Episode 15: Surviving to Thriving – 6 Steps to Turn Trauma & Depression Into Transformation.

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I could recognize people who went through really tough stuff, not overnight, but over time. Not only did they survive, but they actually thrived. And not in spite of what happened, but as a direct result. And I was fascinated by that aspect of human behavior.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

We'll talk with healthcare professionals, those in related fields that support our condition, and others just like us with stories of their myocardial bridge experiences. It's my intention for this content to inform, educate, entertain, and even motivate or inspire you in your personal journey on dealing with a myocardial bridge. Most importantly is to have you leave each episode with hope, knowing you're not alone and that what you're experiencing is real. She received her Doctor of Education from St. Mary's College and Masters of Science in Nursing from Sacramento State, focusing on trauma-informed care with an emphasis on building resilience and post-traumatic growth, or PTG. She developed the word metahabilitation to describe a more optimistic and productive outcome in the aftermath of trauma, and her research provided a strengths-based clinical pathway guiding individuals toward post-traumatic growth. Her postdoctoral research focused on how traumatic experiences also build resilience and bring forth post-traumatic growth in secondary and vicarious trauma survivors as well as communities. Along with the course she created at Sacramento State, Traumatology, an introduction to post-traumatic growth, she continues to research, lecture, and directly apply metahabilitation in a variety of rehabilitation and recovery settings. In July of 1990, she experienced a traumatic event that changed the course of her life. Welcome to my dear friend, professor, author, podcaster, Dr. Joyce Michael Flynn.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Hey Jeff, super great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

It's great to have you. You know, I'd like if you could walk us through something significant happened to you in July 33 years ago. And it's certainly something I've never heard before, and I doubt very many of our listeners, if any of them, have heard anything like this before. So if you would start with what was going on, what happened, and then we'll progress from there.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Well, it's kind of interesting because I don't really have a specific memory of that day. I have some retrograde amnesia, but this is what I was told happened, and this is what happened in the aftermath. But that is, you know, when my life changed. My life was never going to be the same. We, my husband and I have three children. Two of them at the time were on a swim team. There was a huge championship swim meet. And so I kind of remember going out to dinner with some friends on Friday night. I don't really remember much over the weekend, but I do just vaguely remember on Sunday, because it was a weekend long meet. So I do remember on Sunday somebody announcing that they were going to have a fun adult relay before they finished the whole conclusion of the events and let all the other swimmers swim. So I grabbed my husband, I grabbed a couple friends, and I'm very competitive, I'm a marathon runner, Ed was doing a lot of triathloning, so I was swimming a lot. And I said, come on, we're gonna swim this and we're gonna win this, and I'm the fastest, so I'm gonna swim the last leg of the event. So that's what I sort of remember and I was told happened. So we got in the pool to swim. I did swim the last leg of the event. It ended up at the side of the pool that was 13 feet deep. And so I have zero memory, but I was told the timer asked if I needed help out. I said, no, I'm fine. And something happened, and I just sunk to the bottom of the pool. Well, there was a couple of people there, they realized I wasn't surfacing. My husband dove to the bottom of the pool, got me to the side. Luckily, because there were a lot of children there, there were a lot of parents there. And very luckily, some of those parents, one was an ER doc, one was a cardiac nurse specialist, one was a respiratory doc, whatever. And so I received really good CPR at poolside. So I was given, I was told later, over 20 minutes of CPR at poolside. There is a field close to that. They landed a helicopter in the football field close to this place. And I was life-flighted to University of California, Davis Medical Center. I was told my heart stopped again in the helicopter, they got it going, and that's when I did land at UC Davis in an ICU on a respirator. And that's the life I knew changed. So there was definitely a before and an after. The not only the life I knew, but the life then my husband would know and my children would know. I mean, things changed. Because I was super, you know, I was already a nurse practitioner at the time. So I worked part-time, very engaged in our children's life, very much, I got this, I got this, I got this. Just a really active, busy, healthy person. And when this happened, it just really threw me for a loop.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

And you're speaking to so many of our listeners right now who are in that exact same space, who maybe haven't had the same episode that you had, because your heart stopped several times. In essence, you died.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Oh, yeah. I was without respirations in a heartbeat while they were doing the CPR. So, yeah, it was it was very surprising that I actually survived all this. And actually, as one of the doctors told me one time when they were trying to figure out exactly what happened, because nobody I went through all the tests you could go through. I went through just multiple, multiple tests. Nobody could really identify what was the causing factor of this. And I remember going to see a doctor by Stanford, a cardiologist, Roger Winkle, and he was sort of the guru of electrophysiology aspects of the heart. And I remember sitting with him, and the first thing he said to me is, Well, I got a couple of things to say. Number one, you are the luckiest person I've ever seen. I've never seen anybody who had that much CPR, who A, is alive and B sitting up here talking to me. B, your life has changed. Your life has changed forever. And there's decisions about how you are going to live your life. And those are your decisions. And then he just kind of gave me some ideas about what I could do, best ways to strategize around this and to get back into life.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

And yeah, it was pretty overwhelming. For many of us, we have some indication, we have some symptoms, something's going on, we know it's wrong, which obviously creates stress and and in some cases trauma. You have a heart attack, that's a traumatic event. And then it may progress or it may just stay at that, let's call it an uncomfortable baseline of uncertainty until we get to wherever it is that we end up, whether it's medical therapy or if it's it's surgery. But all of these things do compound. And certainly when you d have some indication of something's wrong, all you can do is dwell on it because you don't know what the outcome is going to be. You had no indication, and then you had a severe situation. And in the immediate post of that, because you didn't have any surgery, you didn't have anything corrective because they didn't know what went wrong. Right. You just ended up in the hospital, something happened, and then they said, okay, you seem better, go home.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Well, there was a couple of things they want to do, and and I do want to underscore that, yeah, maybe I you know, obviously I didn't realize what was happening before, and but in the aftermath, believe me, I thought about it all the time. I'm sure all the time.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Could it happen again?

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Could I walk down the street? Constantly was like, what if this happens again? What if this happens again? And I'll kind of get into that in a bit. But also this notion of, you know, I was so active. You know, I don't smoke, I didn't drink, very, very active. And I remember just feeling like, I can't believe my body let me down. I had taken such good care of myself. I cannot believe my body let me down. And I was angry kind of about that for sure. The other thing too is as you're trying to get back into life. You are looking at, well, what can I do? What's what's safe, what's not safe, because I am a runner. And that that running and that triathloning, that wasn't just this, that was a social thing for me. That was a that was my mental health. That was there were so many things that those activities did for me. And for somebody, especially right after this happened, several doctors just, oh, you can never do that again. You know, because when I would ask, when can I run again? You'll never run again. When can I you'll never do that again? And I remember saying to this doctor, you know, you need to stop doing that. You need to stop telling me what I can't do. You need to tell me what I can do. You need to ask me what I want to do, and our job is to get me there. Now they did want to implant, they wanted to put in an implantable defibrillator. And I just, you know, I don't want to get into it because it takes a long time to kind of go over why I thought through this, why I didn't want to do this, all the things around it, but I chose not to do that. And instead went in some different directions with that. But I remember doctors literally being angry with me for not doing that. But it just wouldn't, it just didn't fit with me that I wanted something like that inside. So I went, I did some medication for a while, a beta blocker, and and then luckily my husband and I found a cardiologist, fabulous cardiologist, Dr. Dan Van Hammersveld, who's a runner. And he said, okay, let's all calm down, relax, we'll get you back on there, but let's start this way. And he sent me to cardiac rehab, which was I clearly was the youngest person there. It's only 35. So it was clearly the young, but I I I cannot tell you how fabulous that was.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Built confidence and and you felt camaraderie.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Totally. Absolutely. And I just started walking on the treadmill all hooked up, and then I started doing a little jogging. And this was over a few months. This didn't happen overnight. This was a few months.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

If we could step back just for a second, when you were in the hospital, you actually did suffer some traumatic brain injury, correct?

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Oh that I suffer well, and it's funny, that was like ongoing for a while. And it's so funny, as I told you, I I have a degree in nursing and I am a nurse practitioner. And when I was going through this, I really knew. Like I could talk, but I had a thing called aphasia. Yes. So that is where it's a certain, you know, you have different speech parts in your brain. And one of the speech parts in your brain has to do with you articulate your thinking. So I again could speak, but I couldn't capture memories and capture some words. So as an example, my husband asked me one time, can I get you something? And I really wanted an orange. And I could not say orange, but I could say it's one of those things. They're round. You peel them, there's vitamin C in them, and you know, that type of thing. When I first became aware, first woke up in the hospital, because I was out of ICU, I was, you know, two weeks in the hospital and I kind of first woke up, and I saw or first became aware of my surroundings. And I saw my brother and sister-in-law at the end of the bed. And I said to them, Where am I? And they said, Well, you know, and I'm sure they told me this three billion times. And they said, Well, you know, you had this event, you're in the hospital, you all that. And by that time, all the wires were gone, everything was gone. And I used to be an ICU nurse, and I pulled my gown, and I didn't see any burns. I didn't see I go, no, no, that couldn't happen. No, no, that happened. And then they said, Can we get you something? And my absolute favorite meal is a cheeseburger, French fries, and vanilla shake. And I said, Yes, I want one of those things, like their layers, and there's this brown and then and yellow stuff on it, and like green stuff on it, and you can drive through places and get it, and it comes with these long things you put salt on and a cup of this cold white, cold white, and they and that's basically was what was going on.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

So you go through the process, you get to cardiac rehab, you're building your confidence back that you're stable and and can function in the world. Certainly no strength. I'm imagining it took quite some time to get back. If we can go through that and then fast forward to what got you to even where you are today, because that was not overnight.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Oh no, no, no. I always tell people things happened over time, not overnight. You know, and I I do want to bring this forward too, that I ha went through this, and when I have talked to people who have gone through this, one of the biggest things they deal with is depression. You know, because your life has changed and things seem so out of control. And, you know, sometimes you're not given choices. And that I think was very I think that's that's part of, I've I've come to in my research, definitely know that that is part of cardiac surgical issues, post-cabbage surgeries and things like that. People will have some cognitive delays and some depression. And I think that really needs to be addressed. And you also need to know that that's part of the process. So I tell people try not to get too worried about that, because it would make sense to be depressed. Your life has changed. Your life is not going to be the same. But as you go forward, you start to realize what control you can take over decisions being made, choices you can make, and a re-entry strategy and plan. And always, always make the focus, even on the here and now, what you can do. Well, I can't do this. I can go go, you know what? Don't don't go there, because that's just too what can you do? I can walk. What can you do? I think I've got things a little smarter than yesterday. I can go to a speech therapist and they can help me with cognition. I can go to a therapist who can help me deal with some of the depression I've got. There's so many things you can do. So focus on that.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

And then stay on the positive side. And one of the things we always stress is know yourself, know your body.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

And then you recognize, okay, oh, that sensation, well, that's not my heart, that's something different. That's it's gas. It's from the sternotomy. It's I'm good. Yes. The heart seems fine, especially post-surgery. And as that process continues, again, you begin to develop an understanding of that's fine. And I'm looking at the positive side of things. Oh, I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to worry about, I can do this. Right. I think that's just a great, great application to the post-trauma process. Yeah. So being the underachiever that you are, you you come out of this horrific situation and you decide to go back to school.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Well, part of going so that was, and let's let's all let me go on a timeline here. Please. Okay. So and and I also do want to bring in a little bit on spirituality. So for those of you, you know, I'm Catholic, and I will tell you, I did not want anything to do with God or spirituality because I was so mad that that happened. That was not supposed to happen to me. I had done everything right. Why did this happen? But I can remember to almost the day, six months into it, I was going to bed at night. And I don't know how the rest of you are, but nighttime was tough because it's quiet. And you start to think about, wow, what happened? What if how am I doing? I feel in love, what everything. And I really had a moment where I just literally, you know, takes you to your knees, and you just think, you just beg God, I can't live with this anger, this depression, this frustration. You have to take this away, and I gotta move on in life. And I went to bed, slept great, and those feelings really never came back. But I think a lot of times, one of the things that we know that is helpful is a spiritual life. And so kind of getting back into that. But again, at first I wasn't like into it. I was mad. And that again takes some time. So after I consistently started getting better, I did some, like I said, speech therapy, cardiac therapy. I was a nurse practitioner. I'd gotten my degree at UC Davis. I went back to the faculty at UC Davis and I asked them, can I sit in class again? Can I just sit in class and listen?

SPEAKER_00 19:27

So you could resorb what you already did.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

I totally got back into that. I have one of my best friends, Dr. Dan Fields, and I were in co-practice. He brought me back in and oh, so gently, I started seeing patients again. Really simple things. He walked me through. We went through, so it was a process. So after about two years, I was feeling much better, much better. And I thought, if I really want to get my brain back, I should go back to school. That's it, I'll go back to school. So I lived very close to Sacramento State University. They have a school of nursing there. They had a master's degree you could earn there. So I went back to Sack State and earned my master's. And I was very interested in looking at had other people who had gone through death events or sudden death events and survived, had they gone through, again, like I said, the depression, the anxiety, the fear, the anger, all that, you know, spiritual shift, all that. So I got my master's, and that was my master's thesis, was to look at that. And I started seeing patterns in people. But one of the things I started seeing in terms of patterns was not only in the research I did, but also when I started seeing patients as a nurse practitioner, I could recognize people who went through really tough stuff, not overnight, but over time. Not only did they survive, but they actually thrived. And not in spite of what happened, but as a direct result. And I was fascinated by that aspect of human behavior. So when our children got older and a couple went to college, and our last one was, I thought, you know what? I really want to study this in earnest. I'm going to attach a degree to it. So I went back to get my doctorate. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Keeping in mind, we're only a couple years out of an incredibly traumatic event. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

To rebuild. You're in your late 30s now. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Right. Right. Well, I was probably by that time I was in my early 40s. The other thing, too, is I was teaching at this one university part-time, and I had some really cool colleagues. And lots of times we were just bouncing around ideas about patients and behaviors, and we'd talk about what happened to me. And I kept saying, you know, there's so Something beyond rehab. There's something beyond people go way beyond rehab. They go way beyond the, you know, and and they they don't always they don't look the same, they don't even sound the same, they're better.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

And so we started, I go in spite of the trauma.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Oh, it's a direct result of it. Yes. A direct result of it. And so I was kicking around some ideas, but I need a different word. Rehab, it's so minimal, you know? And so one time a friend of mine said, Hey, what about meta? Like going above and beyond. I go, yes. And so I took the word meta and I matched it with habilitation, restoration, habilitation. So I said, I'm just gonna make up a new word for what people do all the time. People have done this for centuries. They meta-habilitate, they go above and beyond restoration. So while I had this in my head and was thinking about it and ruminating over it, that's when I was going back to get my doctorate, and I really wanted to study that in earnest. So it took me five years. I was in doctoral studies for five years, finished my dissertation, and my dissertation was specifically looking at the notion of metahab, what is behind it, how I had the greatest dissertation chair, Dr. Dean Elias, and I remember saying, I want to interview people, and I I know people do this all the time, and I want to interview people, and I want to know why they did this, why did they go above and beyond? And he said to me, It was like perfect. He said, Well, you kind of want to know why. But that's really motivation, and motivation can change over time. What you want to know is how did they do it? And I went, oh my gosh, that's right. That's right. So I had very open-ended interviews with people who had gone through, you know, gentlemen who'd gone through concentration camps in Nazi Germany and had emigrated to finally the England and then to the U.S. and had a life here. And, you know, guy, a young guy who had a spinal cord injury. He was playing rugby at UC Berkeley and coming back from that, and a woman who had had breast cancer in her early 30s with really tough stuff. And so I not only asked them about their event and the aftermath and kind of just let them talk about it, but I also looked a little bit into their background. Who were their family, how did they grow up, that kind of stuff, which was super interesting. But as I was listening to story after story or experience after experience, I started recognizing they didn't do this in a haphazard way. You could really identify a system here. They kind of went through this and then they did that and then they came out.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

So there was a repetitive pattern with each one of them.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

You really, when you start to listen, you could see they they did this in in it is over time, but 100% you could see how they move through when one thing organically almost led to another stage and those types of things. So chatting with a colleague of mine at SAC State, Dr. Louise Timmer, I was telling her about that. And she goes, you know what? Sounds like there's stages. And I said, Oh my gosh, yes, there are stages to metahab. So I went back into my research, went back into behavioral science, went back into cognitive behavioral theory, went back into all that, and I clearly identified six stages of metahab.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

So today's language it's PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. Something happens that causes, and that can be significant in the general term, but significant is relative to the individual. Loss of a job, a marriage. Oh, yes. Those could be PTSD events. Obviously, first responders, the cumulative effect of these what they see on a day-to-day basis. The significance really is relative to the individual. So people that we're speaking with who are in a position of understanding that they have a heart condition that could quite possibly be fatal. They don't know. They don't know what the next step is going to be for them. Or post-surgery, they've they've had, in our case, it's called the unroofing procedure where the the artery is is unroofed from the tissue of the heart. Well, now what can I do? What am I yes? My life has changed forever. How? So that PTSD event is what you're you're describing in so many cases and incidents, but something happens after PTSD to the term post-traumatic growth, if I'm not mistaken, right? Or PTG. Right. And and you've now somewhat codified the process for post-traumatic growth.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Right. So I did not come up with the term post-traumatic growth. I came up with Dr. Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedesky from the University of North Carolina. And they have a thing called the five domains of post-traumatic growth. And again, it's really important to know, and this can be whether you're doing cardiac rehab, you know, whatever kind of rehab you're doing, as you're coming back. One of the things I have come to understand with PTG is one must engage in the process for it to happen. So if you're after cardiac surgery or after a cardiac event or whatever, and you are choosing therapies to engage in, it is the engagement with that that is going to bring your results. So as I have a course at SAC State called Traumatology, an introduction to post-traumatic growth that's based over all of this. And I tell my students this. So as an example, if you want to get stronger biceps, you cannot just sit around hoping and wishing that you're going to get stronger biceps. You must engage in the process to get those, to do the weights, to do them so often, to do whatever pattern you want to get into. So the same thing with post-traumatic growth. It doesn't just occur, or even if it does, you're not even going to be aware of it unless you purposefully engage in the process. And I think that's a really important message because in the aftermath of what people go through, and there's various levels, and sometimes people say, well, I don't know if it's traumatic. Well, let's just call it a significant adversity or a significant life challenge. Same thing. Unless you enter into actively being engaged in the process of your healing, of your the work you want to do to get better, it's not going to happen. And that is also for the people around you, wives and husbands and children, they need to be engaged in a process of how do we look at things now? How do we see each other now? What does our family look like now? And at the end of the day, or at the end of several months, or even so you many times people will look back on this and say, we're so much stronger. We're stronger.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

And you need that surrounding support mechanism, whether it be the spouse or the children or the family member, sister, brother, whatever it may be. And I'm going to circle back really quickly back to that faith.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Because there has to be a belief in something that is non-material that's allowing you to continue. Yeah. And I I think many of us would would agree that is whatever we call our faith, whether it be God or a higher power, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01 30:51

You know, I I you know I know you're going to mention this, but I'll just kick it in now. So I've written a few books on this. Yes. And my most recent one is called Anatomy of a Survivor: Building Resilience, Grit, and Growth After Trauma. And I have in one of my chapters some information about spirituality. And as I was doing the research on this book, it turns out that even people who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, when they go through a significant situation, they do have a realization that there's something else happening here because they do experience healing and things and realize it just isn't all about me. So you know, whatever you are, whatever faith you adhere to, whatever spiritual life you enter into, it is helpful to have that.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

Let's walk through the stages of metahab because I'm sure as I'm listening to you, I'm going, okay, what do we do? What do I do? What do I do? I'm going to get engaged. I don't like the way I feel right now. I don't like my outlook. I don't like my behavior. I don't like my action in terms of what I'm doing to help myself heal. What do I do? And where does it start?

SPEAKER_01 32:12

I want the people who not only the people who have gone through the event themselves, but those supportive people around them. So family members, clinicians, and everything, you go through stages as well. You can go through these stages as well. So to begin with, I call stage one acute recovery. That's when you I don't want you looking too far in advance. You got to look at the here and now. How are you going to get through day one day to the next day to the next day?

SPEAKER_03 32:45

Living in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Totally. What are you doing to survive and m move through? Then you can get to stage two, and stage two I call turning point. And I would ask your listeners to think about this for themselves. But clearly, in I would say in the hundreds of stories I've heard, it is very clear that there is a moment in time, there is a point in time when somebody says, I don't like what happened, I don't want to go back, I am going to choose to move forward. I don't even know how that's going to work out, but I am choosing to move forward. And when they make that choice, that is a critical choice, where they are taking on and taking control of their situation, they move into stage three.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

And can I hang up on just on stage two for just a second? Maybe that's when you're in the throes of grief and desperation and uncertainty post-surgery where you're going, is this ever going to end? Yeah. I mean, when do I get to do something that is what I want to do, as opposed to this hurts, it's uncomfortable, I don't know what I'm doing, my medical therapies aren't working. They're trying to do this and that, and I don't want to take this, and I don't want to take that. And all of a sudden you go, screw this. I'm I I can't live like this. I am going to do something different. Okay. I'm going to make this through.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Yes. And that is, let me just say, people who do well, take control and make good choices. This is the first part of taking control and making choices. Again, don't look too far in the future. Just look at what's happening in the here and now. Another thing that's super important to look at is I bet those of you who have had a cardiac event and your families, this isn't the first challenge you've ever been faced with. Bet you've had other challenges before. So I always like to tell people look at how you handled those in the past. Bring those strategies forward as well. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

And if those strategies didn't work for you in the past, don't repeat them.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Only go with strategies that work. We don't want to fix anything. We just want to go with what works. We don't want to, you've got enough energy going someplace. So then you get to stage three, which is focus on treatments. And that's complementary or traditional treatments, whatever you are finding. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Cardiac rehab. Those therapies, exercise physiologist, a coach, medications, work well with your physicians, all that. Be clear. I'm doing this and I want to do this and I'll do this. And you know, work with them, collaborate. And there's just so many things that you can do. Then stage four, that stage three, that treatment time, super busy because people you love are looking, helping you out with that, and there you that's a busy time. Stage four is like, take a break. It's acceptance, adaptation, a time for reflection. You've got to just sometimes sit down and go, wow, what did this all mean? Where am I at now? Where do I want to go? How am I going to make this work? You really need to take some time out. And people do that in a variety of ways. It can be going out for a walk every day for 30 minutes. You could go on a short vacation. You could go to your best coffee shop. There's lots of ways you can do it, but you've got to just take some time and let this settle. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Recognizing your accomplishment, so to speak. Wonderful. I've I've done this. I've come this far from where I started. The thing that I keep thinking about as you're saying this, and I'm reflecting on both my situation and others that I've spoken with, is this is the point I think where somewhere along the line you realize maybe this didn't happen to me, but it really happened for me.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Oh nice word. Nice, Jeff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

And I have to figure this out. It's I'm here, I'm improving. Let me figure it out and really dwell on it for a minute and you know, breathe it all in.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Right. This is very, you know, meaning-making. What is the meaning of this? What am I what do I know now that I didn't know before?

SPEAKER_03 37:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 37:25

What am I seeing now? How are, you know, those types of things. What do I need to do to even get better at this? And so there's a lot of, you know, thinking, and once you kind of contemplated that, you get back into life. You do something. Now, here's the kicker. There's a lot of times that people, you know, I want, I want to get, I want my life back. I want my life back. Well, did I really want that kind of life back? I was pretty over, I was pretty I was missing a lot because I was too focused on getting stuff done and being this and being the woman who did the trial.

SPEAKER_00 38:05

And your mom and the after. All that.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

And when I kind of slowed down, what I realized that there's a lot of people around me, including my children, who knew how to do things pretty well. I did not need to micromanage everybody. That was taken away from me because I was too exhausted. And I remember thinking, wow, people can do pretty good stuff on their own. I don't need to do that. And it was much, it was much more relaxing and a better way to have a relationship with that. Also, I have talked to so many people who wanted to go back to the their job or whatever, and for whatever reason, that door closed. But a very interesting, very more fulfilling other door opened up. And again, this is not overnight, this is over time. But in some way, you get back into being a productive, purposeful person. Then stage six is what I call taking on the future. That's meta hab. That's when you've really incorporated this process into you. And you actually use it all the time. You go through the stages in your mind, you go through them fast or slow or whatever. But that's when you really put it together and go, you know, this is my world now, and it's not bad. It's pretty cool. I see a lot now that I didn't see before. You know, it's tough because especially when you're going through some cardiac stuff, yeah, you want the life that you I want precisely the way it was. Even if that's not there, you have made a new life. And you have, in that new life, you have identified and really seen, you know, you got to the essence of. And it's a beautiful place to be because you really everything you can do is an appreciation and a gratitude. And it's like a pretty cool place to be.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

When I think also, depending on where this occurrence happens in your life, at what age, what stage of life you're in, changes the way that it affects you. You know, for me it was at 65 years old. So I had lived and raised my kids and sent them off to school and seen one of four get married. And it it was an accomplishment that was very different than when I look forward post-surgery. You know, certainly I want to be around to see them all get married and have their children, our grandchildren. But it's very different in the perspective. If you're 30-something, we've had guests on the program who are in their 30s. Yeah. And it's changed their life. And in some ways, I think what a beautiful perspective to have so young to know at that age that a lot of the stuff that I thought was important wasn't. Yeah. It just took me a little longer to figure it all out. They can experience that at a at a much earlier age, whether it be job or wealth or whatever you're trying to create. And the ability to see it as a process and understand it. And I think that's what's so significant for those of us who have either been stuck in a place or as I talk with people, knowing where they are in their sense of fear of the uncertainty and the unknown, still carrying the trauma of what happened. Just so many things that they have yet to go through that if they don't have a pick uh process or a structure or some discipline to it, it's uncertain. And there is no time frame and no expectation because they don't know what the next step is. But how beautiful to be able to look at a program like Metahab and say, Oh, I'm there. Now I I'm in stage two. I get it. I know what that's like. Now three, four, five. And all the way to six with reintegration, which is the ability to now get back into the life that you are making as a result of whatever your situation is. Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

I really look at stage six too, like I said. I'll just like go to the my daughter makes really good chocolate chip cookies. Okay. And she went through process to figure out what are the best ways to make that. She goes through stages with that. Well, now she's landed on, and it's the best. And so that is integrated into her. When she makes chocolate chip cookies, she always goes through this precise process with these precise ingredients and all that. That's metahab, where you have developed a mindset and a process that when you are dealing with an irritation, a challenge, or whatever, you go, oh, I go back and I work this. I work the problem. I work the problem. I apply it and I work the problem. You know, it's funny when you said it being younger, I I remember some of my friends as I was going, you know, even months afterwards, said to me, you know, I noticed that you were a lot calmer after all of this. I've seen you're not so intense. I noticed that about you. And it certainly, when I think about let being less intense, it certainly didn't mean that I didn't achieve things after. But I totally remember just like calming down. And I don't know if your listeners have children or grandchildren or whatever, but you know. Yeah, you mean you have in grade four, you know, it's California history, and they had to make this mission. And I remember I was coming out of my event, and one of my children were in the and you know what? They made a cal they made a mission all on their own, and it looked great. And I didn't need to do and they did it. And so It's it's a process too, I think, of little bits of letting go of some of the ego that stops us from life appreciation. And the more I let go, the more I got.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Okay, that's say that again, because I think people miss that so often.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Yeah. The more I let go, the more I got. So I'm a runner. And when I would run a race, I would have to, I want a seven-minute mile, I want this, I want that. And it just afterwards, for a whole host of reasons, it just, you know, I made the decision not to push it, like just to run the race. And when I would finish the race, like I get emotional, just like I was so grateful just to run. So the letting go of that expectation, or that's important for me, that I have to run that time and I have to do that, when I kind of let it go and just said, I just want to run. I got so much more from that. I got so much more from that. You know, I don't know. It just I've just like, but it was a process of it's okay, you know.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

And whatever it is that you do, whether it's it's baking in the kitchen or cooking or enjoying time with family, because everybody's not an athlete, but the significance of understanding the awareness of the moment. And we've had several people on the show, same situation, who have an activity that they used to do with great intentionality. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And now when they do that activity, it's with great appreciation. Hundred oh my god. Because it was on the cusp of being taken away. And if it was taken away, what a void.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Yeah. That's a per that is a perfect way to say that. And I think whether, like you said, whether it's, you know, for me, it was, you know, the athletics, it was the running, it was triathloning, you know, also the things that were super important to me were obviously my family, my religion, running in my brain. And after this happened, those were pretty much, I I did not recognize it a little bit. Well, I did not recognize my husband. I did not recognize who my children were right away. I had to kind of be retaught about that. I, you know, my I'm so being cognitively astute was important to me. And that was kind of gone, and my athletics was kind of gone, and my spiritual. So there's a lot of things, there were a lot of losses there that I had to navigate through. But as they all came back, and they did all come back, again, there was kind of a letting go of expectations of those, and what I I got so much more. I got so much more back in my relationships with my children. So much more because I just the that intensity and expectations and how to be this way and everything. Ah was a lot less, and I got a lot more.

SPEAKER_00 47:25

Isn't that wonderful?

SPEAKER_01 47:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

Joyce, I cannot thank you enough. And before we go, I want to do one more thing. Would you walk through just the six steps again? Just one through six. I want everybody to understand here's what they are, not necessarily an explanation of each one, just what they are. So it they go to your website, which we'll address in a second. Uh if they want to listen to your podcast series, they can listen to uh the actual interviews of people in those stages from acute recovery to reintegration. And we'll leave them with that just to say, okay, I my uh naive understanding of that is I might be here, but I need to understand this process a little bit more so I can take those steps one step at a time. Perfect. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

So stage one again is the acute recovery. Stage two is your turning point, saying yes to life. Stage three is focus on treatments, both complementary and traditional, use them all. Stage four is adaptation and acceptance for now, taking yes, taking a break. Stage five, re-entry, get back into life. And stage six is taking on your future or metahab.

SPEAKER_00 48:45

I'm back. Yeah. And then if people want to get in touch with you or learn a little bit more about MetaHab, where should they go?

SPEAKER_01 48:53

So I have a website. You can get to it through two ways. You can just so my name is Dr. Joyce Michael Flynn. So you can go DRJMF. So D R J M F You can even go www.metahab.com. It'll come up with that. Okay. You I do I'm pretty robust on Instagram, so at DR.jmf. You can find me on Instagram and things I post. And then also when you I did mention that I have a couple of books that might be helpful for you. Please. So the first book I wrote as a result of my doctoral dissertation, and that definitely takes you through the stages of it all, and that is called Turning Tragedy into Triumph, Metahabilitation, Contemporary Model of Rehabilitation. And then a couple of years ago, I wrote my second book, which I really integrated for those science people. So I went into the sci, you know, the neuroscience, the genetics, all that part of it. That is called Anatomy of a Survivor: Building Resilience, Grit, and Growth After Trauma. So that gives even a more in-depth look and takes you through the stages as well.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

Dr. Michael Flynn, I really can't thank you enough. I think what you're sharing is so timely for so many people as we see more and more people enter into an awareness and an understanding of what their condition is. Yeah. And they're afraid. Oh, yes. And they need steps and processes and support to know that what they're going through is not novel, not the only person that's been through it. And secondly, that there is something and a return at the end by going through the steps properly.

SPEAKER_01 50:45

Oh yeah. This is something that can be very I love how you put talk about the fear of going through that. Just because people overcome or move on, or whatever way you want to put it, doesn't mean they don't have fear. They ha 100%.

SPEAKER_03 51:04

Right.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

It just means they have learned some management strategies. And again, I cannot emphasize taking control and making good choices.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

Aaron Ross Powell So I'm going to steal two lines that I know you use. One I'm going to say, and you're going to say the next, and you'll know exactly what I mean. Trevor Burrus, Jr. The first one that I love, it's not going to happen overnight, but over time. And the other one is.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Oh, oh, you got this. You got this. Oh, that's okay. Yes. I actually, that's in my book over and over again. Yes, because people, you know, we do have the capacity built into us emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually, and physically to take care of us. So engage with those processes, because you got this.

SPEAKER_00 51:54

And I've run that through my head so many times.

SPEAKER_01 51:56

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 51:57

Dr. Michael Flynn, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

Thanks, Jeff.

SPEAKER_00 52:00

Thank you for listening to Imperfect Heart. It's my hope that this information helped in some way to improve your situation or will help you better understand this condition. More importantly, that it gives you hope through stories that there is help and you most certainly are not alone. If you've been diagnosed with a myocardial bridge, please be sure to join the private Facebook group, Myocardial Bridge Support Group. For more information about our program or to reach me directly, visit the website, myimperfectheart.com. If you like what you heard today, please give a positive review, thumbs up, high five, whatever your app likes. And be sure to share with everyone important to you so they understand what it is you're dealing with. Please subscribe as well. Welcome each day with gratitude and positivity. The views and opinions expressed in this program are solely those of the host and the guest and are not intended to provide, nor are they a suitable substitute for professional care by a doctor, therapist, mental health professional, or other qualified medical professional. Imperfect Heart is a production of Hear Me Now Studio.