hit so hard is because I lost I lost my career and myself at the same time, almost my life, but it was more the losing of like my identity and so

My new identity is part like having lost that I’m no longer that career woman that I was and then also who I am since the stroke. So

Bill Gasiamis (49:11)
Mm-hmm.

When I was younger, I didn’t have an opportunity to work out my identity. I just got stuck into the tasks that I needed to do.

Cassie (49:21)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (49:21)
To pay the bills, to feed the kids, to put through school, to pay the mortgage, to do all that stuff. And it was never a conversation like, how do I who am I, who do I identify as? Or if somebody asked me the question, I wouldn’t even know what it meant. Like they’d what are you talking about? Like, I just go to work and I do all these things.

You know, but beyond what you do, who are you? That’s such a bizarre thing to have to contemplate. I think that’s what I found difficult about it as well, was that not only did I lose all those things that I did who I thought I was, I actually didn’t have the vocabulary or the insight about the topic or anything. I had nothing. And I’m starting from completely scratch. And that would have been the hardest question in the world for somebody to ask.

Now I stumbled into identity loss and all that kind of stuff just by interviewing people and realizing that other people are going through that and they had a word for it. But before that, if I if I was asked, I wouldn’t have a clue how to begin a conversation with that. I wouldn’t be able to get off telling somebody that I was a business owner and I was a dad and it was all about other people.

Cassie (50:35)
Do you feel like

did it take you a long time to like yourself, like your new self after the stroke?

Bill Gasiamis (50:42)
A a few years, yeah. I think I realized

Cassie (50:44)
Few years.

Bill Gasiamis (50:45)
that so my whole thing started in twenty twelve and then out I was at home out of surgery in twenty in December twenty fourteen. And then I was at home alone from late December twenty fourteen for the first five or six months of the following year, twenty fifteen. Twenty fifteen, around twenty fifteen is when I started the podcast, but there was only a few episodes.

And they were intermittent and I wasn’t well. I had fatigue. I was dealing with and all the things. And then by around early 2016, maybe middle of the year, something like that, would have been the first time when I said, I think stroke was the best thing that happened to me. And and it you know what why I said that. It wasn’t because I I loved the experience of being unwell, nearly dying, brain surgery, all of that. It’s because I realized that I had grown as a person.

And that my identity had shifted from somebody who was caught up in all the labels and all of the what is it like all of the barriers that I put up in between, you know, from in my own way that I created in my own mind about myself. And then I realized I was on a podcast interview and I said that with the the person who I was interviewing. I think stroke’s the best thing that happened to me, and they said the same thing back. And then it’s like, wow, how did you get here?

And I realized how I got there was I how I was speaking on a stage, sharing information about stroke awareness. I was meeting stroke survivors who I really got along with and we understood each other and we were able to appreciate what what both of us had been through. I felt understood for the first time. you know, so I was doing all these things that were different that were actually bringing a different kind of joy into my life.

Cassie (52:36)
Yeah, fulfillment meaning.

Bill Gasiamis (52:37)
Yeah. Purpose,

meaning. And I never knew those things existed before that. I didn’t know that my purpose and meaning needed to be refined and it shouldn’t have been about making as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Because apparently my kids needed the new pair of sneakers or, you know, the new console or whatever it was that they needed. And I thought I should work harder to make possible for them. So yeah, it was

Cassie (53:08)
I think it kind

Bill Gasiamis (53:08)
Unbelievable.

Cassie (53:09)
of I’m thinking about it now, like it strips away everything else so you have nothing left but yourself and you have to take a look at yourself and then that’s when you can really decide who am I and am I gonna choose to like this person? And you can also choose what your new identity is gonna be. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (53:28)
That’s the best part about it. Choice.

I never had that before. Well, I did, but I didn’t think I did.

Cassie (53:35)
Right.

Bill Gasiamis (53:36)
I did what my parents told me to do. I did what other people told me to do. I never did what I wanted to do. I was always doing stuff that I’d been trained my entire life to do. You know, you go to school, d do X amount of hours Monday to Friday for your primary years and then your secondary years doing a certain amount of hours. 13 years later, you’re spat out. And it’s like, okay, what else do you guys want me to do?

Okay, I’ll just do that. And I envy

Maybe envy’s not the word ’cause it’s a little bit harsh, but I I kind of I maybe it is envy and jealousy. Like of people who were twenty or eighteen or nineteen and knew what they wanted to do somehow. And they just went and did it. Now I know they’ve got their own issues and they’re probably struggling in other ways. Yeah. Maybe maybe.

Cassie (54:20)
They probably didn’t know. I don’t think anybody does.

I think you have to have something like a stroke happen to you to really know what you want and to be able to have this different perspective on life. So I get how like it can be it can be the worst thing that’s happened to you and the best thing that’s happened to you at the same time because it’s not about the stroke. It’s about okay, what am I gonna choose to do now? And you can do anything.

Bill Gasiamis (54:48)
Yeah. And that was

Cassie (54:49)
And that’s amazing.

Bill Gasiamis (54:51)
such a gift.

Cassie (54:52)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (54:53)
And it came from this

Crappy path, like whatever. Like such a massive, difficult thing. I have a couple of people who I coach through stroke recovery and whatever. Like I I’m not not not in a doctor way, just like we talk about things that they perhaps don’t get to talk about with other people who are not stroke survivors, right? And one of the things that really happened to me recently was the person who I’m coaching at the moment just came on on board, signed up, and their first session.

The person’s still in rehab. And they’re very emotional and it’s very challenging and very difficult. And it’s so fresh between having gone from their regular life to what their life looks like now.

Cassie (55:37)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (55:38)
And that was in my mind a little bit triggering in that, I had forgotten that feeling. Now I remember what that was like. And then it’s trying to keep somebody in a space of remain calm, you know, be

What Bruce Lee used to say, you know, be the boat on the wave, you know, like just go with the flow and all that kind of stuff. And it’s the time to practice all those things, but it’s also the most difficult time to practice all those things because you’ve had a stroke and your brain is not working optimally and you know, there’s yeah.

Cassie (56:12)
It’s so traumatic and like it’s great too.

Bill Gasiamis (56:15)
It’s traumatic, it’s grief, it’s identity, it’s loss, it’s everything all together, all in one lump sum. And then I’m thinking, okay.

What I know about this person is that it will be better in twelve months time, but how do I how do I impart that s that knowledge, that feeling, that state now onto that person then I can’t. Like they have to go through the next twelve month journey to get there themselves. And maybe all I can do is just plant a seed just to say, look, it might be all right in in twelve months. I don’t know what all right means, but it might be all right.

Hard, difficult, challenging, all those things, but still okay, you know.

It’s fascinating complex topic to wrap your head around and talk about and investigate it. I’ve been doing it for more than four hundred interviews and it’s I’m still not there. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. And conversations like this with you kind of make

just, you know, like they just get me going. They they I just love it because again, you know, here we’ve never I’ve I’d never contemplated stuff like this before. It was out of sight, out of mind. And I think I wasn’t I’m richer for it now where I wasn’t before.

Cassie (57:31)
Yeah,

I like that word. You said richer.

Bill Gasiamis (57:34)
Yeah.

So how do you see the next few months happening for you now? How do you see them kind of how do you see yourself moving through the next few months and evolving?

Cassie (57:47)
I

same way that I’ve been going, it’s just moving forward and

all you can do. And some days suck. And some days there’s like a whole new thing that happens that I was like that I’m like, how is this happening to me? I never experienced this before. I don’t know, I just live my life.

Bill Gasiamis (58:10)
That’s all you can

Cassie (58:10)
But I

Bill Gasiamis (58:11)
do.

Cassie (58:12)
I do think about things a lot more than I used to.

Bill Gasiamis (58:15)
In a contemplative type

Cassie (58:15)
And how.

Bill Gasiamis (58:16)
of way.

Cassie (58:17)
Hmm. There’s a really cool book that I’m reading. It’s called

It’s something about time management for mortals or something like that, but it the concept is about like time management, but it’s not what we think it is. It’s not about like managing your time to be more productive. It’s about living your life to the fullest and how do you want to do that and how can you do that? Have you heard of the book? It’s

Bill Gasiamis (58:41)
I haven’t, but it sounds like a great book.

Cassie (58:44)
four I think it’s called four thousand weeks or two thousand weeks. ‘Cause we live

Bill Gasiamis (58:48)
okay.

Cassie (58:49)
we only live for X amount of weeks and it’s either four thousand or two thousand one of those.

Bill Gasiamis (58:56)
I’m gonna check it up while we’re here as well. So we can let people know who are listening in case they’re interested. So

Cassie (59:03)
And I’ve only gotten into the first couple of chapters, so hopefully it’s a good book actually.

But so far so good.

Bill Gasiamis (59:10)
It’s amazing how

Yeah, four thousand weeks, time management by mortals by Oliver Berkman. Okay.

Cassie (59:17)
Yeah. So if you live to

be eighty, you only have that many weeks in your life to to live. So how do you want to live them, you know? And

Bill Gasiamis (59:27)
Yeah.

Cassie (59:27)
that’s something that us anybody who survived a stroke ha already thinks that way ’cause you’re like, I you know, I may not have that many left. Who knows? I barely got this many and I’m lucky to have had this many and how do I want to live my next week and my next week? I want to travel as much as possible.

There are a hundred and ninety five countries in the world and I wanna travel to all of them before I die. So

Bill Gasiamis (59:53)
That’s great thing to aim for. How many have you been to so far?

Cassie (59:58)
Just thirty five.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:00)
Just thirty five.

Cassie (1:00:01)
Most Americans have only been a lot of Americans haven’t even left the country. But it’s I’ve traveled more than most Americans at least.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:13)
Yeah, thirty five countries, that’s a lot of places. You’ve done well to squeeze in thirty five. I don’t think I’ve been beyond maybe five or six and it’s not a competition, but I never thought about it the way that you think about it, you know.

Cassie (1:00:28)
It’s kind of like a personal bucket list.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:31)
Mm.

Cassie (1:00:32)
And I love it too. I love traveling. I love everything about

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:36)
Does

Cassie (1:00:36)
it.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:37)
does your partner like travelling with you?

Cassie (1:00:41)
He does. He’s

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:42)
Yeah, that’s cool.

Cassie (1:00:43)
not as obsessed as I am with travel, but he loves it.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:47)
Yeah. So does he let you organize it all and then it just he tag along?

Cassie (1:00:52)
Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:54)
That’s the best. That’s the best kind of partner. w this is where we’re going next year. Okay, cool. Organise it and I’ll be there. I’d love that.

Cassie (1:01:02)
Yeah. And I

love to plan things and he loves to show up for things, so it works perfectly.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:09)
That’s awesome. And the dogs, what about the dogs? Who cares for them when you guys are gone?

Cassie (1:01:13)
My friend’s niece will come and stay at the house and take care of them.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:18)
brilliant.

Cassie (1:01:19)
Mm-hmm. So they’re in good hands.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:21)
That sounds like

that sounds like the perfect plan. Cassie, I really appreciate you reaching out and sharing your story on the podcast. I think it’s very important that stroke survivors do that. A share their story for themselves, like there’s a lot to gain, but also your insights from a stroke survivor and a psychological perspective, just because of the work that you did is really unique and it’s cool to hear. And

This is gonna sound weird, but I love that I have a person who’s a therapist, psychologist on the podcast.

Cassie (1:01:56)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:57)
I I know that the only way for them to get here is to have a stroke and to talk about their experience

Cassie (1:02:01)
Ha ha.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:02)
and that’s not the part that I love, but I love that you’re on here and that we had that conversation, that we shared it and hopefully people get a lot out of it.

Cassie (1:02:09)
Hopefully.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:11)
Thanks for joining me.

Cassie (1:02:12)
Thank you.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:14)
Well, that’s it for another episode of the Recovery After Stroke Podcast. A massive thank you to Cassie for joining me on the show and sharing the hardest weeks of her life and for bringing a therapist’s insight into a survivor’s experience. The line I keep coming back to is a stroke can be the worst thing and the best thing at the same time. Because it’s not about the stroke, it’s about what you choose to do next. You can find Cassie at Cassie Jewell.com.

And if identity after stroke is something you’re working through, go back and listen to my conversation with Adam Wolfers, who describes the same collision between who he was and who he is now.

Picture one person in your life who has lost a part of themselves recently through a stroke, a job, or anything else, and send them this episode today. If you want to explore your own path to post-traumatic growth after stroke, grab a copy of my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened. It is available at recovery after stroke.com/slash book.

and if you’re working out who you are after a stroke and you’d like someone in your corner, I offer one-on-one coaching built on my own lived experience. It isn’t therapy or medical treatment; it’s support from someone who has been there. Find out more at recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum. I’m Bill Gasiamis.

Remember to be kind to the person you’re becoming, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Losing My Career and Myself, Then Choosing Who I’d Be – Cassie Jewell appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

Tom Ballo was 65 years old, nine years into a retirement he’d earned across three decades as a telecoms litigator, when a massive hemorrhagic stroke put him on the floor of his own home. There was no dizziness the week before, no slurred word he brushed off, no doctor’s visit he postponed. “It just hit me out of the blue,” he says. “There were no warning signs or anything. No. Very sudden.” His five-year-old granddaughter was the one who found him, ran to get her father, and called 911.

That single fact- a stroke with no warning signs is the hardest one for a survivor’s family to sit with, and it’s the reason Tom’s story matters. We’re trained to look for a prodrome: the TIA that precedes the “real” event, the slurred speech, the drooping face, the classic FAST checklist. Those signs save lives when they’re present. But a meaningful share of hemorrhagic strokes, including Tom’s, give no such courtesy. Understanding this isn’t about inducing fear; it’s about removing the false comfort of “I’d definitely see it coming,” which quietly stops people from taking risk factors seriously simply because they feel fine right now.

What makes Tom an unusual guest isn’t just the suddenness of his stroke — it’s what he says about the recovery. Eighteen months out, he offers a claim that stops most interviewers in their tracks: “Ever since I had the stroke, as far as bad days, I had like one. One bad day, I guess.” For a show built around the long, uneven work of recovery, that’s either the most useful sentence a newly diagnosed survivor will hear all year, or the most worth interrogating. We chose not to resolve that tension neatly, because Tom doesn’t either — and that honesty is more useful to you than a tidy takeaway would be.

“Ever since I had the stroke, as far as bad days, I had like one. One bad day, I guess.” — Tom Ballo

Part of what underwrites his outlook is a framework he leaned on well before the stroke: self-actualisation, drawn from Abraham Maslow’s 1943 hierarchy of needs. Tom describes himself as someone who had already done the internal work of knowing who he was — a foundation he credits with much of his composure now. It’s worth a caveat here for accuracy: Maslow’s hierarchy is a theory of motivation, not a diagnostic instrument, and there’s no validated test that certifies someone “self-actualised.” What Tom is really describing is a stable sense of identity going into the hardest thing that ever happened to him — and that’s a legitimate, replicable idea, whether or not you use Maslow’s language for it.

“One bad day” is not the same as “no hard days,” and the interview doesn’t pretend otherwise. Tom is candid that spasticity the stiffness and involuntary muscle tightness that often follows a hemorrhagic stroke is getting worse, not better, as he moves further from the event. This is a pattern a lot of survivors will recognise, and few outsiders expect: the assumption is that time only heals, when in practice some deficits plateau, some improve, and some, like spasticity, can progress. If you’re eighteen months, three years, five years out and still watching a symptom evolve, Tom’s experience is a useful, unglamorous data point that you are not doing recovery wrong.

There’s a quieter data point too, and it cuts the other way: Tom says he hasn’t had a bad night’s sleep since the day of the stroke. For an audience where post-stroke fatigue and insomnia are close to universal, that’s a genuine outlier worth naming precisely because it complicates any single story about what stroke recovery “typically” looks like.

The practical texture of Tom’s recovery runs through his family: the granddaughter who acted fast, the wife who stepped in to run the household during the hardest stretch, the shift from being the one who handled everything to being the one who’s learned, in his words, that “it’s kind of a blessing” to do less. He’s candid that he hasn’t driven since the stroke and says he doesn’t feel a pull to change that. There’s no performance of getting back to “normal” here — just an honest account of a life that reorganised itself around new limits, some of which he’s made peace with and some of which, like the spasticity, he’s still working out how to hold.

If you came to this looking for a checklist of warning signs, Tom’s story won’t give you one, and that’s the point. Some strokes, including major hemorrhagic ones, arrive without a warning a person could reasonably have caught. What you can control is what happens after: how quickly the people around you act (his granddaughter didn’t hesitate), how you rebuild a working identity in the aftermath, and how honestly you track what’s actually getting better versus what’s quietly getting harder. Tom’s “one bad day” isn’t a promise you’ll get the same outcome. It’s permission to notice what’s still working, even while something else spasticity, driving, the parts of independence you used to take for granted hasn’t resolved yet.

If Tom’s story raises questions about your own recovery, or a loved one’s, that’s exactly the conversation this show exists to have. You can go deeper into the ideas behind post-traumatic growth after stroke in Bill’s book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened (recoveryafterstroke.com/book), and if this kind of interview is valuable to you, the show runs in part on listener support at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

He had zero warning signs before his stroke at 65. Eighteen months later, Tom Ballo says he’s had exactly one bad day.

Highlights:

00:00 Stroke with no warning signs
03:25 What kind of stroke was it
08:18 Learning to talk and walk again
11:42 Does he have aphasia?
17:46 One bad day in eighteen months
27:15 The symptom that’s getting worse
33:20 The one thing that hasn’t changed

Transcript:

Tom Ballo (00:00)
it just hit me out of the blue. It hit me out of the blue. There were no warning signs or anything. No.

very sudden.

luckily, my youngest granddaughter was there. My young granddaughter, she was five years old.

She was there and I guess she saw me and she went and got her dad, who’s my son-in-law. They were living with us.

At the time we had a big house and he told him, she told him and he came down and called 911 right away.

Bill Gasiamis (00:39)
Welcome back to Recovery After Stroke. I’m Bill Garciamas, and today’s guest is a genuinely different kind of conversation for the show. Tom Ballo spent 32 years as a telecoms litigator, retired at 56 to actually enjoy it, and nine years later, at 65, a massive hemorrhagic stroke hit him with absolutely no warning. His five-year-old granddaughter is the one who found him and got help.

What you’re about to hear is a conversation that moves differently than most on this show. Tom takes his time, getting to his words, and there’s a real compassion and openness in the way he talks about what happened to him. No performance, no polish. Just the man being honest about where he’s landed 18 months on. Stay with the pace of it. That pace is part of what he’s telling you.

We’re going to get into what he calls one bad day in 18 months,

what’s actually gotten harder rather than easier, and what he’s learnt about who he already was before any of this happened. Remember to grab a copy of my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best.

thing that happened at recoveryafterstroke.com/book It’s the 10 tools I used to build my own recovery. And a lot of what Tom describes today connects straight back to it. And guys, if this show has helped you, remember you can support the show directly at Patreon by going to patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke and making a small monthly contribution. It helps cover costs of recording, editing and hosting the podcast.

Bill Gasiamis (02:16)
Tom Ballo, welcome to the podcast.

Tom Ballo (02:18)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Bill Gasiamis (02:19)
Tell me a little bit about what occupied your time before stroke.

Tom Ballo (02:24)
Well, I retired, retired 10 years ago. So I was well acclimated to that. And I mostly doing, I had a YouTube channel. It it’s called GTA5 and Squirrels. And I said,

make recordings of Grand Theft Auto V video game, really interesting videos. And then I got some squirrels that were living next to the house and one of them started was really…

friendly. He kept walking up to me and finally started climbing up me and I started feeding him and I was making videos of videos of that.

Tom Ballo (03:19)
I had over 1500 subscribers and 1 million views. And the whole channel just hit 1 million.

Bill Gasiamis (03:30)
And y you used to play GTA, Grand Theft Auto. Was it your favourite game?

So you’re doing that in your retirement before you retire retired, what were you doing for a living?

Tom Ballo (03:40)
I was a lawyer for a real, real large telephone company for 32 years.

I was a litigator and regulatory law, so it was administrative law, I was, it was just, it was cases, and they were the biggest cases that affected the company.

About nine years.

Bill Gasiamis (04:06)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (04:07)
That was one reason I retired early. I retired at age 56 and I just wanted to make sure I had time to enjoy retirement. I didn’t want to work until I died or would have had the stroke when I was working. That’d be different. I had enough time to do a lot of things.

for the stroke happen.

Bill Gasiamis (04:35)
What what was that day like? What what did you notice?

Tom Ballo (04:39)
nothing, you know, it came out of nowhere. I was playing a video game and about seven o’clock at night and I got up and was getting ready to walk in, go into the other room. I was done and it just hit me out of the blue. It hit me out of the blue. There were no warning signs or anything. No.

very sudden.

Bill Gasiamis (05:07)
What kind of stroke was it? What what was the

Tom Ballo (05:09)
Is it hemorrhagic?

And it was, they say massive, it was a massive one. You know, I pretty much started trying to tip over to my right side. That was the side that started effecting. And I think I made it into the bathroom and over towards the sink. I mean, mean the tub.

And that’s the last I remember. luckily, my youngest granddaughter was there. My young granddaughter, she was five years old. She was there and I guess she saw me and she went and got her dad, who’s my son-in-law. They were living with us.

At the time we had a big house and he told him, she told him and he came down and called 911 right away.

It just hit like a ton of bricks.

Bill Gasiamis (06:19)
How did you experience it? Was it painful? Was it were you dizzy? What happened?

Tom Ballo (06:27)
I had about 60 seconds that I was aware of it. It just hit me and I don’t have any pain recollections from it, but…

Apparently I hit my head pretty hard, had bruises and all kinds of things.

Bill Gasiamis (06:47)
Do you have the details about how you ended up in hospital? You they called nine one one. You’re you’re in hospital. Do you have

Tom Ballo (06:54)
right, heat called.

Bill Gasiamis (06:55)
any recollection of that?

Tom Ballo (06:57)
Well, I don’t have any recollection of the ambulance coming or anything about the hospital for about, I don’t know, 10 days.

And even then, even my memory then is very, very generic. Like, you know, I knew I was in a hospital.

That kind of thing.

And then

Bill Gasiamis (07:20)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (07:21)
I don’t have much of a memory of it. The interesting thing, my wife was in Germany. One time she’s gone to Germany or somewhere abroad.

marriage and just happened to be there. Luckily, granddaughter, know, had seen me in the bathroom.

Bill Gasiamis (07:47)
You woke up in hospital and you had some awareness of your deficits. Did you kind of notice that s certain parts of your body weren’t working the way they were prior?

Tom Ballo (07:56)
Well, yeah, I mean, it, you know, I don’t know, it’d just be like a car wreck or something. I knew all kinds of things were wrong. my,

Half my body was numb, exactly right down the middle from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes, straight down the middle. You know, like over here, could feel everything, right at the halfway point, now it’s, this is all numb. The right side of me. So I knew that I couldn’t, you know, I had…

Obviously I had not paralysis, numbness on the whole right side of my body.

So I wasn’t able to do much, know, although they kept me in the hospital for six weeks. And, you know, therapy. was inpatient.

Bill Gasiamis (09:04)
Yeah, because your body was dumb, did that mean you couldn’t walk or use your arm?

Tom Ballo (09:08)
I couldn’t walk. They put me in wheelchair and it would take me down to a…

call it therapy. And there they would get me out of the chair at least and I did speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy. Worked on my head, my arm. That was the occupational therapy and then physical therapy with the right leg.

So I couldn’t really talk that well in the very beginning.

eventually got it, pretty much.

Bill Gasiamis (09:46)
Is that cause your speech was slurred?

Tom Ballo (09:48)
Yeah, it was, it was slurred. was real soft and, which just wasn’t my normal voice. It still isn’t, still is not really my normal voice.

Bill Gasiamis (10:01)
And has it impacted your memory and the way that you recall things?

Tom Ballo (10:05)
has not affected me in that regard, in that manner.

I

was always, I was very, I still am, but very intelligent person. I don’t mean to sound odd with that, but I just have always been, you know.

I’ve always had a good, really good, you know, brain, so to speak.

Bill Gasiamis (10:34)
Yeah. So it hasn’t affected your capacity cognitively, but it’s affected other things. And your voice is not your original kind of sounding voice. You sound a little different. And your right arm is a out of action.

Tom Ballo (10:47)
No, I mean, this is my right hand here. You know, I can, I can live, but I don’t, I don’t use it for stuff like, you know, it’s kind of a hassle cause I’m right-handed, but to have a right hand apparently affected, you know, affected by the strokes. Bad luck essentially. You know what I mean?

Bill Gasiamis (11:15)
Yep.

Tom Ballo (11:16)
now I do a lot of things with my left hand

Bill Gasiamis (11:19)
Yeah. And what about your right leg? How are you up and about? Can you get around?

Tom Ballo (11:27)
I can walk for sure. Yeah, I don’t have any kind of walking assistant and I can pretty much.

I take care of everything. my wife once was gone for I think four days. And so I was able to take care of myself for four or five days straight by myself. So I’m able to get around. But walking, you know, I’ve fallen a couple of times. I know you’ve talked about that.

I have been following, I’d say now it’s been like three or four months. Probably the longest stretch ever. But I was always really good at tripping and catching myself. And people would say, man, I thought for sure you were going down. I was always able to…

catch my own balance, I still have that ability so but you know I have to be careful walking around close and there’s a lot of obstacles on the ground they’re close to me to be kind of careful if I’m walking around that.

Bill Gasiamis (12:48)
And what about driving, Tom? Are you driving?

Tom Ballo (12:52)
I haven’t driven yet. You know, I want to. I’ve talked about it. Just haven’t had to,

haven’t done it. You know, my wife is, she’s great. She does so many things that I haven’t, I haven’t, you know, I don’t really need to drive. Don’t have any need to.

Bill Gasiamis (13:12)
Yeah. So you have access

Tom Ballo (13:13)
Yeah, it’s just.

Bill Gasiamis (13:14)
to transportation even even though you’re not driving, you can still get around.

with regards to the speech challenges after the stroke, was there any aphasia or anything like that that also surfaced?

Tom Ballo (13:27)
I’ll finish ya. I’m gonna go to the set.

Bill Gasiamis (13:30)
that’s when you’re unable to get words out. You know what the words are, but then you can’t generate the the sound in your mouth.

Tom Ballo (13:37)

don’t know. Not really. I think I can get everything out. don’t… There’s no…

systematic problem that I’m aware of. know, finding… A lot of times won’t talk that much. I don’t have to. But if I do, I don’t have a problem saying things.

Bill Gasiamis (14:06)
Yeah. How long ago was a stroke now?

Tom Ballo (14:08)
That’s happened March 1st of last year. about a year and half.

happen.

Bill Gasiamis (14:18)
About a year and a half ago.

Tom Ballo (14:20)
Yeah, you know, it was interesting when I was in, I was in therapy in-house for six weeks. And so I was about the middle of April, had the stroke on March 1st of last year.

I was on with the hospital in middle of April, they sent me home. But, and then I, for the rest of the year, I came in two or three days a week for out, I guess, outpatient therapy.

People used to see me and I wouldn’t, it was pretty odd. A lot of people, I don’t know, I’d say at least 10 people over the time.

you know, seeing me and I didn’t know them, but they knew me somehow. And they all said, I’m doing a great job, you know, being able to, in their recovery. I guess they had seen me in the very beginning and thought there’s, you know, this guy is going to be messed up bad for life, you know? And I,

overcame all that and people would just say all the time I’d get stopped, you’re doing great, you’re just doing wonderful, you It always surprised me that they didn’t even knew.

Bill Gasiamis (15:46)
So were they family members or?

Tom Ballo (15:48)
Now they were just total strangers. They were just people who also go to the hospital. Yeah, there was a lot of therapy in that building.

It wasn’t really, yeah, it’s…

had really good people thought I made a lot of progress. Surprise everybody. Now if you talk about

family, my daughters and my wife and pretty much everyone’s that’s seen me.

Just this beginning, you know, just can’t believe I’m doing as well as I’m doing.

Bill Gasiamis (16:24)
What would you say were some of the toughest challenges at the beginning of your recovery?

Tom Ballo (16:30)
I would say going to the bathroom by myself, was always hard to do in the beginning. And then…

I would say walking, you know, I had to use a wheelchair for a while, then a hemi, they called it a hemi walker.

Used that for long time and then eventually, you know, learning how to walk again. That was the hardest thing.

Bill Gasiamis (17:05)
How did your idea of of who you were begin to shift during those early months?

Tom Ballo (17:10)
That is not a problem that never has been for me.

Bill Gasiamis (17:14)
Uh-huh.

Tom Ballo (17:15)
I’ve been me before and during and after stroke. It’s not affected anything about how I feel about myself. It’s

Bill Gasiamis (17:25)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Ballo (17:29)
one thing I had been working on throughout my whole life was working on the mental side.

of things and I had, you know, eventually, you know, according to every test I’ve ever seen, I passed them all that said I was what they call self-actualized, which is very rarely accomplished.

Bill Gasiamis (17:57)
What is self actualized?

Tom Ballo (17:59)
Well, it’s a theory of psychological development by Abraham Haslow or somebody. the highest, say people are on this pyramid or a triangle and the very top, chip top, the top one or two percent.

They say are self-actualized. They become really just means you know yourself. Whereas most people are down near the bottom of the pyramid, focused primarily on survival and belonging and material things. I’ve been very blessed that I was

self-actualized

long before this stroke happened. it was, it did not affect who I, who I

who I am, really.

Bill Gasiamis (19:01)
So you didn’t change in any way, y even though you have less mobility or you have challenges with your arm, you don’t see yourself as different in any way or not you.

Tom Ballo (19:13)
Yeah, correct. I’d say out of all, ever since I had the stroke, as far as bad days, I had like one…

One bad day, I guess, where I just felt like, man, it’s too hard on this, not try or something. And just felt kind of down. But I felt better the next day and I’ve been the same. So I’ve had one bad day. Yeah,

Bill Gasiamis (19:47)
One bad day in a year and a half. Not bad.

Tom Ballo (19:50)
you know, was talking and I’ve talked to a therapist.

And was talking to her at the time and I just kind of unloaded. I felt bad and all this. was, I thought I’d kind of given up, I got out of it.

Bill Gasiamis (20:09)
Just a quick pause. You’re listening to my conversation with Tom Bellow, sixty-five, when a massive stroke hit him with no warning signs at all. And who says that in eighteen months of recovery he’s had exactly one bad day? Before we get back into it, a couple of things. If you’re already a Patreon member, a YouTube member, or you’ve left a super chat or a super thanks on this channel, you’re the reason this show exists.

And the reason I can keep covering what it costs to make it. Genuinely thank you.

And remember, if what Tom’s describing, rebuilding a sense of who you are after everything’s changed, is something you’re sitting with yourself. That’s exactly what I work through one on one with people at recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum. It’s lived experience coaching, not therapy or medical treatment, and it’s built around getting you moving again when you’re not sure how to start. Let’s get back to Tom.

Bill Gasiamis (21:07)
Do you miss doing any of the things that you’re not doing at the moment? Your

Tom Ballo (21:13)
Well.

Bill Gasiamis (21:13)
for example, your GTA

Tom Ballo (21:15)
GTA 5?

Yeah, I do, although I had a way of playing it now, I still play the game in other video games as well as best I can, but it’s really hard even just to try to keep my finger on the

gas pedal in the cars. It’s tough. And it even started hurting after a while, you know. And I stopped. I still play with them. you know, I miss that I’m trying to think. I don’t do the squirrels anymore. We moved. And we don’t have squirrels here.

So.

It’s been kind of good in a lot of ways.

Bill Gasiamis (22:15)
How? How

has it been good in a lot of ways? Tell me.

Tom Ballo (22:20)
watch TV, I guess, is I’m trying to get around. I don’t watch normal TV at all, you know, but it has commercials,

Bill Gasiamis (22:29)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (22:29)
anything like that. It’s primarily YouTube and movies, but…

Content has to be very truthful and non-deceptive. And I’ve been able to watch and learn a lot of things.

I’ve been able to watch these YouTube videos and find, been very active with that. And then in a lot of ways, I used to do everything and now I don’t. And that’s kind of a blessing, I guess. I don’t know. I used to do my own laundry and…

I did dishes for everyone and mowed the lawn and all these things that I used to do. Now I don’t have to.

Bill Gasiamis (23:34)
So now you have somebody else doing those tasks and you have more free time on your hand?

Tom Ballo (23:39)
Yeah, nobody expects me to do them. You know, really, my wife has been real good. She has picked up the slack, so to speak. It’s not her favorite stuff. I used to do it all. A lot of things. And I don’t have to really do much of anything. We recently moved and moved…

couple hours away from Austin to Houston. And I didn’t have to do anything with the move. It doesn’t move a thing. Whereas, I don’t know, just, it’s kind of nice. I try to do dishes whenever I can, but it’s not like,

used to be. People would expect me to do everything and I didn’t mind doing it. It’s kind of nice not having to.

Bill Gasiamis (24:38)
Yeah. Are you living at home with your wife and is it just you and her?

So it’s ju

just you and your wife at home now.

Tom Ballo (24:46)
Yeah, as far as living here now, it’s pretty, it’s real quiet because for about two and a half years, we had a really, really full house with my daughter and her husband and three daughters, granddaughters.

Bill Gasiamis (25:05)
Yeah. A

and has your wife ever perhaps mentioned how things have changed for her, how she experiences her the new way that she interacts with you or the differences in the interaction with you?

Tom Ballo (25:18)
Hmm, not really. Pretty much she…

very, pretty much the same. Even when I, even beforehand, I would,

pretty much do my own thing and so would she. I’d be playing video games or out with the squirrels. I was on my own anyway.

Bill Gasiamis (25:42)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (25:43)
So really, it’s not really been a big problem.

Bill Gasiamis (25:47)
Yeah. When you got back from home, were you totally kind of independent? Were you able to toilet yourself and do all those things or did you need support for that?

Tom Ballo (25:55)
No,

I’d say when I first came home, I was still in a wheelchair and still using a flask to go to the bathroom for the first, I don’t know, I’d say about two months at home.

until I learned how to walk and then with the hamming walker and then eventually put that thing away and walked by myself. So I’ve had to kind of learn slow. I’ve had to, I’ve made improvements in that regard.

Bill Gasiamis (26:45)
Yeah. Your wife sounds like she definitely stood by you. Who else was around? How did your kids get involved in those early days?

Tom Ballo (26:53)
Well, the first week my daughter and her husband were taking care of me or coming to see me in intensive care and stuff like that at the hospital. And then, my wife was in Europe for the first week of my, first week of the stroke. But then,

And you know, my daughter lived with us. She would occasionally, well, I don’t know, she had to think back on it. Pretty much once my wife, Linda, you know, had come back, she took care of me. yeah, she took care

that care me.

Bill Gasiamis (27:45)
Yeah. took care of all of your needs, I would say. I

Tom Ballo (27:50)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (27:51)
would imagine. Is that right? Like everything you needed to sort of be able to get in and out of bed and to get food and to get showered. Did you guys have any help come from any services like nursing or anything like that?

Tom Ballo (28:04)
I never had that, did not need that. We fixed, well, we completely redid one of the bathrooms at my last house and made it so I could do a walk. It ended up being a really nice bath area with a bench and a.

Handheld nozzle

not a tub, but walk in kind of a thing. So we fixed a shower because at first…

Bill Gasiamis (28:41)
like that.

Tom Ballo (28:42)
No, I don’t think I have.

It was primarily me just each day trying to get a little bit better. But I’ll tell you, one of the problems that I’ve had is that I’m getting more more spasticity, spasticity and

Bill Gasiamis (29:05)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (29:08)
muscle tightness. I mean, it’s gotten, I’d say.

Every day it gets like one thousandth worse every day. It doesn’t automatically get better even if you work out or anything.

Bill Gasiamis (29:24)
Yeah. Do

you have s massage or anything like that to help relieve it?

Tom Ballo (29:33)
Well, I didn’t know for that. I haven’t had anything yet. I’m thinking of. don’t know. I don’t know if it’ll work. Find a hospital and start and see what they say. There’s something that they can can do. It’s. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (29:54)
Challenging.

Tom Ballo (29:55)
I thought that it would, you know, just you.

It would just get better each day, but it’s not quite that way. I used to be able to close my hand, I can still do that. But now it feels like it’s just a lot tighter.

It’s not really painful, but it’s borderline painful. I don’t know, it’s not really pain, but also my feeling is much more sensitive. Like when I yawn, I can feel a tremendous amount of tingling.

throughout my entire, my whole right leg from my hip down to my foot.

Bill Gasiamis (30:49)
When you yawn.

Tom Ballo (30:50)
when I yawn, for some reason it just energizes my leg.

I don’t know, or like, if I don’t, okay, like if I just don’t move my right arm at all, but they put it at rest, I don’t feel anything. There’s no tingling, there’s no sensation. As soon as I start moving it, and if I touch anything, I can really, really feel it a lot more now than I did at the beginning.

It’s very sensitive to touch.

Bill Gasiamis (31:27)
Yeah. I know what you mean. did you ever feel like your like your autonomy or your dignity were being challenged when you went through this? How did you navigate that part of it?

Tom Ballo (31:38)
Well, see, gets back into my being self-actualized.

Bill Gasiamis (31:47)
Yeah.

Tom Ballo (31:49)
My dignity was never affected by any of this.

Now it’s been, I don’t know, like if people see me in a store or in a market, they’re always more than willing to want to talk or they make me feel special in a way. So that doesn’t, it doesn’t bother me. And people like to hear, they have a lot of questions.

It doesn’t affect my dignity at all.

I haven’t fallen down in public,

Bill Gasiamis (32:28)
Okay.

Tom Ballo (32:29)
so it hasn’t happened. I’ve heard people say that bothers them.

That’s

Bill Gasiamis (32:32)
W

what it doesn’t sound like there’s much that would affect your dignity that you seem pretty mild mannered and calm about many things.

Tom Ballo (32:41)
Yeah, I’m very…

I don’t know how to put it.

I’ve just been, people have commented and have noticed by themselves that I’m not like normal. There’s something about me, I really know myself more than most people do.

Bill Gasiamis (33:02)
Yeah. Your what about your message for people who are just starting their stroke recovery? If they were listening, you know, w what would you say to them? You’re a a year and a half in, so you have some insights and some awareness. What would you share with the people who are just starting their recovery?

Tom Ballo (33:18)
Well, you know, one thing I do is I watch a lot of videos about strokes surviving. So and every stroke is different. That’s one thing. It’s kind of stroke recovery is different and the severity of the strokes are different for everybody. it’s kind of hard to say for everybody how to how they can get along. But

I would say, of course, would try to tell people to try to become, have as much confidence in yourself as you possibly can and stay positive. And, you know, it’s hard to do if you want that way to begin with. I’ve been lucky that I was

been positive before I started this, before I had the stroke.

some benefit to me after the stroke. It didn’t affect it. So I would say keep on trying. It’s going to be something to work on all the time, every day from here on out.

Bill Gasiamis (34:40)
Yeah. What are you hoping to work on in the next say twelve months? What’s on your on your list of things to get done or to continue to do?

Tom Ballo (34:48)
Well, the main thing for me is hopefully spasticity, it’s hard to say for me now, spasticity, doesn’t get any, just hopefully that’s.

I can get that out of control.

That’s all I worry about in the future, so to speak. All I think about is hoping that that doesn’t get a lot worse.

You know, if you…

Bill Gasiamis (35:32)
Just want such a some improvement

in the deficits.

Tom Ballo (35:35)
Yeah, improvement in…

You know, I was always, I had stretched every day or every night for 30 minutes. For my whole life, I’ve been into stretching. And…

Now, you know, it’s the opposite. I got stiffness like you’ve never seen. But luckily it has not affected my sleeping at all. Matter of I haven’t had a bad night’s sleep since day of the stroke. Every evening or every night, sleeping is perfect.

Bill Gasiamis (36:17)
Yeah, that’s excellent. Tell me, Thomas, do they know what caused their brain hemorrhage?

Tom Ballo (36:23)
No, they really don’t.

And no one ever came to me and ever once wanted to or wanted to tell me or wanted to find out about what caused it. They were always seem like they were always more like in the moment trying to get just trying to get everything better, doing the best thing.

to recover. as far as what might have happened, no real idea. I would just say it overall. got, I mean, the stroke I had was probably about as severe as anybody had.

It’s really not, you know, it’s not completely debilitating. It’s not too bad, really.

Bill Gasiamis (37:26)
Yeah. Hey Thomas, I really appreciate you reaching out. Thank you so much for connecting with me and sharing your story.

Tom Ballo (37:34)
Thank you for having me on.

Bill Gasiamis (37:37)
Well, that was Tom Bellow, thirty-two years a litigator, eighteen months a survivor, and someone who will tell you straight that some things, like the spasticity he’s living with, have gotten harder rather than easier.

Even while he’s had by his own account just one bad day. That kind of honesty is rare. And it’s exactly why this conversation moves the way it does. Tom’s not performing recovery for you. He’s describing it at his own pace. And that’s worth sitting with rather than rushing past. That’s really the reason these episodes get made at all. Not to hand you a formula, but to let you hear what recovery actually sounds like from someone living it. Because the version

you carry in your head before you’ve heard someone like Tom is almost never the real thing. If this conversation gave you something, a moment of recognition, a reason to keep going, a way to explain your own recovery to someone who doesn’t get it yet, the most useful thing you can do is share it with one person who needs to hear it today. Remember to check out my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened. It’s available at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

And on that note, my new book is out now. And this one’s a bit different. It’s not about stroke specifically, it’s about what happens after any kind of trauma reshapes your life and how you rebuild even when you don’t feel ready to. It’s called Your World Doesn’t Have to Stay This Small. And if your world has gotten smaller since your stroke, fewer places you go, fewer things you say yes to, fewer people you see.

That’s the book I wrote for you. Remember to grab your copy on Amazon, search the title, or use the link in the show notes. If this show has helped you, remember you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Thanks for listening. I’m Bill Gasiamis and this is Recovery After Stroke.

The post Stroke With No Warning Signs – Tom Ballo’s One Bad Day in Eighteen Months appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

It was New Year’s Day, and Letitia Hritz almost didn’t go. Her husband Jonathan wanted to hit a sale at their local mall, and she’d rather have stayed home. She went anyway, with gift certificates from Christmas, a Chinese buffet for lunch, their seven-year-old daughter in tow. They’d barely sat down at the restaurant when it started: tunnel vision, a sudden inability to speak, the desperate, wordless search for the nearest chair. “I remember sitting there,” Letitia says, “and I think I said I feel like I’m going to pass out. And that honestly was the last thing I remember.”

She was 34. The emergency room staff, seeing a young woman collapse on New Year’s Day, assumed the obvious: too much celebrating the night before. It took nearly three hours, and a doctor asking her to roll over and noticing her face had dropped, before anyone called a stroke alert. By then Jonathan had already caught her as she went limp in his arms, already flagged down an off-duty paramedic eating lunch nearby, already made the drive to the ER with their daughter beside him, not yet knowing the word for what was happening to his wife.

Letitia’s stroke was ischemic, centered in the left thalamus a similar injury to other survivors Bill has spoken with (recoveryafterstroke.com/thalamic-ischemic-stroke-survivor-story/), and one that comes with its own particular set of challenges around sensation, fatigue, and cognition. The cause, once doctors went looking, turned out to be a PFO, a small hole in her heart that had let a clot travel straight to her brain. It’s a cause other guests on this show have lived through too (recoveryafterstroke.com/pfo-and-stroke-recovery-yvette-adams/), and like many of them, Letitia had no idea it was there until the stroke forced the question.

What followed was the version of recovery most people never hear about: inpatient rehab, then six months of outpatient therapy, a wheelchair, then a walker, then a cane she still carries today. And then, just as she seemed to be finding her footing, something stranger: a full return of her stroke symptoms, triggered by an unrelated illness, so sudden and so complete that even a family who’d spent two decades around the “stroke world” had never heard the word for it: recrudescence. “I’m glad you’ve never heard of that,” Jonathan told Bill, “because I know you’ve been doing this a long time… and we had never heard of it either.”

This year, a new chapter began, one this episode was built around. Letitia started having seizures. Not occasionally: close to 200 of them since January, sometimes several in a single day. What makes seizures after stroke symptoms so hard to manage isn’t just the seizures themselves, but how unpredictable the warning signs can be. “I try very hard to pay attention to how I’m feeling,” Letitia says, “but there are some days where I don’t feel well, and it’s very hard to differentiate those two feelings.” Some seizures come with a warning she’s learned to read. Others don’t; they simply arrive, and the world goes dark for a minute or three.

The seizures have taken her driving privileges and, with them, a piece of her independence. They’ve also reshaped her household in a quietly heartbreaking way: her ten-year-old daughter now knows to guide her mother to the floor, pull out an iPad, and start a timer. “I hate it,” Letitia says. “I just hate it.” It’s a small, devastating image of what recovery actually asks of a family: not a single crisis to survive, but a new baseline everyone has to learn to live inside.

Long before the seizures, the Hritz family was already learning how much a body’s needs can outpace a home’s design. Their two-story house has eight steps from the driveway to the front door, fifteen more to the bedroom, ten down to the laundry. “I’m sitting there at thirty-four years old,” Jonathan remembers, “thinking to myself, how am I ever going to take my wife home?” It’s a question few young stroke survivors (recoveryafterstroke.com/young-stroke-survivor-izzy-hirst/) or their partners expect to face, and one more reason recovery is rarely just medical.

Then there’s the bill. This year alone, between two hospital admissions, the Hritz family is looking at roughly $178,000 in medical costs a number that grows faster than they can pay it down. “You can make all the payments you want,” Jonathan says, “it never goes down.” It’s the kind of financial strain that stroke caregivers (recoveryafterstroke.com/stroke-caregivers/) rarely get warned about in advance, and one more layer on top of everything else the family is carrying, including, this year, college funds quietly set aside for something else.

Through all of it, one thing has stayed constant. Bedside in the hospital in 2023, Jonathan made Letitia a promise: that no matter what happened, they would get through it together, and he would always give her a safe place to heal. Three years, a heart procedure, a recrudescence episode, and nearly 200 seizures later, that promise is the reason their family calls their story Keeping a Promise, and it’s still, in Jonathan’s words, “something I’m still trying to keep, because we have not been able to.”

Their story is a reminder of something Bill has said often on this show, in different words each time: recovery isn’t a straight line, and it doesn’t end when the hospital discharges you. As Jonathan puts it, “People just think, he was in the hospital, and he’s out now. He must be okay… They’re not okay.” What the Hritz family is living through — the seizures, the setbacks, the debt, the promise is exactly the kind of story that doesn’t get told enough. If any part of it sounds familiar, you are not the only one going through it (recoveryafterstroke.com/stroke-caregiver-journey-donna-odonnell-figurski/), and it’s worth hearing more stories like it, wherever you can find them.

Bill’s book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened, was written for exactly this: the years after the hospital, when the real work of recovery begins. Read it here: recoveryafterstroke.com/book. And if this show has helped you the way it’s helped families like the Hritzes, you can support it directly on Patreon: patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post Jonathan & Letitia Hritz: Keeping a Promise Through Stroke, Seizures, and Everything After appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

Jaemin Frazer has spent nearly two decades and around 16,000 coaching hours on a single question: what is actually going on when a capable person stops trusting themselves? He founded The Insecurity Project to work on it directly. He is not a stroke survivor – and that turns out to be the reason this conversation is useful, because he arrives without any assumptions about what stroke recovery is supposed to look like.

What he does have is a precise account of what happens to a person when their ordered world collapses, which is, more or less, the definition of a stroke.

Almost every survivor says some version of this. Six weeks out, six years out – the sentence barely changes.

Jaemin’s response is to ask what is actually being requested. His answer: not the past. Certainty.

They’re looking for certainty. They’re looking for comfort. They’re looking for safety. They’re looking through rose coloured glasses in many ways, because no one’s life was perfect before anything.

That last part is the uncomfortable bit. The life you want back had its own problems. What memory offers is not a better life but a known one – and the nervous system will take known over good almost every time.

Humans need certainty the way they need food and shelter. We don’t function in chaos. But we also can’t get certainty from the outside world, because the outside world doesn’t have any to give. It never did. The stroke didn’t remove your certainty; it removed your ability to keep believing in it.

Which leaves one option. As Jaemin puts it:

The most resourceful form of certainty is to embrace uncertainty and back yourself.

That distinction – external certainty versus internal certainty – is the whole conversation. When your sense of safety lives outside you, you have to control your circumstances to feel all right, and after a stroke your circumstances are largely uncontrollable. When it lives inside you, circumstances can do what they like. This is the same territory covered in stroke recovery mindset (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/stroke-recovery-mindset/), approached from a completely different angle.

Jaemin draws a hard line between the two, and it’s worth holding onto.

Self-doubt is accurate information about a skill gap. If you can’t yet climb the stairs unaided, self-doubt is what stops you attempting it alone. It says nothing about your worth. It’s wisdom.

Insecurity is different. Insecurity is the belief that a failure would expose something defective about you. Jaemin argues that most people misdefine it – it isn’t fear of judgement, failure, or rejection. It’s one level deeper:

No one’s actually afraid of being rejected. They’re afraid of: if I put my best foot forward and it’s not enough, and then people don’t accept me – what does that confirm about my own inadequacy?

The threat isn’t out there. It’s a verdict you’ve already passed on yourself, waiting for the world to co-sign it.

This is where it stops being philosophy.

Jaemin frames insecurity as a resource problem. Proving yourself, defending yourself, covering and compensating – all of it consumes energy. When life is going well there’s enough spare capacity that you never notice the drain.

After a stroke, there is no spare capacity.

A stroke puts you into survival mode, and now you’ve got no resources to survive, because all your best resources are directed elsewhere to make sure no one sees your inadequacy.

Survivors already know that fatigue after stroke is not ordinary tiredness. An injured brain rewiring itself is metabolically expensive. Every unit of energy spent managing how you appear to other people is a unit unavailable for healing. Attending to the emotional side of recovery isn’t separate from the physical work – it’s what frees up the capacity to do it. That connection runs through emotional recovery after stroke (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/emotional-recovery-after-stroke-dr-bradley-nelson/) as well.

Many survivors have to change how they live – what they eat, what they drink, where they go, who they spend time with. And many report losing friends over it.

Jaemin’s framing here is bracing. Resistance from the people around you isn’t a malfunction. In any story worth telling, the character who transforms does so by overcoming obstacles, and those obstacles almost always arrive in the form of other people. Remove the resistance and nothing in the hero is enlarged.

So when someone says you’ve changed and doesn’t mean it kindly, they are – without intending to – handing you the exact thing you need to become someone who no longer requires their approval.

This distinction matters, and conflating them causes real harm.

Losing the use of a limb is a genuine loss. Grief is the appropriate response, and it deserves acknowledgement rather than management.

The damage begins when the loss becomes a statement about your worth. I can’t run, therefore I’m not a runner, therefore who am I? That is no longer grief – that’s insecurity wearing grief’s clothes, and it needs a different response entirely. Survivors working through that identity question will recognise it in craniotomy stroke recovery and identity reset (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/craniotomy-stroke-recovery-identity-reset/), and it sits close to the ground covered in anxiety after stroke (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/anxiety-after-stroke/).

The line Jaemin returns to twice in the episode is this: being lost and confused doesn’t disqualify you from a meaningful life. It’s what qualifies you to begin one.

Nobody reaches adulthood with an accurate picture of who they are. Everyone arrives confused. The confusion isn’t damage to be repaired before you can start – it’s the starting position. This reframes the disorientation of early recovery as the opening move rather than evidence that something has gone permanently wrong. The same reframe underpins post-traumatic growth in stroke recovery (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/post-traumatic-growth-stroke-recovery/).

And Jaemin is firm that this is solvable – not managed, not coped with. Solvable. Because the inadequacy you’ve been protecting everyone from isn’t real. It’s a conclusion you drew as a child and have been gathering evidence for ever since.

There is no monster under the bed. Only the idea of one.

Start by being precise. When you catch yourself saying I lost my confidence, ask what you actually mean. Confidence at what? In front of whom? What exactly are you afraid would be revealed?

Abstract language hides the levers. Precise language shows you where they are.

If this episode is useful to you, Bill’s book The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened covers ten tools for recovery and personal transformation – you can find it at https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

If you would like one-on-one support with your own recovery, you can apply at https://recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum.

If this show has helped you, you can support it at https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

You don’t need your old life back. You need to trust yourself again – and Jaemin Frazer explains exactly why that feels impossible after stroke.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction – Losing Confidence After Stroke

Transcript:

Jaemin (00:00)

So then it costs you everything. It costs you your future. It costs you your ability to heal, to make sense of this, to come out the other side and reinvent or do whatever you need to be present for yourself.

It’s a slow descent into madness really, if all your best resources are proving and defending, covering and compensating, then you stop being human, you stop being alive, you stop being present, you become hypervigilant around what others are thinking, and your world keeps getting smaller.

Bill Gasiamis (00:35)

Before anything else, thank you to everyone supporting the show on Patreon, becoming a YouTube member, and to everyone supporting it in all other ways. Sharing episodes, leaving reviews, sending them to someone who needs them, buying the book. This show has reached over a million and a half downloads because of people doing exactly that. And I don’t take it for granted.

If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, I just want to be who I was, this episode is going to sit with you for a while. My guest today is Jaemin Fraser. Jaemin is a coach, the founder of the Insecurity Project, a TEDx speaker, and as of this year, a novelist. He spent nearly two decades, around 16,000 coaching hours, on one problem. What happens to a person when they stop trusting themselves and what it costs them? Jaemin has

not had a stroke. I want to be upfront about that because it’s the reason this conversation goes where it does.

He came to it without any assumptions about what recovery is meant to look like. And what he brought instead is a very precise account of what happens to anyone whose ordered world falls apart overnight. We get into why wanting your odd life back is really a request for certainty. The difference between self-doubt, which is useful, and insecurity, which isn’t, why insecurity draws down the exact energy your brain needs to heal.

What’s really going on when friends push back on your habits and why being lost and confused isn’t the tragedy, it’s the setup.

Three quick things before we start, my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened, covers ten tools for recovery and personal transformation. It’s available at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

If you’d like one-on-one support with your own recovery, I walk I work with a small number of stroke survivors at a time. Structure, accountability, and genuine guidance from someone who’s been through it, you can apply at recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum. And if this show has helped you and you want to help me get to a thousand episodes, you can support it either as a YouTube member or by going to patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. I want to make sure that

No strike survivor. has to ever go through what I went through when I first started my recovery, and that was not having any information about how to proceed after I got sent home from hospital. Now it’s time for the interview.

Bill Gasiamis (03:14)

Jaemin (03:15)

Bill Gasiamis (03:17)

Jaemin (03:39)

Yeah, they’re looking through rose colored glasses in many ways because no one’s life was perfect before anything. So the fantasy of if I could go back to where I was, it deletes a whole bunch of stuff around the reality of where you were in the first place. But I think that the desire is it’s certainty, safety, peace, comfort. That’s what a person is driven to find some way or other.

Bill Gasiamis (04:16)

There was, you know, before my experience with stroke, there wasn’t anything that was certain. Is it an illusion? Is certainty an illusion? Because I definitely don’t feel certain about anything going forward either. but kind of not in a bad way. Like I don’t have a bad relationship with the lack of certainty. It’s just.

It i it’s just not real. Like I feel like it might be an illusion.

Jaemin (04:53)

That’s not how we first introduced them. And I am convinced it’s not actually how it works. So just a quick summary. He says, doesn’t matter what age, what sex, what culture, what stage of life, because you’re human, just as important as food, shelter, clothing is the need for certainty. Firstly, we are creatures who do not survive in chaos. We need some sense of control, order. We thrive in the familiar. We need a sense of what’s happening next.

So we organize ourselves and we find certainty. We cannot survive without it. Interestingly though, we also need uncertainty. these six needs operate in paradox. Piers, are you familiar with the six core needs?

Bill Gasiamis (06:07)

Jaemin (06:08)

Bill Gasiamis (06:18)

Jaemin (06:19)

Bill Gasiamis (06:30)

is is is messing it up because you need uncertainty, is that that sounds like like self sabotage.

Jaemin (06:41)

Am I more than just a name and number? Do I have value? Is there any point to me? Now that’s a journey away from the tribe because we’re also relational beings. So we don’t survive in isolation. We need love, belonging, connection, warmth, touch. So if you have 100 % love and connection, you lose your separateness. And if you have 100 % significance, then you’re completely lonely and isolated. But we do need both.

So certainty, variety, significance, love, and then the final two are contribution and growth. So humans do feel the need to make a difference, add value, give back, leave a legacy, solve problems. So contribution is about adding value to others. And then growth is adding value to yourselves, to ourselves. Every living thing grows, you either grow or die. So this is the need that drives us to do more, to have more, to see more, to expand our experience.

one way shape or another. it’s a strange thing to need certainty back to certainty. It’s a strange thing to need certainty for survival in an uncertain world because you then can’t help but cling to things that aren’t really certain and try and control them. Cling to a job you don’t like, cling to a memory that feels familiar, cling to a relationship that’s dysfunctional.

cling to stuff that you know, because it makes you feel certain and makes you feel safe. There’s a predictability around it. What you’re describing is not that you’ve done away with the need for certainty. It’s

that you have a certainty in your ability to handle the real world. So you don’t need to cling to things being a certain way. You don’t need to force things to be back the way they were. You’re like, that’s ridiculous. Here I am now and I’m certain.

that I am a resourceful person, a creative person, a good person, a clever person, I’ll work it out. The real world will happen to me. I’ll wake up, I’ll open my eyes and I’ll handle it. That’s what I’m certain about. So the most resourceful form of certainty is to embrace uncertainty and back yourself.

Bill Gasiamis (09:26)

Jaemin (09:28)

your your capability, your own resourcefulness and to grow up and mature in your own sense of who you really are.

Bill Gasiamis (10:06)

I have this saying that I picked up from somewhere. Some dude in the Middle East, like I think in the 40s or 50s, said this thing. I forget his name. I I always wanted to remember his name so I can give him credit, but it goes like exp expect the best, prepare for the worst. And it kind of feels like that’s how I handled my uncertainty when, you know, the doctor turns up day one.

Of a bleed in the brain diagnosis and says, gives you the most vague version of the diagnosis and said to me, there’s a shadow on your brain. It could be a cancer, it could be a sea it could be a tumor that’s benign, it could be a bleed in the brain. Like, any questions? And I was like, Well.

Jaemin (10:57)

a few.

Bill Gasiamis (11:01)

And then after that came a lot of uncertainty. We didn’t know what a family life was gonna be like. We didn’t like know what my work life was gonna be like. We didn’t know whether I’d be around. We didn’t know any of the things that I kind of knew the day before, which I took for granted that I knew, which was only that w without knowing that there’s something wrong in my head and that potentially I’m unwell, I knew that.

Tomorrow was going to be pretty much the same as yesterday. And there’s going to be some movement in a couple of similar directions, maybe a few odd ones and different ones. And I suppose that expect the best prepare for the worst was me embracing uncertainty, the certainty of uncertainty. Does that saying kind of capture that spirit?

Jaemin (12:03)

to fear inadequacy then undermines your confidence in your own ability to handle the real world. And therefore you must then cling to external certainty and long for things to go back the way they were so that you can be safe. Because you don’t trust yourself to be up for the challenge.

Bill Gasiamis (12:50)

not got the resources backfilled in preparation for when that day comes, and then you feel inadequate, insecure, perhaps, whatever the word is, that you can even handle this. I’ve never met anyone who said, I know, I was 100% certain that I was going to handle this diagnosis from my doctors.

Can you prepare for the worst? Like that whole going back to that statement again, that saying, is there a way that we can even prepare for the worst when we don’t even know what the worst is? Is it even is it sounds like it might be might be a futile pursuit?

Jaemin (14:07)

I I think you and I here today are doing that exact thing, you know, with internal resourcefulness. We don’t know what tomorrow is bringing. So in some ways we are certain in our capacity to, you know, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. So that’s not futile. I don’t consider that futile at all. And I think that is the only job is to resource yourself for the real world, is to grow up, is to become mature.

The way that I think about that is self-sufficiency. You when you’re young, you’re growing through stages of development and really learning self-sufficiency. Can you feed yourself? Can you dress yourself? Can you learn yourself? Can you drive a car? Can you earn money? And they’re all the things, physical, financial, self-sufficiency, but people are…

seem, you know, it’s see when it comes to emotional, intellectual, psychological self sufficiencies, like what is that? How does that even work? And so they come into their adult world, being able to earn money, being able to drive a car, out, address themselves, you know, wipe their own ass. Great. But when it comes to validating their own existence, when it comes to sourcing their own certainty, when it comes to deeply loving and accepting themselves, when it comes to being the one that approves of themselves, that sees themselves.

you know, adults are typically ill prepared for that, you know, stroke

Bill Gasiamis (15:38)

Jaemin (15:38)

about them. you know, primarily that is the work of the insecurity project. It’s these conversations around existential angst, which people don’t prepare for because their world’s ordered. But when your world falls apart, then you really see how unprepared you are to handle difficulty and the worst case scenario if you have not examined your own sense of who you are.

Bill Gasiamis (16:29)

The world being ordered, it can be ordered in a dysfunctional way as well, right?

Jaemin (16:39)

you know, someone looks at one of my clients recently looked at me and says, you’re a free spirit. You’re adventurous. It’s different. It’s different from me. You know, I’m very analytical. I’m risk averse. I’m safety conscious. But if you zoom out and have a look at both of us, I need just as much certainty as that person. Exactly. I can’t survive without certainty. I can’t survive without order. It’s just that I’ve found a high quality, internal adult way to order my world so that I have internal safety.

which then frees me to go into the world and experience uncertainty and play. Whereas this other person has not found an internal way to create order. So they’re clinging to all the dysfunctional external forms of order. Hate their

Bill Gasiamis (17:47)

Jaemin (17:47)

Bill Gasiamis (18:03)

Jaemin (18:06)

Bill Gasiamis (18:07)

you park the car in the wrong bay, or you know, all these little things that people kind of cling to to make their world feel right if they see it like that. If everyone just did the task the way that they needed to do it, then I wouldn’t have a problem, right? But if you have internal certainty and you can be more flexible, I think Tony Robbins talks about being having multiple ways to be to be.

being more flexible, then you realize that there are infinite number of ways that things can be loaded into a dishwasher, for example, even though there are certainly some ways that won’t be able to wash the dishes effectively, perhaps, but there are many ways, and the other person’s ways not necessarily the wrong way or the odd way or or the incorrect way, right?

Jaemin (19:30)

Bill Gasiamis (19:31)

Jaemin (19:44)

because then play becomes possible and you don’t need things to be anything other than they are, know, good, bad or indifferent. You have an experience that looks terrible. Well, are you sure it’s terrible? Or could there be learning? Could there be a gift? Could there be an opportunity? Might you meet someone? Might your life change in an unexpected way? Like who’s to say a bad experience is actually a bad experience if you’re free to encounter it as it is.

That’s what becomes possible if you have internal safety and that you do back yourself to handle that. And I think it’s an abstract concept for most people because they’ve never faced their fear of their deep inadequacy. And so it’s always undermined. They would love to take internal certainty, but their conviction, if they’re really honest, and it’s hard to be honest, because this stuff gets pretty well suppressed.

Their honest fear is that there is a problem with them. There is an inadequacy.

They are not up to the challenge. So if they rely on themselves, they will be found lacking and wanting. So therefore they must look outside themselves. That’s their only option.

Bill Gasiamis (20:53)

Jaemin (21:15)

What do you mean I lost this happened and that made me do this? Are you sure? That’s how it actually worked. What do you mean? Let’s have a look. Let’s have a look. So that’s my whole world is someone comes to me with a level of abstraction. They use language that’s abstract. And when you use abstract language, you cannot see any of the levers that can be pulled. And so you end up feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. When you be precise, when you have a look, you actually

begin to see the mechanics, the structures that are actually influencing your experience. And when you see them precisely, the levers become apparent, like, I could actually adjust that. I could turn this, I could change this. Therefore now I’m back in control of my own experience of my reality. So yeah, that’s where I say, what do you mean? What are you talking about exactly?

Bill Gasiamis (22:37)

others that I come across is I hear the word depression and anxiety. And it’s an umbrella word that people place on so many experiences and nobody ever even really knows if if I challenge if I have the permission and and I’m in a room with the right person to challenge them and ask them, well, do you do you know what the definition of depression is? And do you know what the definition of anxiety is?

Nobody can really give you that. And they’ve taken a word and they apply it to an experience that may have been completely separate from the intended definition of a word like depression and anxiety. And I I kind of feel like that’s what you’re saying. Like somebody says, I’m I’m depressed, like, okay, like, why? How? How do you know that?

Jaemin (24:00)

So the areas you are anxious, you’re only anxious because there’s something about the activity you’re involved in, which you feel threatened, personally threatened that someone might see your flaw. So let’s not worry about the anxiety, it’s downstream. Tell me about this perceived flaw. Tell me about this thing that you think is wrong with you. Are you sure that’s even there? The great humor of my work in the same as what you’re saying, know, insecurity.

Talking about fear, my first question to people, what are you afraid of? And no one knows. People are experiencing fear. They can tell you that much. So what you’re running and hiding, but what are you running and hiding from? yeah, it’s just this, you know, I just feel so, like, okay, interesting. So you’re running and hiding. What about if we go and have a look at what it is you’re running and hiding from? You might be surprised. In fact,

You will be surprised. promise you it’s not what you think it is. And you’ve just been running and hiding for so long. You’ve just become convinced that there’s a thing here that you ought to keep running and hiding from. I’m not so sure.

Bill Gasiamis (25:41)

And the the best thing to do was just put it out there. And if somebody did say that was handle it. And if somebody didn’t say that, well then there was nothing to handle. So just do it anyway. And I remember then also with my book, I’m not an author. I did I’m not a scholar. I’ve never done any of that stuff. But I wrote my first book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened. It’s a pretty loaded title. And I knew it was gonna ruffle some feathers.

But I put it out there and the very first comment that I got from the very first post that I made was a negative one.

And what I realized was that pattern was similar in that when I started the podcast, I had the exact same concern that it might happen and it did. People did give me negative feedback.

But then it seems to me now now that I’ve learnt a few times, you know, what happens when you put yourself out there for the first time when you tell the world this is what I’ve created, you know, I’m sharing my creation is part of the journey has to be something that’s gonna test your insecurity. It might not be a negative comment or so but it but it might be like bad sales or it might be nobody listens or whatever.

So it sounds like insecurity is necessary in some cases to kind of overcome, to tackle it, to overcome it, so that you can be better at tackling it and overcoming it and achieve more things. Do you know what I’m saying? Did I explain that correctly?

Jaemin (27:54)

I think I understand. I don’t think I agree with you though.

Bill Gasiamis (27:58)

Jaemin (27:59)

Bill Gasiamis (28:07)

you picked up self doubt there.

Jaemin (28:10)

I’d be a crazy person and I would be, you know, dangerous to myself and the world. So self doubt doesn’t, doesn’t tell me I’m a bad person. It just highlights the limit of the things I’m good at. So, so the real function of self doubt to me is more what you’re describing. It’s, it’s the limit says, you’re not actually very good at this. Now that doesn’t say anything about your essence, your value and your worth. Would you like to be good at this? And I go.

Actually, no, great. Well, then don’t do it. Don’t do it because it’ll go bad. I’m like, Yeah, I’d actually like to be good at it. excellent. Well, you have a massive skill gap. So go take however long to learn the skills and fill the skills so that you can come back with genuine confidence with earn confidence so that you could compete in this arena and do well. That’s that’s a wisdom conversation. Now insecurity is this personal piece. It’s like, I’m gonna put myself out there.

people are gonna judge, laugh, critique, and then they’ll see who I really am. They will see my flaws, my flaws, my inadequacies will now be exposed to the world. Now it’s personal. And so to me, the definition of insecurity is really important here because people think insecurity is somehow related to the fear of what others think about them, the fear of being judged, the fear of failing, the fear of being rejected.

Bill Gasiamis (30:04)

Right.

Jaemin (30:05)

imprecise. That’s not that’s not insecure at all. It’s just one or two levels deeper than that. You know, say for instance, the fear of failure, which is a typical one. And no one’s actually afraid of failing. They’re afraid of the personal implications of failure. I if I try my best at something, and then it doesn’t work. Huh? What have I just revealed to the world about me the problem with me?

Same as rejection. No one’s actually afraid of being rejected. They’re afraid of, if I put my best foot forward and it’s not enough, and then people don’t accept me, huh, what does that reveal? What does that prove? What does that confirm about my own inadequacy? So then insecure.

Bill Gasiamis (30:47)

I about what I think are my inadequacies. Because it’s not about the other

Jaemin (30:50)

Bill Gasiamis (30:53)

Jaemin (30:56)

Bill Gasiamis (30:58)

Jaemin (31:01)

the substance of your own sense of you, the language you’ve used to describe yourself and check it, check it for integrity, check it for gaps, check it for misunderstandings. Like that’s the fun of what I get to do. It’s take what appears to be abstract, mysterious, messy, unknowable and treat it like a structural engineer just by examining the structure of language.

Bill Gasiamis (31:57)

Jaemin (31:59)

topic to face and yet the great joke is there’s no actual reason for it to be hard other than the confirmation bias we’ve given ourselves buying into our own bullshit, confirming our own fiction, exasperating our own misunderstanding. So there is no monster under the bed. It’s just the idea of a monster that terrifies us.

Bill Gasiamis (32:55)

issue because you know safety comes in in a variety of different things. You know, you have to be safe from people entering your home, you know, back in the day and harming you and your family and taking your belongings. If you’re in a war torn area, you have to be safe from, you know, the invaders and that kind of stuff. But also this discussion that we’re having seems to me, as you keep going into those little beautiful deep places, it seems to me that

Again, it’s about us

creating like many barriers of safety around us and thinking that that’s the perhaps not even thinking like in just instinctively creating this kind of like multi layered safe structure that we can’t be harmed in.

Jaemin (34:06)

Bill Gasiamis (34:20)

Jaemin (34:21)

doing the dishes and not mowing the lawn and not contributing to my ecosystem in any way, shape or form. And yet I’m being rewarded, loved, nurtured, cared for, praised, fed. Hmm, turns out it’s fine to be me. I can be relaxed and at ease being me, me as I am without performing, without achieving, without contributing is enough. Great. And then, then you, you know, you get somewhere past two, you know, somewhere around that the game breaks down.

And all of a sudden you’re expected to participate, to perform, to conform, to behave. And no child’s prepared for that. No one’s ready for that. Such a surprise. And so the first time the child gets surprised, embarrassed, disappointed, upset, scolded, it’s such a confusing experience, but all the alarm, those safety warning lights are going off through their whole being. There’s a danger you didn’t know about. You.

must pay attention and here’s the thing the danger is in you the danger is you’re not who you need to be to survive in this world so don’t be you ever again like be other than you be better than you be different than you do not ever show up present and unguarded ever again or it will turn to shit so yes it’s safe so then you build this safe world this safe persona these safe structures these familiar places where people

think you’re good, think you’re smart, think you’re strong. Also, they never see the thing that you don’t want them to see, which would be the ultimate danger and then you die. Yeah, it’s entirely about a biological, chemical, psychological need for safety that is unavoidable.

Bill Gasiamis (36:21)

One of the challenges that stroke survivors have, well, I’ll talk about me. I had the challenge of, well, I needed to stop smoking and I needed to stop drinking. But all my extended family and friends were smokers and drinkers. And stroke survivors often comment about how they lose friends after a stroke.

And we’re I and I’ve kind of tried to unravel that a few times and understand what it is that makes it difficult for people to evolve and and adapt and grow and stop the behaviors that perhaps led to a stroke, you know, so that they don’t have another one. And family and friends often do that. They kind of intervene in a way which says, Well, what do you mean we can’t have a drink when we go out? Like that’s we always go and have a drink.

And then that person has has to explain themselves, perhaps, or conform again, just to be part of the group. The question is, are we also dealing with the insecurities of our family and friends when we find a way to overcome our own insecurities, perhaps, about something, and then we start to change and evolve and move forward? Are they are those people feeling like

They’re left behind. Th sometimes the sometimes the sentences that people hear when they try and stop smoking or drinking in a particular situation are you’ve changed.

You know, like it’s a bad thing.

But it’s not said in a positive way. People experience it on both sides of the coin in a negative way. The person who’s saying to their friend who’s had a stroke, who’s trying to not have another one, is saying, You’ve changed and I don’t like the way you’ve changed. And the person changing is hearing I’m changing and now people are having a bad experience because I’m changing. Like

What’s all that about with that other person in our life?

Jaemin (38:59)

Bill Gasiamis (39:07)

Jaemin (39:09)

Bill Gasiamis (39:23)

It’s getting too hot in here.

Jaemin (39:31)

for whatever reason says yes to a cold wood venture and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and eventually has to go do the thing that only they can do along the way they meet a wisdom character. You know, there’s a Gandalf, there’s a Yoda, there’s a Dumbledore, Mr. Miyagi, but eventually the hero’s got to go face the biggest fear and do the thing that’s impossible. And when they do, they come out the other side transformed and then they return home with that transformation and their whole world benefits.

So, so it is the process of transformation. It’s the process of potential. It’s the process of destiny. It’s the process of seeing a person fulfilled in their experience of themselves. So a writer is bringing you in, in along for that journey. Now, if the writer transforms the hero magically or supernaturally, it’s a horrible story. You know, if the writer goes, you know, here’s the weak person. They went to sleep and they woke up the next day transformed.

Who knows what happened. It was just, you’re like, really? What’s the point of that story? Like, that’s a horrible story. If the transformation happens in a way that’s supernatural or magic, it’s false. The transformation happens through overcoming of obstacles. The weakling becomes strong by overcoming resistance. And the resistance is almost always through the form of characters.

So the writer says, stage, write the bully and to stage, write the villain, the parent, the trickster, the joker, the judge, the king, like, and so the hero doesn’t know the story is being written about them. And so experiences all these characters very personally and wishes the characters would go away. But the audience kind of sees the gift in the character, sees the opportunity.

You know, when the audience sees a bully harassing a victim, what the audience is rooting for is that the victim would rise up and punch the bully in the nose. And something transformational happens if that victim ever does, you know, they actually then receive the bully’s gift. All along the bully had this gift of personal power delivered in the form of oppression. And because the victim had to find such deep strength that they didn’t even know existed to rise up and finally say this ends here, they’ll never be the victim again.

And so in that way they’re transformed. So you could make a case to go, thanks, bully for being a good bully because you made my life so hard. I didn’t think it was possible to overcome you. Thank you. It’s not personal. So a writer then is not going to write an empathetic bully, you know, a very emotionally intelligent, compassionate, they’re going to write a thug. They’re going to write a dullard. They’re going to write someone who’s big and does not change. And even though the, the hero wants to bully the change.

If the bully changes, if the bully goes to a spiritual retreat and comes home and change man and then apologizes and makes it up to the victim, it’s kind of nice, but the audience is going, but the victim didn’t have to become stronger in any way. So they’re still just as strong and the next bully is coming and they’re no better prepared. So all that to say, love, I love treating our own lives like this hero’s journey story. I love gamifying the experience. I love going.

You know, this insecurity, a lot of people think if only I had a different experience at childhood, then I wouldn’t be so insecure now. If only there weren’t so many difficult people blocking my path, then it would be easier for me. Like, what, do you mean? Like that’s, that’s not the tragedy. That’s the setup. That’s how the game begins. Like that’s how the tensions created so that you have a gift of being able to overcome. So these people exist for you.

And yes, they’re in your way. Great. Yes, they’re making it hard. Perfect. But we only play hard games. Like if you’re, you’re playing footy and it’s, you know, last year’s premieres versus the under 10s girls side and you win, you, that’s a very embarrassing experience. Like you don’t eat. That’s a horrible thing. You, know, this year’s premieres, you know, sorry, last year’s premieres versus the team that’s got undefeated this year and you win that game.

You know, that’s, that’s a meaningful experience. and yeah, I love this idea that everyone comes into their twenties and thirties lost and confused. And most people are really upset about that. Wishing that their experience up till then had been different and feeling disqualified from a meaningful life because of what’s happened, because of who said this and who’s done that. But if you just zoom out and say it like a hero’s journey or a beautiful game, then

then you realize, no, no, no, being lost and confused, oppressed, you know, that doesn’t disqualify you. That’s what qualifies you to go play. Now you can begin, now you can begin this journey of self-discovery to go all the way back to the beginning and see who you’ve always been all along. So it’s a very different way of thinking about life, but I’m constantly confronted with people who treat the stuff that’s happened to them as wounds.

And the best you could ever hope for is that eventually you could bring healing to yourself and it become a visible scar that doesn’t really afflict you. Whereas this says, yeah, what if those things, what if life doesn’t happen to you? It happens for you. And the real gift is your own opportunity to rediscover who you’ve always been by overcoming obstacles and especially in the form of people and especially in the form of insecure people.

who of course are going to make your journey difficult. Of course, you know, not everyone’s cheering you on. Eventually the heroes got to go alone. Eventually they’ve got to. If they don’t go alone, then they can’t do the thing that only they can do.

Bill Gasiamis (46:01)

and

In fact, I learnt about the Heroes Journey after my brain surgery. So we’re talking about I don’t know. I think I got out of hospital for after brain surgery in late 2014. And I think it was around 2017 I did a particular course that I was in. It was a behavioral modeling course and it was about modeling a behavior that we thought was one worth other people learning and repeating. And the

The person who was running the course, awesome friend of mine and mentor and teacher, a gentleman called Marvin Oka, he spoke about the hero’s journey as part of this course to teach us about like how to tell a story. And I hadn’t grasped the concept very well. but because of that course, my first book was able to become a reality. It took four years for me to.

make that happen. And I released it in twenty twenty twenty three, somewhere there. And since then I’ve done a bit of a deep dive into the hero’s journey and understanding how to take people through a story. And my next book is structured that way. There’s a moment where life is quote unquote normal and then there’s an event and then there’s everything, you know, there’s been a spanner thrown in the works and everything is

not like it used to be. And now there is this post-traumatic growth experience that you can go on. And if you know you’re going on it, it’s easier to go on it. But some people are not aware that they might be going on this journey. They’re just programmed from a previous way of doing life that these things are all terrible and bad and they’re not good. And there’s no growth and there’s no learning and there’s no opportunity. But there but there is, but we just framed it.

in our past way of thinking and that’s not applicable now, even though we’re still trying to apply it, apply it, apply it. And what you said about the the bully, I remember at school, if if I was a victim, bullies used to seek me out like like a mosquito knows who to go and sting, right?

Jaemin (48:40)

Bill Gasiamis (48:42)

was was it. That was the key to unlocking the whole how other people perceived me in those types of situations. And then none of the bullies turned up to have a go because they weren’t gonna get or or perhaps they saw that my response was going to affect their insecurities about themselves. Right. and realistically when I was going through stroke, stopping smoking, stopping drinking,

stopping attending the particular venues where smoking and drinking happened so that I can avoid smoking and drinking. It meant that certain people couldn’t associate with me anymore. And

It’s not that they were bullies, but when I learnt how to manage that situation once, the others that now I that I now interact with don’t require us to interact in a way that includes smoking and drinking in a particular venue. We can have just as meaningful interactions without the smoking and drinking, without being in that venue, just being in a different location.

Doing a different thing. And and there’s no n and and no one feels bad about that interaction. I don’t feel about bad about it because I’m not partaking in something that the other person wants me to partake in. And the other person’s not feeling bad because they’re partaking in something that I’m not partaking in. And we’re there for the same reason. We’re there for the catch up. We’re not there for the smoking and the drinking.

Jaemin (50:26)

Bill Gasiamis (50:50)

Jaemin (50:50)

If I, you know, the smoking drinking example, if you never talked to me ever again, if you cannot, then that will be okay. But I cannot go here ever again. And I won’t and you cannot make me and I won’t be made. And so there it is. Great. That your audience is watching that cheering. Yes, transformed. Never be victim again. And then on the other side of that, it’s often surprising what happens in those relationships. And it’s not uncommon for mutual respect, even though

It’s not guaranteed and you have to be willing to let go of it completely. Because yeah, the hero’s got to go alone.

Bill Gasiamis (51:33)

eleven years old or something. And yeah, then we got along forever.

Jaemin (52:08)

Bill Gasiamis (52:39)

Jaemin (52:42)

Bill Gasiamis (52:46)

Jaemin (52:47)

But in the same way, like no victim when they’re being bullied wants to see it like an archer, like wants to say it like a gift. They want to be rescued or they want the bully to change. It’s impossible to face a bully. Same with the parents. It’s like, don’t understand. This is my dad. You don’t understand. Like it’s just, you know, blood is thicker than water. You got to be there for family. Like it’s just how it’s

Bill Gasiamis (53:30)

Jaemin (53:30)

no one wants that tension.

and would hope that the tension just goes away. But if you see it like a great story, it provides the greatest opportunity for your own sovereignty. You know, the bully’s gift is personal power. The parent’s gift is sovereignty. Because when you were born into their world, it’s like you’re born into a kingdom, king and queen on the throne, and it’s their arbitrary rules. In this world, this is how we do it. You don’t like it, bugger off down the street. But here, you know, do this, don’t do that. Why, dad? Don’t ask why, just do what I say.

So the parental relationship, parents are right even when they’re wrong. And that’s a really important distinction for the nature of those relationships. And so you are a subject inside a kingdom, their rules, their map of the world, their right, even when they’re wrong. And it’s incredibly hard to break free from that to create your own map of the world and

Bill Gasiamis (54:29)

Jaemin (54:29)

Freud says, you must live as though your father is dead. You must depose the king. So

Bill Gasiamis (54:42)

Jaemin (54:42)

It’s not to love and support and empower. They might do all that, but their central function in the hero’s journey is to confuse you about who you really are.

Bill Gasiamis (55:12)

Jaemin (55:13)

You are this, this is who you are. It’s like, no, it’s just a bit of

Bill Gasiamis (55:46)

Jaemin (55:47)

is so wonderful because it’s the ultimate resistance to break out of, to examine the structure of that, to examine the confusion and really go back and reparent yourself and really be the one who actually knows who you’ve always been and to nurture that into the real world and then to become sovereign. And you know you’re sovereign when you become the one who’s right, even when they’re wrong. So you’ve got friends and family saying, what do you mean? It’s not.

You need to be able to have a smoke. got to be able to drink. That’s what everyone does. Not in my kingdom, we don’t. In my kingdom,

Bill Gasiamis (56:39)

Jaemin (56:39)

So you could be the one who unconfuses yourself by having to overcome the relational resistance in your world and discover who you’ve always been.

Bill Gasiamis (57:15)

Jaemin (57:26)

Bill Gasiamis (57:27)

over helicopter grandparenting, you know. You know, the kids cold or the kids this and the kids that, you know, we lived this with this kid twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for five, six years, you know, like we knew its needs, you know, my my son’s needs. And my dad just wouldn’t have it that we what we were saying wasn’t that we were saying was correct or was okay or was fine or whatever, you know, we were it was everything was good.

It was just his insecurities, I think. And it was like the first time that I really rebelled against my parent and said to him, Listen, man, if you don’t like it, get out. And he actually got out. He got out of my kingdom and he went back to his kingdom where things were normal and

Jaemin (58:30)

Bill Gasiamis (58:30)

Jaemin (58:44)

Bill Gasiamis (58:45)

Jaemin (58:56)

and you’ll bow down to their kingdom. Someone else who knows better than you, someone else who’s telling you what to do, you will submit to some other wisdom and they’ll be an overlord, they’ll

be oppressive. It’s how it works. Like so in the archetypal world, you either evolve or you repeat. So I’ve had people say, no, no, I left home at 18. It’s not my parents. great, but you never got the gift. You’re not sovereign. You now you just found this person and that person and this person who’s still telling you what to do. You’re still a boy. You’re still a child to be a man.

requires a battle, you must become sovereign. That’s the setup as a gift for you and the characters play a role for you. It’s stunning when you see it.

Bill Gasiamis (59:54)

It’s stunning now because you’ve shown me and man, like, yeah. I’ve kind of done the whole forgive your parents for the things that they did or said to you because they did the best with the information they had available to them, right? And I’ve done that. But this is kind of another level of that. Like just totally understanding that it that was all necessary. it’s the same as it was necessary for my friends to challenge my

not smoking and my not drinking.

Jaemin (1:00:23)

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:25)

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:37)

Purpose on the TEDx stage. Links will be in the show notes. And if you’re listening to this thinking this is me, but I don’t know where to start, that’s the gap that I work in. I take on a small number of stroke survivors at a time for one-on-one support, regular calls, accountability, and someone to talk it through with who’s actually been there. It isn’t therapy and it isn’t medical treatment. It’s structure and lived experience.

If that’s what you’re missing, you can apply at recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum.

Now back to Jaemin and to what insecurity is actually costing you while you’re trying to heal.

Jaemin (1:01:46)

to just examine the fantasy, the often unspoken fantasy that people have. If only my parents were better, more loving, more kind, more present, things would have turned out differently. Well, just go have a look at what happens if you get given a perfect parent. It does happen. People do grow up in really nurtured, beautiful, empowering, loving spaces. They’re my most insecure clients.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:13)

Jaemin (1:02:14)

my way of seeing things and my thinking. And so would seek me out for counsel and wisdom at difficult points in her life. And I would always have wisdom for her. And it was wisdom that would work. But in giving her my wisdom, which she think you’d want from your dad, I then confused her about her own wisdom. So then she comes into the world unsure, will I ever be as wise as dad? Will I ever know what to do for myself? Will I ever be able to solve my own problems? So, you know, I’ve confused her by being wise and my son,

I’ve confused him by succeeding. So he never really saw me suck as a coach and a business owner. He’s only really seen me succeed. So he looks at my lifestyle, plenty of time, plenty of money, you know, you know, it all looks so easy. And then he goes out in the workforce and it’s also fucking hard, you know, and he’s a shit kicker at the bottom of the pile, earning no money. And he looked at me, he’s like, huh,

I, I’m incapable. I will never get to where you are. So

I’m, you’ve set the bar too high and now I’ll never get it. And so it, you know, it, it nearly destroyed him that revelation. So if you can see that there’s no way around it, that’s your parents’ job to confuse you. You cannot protect your own children from insecurity and nor would you want to, even if you could. It’s the necessary setup of the game so that you can come into your twenties and thirties lost and confused. And that’s not the tragedy. That’s the setup. Now the game can begin.

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:03)

Jaemin (1:04:10)

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:11)

Jaemin (1:04:14)

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:15)

They see me in the way that I interact and talk, and they think, I’m I’m so early on in my recovery. I I’m never I’m never gonna be like Bill.

Jaemin (1:04:40)

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:42)

Jaemin (1:04:51)

Bill Gasiamis (1:04:52)

thought process under normal situations or you’ve never considered or you didn’t know you needed to know about or whatever it is, right? And it again, it’s that ru my role is to be the confuser. It is to take the to take the seat, to have the conversation, and then to generate confusion. And then they often come out in questions in, you know, the YouTube channel or via an email, or it often opens it it often opens like a

a rabbit hole that people then need to go down and investigate themselves to become more more certain, less confused or more secure, or whatever the word is that, you know, that the experience that they’re chasing or they’re feeling they need to find. So I did struggle with perhaps generating an illusion that stroke

I you know, like I’ve just nailed it. Like I’ve had a stroke or three and I had brain surgery and I couldn’t walk, but now I am. And it’s like I was always concerned about that perception that people developed of me by listening to one podcast episode and then the role that that played in maybe setting them back in their recovery, which of course there’s not my intention, right? so I love that the confuser is necessary.

In everyone’s journey. And if I see myself as an acute as a confuser, then I don’t need to think about how.

the thing that I do is I talk about how stroke experiences are so broad, the spectrum is so wide that I can’t

that that that I can’t sort of help everyone in the spectrum because it’s so wide and that I somehow that makes this podcast lesser or I or I’m inadequate or I’m not doing a good enough job or I haven’t put enough episodes out or you know whatever. So that’s a real gift that

Jaemin (1:07:10)

Bill Gasiamis (1:07:11)

are getting a similar gift from this part of the conversation.

Jaemin (1:07:20)

Bill Gasiamis (1:07:23)

Jaemin (1:07:38)

Bill Gasiamis (1:07:39)

Jaemin (1:07:48)

You’ve now got zero resources to be directed towards growth, towards safety, towards internal certainty. So you are now in great peril. So a stroke puts you into survival mode and now you’ve got no resources to survive because all your best resources directed elsewhere to make sure no

Bill Gasiamis (1:08:34)

Jaemin (1:08:35)

So I think, yeah, that is the cost. It’s a slow descent into madness really, if all your best resources are proving and defending, covering and compensating, then you stop being human, you stop being alive, you stop being present, you become hypervigilant around what others are thinking and you just keep your world keeps getting smaller. And that’s not being dramatic,

Bill Gasiamis (1:09:09)

Jaemin (1:09:11)

Bill Gasiamis (1:09:13)

so that you can allocate as much resources to the brain to heal and to rewire as possible. And I often talk about it from the perspective of of the emotional recovery after stroke. People often avoid emotional conversations because initially they’re physically the most obvious issue is physical. You know, my left side doesn’t work or my right side doesn’t work or my face is droopy or I can’t see properly. So they attend to the most obvious things.

And then they get some point down the track and they realize they’ve never attended to the emotional, psychological aspect of the recovery. And they’re being inefficient in those spaces and therefore taking resources away from the brain healing. And it whole thing compounds and it decreases.

Jaemin (1:10:34)

that makes sense. And I think, cause people typically tie their identity and value and worth to the roles and relationships that they’ve constructed. So you described your experience of a stroke. All of a sudden you can’t be the same guy. can’t work the same way or your relationships have changed. So if all your identity is tied to that and now it’s gone, you’re in crisis emotionally, psychologically. If you don’t have any resources to examine that.

it’s going to be a significant cost.

Bill Gasiamis (1:11:06)

Often in in a in a serious health is incident,

people kind of experience grief. My old life was such and such and all these things that I haven’t got now, I can’t do now or I can’t go back to.

How does someone tell the difference between like legitimate grief over real loss of function and insecurity?

Can you can those lines blur the like do those lines blur?

Jaemin (1:11:49)

Bill Gasiamis (1:11:54)

Jaemin (1:11:56)

Bill Gasiamis (1:11:57)

Jaemin (1:12:22)

this is

Bill Gasiamis (1:12:24)

Jaemin (1:12:24)

and the lines will blur very clearly in there. But of course that is a grief. You have lost something that you enjoyed and that is to be acknowledged and understood and appreciated. That is a sadness. That’s a loss. That’s appropriate to feel sadness. And the danger is when it becomes personal. That’s the whole insecurity conversation. Then you put yourself in great peril and can spiral into all kinds of dark places.

Bill Gasiamis (1:13:20)

Jaemin (1:13:20)

you have to cling to something else. you know, I’ve seen lots of people, you know, I’m training for Sydney Marathon at the moment. My Instagram feed is full of Instagram runners. One of my friends yesterday read an article, he showed me that the top job in the world now is shit runner, good Instagrammer. People are making careers out of being mediocre runners, but good at Instagram.

But you know, my feet is full of people who are proving something with their running. Like this tragedy happened to me. So I’m proving I’m a good person by my resilience and my ability to do ultra marathons. good. Good on you. you know, so then someone has a loss, a physical loss. They go past the grief of the physical loss. It’s personal, but now they’re so driven to cover that personal by then using that as another opportunity to prove they’re awesome by now.

being superhuman and doing more than the average. show them, can still run a bloody marathon even though I’ve had a stroke, even though it takes me seven hours. And then I’ll be the most famous stroke surviving marathon runner that ever existed. And then the world will know I’m a good person. So, you know, it can get all kinds of crazy when people don’t deal with the insecurity and then feel driven to keep going back into more creative ways to prove and defend themselves.

Bill Gasiamis (1:14:50)

Jaemin (1:14:55)

Bill Gasiamis (1:14:58)

Jaemin (1:15:01)

Bill Gasiamis (1:15:11)

Jaemin (1:15:11)

Bill Gasiamis (1:15:14)

Jaemin (1:15:15)

characters that they’re really elite of the elite ultra marathon is their body is so extraordinarily shaped and designed for that. It’s a credit to them. they’re better suited to an ultra marathon than a road marathon. And so they’re really showing up doing the thing. But there’s a lot of people out there just entirely driven by reading David Goggins book to, you know, hard

Bill Gasiamis (1:15:51)

Jaemin (1:15:51)

by how much you can suffer.

Bill Gasiamis (1:15:57)

Jaemin (1:16:07)

he gets older and he’s still got to keep proven fighting against the younger people. There is no, there’s no exit strategy to that. That ends badly. You can’t

Bill Gasiamis (1:16:15)

Jaemin (1:16:16)

Bill Gasiamis (1:16:22)

Jaemin (1:16:23)

Bill Gasiamis (1:16:27)

Jaemin (1:16:39)

Bill Gasiamis (1:16:42)

Jaemin (1:16:44)

eradicate insecurity because what looks like purpose, there’s a lot of people out there. This is my purpose to solve this problem

Bill Gasiamis (1:17:18)

Jaemin (1:17:18)

Bill Gasiamis (1:17:30)

Jaemin (1:17:30)

what it is that you have said about yourself and is it accurate? Is it fair? Have you misunderstood? So that you can come into the world with nothing to prove and defend and then connect to purpose. It’s not even about you. That’s bigger than you. So he could just show up with kindness and just, you know, optimize for aliveness. Do the things that give you joy, do the things that are meaningful to you, not because you need it to validate, approve, support, you know, endorse you. So.

Yeah, that’s the broad answer to the question. If you’re willing to do an inquiry around the motivation, prove and defend, or if I had nothing to prove and defend, I still think about this in the same way. You know, what need am I meeting here? Am I looking to this external thing to give me certainty or significance or love? And, you know, to cover an absence of my own willingness to give that to myself. But yeah, I think.

You know, insecurity is always a conversation about perceived inadequacy. And, and I’m convinced there’s only seven versions of that. Is it that you’re bad? Is it that you are worthless? Is it that you’re stupid? Is it that you’re ugly? Is it that you are weak? Is that you’re weird or a loser? So I think then if you notice any motivation towards the opposite, I’m trying to be good. I’m trying to be smart. I’m trying to be strong. I’m trying to be normal. I’m trying to be a winner. I’m trying to be beautiful. I’m trying to be.

whatever the other one is that I missed, then it’s still insecurity driven. The motivation is to move away from something you’re sure and to drive towards the other. And so, yeah, when you really are willing to examine the structure of that accusation in the first place, you will have misunderstood and you can then free yourself from trying to not be one and desperate to be the other and just be you.

Bill Gasiamis (1:19:34)

Like the it wasn’t it wasn’t intentional at all. It was just like, okay, this is what you do. You do this for all those people. Then they become teenagers, they leave the house and it’s like, okay, what do I do now? I don’t know w who I am or what it is. The podcast was about me at the beginning. It was about me finding people that were like me to help me get through what I needed to go through because it’s isolating going through a stroke and not understanding what’s happening and

How to navigate it and all that kind of stuff. And then around episode 40 or something is when I first realized that there was way more to this than me. And it was how other people were experiencing my interviews and their feedback and response made me feel the first opportunity to say stroke was the best thing that happened to me, because I’ve now discovered my

purpose and meaning, which my children are part of.

But there just one aspect of it, and I think purpose and meaning really is to serve for me, was to serve other people and expect nothing back. And it just was what enabled me to overcome those insecurity hurdles and barriers, which were the what will people think of me? which was then initially it was about me.

And now there’s 400 episodes and I don’t really care what people think of me, it’s serving the need out there in the community. And people are people are engaging however they want to engage, and I don’t have a I don’t have an expectation on how they engage. It’s just, you know, it’s going out there, it serves the community, it makes a difference and

I don’t feel insecure about it, but I did at the beginning, which was really interesting, you know, to find myself insecure about serving the community because I started off with serving myself and it was self-serving. And

Jaemin (1:22:07)

Bill Gasiamis (1:22:09)

Jaemin (1:22:22)

Bill Gasiamis (1:22:23)

a little less genuine engagement wasn’t as high as it was when I started to make it about everyone else.

Jaemin (1:22:34)

Bill Gasiamis (1:22:39)

Jaemin (1:22:57)

Bill Gasiamis (1:22:59)

I mean, I I this could be a massive conversation. It’d go longer and longer and and it doesn’t need to I suppose as we kind of get to the end of the interview, I wanna

I I don’t wanna do this but just the nature of the format sort of requires that is that like

You know, what’s the what what’s the out? What how do we how do we wrap up a conversation about insecurity to people who may have never had the opportunity to hear somebody whose work has all been about overcoming insecurity? Like how do we wrap that up in a nice little bundle and make it a beautiful outro to to an episode like this? maybe people know the word insecurity, but it’s the first time they’ve heard about like the deeper

topics that we’ve discussed, you know, how do we kind of wrap it up?

Jaemin (1:23:59)

you know, 16,000 coaching hours, you know, nearly two decades. It’s like, it’s just so straightforward. There’s, there’s not ever an experience where someone tells me their story and I’m going, geez, wow. No, you’re rooted. That’s outside the scope. Sorry. Just like, yeah, I mean, of course it seems like a really complicated, unique experience. It’s really not. It’s a, no one escapes their childhood without getting confused about who they are. And that’s not the tragedy. It’s just the setup. So.

It’s a, there’s a gift waiting for you if you’d like it. And the gift is you get to go on a hero’s journey and be the hero in your own life and rescue yourself from your own worst opinion about you as a kid. What a fun ride that is. Like, I don’t know, is there anything more exciting than that? So yeah, it’s, it’s a solvable problem. You can eradicate it because it’s not, it’s not built on actual substance. There’s actually nothing wrong with you. It’s just the idea there’s something wrong with you.

you formed as a child and then agreed with your own assessment and wrapped it in certainty. So then you just gathered more and more evidence to prove it’s truants become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you’re willing to go back to the beginning, which no one wants to, by the way, you know, it’s like, can’t you just fix it from this end? Can’t you just buy a jump? I saw someone at park run last week wearing this jumper that said, are enough. Like, problem solved. I’ll shut down the

Bill Gasiamis (1:25:51)

Jaemin (1:25:52)

buy a whole bunch of these jumpers that ought to do it.

Bill Gasiamis (1:25:56)

Jaemin (1:25:59)

where you encounter the adult world and you perceived inadequacy for the very first time. And there’s always a very first time. It’s not where you started, but there was a catastrophic moment in your childhood where you went, my goodness, there is a lack, a limit and inadequacy. And the fun of it is you can narrow the field search. You’re only looking for one or more of seven things. Like it’s all in there and no one escapes that. So if you’re willing to have a look at it, you can actually have a look at it. You can survive it. And more than that, you could actually

become the person you’ve always dreamed of, the person you’ve known has always been there by breaking through the confusion you’ve lived in about your own value and worth.

Bill Gasiamis (1:27:07)

Jaemin (1:27:12)

Well, it stands to hang on, turn around. Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s the voice, problem. I, you know, I get interviewed on insecurity all the time. This has been one of my favorite ever conversations that I’m not just saying that to you, Bill. Often I get asked questions, pre-prepared questions. Okay. Can you tell me about insecurity, Jaemin? And you’ve got 30 seconds to wrap a short form. Okay. Next question. Where did insecurity come from? And it’s like, man.

You know, it’s a difficult subject. It’s, it’s, needs a bit of unpacking, you know, so to be able to let it breathe and have a conversation like we’ve had, I think it just really gives people a window into go, hang on a minute. Maybe, maybe I could have a look at my own insecurity. Maybe it’s not too big, too scary. Maybe there’s even a gift in here. Okay. That’s interesting.

Bill Gasiamis (1:28:01)

Jaemin (1:28:08)

Bill Gasiamis (1:28:10)

Every bit of energy spent managing how you appear to other people is energy not available for rewiring and healing. If you’ve been wondering where your reserves are going, that’s a place worth looking. And the line I suspect will stay with a lot of you. Being lost and confused doesn’t disqualify you. It’s what qualifies you to begin. Now you can find Jaemin work at JaminFraser.com.

And links to all the other resources we mentioned will be in the show notes Along with his TEDx talk. If this episode gave you something, send it to someone who needs to hear it. That’s how this show reaches the people it’s meant to reach. And if you’d like to go further with the reframe Jaemin describing, have a listen to our earlier episode on post-traumatic growth in stroke recovery. Same ground.

From a survivor’s side.

Two ways to take this further. The book. The unexpected way that a stroke became the best thing that happened is available at recoveryafterstroke.com/book. If you want to work on this with me directly, I offer one on one support to a small number of stroke survivors at a time over three or six months. Rebuilding confidence after setbacks is a lot of what we do. Apply at recoveryafterstroke.com/momentum.

I’m Bill Gasiamis, thanks for being here. Keep going.

The post Losing Confidence After Stroke – Jaemin Frazer appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

If you’re recovering from a stroke or brain injury, there’s a familiar, exhausting question that shows up once the rehab schedule is set: is there anything else a supplement, a nutrient, something that could genuinely support the brain while it rebuilds itself? Citicoline comes up in that search constantly, across nootropic forums, supplement stores, and even some hospital protocols. It also happens to have one of the largest clinical trial records of any brain-recovery compound available. So rather than trusting a product label, it’s worth going straight to what those trials actually found, including the parts that didn’t work.

Citicoline (cytidine diphosphate-choline, or CDP-choline) is a compound your body already produces. It’s a building block for phosphatidylcholine, a major structural component of neuronal cell membranes. The theory behind supplementing it is straightforward: give the brain more raw material to repair damaged membranes and support neurotransmitter production after an injury. It’s sold over the counter as a supplement (often branded as “Cognizin”), and in some countries it’s used clinically, including intravenously, in hospital stroke and TBI protocols.

This is a case where the size of the evidence base is unusually large, and the results are humbling rather than triumphant.

The ICTUS trial, published in The Lancet in 2012 with 2,298 patients, tested citicoline for acute ischemic stroke and found no significant benefit over placebo for global recovery at 90 days; the trial was stopped early for futility (PMID 22691567). The COBRIT trial, published in JAMA the same year with 1,213 traumatic brain injury patients, tested a higher dose of 2,000 mg per day for 90 days and again found no meaningful difference in functional or cognitive outcomes at 90 or 180 days (PMID 23168823). A 2020 Cochrane review pooling ten randomized trials and more than 4,000 stroke patients concluded there was little to no difference between citicoline and placebo in mortality, disability, or neurological recovery, and rated the overall evidence quality as low, noting six of the ten trials were industry-sponsored (PMID 32860632).

Here’s where the picture becomes more interesting. A separate trial gave stroke survivors citicoline continuously for twelve months, rather than just during the acute phase, and found real improvements in attention, executive function, and temporal orientation compared to usual care, along with a non-significant trend toward better long-term functional outcome (PMID 23406981). A broader 2020 systematic review across neurological conditions similarly found citicoline useful for slowing dementia progression and enhancing cognition in healthy adults, while describing its effect on TBI specifically as “unclear” (PMID 33053828). A separate meta-analysis of twelve trials found citicoline significantly improved functional outcomes overall, even while showing no significant difference on several other individual outcome measures a genuinely mixed result rather than a clean positive or negative (PMID 28458415).

The pattern that emerges: as a short-term rescue treatment for acute stroke or acute TBI, the largest, best-designed trials say no, it doesn’t move the needle. As a longer-term support for post-stroke cognitive function, taken consistently over months, there’s a more modest but real signal.

Citicoline is not an acute miracle treatment, and the largest trials in the field say so plainly. If you were hoping for a supplement that meaningfully changes outcomes in the days or weeks after a stroke, the evidence doesn’t support that expectation. The more genuine finding of better attention and executive function with twelve months of continuous use comes from a single open-label trial that wasn’t blinded, so it deserves a more cautious read than the large, definitive negative trials.

There’s also a dosing gap worth knowing about before anyone assumes a supplement bottle reflects the research: clinical trials used 500 to 2,000 mg per day, often for months, while most over-the-counter citicoline products are dosed at 250 to 500 mg per day, meaningfully lower than the doses that produced the modest cognitive signal.

Ask your neurologist or doctor whether citicoline makes sense for your specific recovery stage. Acute stroke support and long-term cognitive support are different questions with different evidence behind them.

If you’re considering a supplement, check the label dose against what was actually studied. A product dosed well below 500 mg per day is not comparable to the trials that showed a cognitive benefit.

Search “ICTUS citicoline,” “COBRIT trial,” or “citicoline cognitive stroke” on PubMed yourself, and form your own view. The honest picture here is nuanced enough that it’s worth reading past the marketing copy.

The value of citicoline, if it exists for you, isn’t as a substitute for rehab, sleep, movement, and nutrition; it’s a small addition on top of everything else you’re already doing well, chosen because you understand the actual trial record rather than a supplement label.

For the broader framework I used to separate genuine evidence from supplement hype throughout my own recovery, see my book: https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book. If breakdowns like this one are useful to you, the Recovery After Stroke Patreon (https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke) directly funds more of them.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post Citicoline for Brain Recovery: What the Major Trials Actually Found appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

If you’re recovering from a hemorrhagic stroke or a ruptured aneurysm, you’ve probably noticed that most “brain health supplement” advice online is written for the other kind of stroke: the clot type. It rarely addresses what’s actually happening inside a bleed injury: blood breaking down inside brain tissue, swelling, and a wave of secondary inflammation that can do as much damage as the bleed itself. So when someone in this community asked whether there’s any real research behind supplements for healing the brain after a bleed, it was worth digging into properly. One compound kept surfacing: curcumin, the active constituent in turmeric.

Curcumin is the primary bioactive compound in turmeric, long studied for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. It’s an unusual candidate for brain-bleed research because most stroke supplement research focuses on ischemic stroke clots where the biology is different. A bleed involves blood pooling in or around brain tissue; as red blood cells break down, iron released from hemoglobin triggers an inflammatory cascade that increases swelling and pressure inside the skull. Anything that can interrupt that cascade is scientifically interesting, at least in principle.

The research specific to bleed-type brain injury is more developed than you might expect, but it comes with an important caveat covered below.

In animal models of intracerebral hemorrhage, curcumin reduced swelling by blocking aquaporin-4 and aquaporin-9, water-channel proteins involved in brain edema, and by calming the NF-kB inflammatory pathway that drives secondary damage after a bleed (PMID 26119880). A separate mouse study found that curcumin given within six hours of an induced brain bleed helped shrink the resulting hematoma, reduced inflammatory gene activity, and improved neurological recovery scores compared to untreated animals (PMID 21417704).

The finding most relevant to aneurysm-type bleeds specifically comes from a mouse model of subarachnoid hemorrhage, the same category of bleed caused by a ruptured aneurysm. Curcumin, administered shortly after the bleed, reduced brain water content and improved neurological scores, apparently by protecting the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (PMID 27979493).

On the human side, the picture shifts. There is currently no published human clinical trial testing curcumin specifically for hemorrhagic stroke or brain-bleed recovery. What does exist is human evidence in an adjacent area: two separate placebo-controlled trials in older adults found that a bioavailable (“lipidated”) form of curcumin improved working memory and helped prevent the cognitive decline seen in the placebo group over time (PMID 27102361; PMID 32512782). That’s genuinely encouraging evidence for brain health broadly, but it is not the same as proof that curcumin aids recovery from a bleed specifically.

A 2024 systematic review pooling curcumin and traumatic brain injury research examined eighteen studies. Every one of them was an animal study (PMID 38798711). That single fact is the most important piece of context in this entire topic.

Here is the line between promising and proven: everything specific to brain-bleed recovery hematoma size, inflammation, neurological scores after hemorrhage comes from mouse studies, not human trials. Mice are not small humans, and preclinical results routinely fail to replicate in people, particularly in stroke research, where decades of promising animal data have not translated into approved acute therapies.

There is also a safety consideration that matters more here than in most supplement discussions: curcumin has a mild blood-thinning effect. If you are recovering from a bleed, on anticoagulant medication, or scheduled for any procedure, that is not a detail to skip past; it is the single most important thing to raise with your medical team before considering curcumin or turmeric extract in any form.

Ask directly about bleeding risk before considering any curcumin or turmeric supplement, especially if you are on blood thinners or still in the early recovery window after a hemorrhage.

Ask whether the standard turmeric found in food or basic capsules is even comparable to the “bioavailable” or “lipidated” curcumin formulations used in the human trials. Standard turmeric is poorly absorbed, and the studies that showed a benefit did not use it.

Ask your doctor, or check ClinicalTrials.gov yourself, whether any human trials specific to your diagnosis are currently recruiting or have published results since this was written; the evidence base here is still moving.

The goal isn’t to decide for or against curcumin based on a YouTube video. It’s to walk into your next appointment with a specific, well-informed question instead of a vague one about “brain supplements” so your medical team can give you a real answer.

If you want to go deeper on evidence-based approaches to stroke recovery, my book covers the broader framework I used to rebuild my own recovery plan: https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book. And if this kind of research breakdown is useful to you, the Recovery After Stroke Patreon (https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke) directly funds more of it.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post Curcumin and Brain Bleed Recovery: What the Research Actually Shows appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

In 1987, Dr. Robert Hedaya found an office he loved. It overlooked a stream and a forest, and it had a balcony. Within about an hour of arriving each morning, he would become tired and mentally foggy, something he describes as unlike him. It took him time to work out what was happening. The building had mold.

He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center and a pioneer of functional medicine psychiatry. He had spent his career studying why brains underperform. And he still didn’t see it until it was affecting him personally.

That story is worth sitting with, because it goes to the heart of a question most stroke survivors eventually ask: if I’m doing the therapy, the exercises, the sleep, the diet, why am I still stuck?

When Dr. Hedaya returned to Recovery After Stroke for his third conversation with Bill Gasiamis, the topic was not a new treatment. It was the opposite: the things that get in the way of treatments already working.

His argument is structural. After a stroke, the brain rebuilds by growing new connections between neurons. That process is physical. It requires materials, energy, and an absence of interference. If something is interfering, no amount of repetition in a rehab gym will overcome it.

So the useful question is not only what helps my brain recover but also what blocks brain recovery after stroke and whether any of it is happening in your own house, your own mouth, or your own bloodstream without anyone having looked.

Dr. Hedaya raised three: mercury, mold, and Lyme.

Picture a neuron as a tree in winter: a trunk with branches extending outward. After a stroke, under the right conditions, neurons grow new branches to make new connections.

To do that, the cell has to lay down a structure for the new branch to grow through. It uses a protein called tubulin, small oval molecules that link together into a tube, the way Lego pieces connect to form a ring.

Mercury interrupts that linkage. Dr. Hedaya points to footage from the University of Calgary, filmed in 1999, showing the process under a microscope: the growing nerve branch shrivels and retracts within seconds of mercury exposure. It runs about two and a half minutes and is worth watching, because seeing it is more persuasive than reading about it.

Where does mercury come from? Two main sources. Dental amalgam fillings, the dark grey ones, were largely phased out from roughly the 1970s onward, which means people now in their fifties and sixties are the most likely to still have them. And fish. Mercury accumulates up the food chain, so large predatory fish such as tuna and swordfish carry substantially more than small fish. Sardines, anchovies, herring, and mackerel carry very little, and bring DHA and B12 with them, the raw materials neurons need.

Testing involves a baseline urine sample, then a challenge dose of DMSA (a sulfur-containing compound), then a second sample. A jump between the two indicates mercury was being stored and is now being pulled out.

If you have amalgam fillings removed, Dr. Hedaya is emphatic that it should be done by a biological dentist who follows a protocol: preparation with sulfur-containing compounds beforehand, a dam in place during the procedure, and rinsing afterward. Removal done badly can expose you to more mercury than leaving it alone.

This is his strongest claim, and he states it without hedging: he has not seen anyone fully recover from a neurological problem while living in a mold-exposed environment. His estimate of the ceiling is around fifty percent improvement.

There are two separate things at work. The spores the visible organism. And the mycotoxins, which are molecular, airborne, invisible, and travel far beyond the patch you can see. They inhibit mitochondria, which is how cells produce energy, and they increase oxidation, which is hard on neurons.

You cannot rule mold out by smell or by looking. Dr. Hedaya has every patient run an ERMI test Environmental Relative Mold Index. You mark ten areas in the home that don’t get cleaned, wipe them down, leave them for a month, then collect dust with a supplied cloth and send it to a lab. He uses Mycometrics.

The second test asks a different question: is your immune system actually reacting? A lab such as MyMycoLab measures IgE (an immediate response, within minutes to hours) and IgG (a delayed response that can begin a day or two later and persist for weeks). You then compare which molds are in your home against which ones your immune system is responding to: Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Chaetomium, Stachybotrys, and others. In Dr. Hedaya’s experience, the two lists usually overlap.

Remediation is where it becomes expensive and inconvenient. Cleaning the visible growth achieves little on its own. You have to find the water: poor grading, a roof leak, blocked downspouts, a badly installed HVAC system, damp ductwork, because if the water source remains, so does the mold.

As Bill put it in the conversation: there is no point putting a year of work into a rehabilitation program and then walking out of it into a moldy house. The cost of remediation is real. So is the cost of never getting past fifty percent.

Lyme is a close relative of syphilis, which was historically called the great imitator because it could present as almost any disease. Lyme behaves the same way, and a single tick can carry around twenty pathogens that affect humans, including Bartonella and Babesia, both of which drain cellular energy.

Dr. Hedaya’s issue is with the testing. It relies on antibodies, and antibodies take weeks to develop, so testing soon after a bite returns a negative that means nothing. The result is also reported as a binary against an optical density threshold: above the cutoff you have it, below it you don’t. His comparison: a blood glucose of 120 is not diabetes; 121 is. The line does not reflect biology.

He also rejects the common reassurance that a tick embedded for under 24 hours is safe. His word for it was “insanity.”

Asked which of the three to address first, his answer was immediate: mold.

Mercury needs no test to begin acting on; switch to smaller fish, eat more cruciferous vegetables, garlic, cilantro, and greens, and you are doing something useful whether or not you had a problem. Test in six to twelve months if you want to know.

Lyme comes last, unless you have had a recent tick bite. And mold has to be dealt with before Lyme treatment is worth attempting.

Dr. Hedaya’s advice here is practical, and it applies well beyond this topic. Don’t arrive with a theory. Arrive with a literature review.

He suggests using SciSpace over PubMed; ask it for a literature review on the effects of mold on the human nervous system, and it will assemble one in fifteen or twenty minutes. Print it, along with a couple of the underlying papers.

Then add the step most people skip: ask it for the counter-argument. Ask why mold might not be a factor in brain function. You are not there to win. You are there to have a real conversation, and a doctor is far more likely to engage with someone who has already tested their own position.

If they refuse outright to order the testing? His view was blunt: find another doctor.

None of this replaces rehabilitation. It removes the obstacles to it.

That distinction matters, because the work you are already doing is not wasted; it may simply be running into something invisible. Checking your fillings takes a minute and someone willing to look in your mouth. Testing your house takes a month and a cloth. Neither is a treatment. Both are ways of making sure the treatment can do its job.

This is the third conversation with Dr. Hedaya on this show. The first covered photobiomodulation and laser therapy (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/photobiomodulation-stroke-recovery/). The second covered hormones, thyroid function, and fatigue (https://recoveryafterstroke.com/hormones-and-stroke-recovery-dr-robert-hedaya/). Both are useful companions to this one.

If you want a fuller framework for thinking about recovery, Bill’s book The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened walks through ten tools for recovery and personal transformation. You can find it at https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

And if this show has helped you, you can support it financially at https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

Related links:

Dr. Hedaya’s practice

The post The Things Getting In The Way Of Your Recovery – Dr. Robert Hedaya appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.