Hiya Pamela,
There's a lot of junk-science and sensational stories out there; there's also a lot of legit science. Beyond that, there's even more that 'we', the giant-brained, quasi-thinking creatures that we are, don't know and don't understand.
I mean, it wasn't all that long ago that the world was flat. Even more recently, 'pain management' was deemed unnecessary for surgical procedures in human infants and animals because the experts said they felt no pain.
At this point, we are just beginning the discovery process concerning plants and finding some of the ways in which they can communicate... still though, we don't speak their language so we interpret (and misinterpret) and put it in our language...
I find your concerns fascinating--
almost verges on "omg, I just realized that I may be a plant sadist
"
tough questions to wrestle with...and then, what happens when it's time to eat?
Life feeds on life, for sure.
Personally, I'm eager for the dawning of vegan awareness that gnawing on plants while they are still alive and "screaming in pain" might actually be more 'inhumane' than the consumption of dead animals
sorry, just a related 'aside' that I find humorous
Anyway, there have been a few studies that concluded that the plants in the study were able to adapt to and 'learn' from, if you will, repeated, non-threatening stressors, such that they significantly decreased their physical, ultrasonic, and chemical responses that the scientists were tracking to gauge their stress response. (In some of these they even ruled out fatigue as a cause and demonstrated a retained response at a much later date, calling that memory and learning, which of course begs the question how do they remember? and shows how little we know and understand about these life forms without a brain and nervous system managing to do these fascinating things.)
So, it's certainly possible that your plants are accustomed to your obsessive grooming and 'fine with it' (in whatever bio-electro-chemical milieu plants process and store their opinions
