448: Ask David, featuring Adam Holman

448: Ask David, featuring Adam Hollman

Relationship woes--what should I do?

How can animals have feelings if they can't think?

How often should I fill out the Daily Mood Log?

Why can't husbands express their feelings?

 

Today we are joined by Adam Holman, LCSW. Adam has recently left his full time clinical practice in Arizona to join our Feeling Great app team here in San Francisco. I think you’ll be delighted by his warmth and wisdom. Although he works with us full-time, he still practices one day per week and specializes in X depression, anxiety, and screen addiction(e.g. video game addiction and more.) He has appeared on two previous Feeling Good Podcasts, # X and # Y.

We are delighted to have Adam as the honored guest on today’s Ask David podcast!

Here are the questions for today’s Ask David. They were all written before the podcast. If you listen to the podcast, you will get much more information and perspective.

The Questions

Hello Dr Burns. I hope you are doing well. I participated in the webinar held on 18th of April. It was a good experience for me and I would like to thank you and your team in arranging for that.

1. Far asks: if You have a relationship problem, but also feel inadequate. Should you use the Daily Mood Log for the internal problem of inadequacy and the Relationship Journal for the actual dialogue?

2. Moritz points out that animals, who don’t think in words, still have intense emotional reactions, including fear and anger. For example, when a deer spots a predator, like a cayote, it feels terror and instantly runs to get away. Doesn’t this prove that terrifying events can cause feelings directly? In other words, that makes it seem like thoughts or cognitions are NOT necessary to feel emotions. What do you think?

3. Rob asks: How often do you fill out your own daily mood journals? Do you do one every day? Would you be willing to share recent examples of your own journals with podcast listeners?

4. Brittany asks: Why won’t my husband share his feelings? (Or, we could ask, why can’t men express their feelings?)

 The Answers

1. Far asks: If you have a relationship problem, but also feel inadequate. Should you use the Daily Mood Log for the internal problem of inadequacy and the Relationship Journal for the actual dialogue?

Hello Dr Burns. I hope you are doing well. I participated in the webinar held on 18th of April. It was a good experience for me, and I would like to thank you and your team for arranging it.

May I ask a question? When there is a relationship problem it should be addressed by the relationship journal and interpersonal downward arrow and not by the cognitive method as far as I know. What about when there is a relationship problem together with strong feelings of depression and frustration as a result of an internal dialogue of being inadequate and defective. Should this component be addressed by the cognitive method and straightforward technique?

Thanks a lot.

Far Kom

David’s Reply

This one just came in, so we’ll answer it live.

 

2. Moritz: Are thoughts REALLY necessary to have emotional reactions to events?

Hi David,

first of all, thank you for the podcast, and in particular for answering my question about how you help people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, which came out a few weeks or months ago.

I just finished listening to episode 430, where you stated that that negative thoughts can cause negative emotions (this part I'm totally on board with), but also hypothesized that probably only negative thoughts cause negative emotions. Did I understand that correctly? (If not, please ignore the rest of this email, it won't make any sense).

I'm kinda confused about this claim. This is totally not my area of expertise, but I'm under the impression that fear is much older and more "primitive" than (at least conscious) thought, from an evolutionary point of view. It would seem unlikely that an old evolutionary feature in the brain would only be triggered from a newer feature.

My other source of confusion comes from my own comparison with animals. It is my impression that basically all mammals show some kind of fear response, but we don't attribute thoughts to all of them, never mind full-blown self-reflective, conscious thoughts. So at least in the mammals with simpler brains, it seems likely that fear (and other negative