TBI Support: Survivor Based Traumatic Brain Injury Support

TBI Support: Craig Part Twenty Four 

Craig goes on to say how important TBI support can be and how much trouble he had finding TBI support from other survivors.

Not A Lot of TBI Support

You went through this period of some down times and writings and music, then what?

In 2006 is when I started looking for peer  TBI support because, there wasn’t a lot of it.   But I’ve seen peer support and that’s what helped, when you saw the peer support.

I had a friend and she had a crush on me and, thank God, she had bipolar, or some fear of bipolar disorder and then I could relate a little to her believe it or not.   So I started looking for another survivor.  That was the first thing.  I was, God, there’s got to be somebody else out there like me.

Craig Finds TBI Support on Craig’s List

I remember just looking at Craig’s List (for TBI support) at and a lot of weird people come out of those Craig’s List.  I’m telling you it was just the most interesting process, but I remember Gloria is her first name, the first gal I met.  I could see it in her face.  I don’t know how I could describe it.  I could just see that she had something similar going on.  It was about the same length of time.   We didn’t have everything in common, but we could relate to what was going on. So I  kept it going, put an ad in the paper and within a couple of months we had 50 people coming to this thing.

 Craig Finds TBI Support In Newspaper

I remember the newspaper because when we did the TBI Act.  They said he claims to have met up to 100 survivors (for TBI support).  If I could see that guy right (the reporter) now.  I mean, I don’t know how many, I’ve met thousands and thousands. I mean, there’s millions of us out there.

That’s where I met Dr. Wayne Gordon at Mount Sinai.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with him?

New York City?

            Yes.

Before our break, you were about meeting Wayne Gordon?

Yeah, and there is a book called Moving On and that’s what they all go back to. Tommy Manning was one of the first other advocates that I met over on the other side.  Through him I met a gal named Penny Condyle, she’s my, partner, more or less, partner in crime, in a lot of what I do.

She’s the peacekeeper, she has a little more common sense than I do.    I still have a problem with people that say one thing and do something else and, and I cannot say it I have to I have to call a turd a turd, and that’s just what I do.   And that gets me more trouble, more times than not. So politically, I let her handle the political end of it and I’ll put it off and I’ll let her deal with it because, politically it all has to work together.  You don’t necessarily always have to call something what it is.

So she’s real good at that.  It’s when we really started growing, creating TBI support group grants, we give some grants out, through the few contracts we have.

Then we found this Moving On.  It’s personal’s future planning for people with brain injury. We talked with them for awhile and he gave me permission to readapt it, and so I rewrote the curriculum.   I still called it Moving On, and gave him credit because it was basically based on what he was doing, but I just needed to adapt it.

When you say he?

Wayne, Wayne Gordon and Beth, his wife.   It was actually rewritten from a developmental disability thing and they rewrote it, and so I took that and  rewrote it to fit the needs that I had with specific populations.  We used it here, on the college level. I’ve used it in the high school level, and I’ve used it on community levels.  So there’s three different versions.

It’s basically just coming up with that initial plan:  Who am I?  Where do I see myself? Where do I want to go?  Just kind of like England would do, just kind of a plan in life, figuring that you don’t get from Point A to Point B without planning it, everything that goes with that – TBI support, doctors, and all that.

So we helped people for a couple years with that process – great process, but then all of a sudden people started graduating that program.  So this year I came out with a new product, it’s called Moving In.

So it’s Moving On and Moving In?

Now it’s Moving In, right.   That one I’m the author of  but I based it on some work I did with a couple practicum students,   that were working with Dr. Judd.  He did a TBI study, which was pretty good, and I used a lot of it. Wayne Gordon’s pretty brilliant, people don’t know how brilliant he is.  He’s done the homeless studies, the mentor program over in New York.  So I’m looking around, who does done good things, and there’s really been some good things done over the years, but they’ve all fallen apart because of money.  It comes down to money and they can’t sustain  them.

So the Moving In is where you’re at, at a certain point, you’re going to get, you might cognitively get better, you might mature or whatever. But you have to accept who you are and make the best of what you have and that’s what that is.  I mean, you may not be able to do what you did, but what do you want to do, what do you like now?

Next in Part Twenty Five – Overview of Craig’s TBI Advocacy