Hi Mark,

Thank you so much for suggesting these readings. I will make sure to check into them.

I'm so glad to hear your friend is leading a productive life! It sounds like he's been through some great struggles of his own. My daughter's speech was one of the last things to return. It took a year before she could put an understandable sentence together and it remains her most noticeable problem.

We're very blessed in this my situation because her recovery is phenomenal considering the amount of damage to her brain. I know most in her situation aren't as fortunate as her.

She is very verbal when she is irritated so it's quite easy to tell when people need to back down. I encourage her to speak her mind when people are bothering her. It helps prevent violent outbursts. Before her accident, she was highly intelligent and gifted. She's still incredibly intelligent; it's just hard to make others see that now because of her speech problem and processing issues. She is also bipolar so it's hard to tell what causes outbursts now. I've had years of practice on not overreacting to situations and calming her down. This experience has been very handy over the last year.

I have tried various things to help reduce stress for her and I'm still working on finding things that work for her. She seems stressed a lot and refuses to talk to counselors. All she says to them is...I don't want to talk to you. I've respected that and took her out of counseling. She's 18 now and that is her decision. We talk about things often, but all I can really do is listen because most of my replies don't seem to help. I have to be honest when I speak to her or I'm not treating her normal and she would know if I were trying to sugarcoat things.

We do our best to go on with life as normal. We realize she's an intelligent person and we treat her as such. The hardest thing is getting others to treat her normally. When you look at her, she looks normal so she's okay at first with people. It's their reactions to her when speaks that irritates us. I would love to know how to reduce the negative stigma that is cast towards her when she speaks.

I really appreciate your input and look forward to speaking with you and others in the near future.

Take care,
Angel