Emotions Anonymous (EA)

Emotions Anonymous (EA) is a twelve-step organization (similar to Alcoholics Anonymous) that helps people who are experiencing problems or difficulties involving depression, anger, broken or strained relationships, grief, anxiety, low self-esteem, panic, abnormal fears, resentment, jealousy, guilt, despair, fatigue, tension, boredom, loneliness, withdrawal, obsessive and negative thinking, worry, compulsive behavior and other emotional issues.

The official website for Emotions Anonymous reports that as of 2007 there were over 1,000 EA Chapters in 35 countries.  A search of its World Meeting List includes six live web chats scheduled at various days and times each week and eight telephone conference calls.

The organization was founded in 1971.  An audio podcast from its national convention in 1981 is available online.  A January 1971 article, “The Role of Self-Conducted Group Therapy,” published in the American Journal of Psychiatry: “People may find EA useful when psychiatric treatment is not available to them, when they have resistance to psychiatric treatment, or as a complement to such treatment.”

A book entitled “Emotions Anonymous“ is available at Amazon.com.  One reviewer wrote that its “redeeming feature is teaching people to minimize external stresses. It has an effective method for handling anxiety and regaining composure during minor internal crisis.”

Website:  EmotionsAnonymous.org

Emotional Eating

Emotional Eating: What is it? How does it apply to you? How do we overcome it?

“April is Emotional Overeating Awareness Month,” proclaims Dr. Denise Lamothe, an emotional eating expert, clinical psychologist, speaker, and author.

“Emotional eating is eating for reasons other than hunger,” says Jane Jakubczak, a registered dietitian at the University of Maryland. “Instead of the physical symptom of hunger initiating the eating, an emotion triggers the eating.”

According to the WebMD network, “experts estimate that 75% of overeating is caused by emotions.”  In its section about emotional eating, Medicine.Net addresses how we can identify eating triggers and break ourselves of this habit.  It concludes, “By identifying what triggers our eating, we can substitute more appropriate techniques to manage our emotional problems and take food and weight gain out of the equation.”

Psychology Today offers an “Eating Disorders and Emotional Eating Test” (62 questions, 30-35 minutes) that will assess your eating habits to determine whether your relationship to food is healthy or damaging.  It will also assess whether you have tendencies towards certain documented eating disorders.

The web site for Prevention Magazine features a section devoted to “Overcoming Emotional Eating” that includes over thirty articles.

Geneen Roth, author of Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, says “our relationship to food is a perfect reflection of our relationship to life itself.”  She believes “the way to transform our relationship with food is to be open, curious and kind with ourselves instead of punishing, impatient and harsh.”

Emotional Fitness – Barton Goldsmith

Emotional Fitness is a weekly newspaper column that appears in more than two hundred newspapers.  Its author, Barton Goldsmith, has more than twenty years of experience as a therapist and has been named one of the country’s top relationship experts by Cosmopolitan magazine. He also hosts a weekly radio show on KCLU/NPR, broadcast in the Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara areas.

Goldsmith’s first book, Emotional Fitness for Couples, was published in 2006.  His new book, Emotional Fitness for Intimacy, will be published this week by New Harbinger Publications.

About his first book, New Harbinger wrote, “Peak athletic performance requires regular exercise, and a great relationship depends on regular emotional practice to stay in top form. Don’t wait for a crisis to make you scramble to save your relationship. Start building emotional fitness today! Emotional Fitness for Couples is a collection of simple tips that will energize you and hone your relationship skills to championship levels-in just ten minutes a day.”

For more about Barton Goldsmith:  www.bartongoldsmith.com

For more about New Harbinger Publications, publisher of scientifically sound self-help books that deal with a range of topics in psychology, health, and personal growth:  www.newharbinger.com

Human Costs of Economic Downturns

Peter Dreier, Professor of Politics at Occidental College, focuses on the human costs of economic downturns in an article published March 10 at HuffingtonPost.com.

Drier points to Dr. Harvey Brenner, a sociologist and public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, who has calculated that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate (1.5 million people), we can expect an additional 47,000 deaths, including 26,000 deaths from heart attacks, about 1,200 from suicide, 831 murders, and 635 deaths related to alcohol consumption.

Drier writes, “For most people, losing their job, their life savings or pensions, or their home is traumatic, even when its through no fault of their own. Our individualistic culture leads people to blame themselves and to think of themselves as failures… Any way you slice it, a prolonged and deep recession is costly in both economic and human terms.”

Drier concludes that if the federal government issued a “social health impact report” as part of their updates on our nation’s economic health, “it would chart how Americans are coping — or not coping — by tracking the link between economic dislocations and the symptoms of stress — suicides, homicides, domestic violence, child abuse, heart attacks, and others.”

Source:  http://tinyurl.com/cnvm2o

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Emotional healthcare professionals, including therapists and counselors, help people cope with stress and the everyday challenges of everyday life.

Emotional Resilience

Our January 3 blog entry, “The Road to Resilience” was inspired by a seven page brochure from the American Psychological Association and the Discovery Health Channel that includes a series of questions to ask yourself and describes ten ways to build resilience.

An article published this week by McClatchy (the third-largest newspaper company in the USA) about “the emotional underside” or “emotional underpinning” of our current economic crisis asks, “What do we need in our emotional repertoire to not only survive but perhaps even triumph?”

Under the headline, “An emotional stimulus plan,” the article says our brain’s ability to adapt is the key to emotional resilience.  It describes resilience as “an all-purpose booster” and “emotional ace in the hole” added to five key dynamics – anxiety, depression, shame, flexibility, and creativity.  The article describes each of these and suggests ways to train our brain for adapting to stress.

Original Link: gilroydispatch.com/lifestyles/254642-an-emotional-stimulus-plan

Human Emotions and Physical Health

In January, we posted an item, “Linking Emotional and Physical Health.” On March 4, 2009, the University of Kansas (KU) announced that the results of a joint study with the Gallup World Poll into the connection between emotions and health were to be presented that day at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society.

The study includes data from more than 150,000 adults in over 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world’s population. Participants reported emotions such as happiness, enjoyment, worry and sadness. They also described their physical health problems such as pain and fatigue.

According to Sarah Pressman, assistant professor of psychology at KU and a Gallup senior research associate, positive emotions unmistakably are linked to better health. The inverse holds true as well: Negative emotions were a reliable predator of worse health.

KU reports, “Most strikingly, the association between emotion and physical health was more powerful than the connection between health and basic human physical requirements, like adequate nourishment. Even without shelter or food, positive emotions were shown to boost health.”

Original Link: www.news.ku.edu/2009/march/4/emotion.shtml

In June 2008, the Gallup World Poll reported findings that underscore the crucial role of spending time with friends and family in determining the daily emotional well-being of the American public.

See:  “Social Time Crucial to Daily Emotional Well-Being in U.S.“

Autism & Recognizing Emotions

In December, in an entry titled, “The Look On Your Face,” we described a program designed to help save children from lifelong emotional problems by helping youngsters ages 3 to 5 to read facial expressions.

Children with autism have difficulty recognizing emotions. The number of children diagnosed with autism has increased nearly tenfold in the past twenty years.

The Transporters is a DVD devoted to helping children ages 4 to 8 with ASC (autistic spectrum condition) to recognize emotions. It was developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge, England.

The DVD was released in the U.K. two years ago. An American version was released in January 2009. It includes 15 five-minute episodes, plus 30 interactive quizzes and a written guide for parents.

Original Source:  thetransporters.com

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The Power of Emotional Connection – Raphael Cushnir

Raphael Cushnir is the author of, “The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection.”  This new book describes how you can incorporate emotions into your daily life and offers ways to identify and release specific emotions that have been blocking your success and well being.

On the Media Clips page of his web site, you can watch a seven minute TV interview with Raphael Cushnir conducted in January 2009.  The podcast section of his web site enables you to listen to a series of sessions recorded with clients facing specific challenges.  The audio podcasts enable you to observe “the process of emotional connection in an up-close, unedited fashion, applied to practical, everyday concerns.”

The author of three previous books, Cushnir is also a contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine and BeliefNet.  He describes his e-mail newsletter as containing “articles and tips to dissolve resistance and create real, lasting breakthroughs.”

Cushnir says his life changed in 1996 when a mentor convinced him to embrace the pain he was experiencing instead of turning away from it, suggesting it was a perfect opportunity to “wake up.”

See:  www.cushnir.com

Emotional Freedom – Dr. Judith Orloff

Dr. Judith Orloff, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, has written a new book, “Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life.”  She describes the book as “a guide to staying brave and positive during stressful times.”

Dr. Orloff says, “Emotional freedom is being able to transform negative emotions into positive ones and not be reactive.”

In her book, “Emotional Freedom,” she combines “traditional psychiatry with spirituality, emotions and intuition to help us understand ourselves better.”  The book presents practical ways to empower one’s emotional life and offers advice on how to face fear, how to stop absorbing the emotions of others, and how to communicate with compassion.

Borrowing from chapter one of her book, Dr. Orloff’s web site includes a 20 question quiz to help assess your level of emotional freedom.  Dr. Orloff says, “Emotional freedom isn’t some place you arrive at and just stay there. It’s an ongoing blossoming.”

Dr. Judith Orloff’s web site:  www.drjudithorloff.com