ABSTRACT
Having been deeply hurt, it is all too easy for people to harden their hearts and/or cut off from their distress and pain. There is neuroscientific backing for this. When we avoid feeling emotional pain, brain scans show that the left prefrontal cortex (the more logical, rational, verbal part of our brain with weaker connections with the body and limbic system) is often more active than the right prefrontal cortex. The latter registers painful feelings far more intensely than the left, as it has far stronger connections with the limbic system and the deeply feeling body and gut (Siegel, 1999). Other brain scans have shown even more dramatic ways of cutting off from emotional pain. This is known as dissociation. Ruth Lanius carried out a famous neuroscience study which showed the brain scans of a woman, who had suffered awful shock, dissociating as she looked at horrible visual images. The pain centres and parts of the brain to do with feeling and thinking and the registering of emotional meaning were simply not activated. Only the visual centres in her brain were activated. In other words, the woman was seeing the images, but feeling and thinking nothing and not laying down any memory of the experience (see Lanius et al. 2003). There is, however, a price for simply cutting off from emotional pain. Cutting off from your own pain means cutting off from feeling the pain of others and hence is a major compromise of compassion, empathy and concern. The result can be very debilitating neurotic symptoms.
