Daniel Davis, LMFT

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Dreams

January 17, 2017 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

My dreams never cease to dazzle me with the insight, emotionality, and creativity that are hidden within them. I awake with such gold and jewels. My life is more beautiful, because of the time I take to examine my dream life. Our dreams are trying to convey inner truths to us. There is a reality to our psychic life that can be transformative when we embrace it.

Yet where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Virtual Reality is highly valued. Science is our religion and technology is our god. Sadly, our dreams are forgotten and discarded as useless trash. When we have the courage to explore our dreams with wisdom and respect, then valuable wisdom can be gained.

Carl Jung said at the end of his life, “I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. . . There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole….I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”

Please watch this video by Manuel Costa about dreams:

Blog 61

Filed Under: Blog, Dreams Tagged With: Carl Jung, creativity, dreams, emotionality, God, inner truths, insight, Manuel Costa, philosophy, religion, San Francisco Bay Area, Science, Silicon Valley, soul, technology, Virtual Reality, wisdom

Do You have a Faith that Works?

March 28, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.” Quote by Carl Jung

Our lives have different eras. What was true when we are young is a lie at midlife. When we are young our lives are focused on educating ourselves, obtaining work, and finding love. These are the appropriate tasks of our early life. We may get married and have children.

Our initial experience of religion is often about certainty. It creates meaning about being a separate individual. If we practice the correct rituals and believe the correct rules – dogma – then we will be saved. Someone translates other people’s experience of God. Yet this level of religion does not change the consciousness of the person. It is all about me – saving myself. This level of spirituality consoles the self and this is needed. It defends us. The problem is that we can use this type of religion to not become a more loving person. We can justify our self-centeredness.

Spirituality can also be transformative. As a young person we need to develop our ego boundaries by separating from our parents. We need to leave home psychologically and develop an identity of our own. We need to distinguish our values from those of our parents and friends. It is important to have meaningful work to do.

About 35 to 45, we reach midlife. Jung called this the afternoon of life. We have the opportunity to grow into a deeper consciousness not possible in our younger years. Richard Rohr says: “This process of transformation does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it. Not consolation but devastation. Not entrenchment, but emptiness. Not complacency, but explosion. Not comfort, but revolution. In short – not a conventional bolstering of my usual consciousness, but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.” Our transformation comes indirectly, “catching us off guard and out of control. We have to be empty instead of full.”

Richard Rohr goes on to say: “The lust for certitude. The lust for answers the last 500 years of the Western Church has not served us well. Once we lost our spirituality of darkness for light, there just wasn’t as much room for growth any more. Everything was . . . words.”

Our journey of spirituality inevitable leads inward. There are many paths on this inward spiritual journey, but they all lead to an experience of the divine. This conscious knowing leads us outward again toward others. We are willing to risk vulnerability to join with others in intimacy. Our spirituality isn’t about looking good, but simply loving others. Please watch this video by Bob Epperly on centering prayer to discover one of many paths inward toward the center of our being:

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Filed Under: Blog, Projection, Spirituality Tagged With: afternoon of life, Bob Epperly, Carl Jung, children, consciousness, correct, dogma, ego boundaries, God, married, Midlife, religion, Richard Rohr, rituals, rules, self-centeredness, spiritual transformation, spirituality, transformative, words

What Does HALT Stand For?

February 9, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

12 step programs offer our modern world an enormous gift. Through-out the world, we can find Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Al-anon meetings, Over-eaters Anonymous meetings, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, Debtors Anonymous meetings, and many other meetings. For many reasons, when Bill W and Dr. Bob founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, something profound began. It was revolutionary in very positive ways. Meetings, books, sponsors, resources, and the 12 steps offer great resources to learn how to consciously live and even thrive with the thought disorder of addiction.

Part of the tradition of 12 step work, includes a great deal of folk wisdom in the form of slogans. This is found in the conference approved literature and can he heard at many meetings.

“One day at a time.”

“Cultivate an attitude of gratitude.”

“Your worth should never depend on another person’s opinion.”

The phrase HALT reminds us to: “Never get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.”

When we take the time to do the simple things to take care of ourselves, we strengthen our individual will. We are more mindful and careful in our choices. When I get 8-10 hours of sleep, my physical brain is healthier. You can see this on a brain scan. When I eat a healthy diet of natural fresh food – including fruits, vegetables, and proteins – I further strengthen my brain. When I get aerobic exercise, I produce endorphins and eliminate adrenaline. My body is calmer and my brain is healthier with exercise. When I take the time to talk with friends who are accepting and empathic, I feel better. These are the practices that support sobriety as well as general mental health.

Psychotherapy can also be a terrific asset for those dedicated to working a 12 step program. It is very helpful to seek out a professional aware of the differences between general psychotherapy and chemical dependency counseling. A counselor, social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist with training in chemical dependency treatment can help the client hold themselves accountable and navigate the world of recovery. Addressing the problems with emotional self-regulation can greatly help with the recovery process. Alcoholism and drug addiction is an attempt to control one’s thoughts and feelings with chemicals. Learning how to calm oneself down without doing anything self-destructive is critical for all of us, if we haven’t learned already.

People who are physically and/or sexually abused in childhood are more likely to abuse drugs. Those who abuse substances use alcohol, nicotine or other drugs to change their emotions that we began regulating poorly due to trauma or adversity in childhood. First, the drug abuser uses the substance to calm overwhelming emotions. Second, the substance enables the person to vicariously re-experience their unresolved emotions from childhood abuse or adversity. Usually, these emotions are associated with memories of traumatic events that are yet to be resolved.

The abuse of alcohol and other drugs interferes with maturation. When a teen drinks regularly from age fourteen to eighteen, he tends to act as if he is fourteen or fifteen many years later; this is called delayed adolescence. When someone smokes marijuana regularly from sixteen to twenty one, she is likely to act as if she is sixteen or seventeen later in life. Taking care of our basic needs of life for sleep, healthy food, social support, and exercise is part of being a mature adult. We take over care of these basic needs from our parents as we grow up, if we are healthy.

Addiction is also known as the sacred disease. Carl Jung wrote that “perhaps it was no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as spirits, and that alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition”.

People who become slaves to alcohol and other drugs long to go back to paradise, reach Heaven, reach home – more than most. Addicts desperately yearn to regain that lost warm, fuzzy sense of oneness. There are two ways of looking at this longing to go home. One is yearning to return to infancy, not only to go back to paradise but to crawl back into the womb.

M. Scott Peck writes: “The other way to look at it is as a potentially progressive kind of phenomenon; that in this yearning to go home, addicts are people who have a more powerful calling than most to the spirit, to God, but they simply have the directions of the journey mixed up. Many contemporary men and women are cut off from their own life source. . . (They) are undermined by the loss of connection to their own energy in their own body. . . . In infancy, ‘I desire” is indistinguishable from ‘I need.’ As adults, they look at other people who seem to love life and wonder why they themselves do not. They pretend, even as children, to be reaching out from their own desire. Their place of desire is false; their desiring is not coming from natural instincts; therefore, those instincts cannot be satisfied. Because their bodies are not expressing desires that come from natural desires, they fall into unnatural desires, driven desires that overwhelm them with stupor and manifest as addictions. They crave food that brings them no nurturance, drink that brings them no spirit, sex that brings them no union. Because their culture worships matter and minimizes soul, they concretize metaphor and minimize life. Their hunger is for food – Soul food; they are starving for sweetness – Mother Food that will reconnect them to who whey were born to be. Their thirst is for spirit; their longing is for union. They yearn for connection to their own ‘I desire'”.

We all suffer from addictions, in a sense. It is human to struggle with self-destructive patterns. Ultimately, alcoholism is a blessing because it is a disease that visibly breaks people. Those who are alcoholic are no more broken than normal drinkers. We all experience terror and shame. One may not be aware of their pain, but they certainly experience it. We are all broken people, but because of their struggle with drinking alcoholics cannot hide their brokenness. The rest of us normal drinkers can hide behind our masks of composure. Yet we do not have the gift of talking with each other about the things that are most important to us. The disease of alcoholism put one into an obvious crisis. Out of the crisis of alcoholism, the alcoholic has the unique privilege of experiencing the profoundly healing community of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Please watch this video by Elizabeth Schindler on HALT:

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Filed Under: Blog, Recovery, Self-Care, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 step programs, abuse, addiction, Al-Anon, alcohol, Alcoholics Anonymous, angry, brokenness, Carl Jung, childhood adversity, conference approved literature, Debtors Anonymous, delayed adolescence, Elizabeth Schindler, emotions regulating poorly, exercise, God, HALT, healthful food, heaven, home, hungry, infancy, lonely, M Scott Peck, marijuana, maturation, meetings books, nicotine, Overeaters Anonymous, paradise, recovery, sacred disease, self-care, self-destructive patterns, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, slaves, sleep, slogans, social support, sponsors, substances, tired, Trauma, unresolved emotions, vicariously re-experience

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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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