Surviving the Impossible: Vincent Van den Broek on Resilience, Neuroplasticity, and Rebuilding Your Life

Some stories don’t begin on the day of the crisis - they begin years earlier, in the quiet choices that shape who we are before we’re tested. That’s the premise Vincent Van den Broek returns to throughout our conversation about his brain trauma recovery on Where to Find Bread.In October 2024, Vincent was struck by a car while riding an e-scooter. He was given a 10% chance of survival, spent three weeks in a coma, underwent multiple neurosurgeries, and had part of his skull removed and stored in his abdomen - a standard procedure, he explains, used to relieve pressure and protect the brain from oxygen loss. His family began preparing for the possibility that he might never wake up. He did. And what followed, he says, wasn’t a transformation into someone new, but confirmation of who he already was.That distinction sits at the heart of this episode. Vincent rejects the popular idea that catastrophe rebuilds a person from scratch. Instead, he describes the accident as a test of the values he’d already spent years developing - authenticity, honesty, and genuine human connection. “Resilience,” he says, “is a muscle that you can train just like any other muscle in your body.” He compares it to lifting weights: you don’t start with the heaviest load, you build gradually, over months, by choosing to face hardship instead of avoiding it.The conversation moves through Vincent’s founding of Until It’s Done, a well-being community built on the idea that dreams and goals are achieved through the deliberate alignment of health, lifestyle, mindset, structure, and action - not luck. He traces this philosophy back to his own life: a structured, closely managed childhood under a mother he describes as “the law,” a first job in hospitality he wasn’t originally allowed to pursue, and a career built almost entirely on his love of people and connection.Vincent shares his physical scars on camera and walks through what happened to his skull and brain during the accident and subsequent surgeries - offered plainly, from personal experience, not as medical advice. From there, the conversation moves naturally into a discussion of neuroplasticity, which Vincent describes in accessible terms as the brain’s ability to “build new roads” after damage. He also touches on concepts like cognitive reserve and myelin, drawing on his own research and conversations with his medical team, while being clear that he is not a medical professional and cannot speak to how these processes work for anyone else’s recovery.Many who’ve experienced betrayal trauma will take away nuggets from Vincent’s experience. Vincent leaves us with an open invitation to reach out to him directly and a reminder that, wherever you are, “when you’re at your lowest, the only way is up.True that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit terisdoingit.substack.com