Does Pain Change Your Brain?

Chronic stress can effect your brain. It affects the amygdala, which regulates fear and emotion. The cells actually grow larger. The opposite effect is in the hippocampus, which where the cells shrink. The hippocampus helps you remember where you were and what you were doing when something important happened. So with larger cells in the amygdala and smaller cells in the hippocampus, The result may be a generalized anxiety because you don’t have the hippocampus to help you connect it to where you were and what you were doing to make the fear specific. 1

But is pain is a catalyst for change? The human brain is adaptable. When a person is traumatized by an event in their life such as divorce, disease or death, it may move them to make a change in their life. In the face of overwhelming, paralyzing grief, the mind seeks to make something positive out of it in order to relieve the pain. Maybe it’s trying to correct the mismatch of brain cells.

I have found that I had to change the way I viewed the world in order to survive divorce. I was married for 32 years and I was complacent emotionally and financially. I assumed that my husband would be around forever and that he would never cheat or lie. I ignored the frequent trips, the credit card bills that mysteriously grew, and the growing distance between us. I wasn’t happy in my career, but I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t work on my friendships because I had a built in friend, or I thought I did. I had my own interests, but they never seemed to intersect with my husband’s interests.

When my husband dumped me, it was like the earth I was standing on crumbled. The brain cells were really mismatched. I was free-falling with no ground underneath me. I couldn’t eat, sleep or otherwise function. I gradually learned to function on my own, but I had to learn to think differently. Insidiously, through the years of marriage, I equated my spouse’s opinion that I was worthless into my opinion of myself. I couldn’t function thinking that I was worthless, so I had to discard that old notion and form a new opinion of myself.

In order to form a new opinion of myself, I had to do new things, talk or listen to new people and think different thoughts. It’s a long, fumbling process. I would get sucked into the blackness of despair and I would have to pull myself out again. I would feel great one moment, then a negative thought would creep into my mind and I would feel the heavy weight of depression that I would have to fight off again. I guess the brain cells don’t balance out very quickly.

Then there’s the ever present fear. Fear that I couldn’t make on my own, fear that I would will never be happy again, fear that my ex would give me grief, fear that I would never have another deep relationship. The fear can grind you down and make the simplest tasks seem like a big effort. I now have to do everything myself and I don’t always do it well. After a while I began to accept the fact that I just had to do the best I could, even if I sucked at it. I still have to fight my safe keeping side, that doesn’t want me to take any risks or try anything new.

In order to get through all the fear, depression and despair, I learned not to get through it alone. I took support from whomever and whatever I could, whether it was other people, a higher power or books. I now accept that some people lie and cheat and I try to avoid them. I had to toss the thoughts of my inadequacy out of my mind when they come sneaking in. When I thought about how my ex would have thought contemptuously about me, I told him to get out of my head. I have gradually made some peace with my life, even though I am not entirely happy with it. I try seek out opportunity to expand my world physically, mentally and spiritually because I am tired of having a narrow, closed life..
Through the process, my entire perspective has changed. The jolt out of complacency has changed my thought processes somehow. Ever a pessimist, I had to turn into an optimist to a certain extent, so that I wouldn’t lose my mind. Hope keeps you going, despair does not. Pain forced me to be a different person. I don’t know if my brain has different neural pathways now, but my thoughts had better behave themselves, or I will beat them into submission.
. 1. Stress Changes Your Brain, Karen Lurie, http://www.sciencentral.com/