Going Home Too Early

In my experience, survivors are still the person they were before the injury, it is just that the combination of traits that gave them what we would call their personality, has been thrown out of balance. That balance was the result of a lifetime of work by parents, friends and self. That throwing out of balance too often results in an amplification of negative traits, magnified by the frustration and sense of loss felt by the survivor.

The process of rehabilitation is not creating a whole new person, but trying to bring those traits back into balance, and finding ways to compensate for new deficits. One reason that I am so vocal against the tendency to return the survivor home too early, especially to a spouse, is that retuning the balance, in face of the frustration and anger felt by the survivor, is harder than molding the healthy mind was the first time. While we cannot take another lifetime to recreate that balance, if we miscalculate the pace of the retuning, the consequences to the marriage and ultimately to the survivor, can be catastrophic.