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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:

Blog 42:

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

We Psychology: Healthy Relationships

November 10, 2015 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen

Everybody’s got a secret, Sonny
Something they just can’t face
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it
They carry it with them ev’ry step that they take
Till one day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag them down
Where no one asks too many questions
Or looks too long in your face
In the darkness on the edge of town

I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley, what is now called “Silicon Valley” – home to the businesses of Google, Apple Computer, and Facebook. When I was born, I was full of joy. I think babies are whole and feel connected to all of life – everyone and everything. I took the criticism of my parents, teachers, coaches, siblings, and friends and began to criticize myself. I tried to be good. I blamed myself for many things that  had nothing to do with me – my dad’s temper or my teacher’s angry outbursts. In turn, I learned to judge others, and I felt better by comparing myself to others. At least, I was a better football player than him. In my family, school, and later work, I came to realize as an adult that our American culture was one based on harsh judgments and conditional love.

Our culture has a strong belief in independence – doing it yourself. This strength of character has its faults. Due to this rugged individualism, we are lonely and isolated in many ways. It is true that we may connect with our iPhones or other computers, yet many of us live in communities where we are strangers to our classmates, neighbors, family, coworkers and – even – ourselves.

Here is a list of what people are wanting socially in their families, neighborhoods, and workplaces (from a North American research study):

  1. Having neighbors with whom you can interact freely and comfortably.
  2. Being able to share deepest feelings with someone.
  3. Having friends who value the same things in life.
  4. Being in a group where you can discuss your most basic beliefs and values.
  5. Having friends you can always count on when you are in a jam.
  6. Having people in your life who are never critical of you.
  7. Being part of a group that helps you grow spiritually.
  8. Having cooperation rather than competition with people at work.
  9. Having people you can turn to when you feel depressed or lonely.
  10. Know more people in your community.

One doctor found out about this in his research. Dean Ornish, MD, wrote: “At first, I viewed our support groups simply as a way to motivate patients to stay on the other aspects of the [heart-disease prevention] program that I considered more important: the diet, exercise, stress management training, stop smoking, and so on. Over time, I began to realize that the group support itself was one of the most powerful interventions, as it addressed a more fundamental cause of why we feel stressed and, in turn, why we get illnesses like heart disease: the perception of isolation.”

There are reasons why we separate ourselves from others. The answer lies in this research. People attending a community building workshop were asked to rate significant barriers to connecting with others:

  1. Hard to find people you can trust (before workshop-65%, after-32%)
  2. Fear of being judged (61%, 13%)
  3. Fear of being rejected (55%, 10%)
  4. Feeling misunderstood (52%, 16%)
  5. Unable to lower my defenses – social mask (48%, 0%)
  6. Too shy (42%, 21%)
  7. Fear of appearing weak (35%, 7%)
  8. No opportunity to meet people interested in connecting (30%, 16%)

How do we find community? One answer can be found in the research of Daniel Siegel. When we are mindful, we are more able to change in order to face the challenges of every day. Being mindful is just being aware of what is going on around us as well as being aware of our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. When we are mindful, we are not overwhelmed with worry about the future – the test tomorrow or the baseball game next week. We live in the present and our mind and heart is liberated from much worry and emotional suffering.

When we are mindful, we are paying attention to the unfolding of possibilities in every moment. Attunement is how we focus our attention on others and perceive their communication at all levels – the sad words they chose, their eyes shamefully looking downward, or the fearful look on their face. I need to take these and other signals from the other person inside my mind and be aware of them to be attuned to this other person to whom I am listening. I can think someone is angry at me, because they look mad. If I ask my friend, “Are you upset with me?”

My friend may say: “Am I mad at you? No way. It is Bob who I am so angry with!”

Now, I am getting more attuned to my friend. I understand what is going on inside her. I need to carefully set aside my assumptions about what someone is thinking or feeling to see and hear clearly what they are really feeling and thinking.

When I am present, I am open to others and the wisest parts of myself. When I attune to others, I work to become aware of what the other person is thinking or feeling. At a wedding, they often say referring to the couple: “Two shall become one.”  Resonance is when I connect with another person in a special way.

Resonance is when we both attune to each other and we are changed by the thoughts and feelings of each other. Daniel Siegel writes: “When such resonance is enacted with positive regard, a deep feeling of coherence emerges with the subjective sensation of harmony … Two literally become linked as one. The whole is larger than the sum of the individual parts.”

The word used for this is synergy. This is a relationship between people or things who rise to a new level, because of the quality of the relationship. Groups can be high in synergy or low in synergy.  David Goff writes: “Synergy, therefore, is a way of describing the qualities in a relationship (that produce the likelihood of a greater or lesser whole). A good example of this difference is one that most people have experienced. Some groups generate positive energy, the way members interact makes the group smarter than any member would be alone would be. Conversely, the way members interact can create a negative synergy, which makes the IQ of the group lower than any given member.”

In 1978, I went to work at the Rustler Steak House in San Jose, California, USA. I was fifteen years old and worked with a group of employees who were around my age. We spent a lot of time together away from work doing the things that teenagers often like to do: playing football and baseball, going to the beach, going to movies, and going to parties. I loved spending time with my friends from work. Our connection with each other changed the way we worked together. The quality of our relationships improved as a result. The performance scores of our restaurant dramatically improved when we were evaluated by the area manager.

Food is something I love. We can find synergy in delicious food. Recipes, which often combine the same ingredients in different proportions, or add or delete certain ingredients for different effects. When I cook spaghetti sauce, I use many individual ingredients: tomato sauce, basil, sausage, oregano, mushrooms, onions, thyme, and peppers. If I were to eat a raw onion by itself it would be an unpleasant experience. If I took a handful of basil and ate it, I would not enjoy it.  Yet the combination of ingredients in the spaghetti sauce with pasta and cheese are magnificent. This is synergy!

In this video, Tim Locke describes the “We Psychology” of Fritz Kunkel and the barriers that keep us from connecting with our own creative center as well as others – our parents, classmates, siblings, friends, children, spouses, and significant others.

Blog 29

Filed Under: Blog, Community, Consciousness, Marriage and Family Tagged With: American culture, Apple Computer, attunement, barriers, Bruce Springsteen, community building, culture, Daniel Siegel, Darkness on the Edge of Town, David Goff, Dean Ornish, Embracing Life: Toward a Psychology of Interdependence, example, Facebook, Four Springs Retreat Center, Fritz Kunkel, Google, independence, intentional community, iPhone, learning organization, M Scott Peck, mindfulness, psychological defenses, research study, resonance, rugged individualism, Santa Clara Valley, Silicon Valley, song, synergy, Timothy Locke, trust, vulnerability, We Psychology

Are You Lonely, and Do You Feel Different From Everyone Else? 

November 3, 2015 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

I live in a culture of rugged individualism.  I generally feel that I dare not be honest about myself, even with someone sitting next to me at church, a person standing in line with me at the store, or someone working down the hall.  I have learned to be vulnerable and express my needs and emotions with those close to me – my beloved, my friends and some of my family.  Yet it is different when I am walking around the community of Silicon Valley where I live, in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA.  When I am out in my community at AT&T Park watching the San Francisco Giants play a baseball game, at Valley Fair mall, or at the beach in Santa Cruz, I am polite and careful, generally not talking about my private feelings or conflicts.  When I was 26, I came to learn a very different meaning of the word community.

Community can arise when there is a crisis.  An earthquake or a Tsunami can leave an area devastated with badly damaged buildings and flooding in the streets.  Many people may be injured or dead. As a result, people pull together, whether rich or poor, from different cultures, and from different religions.  They work together in a spirit of cooperation and sacrificial love.  Once the crisis ends, people often return to their ordinary lives and prejudices.

There is a different type of community than the one that emerges in crisis and it is called intentional community. I first met my friend David Goff at a workshop for Community Building in Marin County, California, in 1989.  On this weekend, I learned how to develop an intentional community.  The two leaders gave the group of about 50 people, who were mostly strangers to each other, simple instructions: listen deeply, speak when you feel moved to speak, use “I-messages,” practice inclusivity, observe how you maintain separation, and share responsibility for the outcome of the workshop.  The leaders used silence, stories, reminders about the guidelines, and brief feedback to the group as a whole – not directed to any one person.

After two days sitting with the group in a circle, I experienced a profound sense of community on a foggy Sunday morning in the Marin Headlands.  I felt peaceful and my mind was quiet.  Feelings of compassion and kindness filled my body.  I lost track of time and myself; I experienced a sense of the sacred.  I had a shift of my awareness and felt a connection to the group as if we were at one with the whole group.  Before this experience, I had never been aware that I felt this way toward my family or friends.

This weekend changed my life and motivated me to learn about intentional community.  With David Goff and others, I spent from 1991 to 1998 learning about how people function in groups and how intentional community arises.

David Goff had a stroke in 2003 due to a rare disease.  David is bound to a wheelchair, wears a patch on his right eye, and types using only his right hand.  In 2013, he published a book called, “Embracing Life: Toward a Psychology of Interdependence.”  David impresses me with his resilience and strength.  He writes that we need to see ourselves as we are truly.  You are a part of the whole universe which is larger and more diverse than it is possible to imagine.  Like the universe as a whole, including all the planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, and supernovas, you have creativity, strength, and resilience that sustains you.

Yet at times, I may fail to remember, recognize, and experience my potential.  I may be going on a date and feel afraid of the unknown.  I may be about to take a test and get angry at the challenges.  Yet, I am always connected to the universe as a whole: a vital source that is positively vibrating with energy, potential, and creativity.

Fritz Kunkel was a German doctor who was injured badly in World War One, during a battle.  Dr. Kunkel also had an experience of connection, where he felt connected to everything and everyone – a sense of “we-ness.”  In this video, Dr. Tim Locke, Executive Director of Four Springs Retreat Center, describes the psychology of Fritz Kunkel, called “We Psychology.”

 

Key Words:

blog 28
Blogs by Daniel Davis, community building
culture of rugged individualism
community building
learning organization
intentional community
disaster
M Scott Peck
David Goff
Fritz Kunkel, We Psychology
We Psychology, description
Timothy Locke, We Psychology
Four Springs Retreat Center
“Embracing Life: Toward a Psychology of Interdependence,” book
“Are You Lonely, and Do You Feel Different From Everyone Else?”

Filed Under: Blog, Community, Consciousness, Marriage and Family Tagged With: community building, culture, David Goff, description, disaster, Embracing Life: Toward a Psychology of Interdependence, Four Springs Retreat Center, Fritz Kunkel, intentional community, learning organization, M Scott Peck, rugged individualism, Timothy Locke, We Psychology

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