Free weekly newsletter for caregivers navigating brain injury, CTE, dementia, Parkinson's, and PTSD. Real information. Peer-reviewed. From people who've been where you are.
We did become someone else. Here's who.
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FROM THE NEST | Issue 15 We did become someone else. Here's who. ROB'S CORNER I want to tell you something about the Veterans Expo. I said yes. Not because I am back to what I was. I am not going to pretend that. But I have spent enough time hiding behind what I used to be, and it has not helped anybody. Not me. Not the guy in the back of the room who came but does not want to be seen. I know that guy. I was that guy. For years. He is not going to be reached by statistics or by someone standing at a podium telling him what his diagnosis means. He is going to be reached by someone who has been where he is and is willing to say it out loud in a room full of people without flinching. I cannot promise my words will come out right. I cannot promise I will not stumble. But I can promise that whatever comes out will be true. And I think that is what that room needs more than anything I could have offered it before the disease. The disease took a lot from me. But it gave me this. The ability to walk into a room without armor and still be useful. I did not see that coming. -- Rob Robbins HEATHER'S TRANSLATION This month we launched a five-part short video series called What Caregiving Does. We covered the mortality research. The cellular aging data. The social isolation studies. The identity erosion that researchers call foreclosure. And then we ended with the one thing the research also documents that almost nobody talks about in caregiver spaces. We do become someone else. And if you let the process do what it does, that someone is formidable. I want to be clear about what that does not mean. It does not mean the hard things were worth it. It does not mean you owe anyone gratitude for your suffering. It does not mean you have arrived at some resolved and peaceful place where the grief no longer shows up uninvited. What it means is that the research, across hundreds of peer-reviewed studies spanning decades and multiple trauma populations, documents something growing inside the damage. Strength you did not ask for. Clarity you could not have bought. A version of yourself that could not have been built any other way. Rob walked into our living room a few weeks ago and sat with GR Zuniga, a 2025 Elizabeth Dole Foundation Fellow and his brother, a fellow veteran, for three and a half hours of raw conversation. Last week he said yes to speaking at a Veterans Expo in front of a room full of people he has never met. This week he told me that the thing he grew the most from caregiving was trust. Specifically, trusting me. I have been his caregiver for decades. I have been called a liar by a brain that could not help it. I have sat in the driveway and wondered if I was the problem. And I am sitting here today watching him choose to walk into rooms without armor. That is post-traumatic growth. Not the absence of everything that came before it. All of that is still true. But this is also true. At the same time. Both things. Always both things. -- Heather Robbins THE MEDICAL FACT The five domains of post-traumatic growth identified by Tedeschi and Calhoun are personal strength, new possibilities, relating to others, appreciation of life, and spiritual or existential change. In a 2023 meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin reviewing 122 studies across multiple trauma populations, researchers found that PTG was consistently associated with active meaning-making, social support, and time since the traumatic event. It was not associated with the severity of the trauma itself. The hardest experiences did not produce the most growth. The most supported and meaning-directed responses to hard experiences did. That finding has direct implications for caregivers. The variable is not how bad it gets. The variable is what surrounds you while it is happening. Who knows your situation. Who tells you the truth. Who stays. This is why RNA exists. Not to make caregiving easier, because we cannot do that. But to make sure that the people navigating it have accurate information, real community, and the clinical evidence that what they are experiencing has a name, has been studied, and has a documented trajectory that does not end at the hardest part. You are not at the end of your story. The research says so. Sources: Tedeschi, R.G. and Calhoun, L.G. Psychological Inquiry, 2004. Meyerson, D.A. et al. The relationship between post-traumatic growth and resilience. Psychological Bulletin, 2011. Prati, G. and Pietrantoni, L. Optimism, social support, and coping strategies as factors contributing to post-traumatic growth. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 2009. WANT TO GO DEEPER? If this landed somewhere close to home, these resources are here when you are ready. Watch the full PTG series: What Caregiving Does Watch: What We Become | Post-Traumatic Growth and the Caregiver's Hidden Transformation Caregiver Support at Robbins Nest Alliance Brain Injury 101: Start Here Browse the RNA 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. robbinsnestalliance.com |
Heather at Robbins Nest Alliance
Free weekly newsletter for caregivers navigating brain injury, CTE, dementia, Parkinson's, and PTSD. Real information. Peer-reviewed. From people who've been where you are.
FROM THE NEST | Issue 16 The glue was dry. All of it. ROB'S CORNER She came upstairs and it only took one look to know she was mad. I was still waking up. I had no idea what had happened downstairs. I asked her what was wrong. She told me. I did long blinks. I want to be clear that I understood every single word she said. I also understood that laughing would have been the worst decision I had made in recent memory. And I have made some bad decisions recently. She hobbled out. I did more long...
FROM THE NEST | Issue 14 Your brain is still working. So are you. ROB'S CORNER World Brain Day. I have a complicated relationship with that phrase. When you spend your career in medicine, when you teach at the doctoral level, when your entire professional identity is built on a brain that performed under conditions most people will never encounter, being told your brain is the problem is a specific kind of loss. But here is what I have learned, and I did not learn it easily. The brain that...
FROM THE NEST | Issue 13 He didn't believe me. For years. And his brain was not lying to him. That is the part nobody tells you. ROB'S CORNER Trust was everything in my world before this. In special operations you trust the man next to you with your life. Not because you like him. Because you have verified him. You have watched him perform under pressure. You have seen what he does when everything goes wrong. Trust in that environment is not given. It is earned through evidence. And then the...