Does Faith Serve a Purpose After Brain Injury?

Source: Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy

A few years ago, a presenter asked the members of the Brain Injury Society of Toronto to raise their hands if they believed in God or a higher power. Most raised their hands. The presenter asked the same question of those who provide health care to people with brain injury. Most did not raise their hands. I found that interesting. And it may explain why faith is not part of the discussion with most health care providers unless they, too, believe in God and/or attend religious services.

“When they are able to engage their religious and spiritual selves, they do tend to feel better, function better, and actually live better and live longer than those people who are not religious and spiritual ... The medical establishment needs to look at this data, try to understand it better, and try to find ways of helping patients to better engage a side of themselves that might be very valuable for their overall health and well-being.” –Dr. Andrew Newberg, The Spiritual Brain, Great Courses.

Recovering from brain injury is more than relearning to walk and read, it’s also about finding your new identity, discovering a new or renewed purpose, trying to create meaning out of catastrophic suffering so that one can thrive again. Faith undergirds the latter.

The question "Why?" threads its insistent way through endless days of diagnosis and treatments and beyond. The question first whispers with a feeling of being in a surreal place. This cannot be happening. Then when you grasp that the brain injury is real, that it actually happened, you still cannot understand it because the fundamental question of "Why?" shouts aloud yet remains unanswered. Faith is about answering that question—or at least grappling with it.

We grow up with the idea of working at a certain job or developing certain skills or exploiting our talents. Underlying all of those is the idea of purpose. It really doesn’t matter what the job is as long as you have a sense that it’s important to who you are. What one person may consider menial, another will take great pride in the opportunity of serving the needs of the community well. What one person may consider hoity-toity, another feels their own personal desires being fulfilled. What one person may consider too difficult, another may relish the opportunity to challenge their skills and talents.

Brain injury rips away jobs, skills, talents, relationships, identity—and purpose. Waldron-Perrine noted in their study "Religion and spirituality in rehabilitation outcomes among individuals with traumatic brain injury" that:

“Little research, however, has investigated how various elements of the religious and spiritual belief systems affect rehabilitation outcomes. The present study sought to assess the use of specifically defined elements of religion and spirituality as psychosocial resources in a sample of traumatically brain injured adults.”

Waldron-Perrine et al's study in 2011 of mostly African-American men with brain injury and their knowledgeable significant others, found that “specific facets of religious and spiritual belief systems do play direct and unique roles in predicting rehabilitation outcomes whereas religious activity does not.”

The personal connection with a higher power robustly predicted subjective and objective rehabilitation outcomes. This connection improved life satisfaction, reduced distress, and predicted better functional outcome—the same things that Dr. Newberg found in the research studies he reviewed in his course The Spiritual Brain.

This doesn't surprise me, for the opposite of faith, the idea of randomness of chance, itches like an unsatisfactory wound healing.

I believe that unearthing meaning out of suffering strengthens adaptability. Feeling like the butt end of random chance distresses much more than grieving the suffering concomitant to leaning on faith to find a way to bring good out of it. Faith provides a kind of internal social support that drives you through the heartache of rehabilitation and recovery in order to get to where you can create good out of the bad. Thinking about the purpose of the journey lifts the focus from how the injury happened to how to keep recovering while making the present as meaningful as possible. Even if the present is only about attending one medical appointment then resting on the couch the rest of the day, it has meaning when seen as one step in the journey to creating good out of the bad.

A 2018 Craig Hospital blog post discussed nurturing spirituality after brain injury to help patients move from bereavement to belonging:

“Often, we see patients go one of two ways after their injury—they turn toward their spirituality or they begin to question it. Neither is right or wrong; it’s all a part of the journey,” says Candi Boyd, MDiv., Chaplain at Craig Hospital. “I tell patients, ‘You are where you are. Let’s work with it and pay attention to it, but most importantly, let’s find your center.’”

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Questioning in faith leads to discovery about yourself, your relationship with a higher power, and how that’s reflected in personal relationships. Faith provides no judgment. Faith provides love when all else abandons. It teaches you to ask who you want to be and suggests that perhaps this is a chance to remold yourself mindfully. Wrestling with faith, asking "Why?" and "What’s the purpose?", helps you unearth your new identity. Or maybe it helps you endure a changing identity because questioning becomes part of life and thus your identity.

When health care professionals invite discussions of faith and weave their medical care and prescriptions (from exercise to medications to brain biofeedback) into their patients’ expressed faith, they’ll improve the quality of life and functionality of people with brain injury.

Copyright ©2021 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy. May not be reprinted or reposted without permission.