Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance

by Kelly McDaniel

For those of you interested in the brain, you may already know how stress impacts the temporal lobe—specifically the amygdala and hippocampus. Stress irritates the functioning of the amygdala, where empathy develops.33 Cortisol poisons the hippocampus, which makes sense of incoming data and memory processing. The brain is adapting, keeping the necessary biological processes going, like our heartbeat and breathing, but filtering out less critical processes, like memory and empathy. During a stressful event or moment, the brain literally ignores information secondary to survival. Over time, unused brain neurons and synaptic connections disappear. Scientists call this sophisticated neurological process pruning.34