What Actually Happens Inside Your Brain When You Move Countries. Janaina de Carvalho Explains.

Jun 8

Dr. Débora Pasin read Parenting Unpacked and said silent transformations.Aline França shaped Chapter 19. I have been on a rampage of asking the people whose work sits inside this book to answer questions I am genuinely curious about.

Janaina de Carvalho is in Chapter 3.

She is an intercultural psychologist whose work in the chapter describes what happens to a couple when each person takes on a separate role in making the new life work and somewhere in that process the couple disappears. She also describes the moment when the woman without her support network puts everything onto her husband, expecting him to be the friend, the family, and the colleague she left behind. He cannot meet that weight. Neither of them is wrong and neither of them can see the other clearly enough to say so.

I asked her the neuropsychological questions because I wanted to understand what was actually happening inside the head of the woman who cannot find the heating in a Swiss apartment because it comes from the floor and she has been looking at walls. Not the emotion. The mechanism. What is the brain actually doing in that moment and why does it cost so much.

Her answers changed how I think about the loss of felt competence.

Intercultural Psychologist Janaina de Carvalho — This is Janaina de Carvalho 😊

From a neuropsychological perspective is there a difference between how a man and a woman's brain processes a major life disruption like relocating abroad?

Biologically the stress machinery is the same. The divergence is structural, carved out by the social roles built over a lifetime. Many women construct identity like a web, anchored simultaneously by professional status, community, family, and relational networks. Pull the rug out via migration and the entire web collapses at once, fracturing their sense of belonging. Men tend to build identity like a pillar, anchored heavily in competence and provision. Their crisis occurs when that single pillar is threatened.

What actually happens in the brain when the environment that once made someone feel competent and capable suddenly stops making sense?

The brain gets lost. Literally. It is a prediction engine designed to find patterns and automate them so it can save energy. When you move countries every automated pattern fails. Language, social cues, even where the heating comes from — they all require conscious, heavy cognitive labour.
The brain searches for the old map, finds nothing, and shifts into hyper-vigilance. The amygdala fires up, scanning for threats in the mundane. You are not just tired. Your brain is burning massive amounts of fuel trying to build a new cognitive map from scratch.

When a woman relocates for her partner's career and loses her professional identity, her social network, and her sense of daily competence simultaneously, what does that cost her neurologically?

While clinical neuroscience is still catching up to the specific data on trailing partners, the psychological toll translates directly to neurological fatigue.
When you lose professional identity, autonomy, and your social fabric all at once, you overload the brain's adaptation systems. It manifests as a profound cognitive drain — brain fog, memory lapses, and chronic insecurity. A silent exhaustion. The brain is working so hard to find its footing that it has no energy left to maintain motivation, often triggering an urgent, survival-driven desire to just go home.

The phrase I keep returning to from her second answer is this: the brain gets lost. Not overwhelmed or damaged. Lost. Searching for the patterns that used to work and finding nothing familiar enough to hold onto.

That is the loss of felt competence described from the inside of a brain that is working harder than anyone around it can see.

She is in Chapter 3. If you know the chapter you already know why I needed to ask her these questions.

Parenting Unpacked launches June 24th on Amazon.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

What Actually Happens Inside Your Brain When You Move Countries. Janaina de Carvalho Explains.

From a neuropsychological perspective is there a difference between how a man and a woman's brain processes a major life disruption like relocating abroad?

What actually happens in the brain when the environment that once made someone feel competent and capable suddenly stops making sense?

When a woman relocates for her partner's career and loses her professional identity, her social network, and her sense of daily competence simultaneously, what does that cost her neurologically?

I Had No Diplomat Parents. I Had Harry Potter and a Grandmother With a Travel Company.