This is a part of the Hot Topic podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center on Relationships After TBI. Hugh Rawlins, TBI Survivor, discusses Thoughts on Going to a Relationship Counselor.

I never had been to a counselor before and going to Dr. Kreutzer I didn’t have a problem with because he was a counselor, I had more of a problem going to what I call the, I’m trying to think, psychiatrist waiting for them to do the typical, you know, lay down on the couch, all that you see in the TVs. That bothered me more than going to see Dr. Kreutzer, because when I first met him was doing the neuro psych eval so he was a lot more, he wasn’t thinking of okay, lay down, I’m going to analyze all your stuff. So it was a lot more realistic, down to earth.

I basically knew what I’d had before but I had never stopped and analyzed it. And not that Dr. Kreutzer bit it apart, chopped it apart, excuse me, we were just talking about some different things that we had to do due to this injury, and again living more in the here and now and going forward, because he effectively was saying is what you had before is what you had before, but you have to really shape what you have now and moving forward. And because we had that affection from previous we were able to do that and kind of put it together now so we can see where we’re going in the future.

The sessions were great. They were invaluable because it was something that somebody was making us both work on together. And so we could talk about the different things and again move forward with it. So it was I’m going to say foremost in our minds of how we were doing things, how we were communicating.

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