S10E19: Difference between Rehabilitation & Recovery.

Hello my beautiful survivors, how are you? This is Karina, the host and creator behind Stroke Surviving the Odds, the podcast. The mission of the show is really to help you move forward past the events of the stroke. Reclaim your life, reclaim your identity and everything that follows. You see, 27 years ago I suffered a brain stem dissection that led me to coma in the Locton Syndrome. Evidently, I am here today sharing everything I have learned throughout these years that are going to help you survive this world as a stroke survivor. So I urge you to grab a pen and paper because the faintness I think is better than the best memory. Come and join me here as we are recording today's show. I'd like to do a little bit of

clean house before we get started and remind you that we have audio podcasts on Spotify, iTunes, Apple and Google Podcasts. Those are episodes that are published weekly. If not one, there's two episodes and I urge you to download download those episodes. That way you're going to be able to re listen or listen all together to the episode while you're while you are recuperating yourself. I also want to tell you that once a week I have amazing guests about everything and anything under the moon concerning stroke surviving.

OK, not just stories, but really conducive help for you guys. So that is going to be on YouTube. That is rather on YouTube. So remember to subscribe that way you are never going to miss an episode. How you subscribe very easy. You hit that bell. You know I have a lot of free resources for you guys.

I really vowed to help stroke survivors everywhere. Back then I had no support. There was no social media, no podcast. My social worker at the time didn't even have a stroke herself. She was an amazing caregiver, amazing support for me, yes, but nothing like what what Ioffer and what is out there today.

So take advantage of those free resources I'm offering you. I have lives and master classes on my group on Facebook under the same name. Stroke Surviving the odds of the podcast. Ioffer all my stories. Ioffer bits and bits and informations all the time. I try to make everything as helpful as possible so take advantage of that. And I have tons of different PDFs, Example PDF on emotional ways to save emotional energy, which is extremely important as stroke survivors.

I have another PDF for the people pleasers out there, one that gives you 20 different ways you can say no politely without ruffling any feathers, without upsetting anybody, but you are politely saying no. Take advantage of that guys. Also make sure that you share the podcast you share. That way the algorithm knows that we are helping and we are a movement that is here to stay because we're helping everybody around the world. How very easy, you guys.

Without you, Oh my gosh, I would not be existing. The show would not be here. My mission would not be to help. So thank you. So how do you help more people around the world? By sharing because now the top five podcasts, yes guys, we are in the top five. So that is an amazing accomplishment. I'm just the voice behind this. You guys move me forward.

Thank you. And before we officially go for real guys, real, real, real, I'm sure that you hear a little munchies or stuff behind me. My sidekick, my Yorkie, is literally, if he could be on the mic, he would be. He's a very vocal Dong. And right now he's eating his toys, so I'm sure you're bound to hear him.

His name is Einstein. Yes, he's named after Albert Einstein, 'cause he's just that intelligent. All right, all that is said and done, we are going to get into today's shop. What I want to do is return to basic when I first started ten seasons ago. That's amazing by itself guys, 'cause when I started, I had no clue how to podcast. I still, I know how to podcast, but I still don't know how to edit.

And this is proof that you really don't need to know something perfectly to do it. I thought one or two seasons we are down Season 10, we're halfway into it actually. That's over 250 episodes. That's crazy, guys. For me, that's unimaginable. So thank you. You are really keeping me going. The show, everything I do on social media to help the community is really giving me the energy to just keep going. I get inspired all the time by everything. It's crazy, crazy, crazy.

So like I said at the very beginning, I gave in Season 1. What I did is I gave you my story. Of course, you needed to know who I am. You needed to know where I came from. I'm not an Angel that fell from the sky. No, no, no. So I had to give you a little bit of my background. So I thought I would go back to that very briefly. And then we are going to go back to the basic, which are the 3A's and you'll get what I'm talking about. South.

Many moons ago I explained that I had a beautifully, beautifully traumatic childhood. I'm trying to be sarcastic here. There was a lot of generational trauma out there and a lot of obviously not only the stroke, but then I got divorced and there was a lot of stress out there. And my second husband, a great guy, but he had one problem, like so many others in my family, he was an alcoholic.

So I ended up going to Alcoholics Anonymous. And by any means, am I affiliated or promoting? This is my journey here, my podcast, my journey. All I'm doing here is I'm sharing with you guys in the hopes that when I say it helps, I'm always recommending that you take my story and bits and pieces and you turn it into your own story. How can it benefit you?

That's all I care about you. How can my story help you? So I ended up going to Al Anon, which is for family and friends of alcoholic people. So it's the sober version of a A, if you will. And I learned a lot. And like everything else that I do, I got very implicated. So I went through years of therapy.

I now am a stroke survivor in love with an alcoholic for 16 years. And I'm at the end of my thing and this is this is my journey. So I'm going to AAI call it a a. Anyway, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I get so involved that they asked me to be a speaker. Of course, in true Karina fashion, sure, no problem because I love talking. I love the public and I, I just said yes. Well, all week I know the meeting is Wednesday. So from Wednesday to Wednesday I'm going about my life and every day I'm thinking, what am I going to talk about? What am I going to talk about?

God knows I have a lot to talk about. What am I going to talk about? Then I'm in my car literally the day before. Was it the day before or the day of? I think it was the morning of. I'm on the highway and I get this, all of a sudden, this brain like, oh, this, this, this epiphany. I love you, Einstein. I love you, baby.

I get this epiphany and all of a sudden it comes clear what I need to talk about. So when I got home, I sat in my living room with a coffee and I wrote down not my whole stories, but bits and pieces of my stories. And I found out that my life had seven stories at that time in it. So that was great.

But now I needed to turn it into how have I become? How did I become so undeniably confident? Still scared, but I had balls of steel. I still have balls of steels, by the way. That means I'm not scared of anything. I'm not afraid of failure. I'm not afraid of many, many things. So I'm looking at this and I'm saying, OK, what are the common denominators in my personal story, in all the things in the physical abuse, the emotional abandonment, sexual abuse, the, I don't know, man, the different types of abuse that was going on in my life.

What is the common denominator? What are the common denominators? And it's so funny because as I'm asking myself, other than God, other than my spirit, what helped me get through each and every one of these phases? So today that's what I'm going to be talking about. So I'd like to call it the three A's, the first A that helped me go from one challenge to the next and conquer it to the best of my own ability. And this is when I would like for you to take your pen and paper out.

The first one is acknowledge. A lot of people out there are in denial. A lot of people out there don't want to remember. The memory is very, very intricate. In your mind, you go through something traumatic, something disgusting, something. How can I say the brain is going to put it on the back burners as far as it can in the back of your brain?

And that creates denial. Some people believe it never happened because it's so far behind. There's so much fear involved. And the brain is another thing. The brain doesn't know, doesn't get the notion of time. It doesn't know if something, if a trauma happened 40 years ago or 5 minutes ago, the brain doesn't get it.

Therefore, your bodily reaction, your emotional reaction, your energetic reaction, your nervous system does not know. So it's going to react exactly the same as it did back then. So when we are in denial, we are only prolonging, but we're going to talk about that after. OK, So I realize that. How did I come about acknowledging I always knew nothing was my fault and I always knew also that I was not a victim. I just had something terrible happened to me many times and I realized that I can do something about it. I even have a girlfriend.

We went out to dinner with five girls. I don't know how the conversation turned. That was just about before I made the podcast, before I started. So I'm going out to dinner with five girls and I don't know how the conversation turns, but it turns into sexual abuse. Who got abused out of five, three of us, That's more than 50%.

And at the end of the dinner, one of my friends come up to me and it was very symbolic what she said. It was symbolic in my life because that's when I realized that my story could help others. She came to me and she says, oh, geez, Karina, thank you so much. It says if you didn't bring the subject or if you didn't talk about it, I never would have.

I would have been too ashamed. And I don't want anybody to know. But we were just us around the table, and it felt comfortable. That's when I realized not only was I touched and humbled by her trusting me or trusting the group and opening up and feeling better at the end of the dinner, but it also made me realize that I have a voice of so many millions of people out there. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So why would my story be held back if it can actually help out, comfort other people and make them advance in their emotional journey?

And that's when my podcast was born. I think the week after when I I went home, I thought I thought, and then boom, it just came. I always wanted a podcast. I always wanted to do something on on. I don't know what it was video TVI don't know, but and I always wanted to help people. Always. I my first in high school, like the first job I wanted to do, my career I had chosen, believe it or not, as a social worker, I wanted to help people right from my young age.

So here I am in my mid 40s, going to an Al Anon meeting, sharing my story. What the hell am I going to talk about? And then this big ah, the heavens open and I know. So the common denominator, number one, that helped me go through challenge over challenge over challenge. Write this down, acknowledge equals, don't be in denial. Sounds good one now.

Ah, the second one is going to be hard, guys, You're going to have a hard time with this one. Some of you are going to have their feathers ruffled and you're going to be a little like, oh, Karina, no, you're going to Grinch your teeth, but I don't care. I'm saying it anyways. Except, yeah, now that you've acknowledged, you have to accept that shit happened. Very, very bad shit happens and you can cry all you want. You can be upset.

You can relive every time you decide to put that memory behind you, or every time you decide to even bring it back up front. You have to accept that it is what it is. It's not your fault. It sucks. Your body is going to be active exact same way it did back then. You're still going to have knots in your stomach like I have right now, even though I'm telling you guys this and I feel it in my body, but I don't care. I don't care.

So how does this relate to the stroke? Hmm. Guys, very easily, I think the number one thing that stroke survivors e-mail me about or reach out to me or talk in different groups on Facebook and different social medias, the number one thing that is most difficult to do is acceptance. We don't want to accept.

It's it's normal. It is so normal, guys, for you not feeling like you want to accept because you hate it so much, you sow this, please call it whatever you want, but hating something that happened is not going to make it not happen. You get that? And let me repeat, hating something so bad is not going to make it not happen.

It happened, it's done. The question is right now, my love, what are you going to do with it? What you resist? Persist if you can't accept and you will not accept for XY and Z reason, you are only prolonging the pain. I had a social worker telling me this Sabina and and and she had to drill it in my head at the beginning, even though I was OK emotionally, I was upset, but I was OK because I was accepting the event.

I was accepting of how I was after the stroke. And the social worker said to me when the pain of remaining the same is greater than pain, you will change. That means, very simply, it's painful the process of changing, but it's more painful not to change. Does that make sense? I'm talking about over 25 years of therapy here. I'm sharing this with you guys so you don't have to go through the turmoil and the anguish that I had to go through. And I know you will.

I know logically you're a stroke survivor and I know how you're feeling, but I don't want you to hold on to it as long as you might have had. Letting go of something is accepting. Accepting is not giving in. Accepting is not giving up. Accepting is understanding that it is what it is for the time being.

The operative word is for the time being. OK, now last a when you can't have change, guys, write this down. We acknowledge, we accept, and then we take action. You cannot change if you don't have action. If you don't do something, anything, you will never know if it's good or bad until you do it. But you cannot have change without action. These are the three common denominators that helped me move forward from my life.

There's there's no, there's no bigger story. I gave you everything I have right now. The episode today is going to be a bit longer because we returned to basic and I want to make sure that you guys know why I'm saying what I'm saying. OK, So every single thing that you might be feeling that I know you are feeling totally normal.

Absolutely. Can you do something about it? Absolutely. Yes. OK, the choice is yours, the decision is yours. Acknowledge, accept and action. Those are the 3A's. OK, today's episode, like I said, was a bit longer and really packed to the Max, but I don't care because you're the best and I know you can take it. And if you have to listen to the episode in two different sessions, I don't care.

I really don't. All I want is my message to come across and for you to learn a little something from it and just try. I mean, listen, if it works for me, there's no reason why it will not work for you, right? So give it a try, see what happens and worst case scenario, it didn't happen, but at least you took action.

Sounds like a plan guys. This is what I have for you today. Make sure you like, follow, subscribe on YouTube, download your podcasts, and you can comment and leave me personal DMS on my Facebook group. Stroke surviving the odds. I'm going to leave you all my credentials in the description. That being said, I really love you.

S10E19: Difference between Rehabilitation & Recovery.

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