Blog post 2 – 17th November 2022
My life was a mess, until I cleaned up my childhood developmental trauma…
Autobiographical story about recovery from childhood developmental trauma…
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
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Hello, and Welcome.
You might think you are managing your life from conscious choices, but that life is resisting you. You might be surprised to find that a little child, in the basement of your mind, is “driving the bus” of your life.
We humans are storytellers in a sea of stories.
And the stories we make up in the first five years of life are the most damaging ones, if we are living in a traumatizing or highly stressful family environment. (If you were born into a “good enough” family, you will have created a good life script for yourself; but not otherwise!)
“The unexamined life is not worth living!” Plato
I have been exploring the story of my life for a long time now.
I have recently written a new version of the first forty years of my life, to explore the journey I had to go on in order to fix the damage that was caused to me in the first two years of life by my incompetent, very young, damaged mother.
Here is an extract from the Preface I wrote for this new book:
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By Jim Byrne
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“Childhood is a nightmare. Children are vulnerable to emotional distortion. Take good care of them, if you know how to love.”
Micky J. Moran, A Very Peculiar Tragedy. (Page 4).
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Preamble
To those who say it is extremely vain of me to write my own autobiography – as if I was “somebody” – I must retort that I did not write this story to enhance my battered ego, but rather to try to heal and recover from a very sad case of childhood developmental trauma.
To those who say it was unfair, unreasonable or paranoid of me to hide behind a fictionalized account of my life, I have to say that I have used fiction to reveal my life rather than to conceal it!
How could that be?
Well, as a matter of historical fact, I retain very few conscious memories of my childhood, as is normally the case with developmental trauma disorder. My childhood is stored in black boxes, in the basement of my mind – beyond direct conscious inspection.
So, since it is impossible to directly inspect my childhood, to see what went wrong, I had to ask myself, “Is it possible to indirectly inspect my childhood, to maximally reveal what went wrong?”
And it was that question that caused me to consider the possibility that, if I created an ‘alter ego’[1], and walked him through what I assume to be the phases and stages of my childhood, this would throw up many insights into how I was deformed and distorted by my childhood experiences.
So I “created” Daniel O’Beeve – (or was he “given to me” by my non-conscious mind?) – and I walked him through many of the pages which constitute the present book; revealing many interesting insights and stories.
But if that was all I had to go on, it would seem a bit thin, as a personal history; so I also considered the possibility that my dreams and reveries might also contain clues as to what had gone on in my family of origin; and so I began to collect my dreams and reveries in my journal. It was Sigmund Freud who argued that “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious mind”, and so that is good enough for me, as a justification for that strategy.
Then, thirdly, I decided to write a more straightforward “psychological report” of those aspects of my work on my past which I did beyond the age of 22 years.
The strangest development was that my therapy work – described in Part Two – gave me a couple of visual “archetypes” – or “literary devices” – known as “the little blue bear” and “the yellow-haired rag doll”.
Later, I was “given” other archetypes: Professor Valises, a little blue alien; Sheikh Exal Rambini, a strange sage and spiritual guide; “the little white goat”; and a whole host of others. Each of those archetypes evolved their own stories.
Then I worked hard, for a number of years, weaving all those strands of data into a coherent story of who I was as a child; how that affected my development; and how I escaped from the “stink pot” into which my birth and early life had thrown me.
Finally, by reflecting on my own journey, I was able to extract some guidance notes for readers of this book who might want to work on the healing of their own childhood wounds; and especially their mother-wound.
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For more, please click this link! Jim’s amazing story – from childhood trauma to Nirvana!***
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Best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling, and survivor of childhood developmental trauma disorder.
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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).
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[1] An ‘alter ego’ is a ‘second self’ or different (hidden) version of oneself (like Superman and Clark Kent; or Jekyll and Hyde).
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 