Hi @GavT and welcome to the forum, this is an excellent site for getting answers to those niggling questions the health services don’t tell you.
It takes time but it can come back. In the first year after my stroke I was totally emotionally numb to my family and friends, I had to fake it half the time. And yet, I could cry at the drop of a hat when I’d see anything on tv or video clips for example. So yes it does go with the territory. The way I looked at it, my brain was protecting itself from real life while it healed and repaired the damage done. It would seem my brain concentrated more on the physical aspect of my stroke, getting my arm, leg and balance functional again and left anything else like cognition, my aphasia to find it’s own back.
If you do a search for “cognition” on here you will find a lot of past posts with various methods for improving cognition from fellow stroke survivors.
Just click or tap on the spy glass 
up in the right corner and type in “cognition” and be sure to select “in all topics and posts”.
If you then scroll down the list of results to the bottom and select “More…” you will get a fully expanded list of results.
From there you can also sort by Relevance, Latest post, Most Liked, Most Viewed or Latest Topic. I won’t go into into the “Advanced filters” because I dare say this is complicated and taxing enough on the brain.
I hope this helps and look forward to hearing more from you on here. It’s a good place to be, especially when you need to off load as we all understand better than anyone else, what you are going through. Take care 
Also thought this post might help, it’s always worth a read through and can be reassuring to know you are not alone in this: