Author page: Anthony Aquan-Assee

Spirituality and trauma are interconnected. Spiritual practices can help build resilience when healing from a trauma which in turn supports spiritual growth. Trauma looks and feels different for everyone as our lives are very unique. Spirituality is the belief in one's own higher power and it has to do…

When your life changes because of a Brain Injury you search desperately for anything that will help. Your life has changed so drastically and you feel that you have lost everything that was important to you. You feel lost and terrified. Everything that you used to know has changed or is gone, and you don’t…

Guiseppe Penone is an Italian artist and sculptor, known for his large-scale sculptures of trees. In the attached picture, Guiseppe Penone carves out a young tree with an older tree to reveal its past, showing us what once grew inside so that it may now “live in the present.” I am really interested…

There is a lot of attention on the Olympic games. Rightfully so as these athletes have all trained very hard to cope with some extreme challenges.  Many brain injury Survivors might also feel as if they have had to compete in an Olympic final every day since they sustained a brain injury.  Similar to an Olympic…

“Some days you feel so-so, and some days you feel downright awful.  But you wade through those days to get to the one or two days a week that satisfy you.” Our physical world is made up of energy that is carried by repeating patterns called waves. A wave will transfer energy from one…

True nobility to a Brain Injury Survivor is being better than their previous self. The dedication, commitment, and the hard work needed to recover is often invisible and unknown to most others . Brain Injury Survivors may share some of the following similarities to an Olympic Athlete in training. ****Note: Please share if you think…

I had a terrible sleep last night. I only got 3 broken hours of sleep so obviously I woke up feeling horrible. My neuropsychologist suggested I try "grounding" to help me feel better in the morning and to help me with my sleep. After I did my "grounding" this morning, I felt an almost immediate…

It is unfortunate that society has an obsession with things such as "the best looking", "the wealthiest", "the smartest", "the most educated", etc. The constant exposure to perfection in the media may have a negative impact on someone's self-esteem. We survivors are at risk for comparing ourselves to others who have what we "think" we…

A Brain Injury is an invisible disability.  The term disability includes a wide variety of conditions.  The Ontario Human Rights Commission states that a “disability may be the result of combination of impairments” and it is also something that is the result of barriers in our society, including the physical environment, people’s attitudes and other…

It has been 24 years since my near-death experience where I sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and lay in a deep coma for two weeks.  I also sustained numerous life-threatening internal injuries which led my neurosurgeon as well as the other doctors to tell my parents that there was no hope for my survival. …