Healing into Possibility by Alison Bonds Shapiro

Author:Alison Bonds Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781932073300
Publisher: New World Library

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Habituating the Disability

I WAS NOW BEGINNING TO BE ABLE TO FOCUS on something that my friend Stanley Keleman had explained to me: the concept of “learned nonuse.”

Take a look at what you do, and see if you can identify how many habits appear in the space of a few hours. Habits are everywhere. Our bodies can turn anything into a habit. Before the stroke, I invariably put my pants on the same leg first every time. In fact, the habit was so ingrained that I still do it. Right leg first, followed by the left leg. It would be much easier, poststroke, if I did it the other way around. My right leg is more agile than my left, but I still put my pants on the way I’ve always done.

Our bodies and particularly our brains make habits to create efficiencies. We end up with hardwired brain circuits, predictable neural pathways, which are created when we do something over and over again. The brain says, “Oh, good, that action’s solid and useful; I’ll just reinforce it.” While the brain is always remapping itself, teaching it to rewire a working section by challenging a habit takes a while. All of us who’ve tried to change a habit have the experience of how the habit reasserts itself unless we keep our attention on it and keep on trying to change it. The longer the habit persists, the harder it is to change.

The important and powerful thing to know about this is that the body and brain will habituate a disability quickly and will do so over and over again in different ways and different areas. It happens very fast. It’s as if there’s only so much that the brain wants to pay attention to at any one moment, and creating a habit will allow the brain to focus on something else. Creating a habit is a way of not having to pay attention.

That’s what Stanley taught me. When he told me about learned nonuse, I began to watch for it. I saw how it worked. Habituation of the disability is one of the main reasons the statement that you only have a short time to recover is so self-predictive. Tell people they can’t, the body makes a habit of the disability, and then they don’t see themselves as able and they won’t be able. If you don’t take away anything else from this book, please remember this one observation: Our bodies will make a habit of a disability, and it’s up to us to break those habits.

Nobody had told a man I met named George this information about habits. George had had a severe stroke. He worked very hard for a while and made good progress but then ran into a bunch of habits that his body had created. He thought the habits were permanent disabilities. Unfortunately, George believed that his habits and his disability were the same thing. Because he didn’t know he could challenge the habits, he didn’t challenge them and stayed stuck for a long time.

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