This is a part of podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center discussing emotional challenges after a traumatic burn injury (TBI). In this segment, Dr. Dawn Neumann discusses managing emotions after TBI. 

If you are having trouble managing your emotions. It's going to impact your life in every way possible, your own personal life, and how you're able to cope throughout a day and just getting extremely frustrated with whatever it is that you encounter and not necessarily having the tolerance to deal with just little things that get thrown at you throughout the day, all of a sudden become such an extreme event and kind of just adjusting and coming back from that. But then if you think about how somebody with the brain injury who has emotional problems, our emotions affect our behaviors, and which what that means is that it's going to affect how we are interacting with other people, and that can just turn relationships upside down. We so often hear from patients and family members is that this person used to be so loving and so kind, and now all of a sudden this person is very different and I'm walking on eggshells being around this person.  

I don't know what to do and I don't want to be around this person. And when you have that type of situation that is so uncertain, when you don't know that somebody's going to blow up or how they're going to react to a situation, what you do is you tend to isolate yourself because you can't trust necessarily what is going to happen. And if it's not you that's isolating yourself from others, well, it's your friends and family members that are going to start pulling away and isolating themselves from you because they don't necessarily want to be around somebody that is angry and aggressive. It also has an impact on getting back to work. If you think about it, you have to know how to manage your emotions at work. And if you are going to explode at a customer or your boss, that's not going to go over very well, and that is one of the major the things that can prevent or hinder somebody from getting back to work.  

Visit https://msktc.org/tbi and get the answers you need from experts who conduct innovative and high-quality research, provide patient care, and work to improve the health and overall quality of life for people with traumatic brain injury. That’s https://msktc.org/tbi.