FROM THE NEST | Issue 12

He doesn't care if he stumbles anymore. And that changed everything.

ROB'S CORNER

My job was simple.

Communicate. Articulate. Use the right words at the right level with the right people. When you are teaching at the doctoral level, when you are the most capable person in the room, when your entire professional identity is built on your ability to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment, communication is not a skill. It is who you are.

And then the disease took it.

Not all at once. That would have almost been easier. It came in pieces, and for a long time I hid it. If I could not find the words, I stopped talking and just did the job. Watch what I am doing. Now repeat it. I do not have to say a word. Nobody has to know. I turned the speech difficulties into frustration, into intensity, into authority. I shut my mouth and did the procedure. And it worked. For a while.

But you cannot hide forever. Not from the disease and not from the person standing next to you every day who sees everything.

There is an event coming up in July. Veterans. A room full of people who understand what it means to be the most capable person in any given situation and then not be. I said yes. Not because I am back to what I was. I am not. But if I hide behind what I used to be, I am not growing. I am not helping anybody. And I am certainly not being honest.

It is what it is. I know where I have been and I know where I am now. If I stumble, they will know why. And maybe that is exactly the point.

-- Rob Robbins

HEATHER'S TRANSLATION

A few weeks ago I would not have predicted that sentence.

Rob spent years making sure nobody in any room ever had reason to question his competence. That is not ego. That is identity. When you are trained to be the most capable person in an austere environment, when lives have literally depended on your ability to communicate under fire, the idea of stumbling over a word in public is not embarrassing. It is a threat to everything you understand yourself to be.

So he hid. Brilliantly. In the way that only someone very intelligent and very trained can hide something. And I watched it, and I knew, and there was nothing I could do except stay close and wait.

What changed was not the disease getting better. It did not. What changed was something the research calls post-traumatic growth. Not recovery. Not acceptance in the greeting card sense of the word. Something harder and more specific than that. A rebuilding of identity around what is actually true, rather than what used to be true.

Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun spent decades documenting this process. They found it in caregivers. They found it in patients. They found it in people who survived things they did not think they could survive. What Rob said today, that he does not care anymore if he stumbles because now they know why, is in the literature. It has a name. And it does not require the hard thing to be over before it starts.

We just published a full video and companion article on this. It is Video 4 in our series We Have to Tell What's Happening. The research is in there, cited and linked, because that is what we do.

We are also launching a five-part short video series this month called What Caregiving Does. It covers the bad, the documented, and the formidable. Starting July 7.

All of it is free. All of it is peer-reviewed. All of it was built for people in rooms like the one Rob is going to walk into in July.

-- Heather Robbins

THE MEDICAL FACT

Post-traumatic growth is a documented psychological phenomenon first defined by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at the University of North Carolina Charlotte in the 1990s. It describes positive psychological change that emerges from the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. It is not the absence of distress. It coexists with grief, loss, and ongoing difficulty.

Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five domains where growth most commonly appears: personal strength, new possibilities, relating to others, appreciation of life, and spiritual or existential change.

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology tracking patients with multiple sclerosis and their caregivers over 36 months found that both patients and caregivers showed measurable post-traumatic growth across all five domains. The growth was parallel. It happened to both people navigating the same disease.

PTG is not a personality trait or a choice. The research describes it as a process, one that unfolds over time, often without the person recognizing it is happening until they find themselves saying something they would not have said a year ago.

Like: I do not care anymore if I stumble. Because now they know why.

Source: Tedeschi, R.G. and Calhoun, L.G. Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 2004. Goretti et al. Frontiers in Psychology, 2022. PMC9260691.

WANT TO GO DEEPER?

If this landed somewhere close to home, these resources are here when you are ready.

Watch: What We Become | Post-Traumatic Growth and the Caregiver's Hidden Transformation
​https://robbinsnestalliance.com/blogs/the-nesting-journal-1/what-we-become-post-traumatic-growth-caregiver​

Watch the full series: We Have to Tell What's Happening
​https://robbinsnestalliance.com​

Caregiver Support at Robbins Nest Alliance
​https://robbinsnestalliance.com/pages/caregivers​

Browse the RNA Shop
​https://robbinsnestalliance.com/pages/shop​

Robbins Nest Alliance provides free, peer-reviewed caregiver education across neurological conditions. If someone in your life needs this, forward it. That is how we grow.

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