I turned off the like notifications a long time ago. It instantly made things much more manageable.
Yes, so much better! 10 notifications instead of 3432432 is great. :D And it doesn't matter if people here like my comments anyway, does it? ;P
This is all really common in people with TBIs.... It's because the part of the brain that regulates emotion has been knocked off kilter. I didn't know about the stealing thing but it's ok to tell him the truth. It's kind of like if you break your arm and then knock something over because you are in a cast. Would you blame yourself? Of course not. You have an injury and it made you clumsy. Same with a TBI. You do stuff because that part of your brain is injured. It is what you have, not who you are.
I probably won't. The fact that I could eventually control the urge was good enough for me. I quit hoarding apple juice cups at the hospital so that was good enough. :laugh:
Seriously, though, I had looked it up at the time and found that it's a thing that people who already had problems dealt with, and people with dementia (which I imagine I'm not a part of that group of people at this point). I looked it up again, and apparently one patient recently got the issue from the brain injury, but the behavior of the man is a lot different from what I had. No gratification and no remorse, like he didn't even know it was wrong in any way.
And if it was just brain injury causing that, then it should get better as my brain heals. Because it's definitely healing. (I'll miss the super power of being young by the time I'm 67.) My vision got a bit worse (when I hit the frontal lobe it hurt the rear lobe) but I can read again without problems. Last time I had to have a robot read MyPTSD posts was more than a month ago. I still have to use filters on my phone at certain hours or else I'll get a headache, but that's not the worst. I still start crying and feeling sad without actually being sad when movies start, but I've gotten to the point where I can control it and not have to worry about other people reacting. I haven't had any strange episodes in movie theaters since 2017ish. So I'd say I'm healing!
It just frustrates me because I know it's wrong and I feel a lot of guilt about it. I'm not being a good person when I cause harm. But, now I've got it switched out with buying things
and feeling the same sort of guilt. I'm not sure what it is exactly. But telling myself I can afford it was not the best way to go apparently. Because technically I can't afford it.
Also, I didn't mention this to my therapist today. We got to talking about what's making writing romance so hard, why I'm closed off to people who want to date, etc. Ended up talking about my mom again. It was an exhausting conversation. Maybe I'll mention it here later, the important bits I might want to explore further anyway.
