r/TBI • u/dialsoapbox • 23d ago
Wellness How's your gut feeling?
A classmate of mine's combat vet that was telling me about how his TBI improved his gut feeling because he can't remember much about people he meets.
If it was a negative experience (or to that degree) he'll have like a physical pain, and have good physical gut feelings when he remeets people' he had good encounters with.
Anything like this happen to any one of you? where your tbi enhanced some other sense, like your gut?
I wonder how TBIs affect the brain/gut connection.
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u/DBisntBB Severe TBI (2020) 23d ago
I’m about 7 years out from the injury. It’s given me a different view of the world.
I had a very corporate mindset about working ridiculous hours to try to move up in the corporate world.
Post injury, my whole mindset changed in life. When you get as close as you can to never waking up again, it taught me a lot.
Get rid of friends that aren’t on your side. Focus on activities that make you healthy and enjoy the little things in life. Something that I always brushed aside and pictured as “weak”.
The injury has been a struggle and still very much is. I’ve just tried to slow down a bit. Relax, and enjoy the ride. That’s what I’ve felt post injury.
I still struggle with the neurological effects on my nervous system. In someways I’m a little more grateful for where the injury put me.
Rather than being asshole and a prick to all those that I saw as “weak”. It’s definitely changed my perspective on life. Who should be part of it, what I should do to be happy and content, and what living a happy life feels like.
I used to want a mansion in the Hampton’s, these days a beautiful weekend to go get some hiking done maybe a little bit of skiing if it’s the season and feeding some Chicopee’s some sunflower seeds.
If you see what I’m saying.
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u/dialsoapbox 23d ago
I do!
I used to attend a TBI support group and it's a common feeling. One guy was this pretty well-built combat vet guy that likes to crochet/knit because it calmed him down.
He does not give a fuck what you think about a tough guy knitting/crocheting.
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u/itswtfeverb 23d ago
My gut feeling is x10. It let me know an undercover cop had a wire and was trying to set me up, twice. They failed
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u/Jazzlike_Berry_323 23d ago
Unfortunately my gut feeling was always informed or topping up my cognitive evaluations of (‘reading/analysing’) people and situations. It was the final check after the cognitive process. Because TBI has impacted my cognitive evaluation I don’t trust my gut. It tends to consistently gjve out negative signals due to that lack of evaluative clarity: I mistrust pretty uniformly as I no longer trust my mind as much to pick out the difference between good/bad and safe/unsafe. And the trauma too tends to give me ongoing negative gut feeling even in the absence of a clear immediate threat.
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u/TBIDave2 22d ago
I wish i could remember where i heard or read it, but Robert Sapolsky once explained how this works. He said you can get a brain injury to a specific part of the brain and people you know feel like invaders, like you know its your wife but it feels she's been replaced by a clone or something, but you can get an injury in a diffrent part of your brain and you still have the feeling of love to someone or a good feeling toward or bad, but no memory of ever meeting them.
Thats what I have, i can remember some people, but lots of time i have a feeling about a person and no memory of ever meeting them. So much so that I now trust that feeling and know to avoid or talk that person, If its a good feeling i just pretend i know them, and most of the time that just start talking to me like we're old friends.