Daniel Davis, LMFT

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A Felt Sense of the Body

February 2, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Alexithymia is a condition where one has difficulty identifying feelings and difficulty describing feelings. Someone with Alexithymia has trouble with thinking and regulating their emotions. This disorder appears to be partly responsible for disease and mental health issues.

John Omaha, the inventor of Affect Management Skills Training, cites research that men lack emotional sensitivity. Research indicates that emotional numbness is a one way someone responds to stressful challenges in life. Men are more emotionally numb that women. I realize that this is not a surprise to much of the world. Men, women, and children are often reminded of how men lack emotional sensitivity. Women are often better at bonding than men which is related to emotional sensitivity.

Many men have one person that they share their insecurities, fears, shame, sadness, or tragedies – their wife or girlfriend. Many men do not even share intimately with anyone. It can be a lonely world to hide our feelings and thoughts from everyone. I must add that some women do not share their insecurities, fears, shame, anger, or tragedies with anyone as well.

Women seem more playful than men. Watch children. The girls and boys are singing. The girls will be swaying and grooving with the music. The boys will be stiff as boards. It may be the due to incomplete separation from their mother. Robert Bly writes: “When a girl is two or three, she can look up at her mother and say ‘That is what I am going to be’. A boy the same age can look up at his mother and say, ‘That is not what I am going to be’. Separating from the mother is difficult for both genders; some children have good luck with it, some less good luck”. When we separate from our mothers, other boys often shame us calling us sissy or mama’s boy. This results in a wound that stays with us for a long time. Some boys are able to resolve this wound and gain more separation from their mother psychologically.

If as men, we are unable to resolve our wound separating from our mother as a young boy, then will tend to be stiff. We may become a lawyer, an engineer, or scientist. We can become obsessed with distance. He may have a tendency as an adult to treat people as if they were things, and to treat things as if they were people.

Although social support is a key factor in our psychological and physical health, many of us live lives of isolation, loneliness, and despair. We may live in bedroom communities in our neighborhoods, driving home late in our smart cars to our big screen televisions, computers, or smart phones. Some of us are overwhelmed with the responsibilities of children or work that we scarcely feel as if we have a free moment. We had friends once, but no longer find time.

Our experiences of our bodies may be numbness and pain. We may experience moments of relief when eating or drinking alcohol or having sex or playing a video game or working on the computer. Robert Johnson wrote: “We have an insatiable need of entertainment – we moderns watch TV and other screens more than seven hours a day – and for anything that might assuage our longing, especially late at night”.

Many of us remain strangers to our body sensations. Waking up to our emotions, body shifts, vital energy, erotic urges, and even aggressive impulses can be disturbing. We have become strangers to our own pleasure. We have sacrificed our joy for the seductive distractions of the commercial replacements in modern life.

From our morning caffeine, to our mid-morning sugar, to our afternoon Red Bull, and then to the big dinner and perhaps a few drinks. We may find temporary relief in our submission to much artificial assistants to climb up the daunting hill of our day, only to rest and do it all again tomorrow.

Vacations are a rarity. If someone takes time off, they must check their email and return phone calls from work matters. They may get up at 3:00 am for meetings with colleagues from around the globe. We become a source of output for the corporate profit machine. What is our reward? Where do we find relief or sanctuary if our own body no longer recognizes pleasure but only a relief from pain into temporary numbness?

Please watch this video by Nils Peterson on poetry and the body:

 

Filed Under: Blog, Calming Oneself, Somatic Therapy Tagged With: Affect Management Skills Training, aggressive, alcohol, Alexithymia, AMST, big, body, body shifts, bonding, caffeine, children, Dinner, disease, drinks, drugs, emotional, emotions, entertainment, erotic, fears, impulses, insecurities, John Omaha, marijuana, mental health issues, numbness, overeating, playful, Red Bowl, regulating their emotions, research, Robert Johnson, sadness, sensations, sensitivity, separating from mother, shame, sugar, thinking, tragedies, urges, vacations, vital energy, women, wound, young boy

Grounding Skill

October 13, 2015 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

I love having my feet planted on the ground as well as being connected to the deepest wisdom. This kind of balance is rare, and yet I aspire to find this type of inspiration and effectiveness inside of myself. Affect Management Skills Training (AMST) has a key skill to help me become my best. It is called the Grounding Skill.

AMST enables a person to recognize and name a range of positive and negative emotions. Our emotions are not good and bad, but some emotions are more pleasant while others are more painful. My emotions give me important feedback about what is going on inside and outside myself. Outside of myself, there is an environment with people, places, things, and events. Inside me, I have reactions to my environment as well as overreactions which I call projections. When I can see objectively and stay aware of my emotions, I am able to navigate life with more grace and effectiveness.

We can confuse emotions or not know what were are feeling, even though we know we are upset. Alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions as well as express emotions with words. Some people walk around unaware of how they are feeling. They are mad but do not know it. I ask my friend, “are you upset?”

And he answers, “No, but if you keep asking me questions like that, I’m going to get mad!”

AMST teaches us to uncover and name the physical sensations we feel as we experience specific emotions. When I am mad, I feel a rush of unpleasant hot energy in my arms and face. AMST skills enables us to link the emotion of anger with being grounded in our bodies. When we are rooted in our body, we can sense how we feel. Grounding enables us to remain aware of the present moment, including what is going on with people, place, things, and events outside us as well as our thoughts, feelings, and other sensations inside of us. As we us these AMST skills, we automatically link emotional responses with staying grounded and present. This keeps us in an adult state of mind and enables to be at our best.

The Grounding Skill gives me the tools to stay grounded and present when I feel anger. The AMST tools enable us to stay conscious, instead of unconsciously and compulsively “acting out behaviors such as bingeing or purging, substance abuse, and verbal or physical violence.” writes Dr. John Omaha who created AMST.

The Grounding Skill helps us learn to tolerate a range of emotions as well as regulate a range of intensities of emotions. Our emotions are like a heating and air conditioning system. Could you imagine living in a house with no thermostat? The air conditioning may come on in the middle of winter when there is snow outside. The heater may come on during the hottest day in summer. Wow, this makes life so difficult! When we can lower or raise our emotions with AMST skills, we feel empowered. When our emotions are beyond our ability to influence, we feel powerless.

These AMST skills enable us to heal from painful psychological symptoms of accidents or violence, sometime called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We can heal from the traumatic events, because we have the capacity to stay grounded and present while we recall upsetting events from the past. We are also able to identify how we are feeling and reacting in a variety of stressful situations and talk about these responses which enables us to heal more rapidly.

These AMST skills are like the skills we learn playing sports such as soccer, playing a music instrument like a guitar, or singing. The more we practice the skills, the better we refine our use of the skills. Practicing skills enables us to eventually apply the skills without thinking about them. We can become unconscious and competent – at the same time. “Repetition is an important element” in AMST, writes Dr. John Omaha. We learn “to construct new neural networks and that repetition facilitates the process” of learning.

We learn to change our physical brain with our willpower. As Dr. Daniel Siegel says, “our mind changes our brain.” That is encouraging! Please watch this video and learn how to stay grounded and present as you feel a variety of emotions, like anger and fear:

Key Words:

blog 25
Blogs by Daniel Davis, Grounding Skill 2
John Omaha, Grounding Skill 2
Affect Centered Therapy
Affect Management Skills Training (AMST), Grounding Skill 2
Alexithymia – example
emotions
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
skills acquisition
“Grounding Skill”

 

Filed Under: Art, Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: Affect Centered Therapy, Affect Management Skills Training, Alexithymia, AMST, Bilateral Brain Stimulation, emotions, example, Grounding Skill, John Omaha, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, skills acquisition

Safe Place Skill

October 6, 2015 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Do you feel afraid too much? Do you have difficulty trusting people close to you?

The Safe Place Skill is an important part of Affect Management Skills Training (AMST). The Safe Place Skill and the Container Skill provide a foundation for our future healing and our development throughout our lives. When we lack the skill of trust, we are limited in our work and relationships. Yet when we are able to reclaim our ability to experience authentic containment of disturbing memories and a general feeling of calm, our life changes.

In our early life as a baby, we had the opportunity to develop a secure attachment with our mother. If we formed a secure attachment, our life had a strong psychological foundation upon which to build. In essence, we are developing a sense of safety in our early experience with our mother. Some of us have only a grandmother, father, or foster mom who raises us, but the challenge is still the same. Our task is to develop a healthy sense of safety.

When we feel safe at the appropriate times, we are able to venture out from our mother figure and experience the world independently. If we do experience the sensation of safety when we are in fact safe, it affects how we think and the choices we make. The relationships we develop are different, because we do not feel safe at the appropriate times.
When we have a well developed skill of trust, we are able to identify who is dangerous and who is safe. We can feel sensations in our body that help us distinguish situations and people that are unsafe. This is a skill that can save our life. We need to know who to trust and how much.

There is an important difference between feeling numb or feeling calm or neutral. Some people suffer from Alexithymia which is the inability to recognize emotions and express feelings with words. They feel numb.
We have implicit and explicit memories. When we have an explicit memory, we are aware of the past event and feel the emotions related to the memory. An implicit memory is a real event that we are not aware of as it effects our emotions. We see a dog and our heart beats rapidly, because we were bit by a dog in the past. Yet we may have no idea that we are feeling afraid. This is an example of an implicit memory.

Of course, ninety-five percent of our thinking is subconscious, below the level of the thoughts of which we are aware. Many thoughts are affecting us that are hidden from our conscious mind.
The Safe Place Skill can be used to soothe ourselves in situations that are stressful in daily life. It also can be used to learn to consciously induce the relaxation response. The relaxation response is our body’s ability to calm itself down. Affect Centered Therapy can rapidly enable us to feel safe and contain our worries. In this video, I demonstrate the Safe Place Skill, please watch and learn for yourself:

Key Words:
blog 24
Blogs by Daniel Davis, Safe Place Skill
John Omaha, Safe Place Skill
Affect Centered Therapy
Affect Management Skills Training (AMST), Safe Place Skill
Alexithymia
Memory – Implicit and Explicit
Secure Attachment
Subconscious Mind
“Safe Place Skill”

Filed Under: AMST (Affect Management Skills Training), Blog Tagged With: Affect Centered Therapy, Affect Management Skills Training, Alexithymia, AMST, Attachment, Bilateral Brain Stimulation, Explicit, Implicit, John Omaha, Memory, Safe Place Skill, Secure, Subconscious Mind

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About Daniel Davis, LMFT

I create an environment where clients experience their unique significance, authentic empowerment, and profound acceptance and collaborate with clients to identify solutions to their current crises. For more information on how I can help you, contact me today by calling 408-249-0014 or emailing info@danieldavislmft.com. I look forward to speaking with you! Read More…

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Daniel Davis, M.A., LMFT
Counselor in Santa Clara, CA
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