Get Over Breakup – Accelerated Resolution Therapy(ART) for Romantic Heartbreak
Completely get over breakup involves more than waiting for time to heal. The neuroscience of emotional healing suggests the benefits of using mindfulness and breathing exercises to suffer less and be more present. That is excellent psychological first aid. However, if you want to get free of past hurts, you must see that the emotional effects and unconscious patterns aren’t dragging you down or being dragged into new relationships, which requires updating the brain.
After a breakup, lower areas of the emotional brain take over in response to the change in your social connection. You’re feeling heartache because of the evolutionary wiring of our brain’s emotional systems to do stuff automatically in response to social loss. Your brain can use a tune-up after saying goodbye to love. An essential intervention in the rapid resolution of heartbreak is the recoding of emotional memories, especially the addictive types of what used to be good in the way of love.
On April 7th, I was invited to speak at the 7th annual conference of the International Society for Accelerated Resolution Therapy (IS-ART) on using ART to transform romantic heartbreak.
What is ART?
The picture was taken from (Google images)
Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) is an evidenced-based eye-movement therapy that has been around since 2007. ART provides rapid results in as few as 1-to 5 sessions and lasting resolution to emotional pain. I use ART to relieve my clients’ most physical and emotional reactions to Romantic Breakups faster. (see my blog on Getting over a Breakup, where I describe the physical signs of Post Romantic Distress).
As a Certified Master Practitioner of Accelerated Resolution Therapy for over six years, I’ve been providing an emotion-focused, creative, caring, novel, fun experience with eye movements and voluntary image replacement, allowing the rewrite of emotional memories. Thanks to ART’s founder and developer, Laney Rosensweig, LMFT, in 2016 I quickly added eye movements and voluntary image replacement to my psychotherapist and transformational healer toolbox. The other transformational change processes I’ve used for over 30 years to resolve traumatic memories rapidly included Emotional-Freedom Technique/Tapping, Hypnotherapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). I’ve experienced that transformation change personally with the traumatic grief I had after losing my first-born child to cancer when she was just four years old. So, I know these brain-based interventions are fast and permanent.
Like many others, I’ve had trouble moving-on after breakups. I began to study the neuroscience of heartbreak and quickly realized that a measure of how fast recovery happens has more to do with how the brain responds to relationships ending and how you relate to your internal processes, e.g., emotions, images, and thoughts. If you don’t know what’s going on in the brain you might think you’ll never recover. So, I made it my life mission to teach all my clients and other psychotherapists simple concepts about how the brain works and the neuroscience of transforming heartbreak. Rather than use talk therapy, there’s a benefit to specializing in techniques for reaching non-conscious brain systems or recoding emotional memories of what used to be good in the way of love so that those suffering from romantic heartbreak can get free to love.
These processes for rapid recovery from heartbreak can be done using ART interventions which are brain-based, innovative, and experiential processes. ART utilizes bilateral stimulation to activate both sides of the brain to allow for more significant processing of whatever issue the session targets. This eye-movement technique provides rapid relief from strong physical/emotional reactions such as those we see after a breakup due to how the lower regions of the brain are lovestuck™ and making automatic responses post-breakup.
Psychotherapists trained in ART were very interested in my presentation. I reviewed some highlights on the neurobiology of heartbreak and emotional pain. For example, I refer to the lower brain as BOTTOM Brain that can get lovestuck™ on old love learnings and respond to separation with intense distress. And I shared how I use ART for neuroplastic healing with memory reconsolidation to help clients get over past hurts and be in their right mind for future love. ART’s rapid change potential has already been demonstrated by research on other disorders such as; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, and OCD.
At the IS-ART Conference
I discussed how ART reprocessing of emotional memories comes after some simple neuro-education. Before targeting the brain for change Emotional Pain Intervention (EPI®) brain-changing conversation methods of neuro-education set the neuro-intervention steps for neuroplastic emotional healing. Then everything makes more sense by enhancing agreements for ART protocols to accelerate transformational change and update emotional memory of any past relationship blocks to future love.
I help clients begin a process to rewire their brains to experience a mind that works for them. They learn to use a brain-change conversation to arrive at the ideal state of mind and open the brain for change “calm and optimal.” Research on emotion regulation skills demonstrates how intentionally engaging higher brain regions helps you learn to take control over internal emotional states. The brain is being trained and tamed with practice to begin working optimally. Higher brain regions play a role in how you are responding, choosing, changing, and creating your best life and love.
I explain the whole brain that reframes a client’s feeling sensations and cognitive reaction to primary emotional processes due to things going on automatically in the lower and midbrain regions. It’s not you but something your brain has been doing. You are human, and this is normal to feel emotional, but it can become dysfunctional. After getting introduced to the whole brain as an organ of change, clients can understand the brain as a metaphoric pipe organ of many levels and systems working in concert. With the new perspective, they put their hands and feet on the keyboard and pedals, attune to the bottom brain’s negative emotional systems as learning to play the brain. Looking into what to do with those BOTTOM Brain pedals to accelerate, brake, and reset emotions.
Understanding that the BOTTOM Brain reacts fast, involuntarily, and quicker than you can think can help one do something to respond differently and assist the clinician in selecting interventions. ART targets what I refer to as Lovestuck™ patterns in BOTTOM Brain emotional responses that activate after a breakup. We can target Heartbreak as Post Romantic Distress and use ART to alter sensations. I use the ART protocol to help clients with those panic sensations and uncontrollable crying fits. I am teaching clients to influence their BOTTOM Brain by self-administering the eye movements to calm and reset BOTTOM Brain emotional responses. ART processes can also affect how often we have automatic Emotions and Cravings for the Ex-partner, primarily if we use ART to target emotional love memories.
For example, the first time you meet someone, your brain automatically forms a memory of that person. When you meet them later, you retrieve the memory, and all the things you’ve learned about the person are incorporated into a new memory. Thus, if you have an emotional experience with that person, your brain includes an emotional ‘feel good’ to be with them type of emotional memory. That allows memory to persist in guiding you to connect for more “feel good” rewards in the future, but in this case, the first memory has been altered by a new experience, such as a breakup, the brain may still get stuck on old response pattern.
The brain in breakup mode is reacting to the loss of connection. It’s a survival threat to be disconnected from someone. With all the stress reactivity, critical parts of the brain that influence the formation of memory, namely the hippocampus and amygdala, can get dosed by stress chemicals such as high cortisol for one and not wholly process the memory, leaving one stuck in the worse part of the painful memory.
By targeting the scenes of heartbreak, we can use deconstruction of the Heartbreak Emotional Pain experiences to get at what’s at the root of the distress and alter it to accelerate healing and breakup recovery. With ART interventional neuroplastic healing and transformation are intended from the start, and we can adjust how BOTTOM Brain systems respond after losing a love connection.
With Emotional Pain Intervention, the neuroplastic healing steps of a RETUNE can help someone suffering from romantic heartbreak. There’s scientific evidence illuminating our understanding of how we can change memories with new therapies. I’ll be sharing more on this in an upcoming blog post all about memory reconsolidation, but in short, whenever memory is recalled, its molecular trace in the brain becomes plastic. So when you have a reactivated memory open, it has to be ‘saved’ again or consolidated all over again. We can hack the memory so that it doesn’t keep you in emotional pain. ART allows you to keep the knowledge of the breakup event and lose the heartbreak.
How is ART Different than Traditional Psychotherapy?
ART isn’t talking therapy focusing on discussing what you think and feel. The ART developer, Laney Rosenweig, reminds practitioners of ART to let the brain use eye movements to heal. She suggests “more grab than gab done.” The grab involves how ART targets the brain images, emotions, and body sensations for change. I don’t need to tell anyone about the physical and emotional pain present in breakups. I want to share that the brain requires new emotional experiences to update memory. When doing BOTTOM-up and horizontal brain interventional processes fresh, new ways to be with emotional pain appears to help move and change memory. ART is process-oriented, not content-oriented, so you track more of what you feel and notice with sensations than thinking and talking about the breakup. Healing is accelerated beyond desensitization to include positive image replacement. This is one of the primary differences between ART vs EMDR, another form of eye-movement therapy that only focuses on desensitization.
Why do clients love ART?
Quick and painless, breakups hurt way more than healing them with ART. But, the client is in control. Details can be kept private. But, in as few as 1-5 sessions, relief can transform the “Lovestuck™” vivid images—into a creative and positive process. Who better to work with individuals wanting to change their emotional reaction to the vicissitudes of life than those trained in ART, as they can help the brokenhearted by changing memories of love gone wrong.
How do Eye Movements work to change how you feel?
Research on the efficacy of eye-movement therapy for desensitization and reprocessing indicates that the back and forth or lateral eye movements we use during ART can calm the brain and body. According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist, and professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford has made many contributions to brain development, brain plasticity, and repair fields. Your brain will follow the visual system and even as you walk naturally your eyes move side to side reflexively.
BOTTOM Brain’s key player, the amygdala, seems to respond to eye movements, that are both calming and brain-changing. Huberman’s research area is on the brain’s visual system, including the mechanisms controlling light-mediated activation of the circadian and autonomic arousal centers in the brain. Huberman has won awards for contributions to Vision Science and Ophthalmology. He illuminated that the eyes are outside of the brain but windows for inputs of light and information. Research is still underway on why eye movements work to calm us and assist in reprocessing emotional memories. Still, there is evidence that they do work, and therapies that use them are at the forefront of treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress.
There’s no pain without a BOTTOM emotional brain response. I consider eye movements an interventional tool for Unburdening the Nervous System from stress responding. Think of targeting, taming, and training the amygdala with eye movements as they can be instrumental in Playing the Brain for a change. Neuro-intervention with ART for rapid recovery of emotional pain response patterns is due to what we can do when reaching the whole brain and targeting lower brain systems involving stress reactivity, emotions, sensations, body movements, and orientation.
Conclusion and next steps:
I want to spread the good news to transform heartbreak emotional pain and target the brain to help others get UnLovestuck: be calm, clear, and free to love.
Psychotherapists must get adequately trained and certified in ART to use it with clients. Training is available through Rosenzweig Center for Rapid Recovery or IS-ART.
If you already do ART or other transformational processes you may check out www.drelizabethmichas.com to learn more about my comprehensive, neuropsychological, poly-vagal informed evidence-based approach to treating and resolving Romantic Heartbreak using Emotional Pain Intervention’s neuroplastic healing system. You can be certified in EPI® and use it to be a breakup and divorce recovery specialist accelerating emotional healing for your clients.