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Excerpt from "The Toxic Mind" by Armand DiMele

 

 

In "The Toxic Mind", host of “The Positive Mind” radio show and founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy, Armand DiMele,  along with special guest Roberta Maria Atti, talks about the side effects of suppressing feelings like anger and frustration, and discuss ways to prevent the side effects from suppressing emotions and how to heal them.  Following is an excerpt from this important program.

 

 

 

Hey listen -- here’s something for you to consider. Consider this: the continual suppression of emotions during fight or flight reactions results in atrophy, an endogenous toxicosis in noradrenic neurons. How do you like them apples? That’s what our program is going to be about today. Today we’re going to be talking about this and that sounds pretty technical, doesn’t it? Well, Roberta and I have uncovered The Biology of Mental Illness and Violence, and it’s really remarkable, by E. Van Winkle. And by the way, this work is available in 23 languages. It’s called “The Toxic Mind”. E. Van Winkle just woke up to write this article. 

Let’s start with the theory, the idea here, the following hypothesis, right? The continued suppression of emotions means you feel something and you don’t let yourself manifest it. It comes up, you feel it, and it gets shut off for one reason or another. During fight or flight reactions, now that means when you’re excited, nervous, or tense, when your body is saying we have to do something and we’re going to get all ready for action. So that’s the fight or flight reactions, that if you don’t do something when your body says we’re ready to do something about the situation, it results in a toxic accumulation. Now that’s what we’re going to look at today. 

This is a really interesting thing. How could that be? How does it work? Well, we know how it works because we see it all the time. Your leader at work is in a miserable mood and they bark at you, and you get upset but you can’t say anything about it. So it boils. Part of the suppression of emotions is actually what is the backbone of civilization.   We as civilized humans, we suppress emotions in part because it’s necessary in order to function in a human society.

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Armand DiMele bio and links

Excerpt from "Weeping and Crying" by Armand DiMele

 

In "Weeping and Crying", host of “The Positive Mind” radio show and founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy, Armand DiMele,  along with special guest Roberta Maria Atti, offers a great talk on how scientific research has shown that there is strong and consistent evidence that crying is linked to significant health benefit. Following is an excerpt from this fascinating program.

 Now listen to this. You know you heard about people laughing on the outside and crying on the inside? You know, crying on the inside, you cry a lot more on the inside than you do on the outside is what our research shows. That when you cry on the outside there is a certain amount of water coming out. A certain amount of this lacrimal fluid coming out which is fed by water. And you are aware of it. And on the inside there is an enormous amount. I don’t know what the ratio is, but I know it is bigger, and so that stuff coming out of your nose is also tears. And I also have noticed that when people do not want to cry outwardly, let’s say that they are embarrassed, sometimes the inside crying is increased so that people may say, “Oh, I have a lot of mucous in my throat.” 

So one of the signs of people inhibiting crying -- which we are going to go to in a couple of minutes -- is an increase of mucosa inside and something else. They think it is mucous. In fact, mucous formation, or people who think they sometimes have sinus drips, really may be crying on the inside, you know? And it could be all that it is about. And what they do is in part is alexithymic because they disconnect from the awareness of the process, so it may be happening without them knowing that indeed they are weeping. 

So people that don’t cry may in effect cry and then people who don’t weep -- there are some people who never weep -- they would easily weep on the inside and that could be interpreted in any number of ways because remember again, weeping on the inside without it coming out of your body could easily be filled with an enormous amount of bacteria that doesn’t belong down in your throat. And you could think that it is a form of an allergy for instance. You could say, “I have allergies” and you really could be crying. You could be sad. And a good cry may actually get this stuff out of your body and you could feel purged of that thing which you thought was your allergic reaction. It’s a theory, but we’re going to teach you more about this and you’re going to find a lot of evidence for it.

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Armand DiMele bio and links

Excerpt from Armand DiMele's Talk on "Disconnecting the Mind"

In "Disconnecting the Mind," Armand DiMele, founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy and host of “The Positive Mind” radio show, examines the different ways we disconnect our minds from the stresses of everyday life, and offers instruction on new ways to deal with stress without disconnecting from reality.  In this excerpt, DiMele talks about using substances to disconnect.

 

 

Let’s think about some of the different fugue states, ways of spacing out, that we all have. Or know, or might have known. I mean, drugs are a classic one. You know -- typical drugs. Any drugs if you think about them. You know, alcohol helps you space out. You know… if you’ve ever been a drinker, or a non-drinker, not an alcoholic, but if you’ve ever had this yearning, “I gotta have a drink.” Now, I haven’t known that for ages but I remember it well. Having one drink and feeling the alcohol burn down my system as it kind of goes down and whatever form it goes in -- whether it be a cosmopolitan or a Manhattan or bourbon or whatever it was -- whatever it is going down, whenever it hits you, you can feel this kind of glow take over you. And in a way, what you’ve done is you’ve fugued. You’ve spaced. You had a little distance between you and life. 

Excerpt from "The 8 Stages of Love" by Armand DiMele

 In "The 8 Stages of Love", Armand DiMele, founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy and host of “The Positive Mind” radio show, discusses romantic relationships and how they grow and evolve over time. Following is an excerpt from this program.

 

Let’s start off with that famous honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase -- I’ll call it the Honeymoon phase: phase one of a relationship. It’s mostly run by automatics and you don’t know it’s run by automatics. You see something in your immune system and something in the chemical system and something in the omental set leads you to find a person and hook up with them. And by hook up, I mean connect. You don’t know why it is but, you know, given another time this person may not have been appealing. Given another day, given another condition. Like, let’s say you just, you know, you’re feeling old and you meet somebody young, and boom, you feel in love. Or you’re feeling young and you feel like you’ve just been dumped by somebody, so you find somebody older and you fall in love. Or, you know, it’s set and setting. 

Excerpt 2 from "Keeping Love Alive" with Armand DiMele

In this second transcribed excerpt from  "Keeping Love Alive", Armand DiMele, host of the popular "The Positive Mind" radio show, explains that we first must understand what happens when love dies in order to know how to keep love alive.

 

You know the relationship: a good relationship is like a sail on a sailboat. It’s like you got wind in the sail, two of you are going somewhere, it’s wonderful, you touch each other, you feel each other, you smell each other, you like each other. And then time, time does this thing. And time seems to, through familiarity, through whatever it is -- the seven year itch, whatever you want to call it. Time seems to rob the sailboat of its billows, you know? And it usually winds up, either one or the other person feeling turned off to the relationship in some way. Not turned off completely necessarily, just not turned on. It’s almost as if one person becomes the positive magnet and the other person becomes the negative magnet. It’s almost like there’s a vacuum on one side and there’s abundance on the other. 

Excerpt from "The Alchemy of Love" by Armand DiMele

In "The Alchemy of Love", host of “The Positive Mind” radio show and founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy, Armand DiMele,  along with special guest Roberta Maria Atti, talks about the concept of love and the chemical processes that happen inside a person’s brain when he is in love.  To open up this conversation, check out the following excerpt with beautiful quotes from Thomas Moore and Noel Coward.

 

 

Just talking about human evolution and human sexuality, I want to read to you from Thomas Moore. Thomas Moore wrote a book called The Soul of Sex and he says, “In order to discover the sublime joys of sex, we may have to develop a special kind of intelligence about the erotic life. As a therapist, I find that one word characterizes most people’s attitude towards their own sexuality -- one word: confusion. They don’t understand their attractions and desires. They feel generally that their sexual lives are and have always been a mess. They believe that they are blind and powerless in the face of passion. They sustain the hope that one day they will find sexual bliss. But so far that hope has not been realized.”

Excerpt 1 from Armand DiMele's Program on "Keeping Love Alive"

In "Keeping Love Alive", Armand DiMele, host of the popular "The Positive Mind" radio show, along with Stephanie D’Ambra, a psychotherapist who specializes in communication and sexuality, discusses how to keep love alive and strong after many years together, and the chemistry changes that take affect over the course of a relationship. Following is a transcribed excerpt from the program.

 

Today’s conversation is going to be about irritability, nastiness, disregard, and all that other stuff that comes with it. It’s what happens between people. It’s something that’s so common. It seems that all relationships seem to start off with a lot of love and good chemistry, and then after awhile they get sloppy and after awhile they kind of turn in to this kind of slight nastiness. Now not all relationships do it. But you learn different ways. I’ve known maybe five couples who have never had that happen, but with most other people a thing happens where you treat the other person with a kind of disregard.

I met with somebody earlier today who was describing to me how this happened between her and her husband and she says, “Well, you know there are times when I’m around him I just feel totally irritable towards him and I, not even irritable, I just don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to go near him. I don’t want him to touch me. I don’t send out any signals.” What is that thing?