Accelerated Resolutions After Breakups
Show Notes
Accelerated Resolutions for Heartbreak uses brain-based procedures that involve imagined exposure, image replacement, somatic focus, eye movements, and hypnosis—memory reconsolidation steps to change how the brain stores an emotional memory.
Key takeaways from the episode:
Romantic breakups activate systems of the brain involved in feeling emotional distress and increase information processing of thoughts, images, and memory.
Explore what post-romantic distress is and how Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) can relieve it.
Dispel grief and heartbreak myths like “it takes a long time and you never get over the loss.”
Dr. Elizabeth Michas is a licensed clinical psychologist who has helped thousands of people recover from abusive relationships and heartbreak by transforming their emotional pain and trauma with brain-based perspectives and interventional methods to play the brain for change.
She is an expert in the neuropsychology of change, brain-based hypnotherapy, and eye-movement reprocessing processes for the rapid resolution of post-romantic distress, anxiety, trauma, love addiction, grief, and heartbreak.
Noteworthy quotes from this episode:
[04:00] "But with a therapist, they're like stabilizing the problem, validating them and people were getting more stuck and sometimes dropping out of therapy and saying therapy isn't working for me. You know, “I'm just more obsessed with my ex. I'm not getting over it. I don't want to date.” And so these newer technologies, like using eye movement reprocessing and also hypnosis were doing something different when it came to the brain processing and responding and memory."
[27:00] "So you're not choosing to be a negative thinker or have a negativity bias. It's a feature of how your brain operates, you're just getting played by it."
Connect with Elizabeth
https://drelizabethmichas.com/
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Connect with Paige Bond
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Website: https://paigebond.com
Paige Bond hosts the Stubborn Love podcast, is a Licensed Marriage Therapist, and a Polyamory Relationship Coach. Her mission is to help people-pleasing millennials navigate non-monogamy so they can tame their jealousy and love with ease. Her own journey from feeling lonely, insecure, and jealous to feeling empowered and reassured is what fuels her passion to help other people-pleasers to conquer jealousy and embrace love.
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Disclaimer: This podcast and communication through our email are not meant to serve as professional advice or therapy. If you are in need of mental health support, you are encouraged to connect with a licensed mental health professional to receive the support needed.
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Transcript
(generated by AI - please excuse errors)
[00:00:42] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Welcome back to another episode of Stubborn Love. I'm so excited for today's episode, as always. And I want to welcome a very special guest, Dr. Elizabeth Michas, and she's a licensed clinical psychologist who has helped Thousands, not hundreds, but thousands of people recover from abusive relationships and heartbreak by transforming their emotional pain and trauma with brain based perspectives.
Here's what we're going to dive into. How romantic breakups activate systems of the brain involved in feeling emotional distress and increase information processing of thoughts, images, and memory. We're also going to talk a little bit about what post romantic distress is, the neuroscience of heartbreak and its healing, and also dispel some of those common breakup myths.
And lastly, we'll dive into how you can have accelerated resolutions for heartbreak. Dr. Michas, I'm so excited that you're here. Can you please introduce yourself to listeners and let them know your story on how you got into such an interesting topic?
[00:01:52] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: I'm so excited to be here. Well, so I started my training in neuropsychology to become a licensed psychologist.
So I knew a lot about the brain and in the 1990s, we had what they called the decade of the brain where we were just, you know, in flux of data, we had the fMRI so we could see the brain at work. And so more and more researchers were starting to look at all kinds of tasks and things, including like how we fall in love with science with this technology, this new technology.
We didn't have to guess what people were thinking. We could actually see different systems at play. I have been, teaching other psychotherapists primarily about the neuropsychology of change and brain based hypnotherapy, eye movement, reprocessing therapies, so that they could bring about these rapid resolutions of trauma, post traumatic distress, anxiety, panic attack, love addiction, grief.
And so it was just a natural thing. I was like, who hasn't gone through a breakup and somehow been impacted in the way that they feel and think. And, you know, it's just not logical, right? Like really smart people can say like, I don't even know why I feel this way, you know, but it, it just comes on. And so I wanted to find a way to really use the science.
Things that we were learning about falling in love and breaking up and heartbreak to help people recover and, and get out of these kind of vague statements that are being made about heartbreak and grief, especially because sometimes I found like it prohibits the rapid resolution of this. You know, where therapists-
and like I said, I primarily had been training therapists. I'm moving to more of the self help audience here. But with a therapist, they're like stabilizing the problem, you know, validating and people were getting more stuck and sometimes dropping out of therapy and saying therapy isn't working for me.
You know, I'm just more obsessed with my ex. I'm not getting over it. I don't want to date. And so these newer technologies, like using eye movement, reprocessing and also hypnosis were doing something different when it came to the brain processing and responding and memory. So we have uncovered that every time we remember something, there's potential to do updates to it and then save it like as a new save as and they call this theory
memory reconsolidation. So many of the therapies that I've been doing, some of them over 30 years actually follow those principles of memory reconsolidation. So things are happening in the brain. It's rewiring their stuff with protein synthesis, and we're creating different updates. neuroplastic emotional updates and how the memory is formed.
And when you think about Your acts after you go through one of these processes, and it's only one session. Sometimes, you know, three sessions really depends. They're very quick and you, you seem like, okay, I don't know how you did that. It's like voodoo witchcraft, but it's not, it's science. How did.
Something where I was in pain, crying myself to sleep and now I'm fine and I don't even know what happened. Well, we changed what the brain was doing. We didn't have to change you. We didn't really need anything from the ex for you to be okay. A lot of people think that I need closure. I need, you know, something from them.
I have to understand, but actually not so much. We know that there's tremendous changes going on with the emotional center. Our brain, you know, they're wired to be social and love. And there's a particular system called the panic grief system that activates after a breakup or any disconnection, even when you lose somebody to death or a pet.
You know, there's this kind of restlessness and lots of physiological distress. And also crying, sadness, and shutdown. And so that emotion, lots of people knew about, you know, fear and rage, you know, but this panic grief emotion is a different emotion action system that all mammals have. And it really kicks into high gear when there's anything that happens to our connection with people.
And when that's unexpected, it's even more so. And then, unlike animals who, you know, they have these distress calls and so if you lock your, you know, puppy out it'll, it'll probably whine all night to get you to come to it. It will have that restlessness and, and the same with, you know, dropping off a kid at daycare and, you know, so people are well aware of the separation distress calls, but we don't always call it that.
And, and the science of this. We know that when we can name something, we actually tame it for how this lower brain, the emotional brain works. Because the emotional brain, sort of in the right brain, starts to have this negative arousal and emotion. But when we cross the hemisphere and we give it a label or a name, we give the affect a name.
Well, guess what? We name it and we tame it. And so in my system, I talk about the brain as an organ of change and transformation. I say, it's not just tame. We tune it, you know, and sometimes things are like broken records and we need to do a retune. And that's where these. More rapid or accelerated healing therapies can be very, very useful.
So I don't know if you want me to get, go into the post romantic distress. You know, that's what I call it, you know, because something's happening, you know, like you get the call and, you know, you're noticing all these physiological changes. So we talk about the romantic breakup, breakups really activate the system of the brain where we're feeling emotional distress.
And when that happens in the brain, we also see a lot of information processing in the middle region of the brain, more thoughts, more images, more memory, especially emotional memory, you know, things are linking and it's just like a flood gates have opened up with a whole lot of processing. And, of course, people really don't feel like themselves during this, so some of those body signs, so if you're wondering like, Oh, do I have it? You know, do I have this post romantic distress? Well, after a breakup, you know, you're withdrawing from love, but you may also have post traumatic distress, which is like a physiology change. All right, this is how we know this bottom brain.
I call it the emotional brain is turned on. And so mostly people don't like to tune into it because it's so uncomfortable, but you notice physiological signs like a lot of people have mentioned, like a lump in your throat or eyes twitching or blushing or rashes coming up butterflies in your stomach, you know, sleep changes and you can become a instant insomniac.
You know, there's lots of restless. And, you know, racing pulse and pounding heart unusually rapid breathing, you know, dizziness, sweatiness shakiness, weak knees cold feet, you know, pain and tension and different parts of the body from the head to the chest, even gut pain and nausea. And, of course, a telltale sign is this increased tearfulness that people talk about.
I'm just crying all the time, you know, I'm constantly on edge, you know, the next thing I see or hear is just going to bring me to tears and flushed sometimes fever, skin cold and shaky hands. So these are all ways that emotions show up in the physical body. And we know that, you know, the brain is running these more survival based systems so you can notice that most people don't like to attune to it.
They don't like to come into it. But that is one of the ways that we update the response pattern is we use interoceptive exposure. We actually have them bring it up, we reactivate that, and then we can process out those sensations so you don't have to live in fear of them. We kind of go into them to make them new and different.
And of course, you know, you're, they're given another understanding of what this is. So just know that if you're going through this and you're having any physiological changes, that is probably this brain based phenomenon where the lower brain regions take hold of everything to do with emotions reward seeking like what you want, you know, what you want to get a craving for, get a dopamine hit on and all kinds of survival based systems having to do with like being ostracized from the tribe, you know, this was a survival threat.
So there's evolutionary wiring and it's not you and it's not the breakup, but it's definitely something the brain has been doing. They say, you know, the body keeps the score, but really there isn't a scorecard. I don't like to think of it as, you know, a scorecard. I think of it as like, no, the, the body is burdened by having to process and respond to something that keeps coming up.
And if you're freaking out about sensations or you keep crying, that's kind of an emergency. The sensations become the emergency. One of my clients, she was at a restaurant waiting for some of her friends to arrive, and she looked out on the docks there, and she actually saw her ex, and he was working on some project out there, and she said her heart started racing, and she left the restaurant before her friends could even arrive.
You know, she just called them. She goes, Hey, I'm not feeling well, and I won't be coming to lunch. So you see those strong sensations cause a lot of discomfort. I mean, it could be like a full blown panic attack. Just fleeing the scene is what most people like to do when they're experiencing that kind of high arousal.
So that's part of what can happen in post romantic distress. So an ex sighting can make you feel like, you know, you're running from a scary monster or something. It's like, Oh my gosh, you know, what is this? And it isn't a horror flick and it's something about what the brain is recognizing as kind of an unexpected.
Lots of times it's treating it like if you were walking in a forest and, you know, you saw a snake or something like it's having this immediate, like, get the body moving. Right? So your brain doesn't really care to make you happy. It's trying to make sure you're not getting eaten.
So yeah, I would say in the post romantic distress mode, you're looking out for, "Hey, do I feel anything?" Because full recovery, you will notice the absence of that. So a lot of people say, well, how will I feel? I mean, I don't know. I don't even know if it would be okay. It would be like totally okay.
Not to have an emergency alarm go off every time you see your ex. Or, you know, feel like you're having uncontrollable emotions and sensations. So.
[00:13:50] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: And I can imagine that, you know, there are some other things that could bring back all of these distress signals. It could be a text from the ex or maybe coming up on a social media memory or looking through photos in your phone, just bringing it all to the surface.
[00:14:09] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah, because it's all data, right? Like whether it's a digital diet of stuff that people are taking in from the internet or from text messaging, like this comes to represent. The person, you know, like with hoarding and people have a great difficulty getting rid of stuff. And it's usually because it has some sentimental association, you know, it's not like I'm getting rid of a picture of my ex.
It's like, I'm getting rid of my ex, you know, so, people have to clear out stuff. They have to detox. There's things that were definitely part of the relationship that could make you think about the relationship. Because in the lower brain, it's more of an animal brain that learns by association, more like classical conditioning, too.
So it's an easy reminder. It's like, oh, that truck is like his truck, or, you know, she always wore, you know mini skirts, or, and so these are things that when you see it, songs, like a lot of people relate to music, and that was their song, or, or, you know, it reminds me of it. There's. A big business in songwriting and there's a lots of, you know, love stuck songs then they speak to this because it's so much a part of the human condition, but we really haven't approached it by using the science of of love and how we fall in love and break up, heartbreak to get the healing.
And so that's what I'm bringing forward. I think it's time. We know enough now. We don't know everything, but we know enough to really target some of these key systems and we can start to look at grief science realities instead of these grief myths. But the grief and heartbreak myths is that it takes a long time and that you never get over the loss.
I don't know if you remember, Paige, there was this if you're with somebody for 10 years, it's going to take you five years to get over them as some kind of like break up,
[00:16:09] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yea, you divide by two or times by six
[00:16:11] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Where do they get that from, I mean, somebody just made it up, you know, and that it's time that heals.
No, it isn't time that heals.
Individuals recover from the loss and the science really supports that targeting the brain to mend the heart versus just waiting for time to heal. And maybe through brain plasticity, you're just stabilizing it. You're talking to everybody about it. You keep checking, you know, you're getting more and more data to come in and limit and confuse and even activate the emotional centers.
Right? I teach people how to be aware of what's going on in their brain and how to use their knowledge of this to kind of shine the light on what systems do automatically so that you're not played by the brain. You play your brain for change. You actually start to become more meta aware or mindful.
And that Mindfulness even begins to alter it, but then we've got all these kind of tricks that really are more bottom up techniques that work with the body and, you know, things like eye movement and you know, tapping. And so you're, you're causing a shift to occur. You don't have to sit there and wait for time to heal.
You could actually start to accelerate the recovery. So you could be at peace and clear headed. Right, and know what you want. And then most importantly, be free to love.
So when I'm talking about it, I'm taking people from love stuck to love struck with this higher kind of genius reality that we create love.
We're not looking for it. We're making it happen. And then sometimes. You know, accepting breakup stuff is not easy, right? And, you know, the Kubler Ross stages, right? When you went through your training. And I don't know if you remember, I took a course on death and dying, you know, as an undergraduate, that was like over 30 years ago.
But it was about people, Kubler Ross, Elizabeth Kubler Ross developed a theory about people's individual dying process. Right, moving through these stages and the theory was created for those diagnosed with the terminal illness, but, you know, we've applied it to everything. There's the 5 stages of grief, you know, if you lose your job, if you lose a pet, if you, you know, and the stages loosely apply to many life losses.
Right. But they don't really tell you how to recover. They're just kind of more like saying, okay, you're going to go through stages, but depending on what, depending on what you're processing, depending on where you're stuck in how these different brain systems are operating. So that's why there's not a linear movement through the stages.
People go back and forth. Sometimes you're angry. Sometimes, you know, you're depressed. And then, of course, it does move into this freedom, which is something like radical acceptance. You know, I was showing a film to some therapists, because I do train them in the model, and a client was saying, you know, she had remained friends with her ex.
And a lot of people try to do that, right? Like, let's just hang on, you know, it won't be romantic. We're not seriously committed, but we can be friends and do things together, you know. and, you know, she says very platonic, you know, some people have the friends with benefits kind of thing, but this remained really platonic.
She said sometimes she would in that two months. time that they did it, she kind of pushed to see if it could get romantic and clearly not. He had made up his mind. But she said, you know, after a while that helped her see that she just couldn't hold out this hope, you know, that seeing him actually made it more difficult.
And many times that's what the breakup research shows. That in order to facilitate this kind of emotional pain response that it's better to take a break physically, right? So the physical separation helps with the healing and the emotional. Kind of, I can live without you. I do think, right?
And so that can get worked through but it's tempting. And I think a lot of people ask that, you know, they'll write in and say, can I be friends with my ex? You know, what about, well, it's confusing to the brain. Let's say you were addicted to doughnuts, it would be easier for the brain to learn to stay away from doughnuts than to eat them just sometimes or every now and then kind of that intermittent reinforcement.
Right. So it's kind of working on that craving, addictive level as well, that it sees it as an opportunity. And so going cold turkey is easier than doing it in moderation. It's not that you couldn't sometimes come back to that, but in those early stages, it's better if it can be out.
[00:21:14] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Is there a time period for that?
Or is that dependent on that person's particular healing?
[00:21:21] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah, I think the second what you said, it's really depending on that person's healing because here's the key question and I always ask people, I don't assume. We want to know what is going on, what about this is most upsetting, you know, because you're not going to say as a therapist, like, oh, well, I've gone through a breakup.
So I know exactly how you feel because, you know, he lied or she cheated. And so you have this react. You don't know that. So you kind of ask the question to get a full picture on what is the brain putting together about this, like, where are you in pain and stuck? Where is the love stuckness? Is it some belief that's formed some meaning?
Is it some memory that keeps replaying? Is it this kind of hook? To keep trying to get the reward. Is it just kind of addicted to it used to be good and it's like trying to repeat the cycle and get it back how it used to be, you know, so that kind of thing is keeping it open. And I think everyone's individual and how much time it takes or whether or not they even go back.
I mean, it's much easier for people what do they say the best revenge is to have a great life, but it's even better than that. It's like to find someone that you're truly compatible with and wants a relationship with you. And so I'll teach people how when we're looking for love, you're sorting. You're sorting through different groups so that you're not fishing in the wrong pond.
You know, oh, there's plenty of fish. Yeah. But if you're in the wrong pond, if you're not with somebody who wants committed relationship or you're not compatible with them, you know, and they're not caring and they don't communicate, then they don't have this love, right? So I'm thinking that in the highest level of how the brain operates, if we're going to create love, we want to create love-love states where I bring it, I know how to love,
at the highest level and communicate and share that with vulnerability, you know, openness, and so do they. And then that's really the true match. So then I call it love-love. So it's not like I'm looking for love. No, you're going to create love-love. So you need to know how to sort and pick somebody who can have amazing love.
Instead of saying, Oh, well, somebody's, you know, wounded and, and so I'm going to help them. You know, many people can't leave a relationship because they're afraid what will happen to this other person. It's not really their, their emotional distress about being separate from them. It's the whole idea that, you know, they've threatened suicide or that they're going to expose you.
You know, one of my clients had somebody took pictures, you know, during the relationship. And then they posted these nudes on a website and, you know, another friend called and said, Hey, you know, you have pictures like, Oh my gosh, you know, you can't be friends with the people that we were friends with.
So there's many things that can get very painful about it and that could get people stuck. And so we unpack that, but, you know, if, if you've had friends that were kind of stuck on their ex and talking about it a lot. They're probably saying things like, you need to move on. Like, they are so tired of hearing the conversation again and again. You know, you're, you're talking about it.
So many people will actually make a referral. Of a family member or a friend to me saying, you really need to talk to Dr. Elizabeth about this because, you know, I can see it, but I can't explain it, but she can explain it, you know, because when people say you need to move on, what, what does that mean? That, that, that move on and.
And learn to love yourself kind of are these vague statements that are tossed around in, you know, the breakup vernacular, but people are like, I don't know what that is. What's wrong with me? Why can't I move on? What's the move? You know, here, you know, so.
[00:25:35] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: And then even more shame kind of perpetuating that.
[00:25:38] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah, and shame, yeah. Right, because you don't know.
But really, it's like you don't have a clear understanding of what the solution is here. How would you have an accelerated resolution? We're not talking about that.
So, you know, people try to make sense of how an experience of loss changes them.
And even the breakup literature says there's two things that are going on after a breakup. We we've got the emotional arousal and that's the post romantic distress. It's very physical, visceral, somatic in the body. And then we have self concept changes. Why? Because we're trying to understand ourselves It's like I'm an emotional basket case. I'm a mess. That's what I am, you know, and they don't see it as something their brain is doing. They see it as they become this. You know, because it just kind of takes over. It's just this wave. So being love stuck is you know, like you're not in your rational mind, but you're still having a lot of thoughts.
And so that's another thing I teach with my brain based model is that much of our thinking is colored by emotion. When it comes up in that lower brain system, and then it gets racy and very distorted, very illogical. And sometimes we'll pick up and, you know, cognitive therapists teach about cognitive distortions, but I teach on how this midline region defaults into automatic thinking.
So you're not choosing to be a negative thinker or have negativity bias. It's a feature of how your brain operates, you're just getting played by it. And then there's all kinds of tools and techniques. You know, starting with becoming aware of it and non reactive right and not thinking it's you, but also how to change what you're thinking, and especially the meaning or if there are narratives and stories, that's another thing that that part of the brain is a social brain.
And so it's, you know, getting. Information by watching others. I don't know if you've seen like America's funniest videos and people are getting hurt and you're just sitting there going, Oh, wow. You know, the mirror neuron system of the brain just really gets you feeling another's pain and you automatically try it on like your brain just puts you in that role of somebody doing that.
I mean, Advertisers know that so they show people eating delicious food and we're like, oh, that's good. Like, you know, that's door dash that right. It's so easy now just to get it. And so when we see people in pain. We also start generating ideas about what's causing that, right? And it's automatic. It's not necessarily all the information.
Sometimes it's stereotypical kind of shortcuts in the way that we think. So I teach about a brain processing that has to do with the science of cognition, which most therapists don't learn about it. They just think, Oh, we're just rational. And, and if you're thinking, you know, stinky and stuff, that's the problem.
You're, you're choosing that, but you don't actually choose that. And it, it Really changes your thinking after a breakup because you're in a stress mode and your thinking isn't so sound. It's not,
[00:29:04] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: it's intrusive.
[00:29:06] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah. It can be very intrusive. Right. It just pops in there and it's not just thoughts ideas.
Sometimes it's images. I just images of stuff or sounds and, you know so, yeah. And guess what? What we learned about the brain from that whole default mode was it came on most when we were idle. So, you know, if you, if you're busy, if you have a lot of tasks that you're doing you know, going from client to client or, you know, you're, you know, you're a teller, you know, so your, your day is taken up by structured appointments and lots to do.
You don't have much time to think, but when you're going home or you're about to fall asleep at night, this is when it really speeds up, right? So it's coming on this characteristic way of thinking, which I call middle brain is most active when you're not busy. So bored or idle or in transition.
[00:30:13] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: So what do you do during, you know, that time?
[00:30:17] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Well, you need to know that that's a time when your thinking doesn't need to be you know, attended to so much, right? That you could have an emotional response to it. I teach people that if you have one, then your brain is doing something with it, whether it's true or not. Right? So if it could even get into beliefs.
Like I'm not good enough and no one would ever love me because of this. So, you know, the rational thinking would be like, no, we could poo poo on that. You would never even say the things you're thinking to another person, but see, our brain gets away with just coming up with it. And the more we hear these tunes, I call them tunes, the more familiar, the more we let them through.
So you kind of want to develop, you know, this kind of bouncer mentality, you know, like a bouncer in a club, like the VIP lounge, like you don't get in here. Like, this is useless. It's not happening. It's not true. And so that you don't have to burden. The emotional system with having to process and respond.
So this is part of what I'm teaching in the rewiring. So it's actually a brain plasticity system where these common thoughts and we go through lots of them and we find out what your common thoughts are. We retune them. We have them, you know, do something new with them so that they can't. just burden them and make them do things about this and feel bad about themselves.
You know, there's blame based thinking where people that are in a lot of distress will say it's because this breakup or this event happened or this, you know terrible situation. That's why I feel this way. And then you mentioned it earlier. There's where the lens goes in and it's shame based. It's because I didn't control this, or it was my fault, or guilt, or I'm not enough.
So it's a very old tune for many people. And it got in when they were very young, when they were very egocentric, like we even go back to early attachment histories, and sometimes parental divorces, and people leaving. So in, in, in some way. It's, it's shaping the network of why that would come up for that person.
And so we just brain scan back, we go, we find that initial sensitizing event. Some of these techniques like hypnosis is wonderful with it. ART makes that same suggestion that the brain will come up with the scene, a scene match, and then we're just processing it through. You know, the good thing about these more primitive systems, the lower brain systems, they don't know the difference between real and imagined, so we can get away with suggesting many good things, too, and making that tilt towards positivity and the freedom from heartbreak, and I think that that's amazing, and therapists that don't take advantage of that, your clients are just going to suffer, you know, it's like how much, you know, Kleenex are we going to use before things Start to shift, right?
It's not just about the validating. It is painful, but it doesn't have to stay that way. So I, I like to look at those myths versus what we can do with the new science of healing heartbreak and these new therapies. Right?
[00:33:46] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yeah. What would you suggest if mainstream media, or you have friends telling you, or you have your therapist telling you, time heals all wounds, or move on, get over it, and, you know, you're this person going through a breakup, going through this kind of distress, How do we go into breaking free from all that is surrounded by you that's trying to keep you actually in that love stuck place?
[00:34:18] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah. Well, I, I think people just ignore it. I mean, like I said, it's too vague and confusing when you say to somebody, you just need to move on or you just need to learn to love yourself. I was watching that Netflix documentary, the Escaping Twin Flames. Where they were saying, Oh, you're just not trying hard enough.
You know, you need to do this like mirror technique where you blame yourself. It's like a, like a projection kind of thing. And it's you and they really are in love with you. And it's like, Oh my gosh, you know, these are very negative suggestions to people, right? They got people you know, jailed for stalking and, you know, terrible things are really educated people too.
So, yeah. Be cautious of what your therapist or friend is saying to you. Don't listen to it. It, you know, a lot of times it'll just fall by the wayside. But if they're very you know, authoritarian, you've got to do this. And, you know, yeah, that's harder. But usually people are like, yeah, yeah, you don't understand.
And that's part of this, if you don't understand where people are stuck or in pain on it and you make them feel bad by suggesting they shouldn't be, then, then you don't have an in road to change it. I mean, that's just not going to work. So this is very real. Heartbreak pain is real. It hurts, but you have no pain without your brain.
So even if you stub your toe, it's going to take until that comes via nerves to your brain for you to even know that you're in pain. And so I like, you know, looking at the science realities of this heartbreak and what it's suggesting about these rapid alternatives. So they reduce the stress and distress.
You know, we get at the troubling meanings and memories that get in the way of the getting over the ex or even finding new love. And it's different than talk therapy. Talk therapy doesn't work for a lot of this because they're they don't really understand what it is.
[00:36:21] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yeah. Yeah. After my last heartbreak, I did three ART sessions, accelerated resolution therapy, which is part of your protocol.
Yeah. And I was a completely different person. I just like could not even recognize myself or even believe that I would be doing so good so soon, just even like weeks after a breakup. Yeah.
How, how is it that these huge transformations can be done so quickly?
[00:36:53] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Well, we think it is because we're doing a re exposure.
You know, we thought for a long time that, you know, a reactivation of this target learning or exposure opens the brain for change, but we're doing stuff that's different during, during the process. We're just not opening it so people can have catharsis and cry or release something like that's the old model sort of the industrial revolution model is, you know, just, it's a catharsis, you know, you've got to scream, let go.
And here, I mean, I don't know if you remember from your session, your Doing things with processing out the post romantic distress stuff that's coming up, you have a particular thought or scene that you're holding. It's an image and and a lot can be replaced or erased with the image. That's a suggestion putting in new perspectives and ways of being.
You know, yeah, you did a lot, you know, time, but it was very active in it for the brain. It loves novelty. The brain loves and will change quickly. So it isn't this slow, gradual, incremental thing. Like if you're learning to play piano or, you know, maybe you're learning something of a skill.
And it takes effort and you have to keep practicing it like even good things for the brain like meditation or yoga like involve a practice. They're like compensatory and you do them and there's changes in the brain when you practice these things. But this stuff is a one and done or or three and done.
It's so rapid. And we think it's because it's changing the Emotional response. It kind of de links it from automatically playing, right? So you in ART, we say you keep the knowledge, but you lose the pain. Like, you know, the breakup happened, but there's this new way of being with it and new images.
And most of the pain is processed out. And we're, we even in my retune process, I'll say, well, let's reactivate it. Let's imagine you're going to run into him, or you're going to see him with another person, or, you know, we really test it out. And it's like, doc, I got nothing. What, what is this?
I can't even believe my brain is doing it because see, you weren't choosing to do it. This wasn't a choice or decision. And that's the part, this, You know, other two thirds of the brain that's not so rational. You know, we need different ways to be able to influence it. And hypnosis is one of those ways.
The eye movement reprocessing therapies is one of those ways. Even tapping emotional freedom technique can be one of those ways. And so what I'm using is a protocol, which I call a retune protocol, where how we expose the brain to the memory. So that it will not have that response, but it will replace it with a new response.
And then the memory reconsolidation science, it says we must mismatch those and juxtapose them. We're going to just slam them together. And once we do it, the memory is altered for good. So this is a new paradigm for how the brain changes. It's not extinction. Extinction would keep it at bay.
You would keep doing something to kind of keep it, you know, and Pavlovian conditioning, even that would come back right from all the pairings. But in memory reconsolidation science, it's saying there is a brand new pathway and it just takes off and it's using that way and the other one. Is eliminated from you. So and I've seen and I have long term, you know, research data and longitudinal data on people and they'll come back and say, will you do what we did for this on this, you know,
[00:40:58] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: yeah, proves that it works.
[00:41:00] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: It does work. Yeah. So, right. I say, go ahead and test it. See if you can get it. See if you can get angry. See if you can get the panic grief. It's like, how did that happen? It is. It's just amazing. The brain can change fast. It does with trauma. It does with, I mean, it changed with heartbreak overnight. And, you know, there is some stuff related to how we think about ourselves and the self concept changing.
But I think when we get more awareness about how the negativity bias comes up and how the brain, you know, travels time and brings up and replays the past and drags it into the future, when you get a good understanding of how that process is going on, you're more empowered to create who you want to be post breakup.
That's the new perspective. Who do you want to be? Because your brain is so good at taking in and doing for you. But if left to time to heal or these negative patterns. Of emotion and mental processing, you can get really stuck easy. So it's not shifting, you know, sometimes we say with acute stress, you know, give yourself like, you know, six weeks, right.
And if you don't feel like it's getting better, you know, then you're, you're getting more stuck. You know, we, we want to look out for that.
[00:42:27] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: I love this.
[00:42:28] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Like an adjustment, it's an adjustment disorder, right? That's how we, it's like, okay, it's going to pass. And, you know, All right, but if you're having nightmares, crying yourself to sleep, and it's been months or years, then it's time to do something about that.
Don't wait for time to heal. It isn't because of the relationship. It's because of something the brain is doing and, and that's so painful that you're really not in your right mind for love. Right?
[00:42:55] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: No.
[00:42:56] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: What I'm teaching people is about how their mind can not work after a breakup and then it can work for you and it can even change your brain.
And that's, you know, the mind, that flow of information and energy and just being aware of what the brain can do. We need to use the science to explain that, not age old, outdated theories.
[00:43:17] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yeah. Well, I'm so glad that you are, you know, coming in like a wrecking ball and just changing everything.
[00:43:25] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: I'm going to stir it up. Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:43:27] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Good, good. I'm excited for it. Well, are there any other last things before we wrap up here that listeners who may be going through a heartbreak should know, or if they know someone who's going through a heartbreak, maybe how to help them.
[00:43:43] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Well, in general I have some resources out there and you can look at some of the stuff I've written, because like I said, you can really get into these myths, into the frustration and not know how to help people.
But, you know, telling them, maybe look at this is something that your brain is doing and it's not you that your brain can change. I mean, right. And then people will get better. And like I said, it does go much quicker if you're doing something than not. You know, if you're developing in, you know, more you know, depression or suicidal thinking or really getting into negative habits, like over drinking, over eating, you know, these are ways that people self medicate too, right?
So some people have been concerned about their friends doing that because they're just really taking a deeper dive in and looking for something to make them feel better. You know, your brain doesn't want to make you feel bad, but it's definitely burdened with trying to process and, and do a lot and so we got to get them to understand this is just data.
Yeah. They're going to be okay.
[00:45:03] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Oh, beautiful.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. You know, if listeners are really fired up by what you have to say, where can they find you or learn more about you?
[00:45:15] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Well, I've got, I'd left a link for you to some of this brain perspective stuff. I have a little mini course on a rapid recovery from heartbreak that introduces that brain model.
I also have a quiz. If you're wondering, am I in stuck. Like, is it more of a bottom, a middle, a top brain? You know, these are very interactive systems, but sometimes, you know, you can just see symptom wise where you're more stuck. And then again, we will look at whole brain interventions because a lot of this like insight and, and rational thinking isn't changing this like ART will, we're hitting those. Yeah. And I, you know, I've been teaching hypnosis for a long time. I have a brain based hypnotherapy online academy where if people want to learn about the brain model and how they can use that, you know, they can take a course and that gets certified, get certified hours for the national board.
And I'm always helping therapists because I want them to move out of the talk therapy models for this and do stuff, do ART and other things to really help people heal rapidly.
[00:46:27] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yes. Yeah. We don't have to be stuck anymore. No. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate all the knowledge that you shared today.
I'm just so excited about just all the science that is out there and how you're just like really leading the field in recovering from heartbreak and how it doesn't just have to drag on forever. So thank you so much for being here.
[00:46:51] Dr. Elizabeth Michas, Licensed Clinical Psychologist: Yeah. Thank you. It was wonderful. And I hope this will help people. I also want to mention The Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love.
She has some nice videos on the fMRI studies on the brain and heartbreak mode that I think people would love to see, you know, that gets at these different systems that I'm talking about as well. My model's easier to understand than some of the big terms that they use. I want something that's Simple science that sticks and stays with people so that they can become brain changers and really transform their lives and love more.
Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage Therapist: Yes. Make it easy to understand. All right, listeners, I will have all of the links so you can find out more about Dr. Elizabeth Michas and all of her work in the show notes. Thank you so much. And until next time.
