One of the hard facts of life is that throughout our lives we run into circumstances that seem intolerable, unacceptable, and beyond coping. The circumstance seems overwhelming and dooming. It tempts one to despair, and sins to deal with despair.
A child gets covered in poison ivy and wonders how long their body will be full of itchiness. During a high altitude backpacking trip, your tent caves in from ice cold rain leaving you drenched shivering, sitting below a tree counting the hours until daylight. You find your work shift absolutely intolerable, expecting a transfer to another shift next month when your manager tells you it won't happen for another six months...possibly longer.
A person is born without arms. A devout Catholic wife has to put up with her faithless, godless husband full of vice (or vice versa). A person is born into the lowest Hindu caste system in India, raised in the darkest section of the slums. A young woman suddenly develops severe, crippling rheumatoid arthritis.
A new high school graduate, a devout conservative Catholic, goes to a gigantic liberal university that is essentially a mosh pit of rebellion, lost in a foreign world, those like him being rare, facing four daunting years there. A young pretty woman suffers permanent scars across her face after being burned in a fire.
At age 60, you have to cash in your entire 401K for an emergency, reduced to working until you die. An elderly person living independently winds up in the hospital, and then suddenly is placed in the nursing home, and one that smells of urine with screaming up and down every hall, like an insane asylum.
At a glance these situations at first seem insurmountable, like looking up at Mount Everest from base camp.
Yet, one thing God has given us in our nature to cope and overcome extreme adversity, is how the brain can adapt and literally, continuously program and re-program itself. Habituation is one process. For example, annoying sensations like pain or itchiness can become so habitual that the mind knows how to tune it out, to a level of zero or something in the background that no longer oppresses us.
This happens especially well when we use will power day after day to force our minds to think optimistic thoughts and subdue pessimistic thoughts, but habituation in the brain happens even if we do not consciously choose for it to happen. Given enough moments in a day in which we perform and use our minds in all sorts of ways, eventually the neural pathways get rearranged where they need to be, and then you either feel no pain or far less pain. You adjust. You “get used to it.”
It is neural plasticity that is so powerful, that is the fantastic, unimaginably ingenious set of neural mechanisms that create constant shaping of neural pathways, and literally new sections of nerves organized to cope with a particular situation.
This happens after every brain injury, whether it is from a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or concussion. It happens after every traumatic event that results in shock, anxiety, or depression. And it happens every time we learn something new or go through some kind of personal growth, which happens even when we are old.
I think there is an implicit philosophical error some devout Catholics fall into, and that is a simplistic, dualistic view of human nature. The person is viewed as a body and a soul, but “the body” itself is not distinguished between the brain and the rest of the body. That is, it is like our spiritual soul alone is what controls the body, instead of also the vast network of neural pathways and structures in the brain. God has created us such that the soul and the brain are harmoniously one. Just as we must take care of the body, so we have to take care of our brains. So as long as we are alive in our bodies, our lives or behaviors result in part from what is happening in the brain. This is why mental illness is real, working on mental health so important, and why cultivating our cognitive state is integral to dealing with life and the sufferings of life, that is adversity. Prayer is supreme in doing this, but psychological meditation and mindfulness practices arw also important to re-frame our minds to avoid evil and seek the good, and to tune into reality.
This takes time, reading, reflection, and daily practice alongside prayer. Meditative walks, reading, journaling, clearing the mind sitting listening to classical music, grounding yourself in your physical environment (ex: walking in the grass barefoot), all these kind of things will help a person habituate to and accept their adversity or cross no matter what kind it is. The brain absolutely will then re-shape areas of the frontal and temporal lobes that process thought, memory, emotion, choice, orientation to space and time, etc.
In conclusion, I think it is good to be aware of our brains, the need to work on mental health (in addition to spiritual health), and continuously re-frame how we think about whatever adversity we have not fully come to peace about. That might be chronic pain in a knee that still depresses you mentally, obsessions with some past injury done to you by a harmful person in your life, or any adversity big or small that still dominates you, rather than you dominating it.
If you are still trying to figure out how to cope with a heavy burden in your life, and I think most of us are still trying to do that about some kind of adversity, you can be assured, in addition to God’s grace we receive through the sacraments and prayer, God has given us in our natures, in our brain, the capacity to be resilient and conquer any oppressive situation. It just takes time and daily effort and steps, and before long you will habituate and permanently change for the better.