You Disappear

I wish that this site had been available to me when my husband was first injured. I was warned at the hospital that there could be some personality changes, but no one told me what kind of personality changes to look for. The man who returned home from the hospital was so totally different from the man that I had married. Although he was no angel before the closed head injury, at least he had some degree of a conscience and a little bit of empathy. After the injury, he showed almost no emotion, unless it was extreme frustration and rage. His thinking became very concrete, yet his ability to function in a highly technical job seemed to get better. In other areas of functioning, he demonstrated poor judgment, poor impulse control, sexual disinhibition, reckless spending, a general disregard for others, lack of conscience, lack of remorse, zero empathy, etc.

I never understood what was going on, but did the best I could to hold the family together and give our life some semblance of being normal for thirteen years. We even had another child during that time. He tried to parent but simply couldn't sustain the effort and soon began to not only neglect this child, but also put him in extremely dangerous situations, almost as if he wanted an accident to happen. He also had outbursts of rage.

He is the one who left the marriage. The separation occurred when I told him that he needed to see a psychiatrist. I realize now that it was probably a neurologist that he needed. His behaviors and the way he was treating our youngest child was so dangerous that I had to set limits. I had been walking on eggshells so as not to set him off for thirteen years since his injury, but when it comes to protecting a child, a wife has to speak up.

Marital separation and divorce was probably every bit as difficult as being married to a man with the type of post-head injury symptoms, but I look back and realize that he did us a favor when he walked out. He rarely took advantage of the visitation privileges he had with our son. Was this because he realized that he wasn't capable of parenting effectively or was it because he simply didn't want to parent? Things would have been better if he had agreed to work with a psychiatrist or neurologist, but since he was not willing to do this, it was better for him to leave.

At first, after a job colleague who was also a psychologist showed me a list of symptoms associated with a specific type of head injury, I was angry at not being given more specific information by his doctor about the behavioral symptoms that might occur after his head injury. Now I look back and realize that there is no way to predict what kind of behavioral symptoms a TBI patient might develop if any at all. In fact, trying to predict this, and preparing a wife for it, might create a self-fulfilling prophecy or a tendency to look for problems. I think that a type of case management approach that involves some outreach to the family on a yearly basis (or more frequently) would work best. In my ex-husband's situation, these behavioral symptoms became worse over the years. I think that outreach might have led to an intervention that could have prevented all the trauma that I and my children went through.