Fall(ing) in Love with Yourself: How to Pick up the Pieces after Traumatic Brain Injury

NEW YORK - Sept. 17, 2018 - PRLog -- From Abraham Maslow to researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, science recognizes that trauma can be a teacher. Those who survive adversity and damage can experience what is called post-traumatic growth. With 75% of adults in the U.S. having experienced a trauma at least once in their lives, the need to address the aftermath of trauma is profound. Kate Harvie (www.KateHarvie.com), survivor of a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and author of Believe It and Behave It: How to Restart, Reset, and Reframe Your Life, says, "Whatever the trauma was, recovery is an ongoing experience that requires the survivor to learn from scratch how to, frankly, be again. Women specifically are expected to 'have it together' almost immediately following their release from hospital or treatment, because they are thought to be survivors by nature, genetics, and experience."



Kate Harvie has beat the odds. Today she is a strategist and marketer for Suit & Artist and The Vanderbilt Republic. She relearned how to think, talk, and live on her own after suffering a TBI. Harvie has dedicated herself, post-trauma, to redefining recovery and teaching how we can put the pieces back together better and in ways that work. Kate empowers people to tell their stories with insight, empathy, and advocacy.

The purpose of Harvie'sbook, Believe It and Behave It: How to Restart, Reset and Reframe Your Life, is to provide what she calls an active blueprint to guide and support people as they rebuild. "I decided that the best way for me to help people was to be as blunt as possible, because in my candor there was clarity. And when we are who we truly are, everything is possible," declares Kate.


5 Tips for Surviving and Thriving after Trauma by Kate Harvie:



1)  Asking for help is not a weakness: it's a step forward. Knowing you can't do something by yourself is not a sign of anything other than self-awareness. Once you apply the courage needed to ask for help, what follows is easier.



2)   Failure, or what feels that way, can be flipped. Before you were demolished, you tackled a variety of things, often with little to no resources. You figured it out because you needed to and most importantly, you could.



3)   Things will never be the ways they once were. (Thank goodness!) After surviving something – anything! – destructive, a person is not the same. When you've been to the edge, and perhaps seen or considered the other side, this alters how things will be perceived, addressed, and resolved.



4)   Be patient with yourself.  While history, media, and society may say and expect that you "get better" in an instant, it takes time to transform your story. First, you must realize that what feels like fact, is actually fiction. The re-learning of things does serve you, as long as it may take to relearn them.



5)    Besides fight or flight, there's dealing with it. When you can't fight it or flee it - the "it" being your life - you figure out how to face it and tackle it. Because no one knows you like you do, you find methods and means that are aligned with all of your elements and attributes.




To learn more about Believe It and Behave It and Kate Harvie, visit her website, www.kateharvie.com/book. To schedule an interview, contact Karen Taylor-Bass, TaylorMade Media, 917-509-3061.