Rehabilitation After a Disease: What Is “Normality” After an Invalidating Disease?

Abstract

Listening to the words of the patients involved in the treatment process represents a valuable tool for the rehabilitators because it allows them to learn about the way the patients are organizing themselves in relation to the disease. When a patient says he or she feels like a “warrior fighting against a monster”, they are not only referring to the difficulties dictated by their condition, but they are offering much more significant data about how they interpret the disease, recovery, and treatment. Defeating the monster most of the times means regaining the normality that was unjustly taken away on the day of the stroke and this offers the patient with only two possible outcomes: defeating the monster and therefore recovering or letting themselves be beaten and remaining disabled. The family members and professionals who are treating them are also part of this metaphorical landscape, and they are often the ones who unconsciously encourage the patients to step into the shoes of the warrior, of the hero who must take on this fight, because otherwise, the risk would be to sink into a depressive state taking away a great quantity of energy required to face the rehabilitation process. The metaphor of the warrior offers short-term advantages in terms of determination and discipline, but in the long run it risks backfiring on the new Us created by the patient-therapist-family union, because the patients who associate recovery with normality and normality with the return to the situation prior to the pathological event, lose contact with all those small gradual changes obtained through rehabilitation, which if experienced instead in a conscious way, could allow them to learn how to extend outside of the gym what they have learned with the therapist. The task of the rehabilitators is to help the patient learn to adapt to the world while experiencing a pathological condition and this also includes helping them to build new metaphors that can guide them through the process of treatment.