Updated on 31st May 2019
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The benefits and outcomes of E-CENT coaching, counselling and psychotherapy
By Jim Byrne and Renata Taylor-Byrne
Reviewed on 31st May 2019
Introduction
What follows is a brief list of some of the main benefits you could gain by consulting us for help with your on-going problems of daily living. Perhaps you are feeling angry, anxious or depressed; or involved in couple conflict; or struggling with your career or your family relationships. Whatever your problems, we can help you to clarify them; and to develop stronger muscles for dealing with them.
E-CENT counsellors explore the narratives of their clients, with a view to helping them to manage their feeling-stories better: “Creating a consistent self-narrative (or personal story) that feels true to ourselves is a challenge at any stage in life. Our stories give shape to our (unformed, fragmented), fleeting impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the present to provide us with structures for working towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the language of our left”.
Philippa Perry, How to Stay Sane (2012). Page 74. (-2)
Our comments: But we must never lose sight of the fact that the maintenance of those stories depends upon the state of our physical well-being – our body-minds – through diet, exercise, sleep, relaxation, relationship support and environmental stressors, and so on. It is not about free-standing stories in a ‘floating head’.
Jim Byrne and Renata Taylor-Byrne, November 2015
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List of benefits
The main benefits that clients gain from our coaching, counselling and psychotherapy services include the following:
1. A listening ear. We all know that a problem shared is a problem halved. And being listened to by a professional coach, counsellor, psychotherapist can halve your level of distress, and help you to clarify for yourself exactly what is bothering you, and what your goals are in relation to that clarified problem. This helps to be clear about the solutions that are available to you, and the actions you need to take to move forwards.
2. A teaching /learning experience. When clients come to see us, they often think they know precisely what their problem is, but fail to recognize that they are looking at their life from a limited frame of reference. We can often teach our clients new ways of looking at their strengths and weaknesses; their blind spots; their potential for change; and we also teach them many new ways of thinking and feeling about their problems.
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Counsellors and their clients need to develop a feeling language; a language of the heart: “The logic of the emotional mind is associative: it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes, metaphors, and images speak directly to the emotional mind, as do the arts – novels, film, poetry, song, theatre, and opera”.
Quotation from: Daniel Goleman (1996) Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Page 294. (129)
Our comment: Great spiritual teachers have always known this, which is why they teach in parables, fables, and stories. And that is why, in E-CENT counselling, we teach using stories couched in the language of the heart.
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Contact details:
Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com; or renata@abc-counselling.org
Telephone: 01422 843 629
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Dr Jim’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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Renata’s Coaching and Counselling Division
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Reassurance. We can often reassure our clients that they are okay exactly the way they are; or that all will be well; and that everything will work out reasonably well if they simply adjust their approach to their life in some particular way. We often create hope where the client was feeling hopeless and helpless. And we often teach better ways to prepare for dealing with threats and dangers. - A secure, emotionally supportive relationship of care, respect and support. We provide a secure basefor our clients, building up their sense of secure attachment in the world. Humans are emotionaland relational beings. We need to be loved, and to feel securely connected to other people in the world. “No person is an island, complete within themselves”. We all need to be securely connected to somebody, and we teach our clients to feel securely attached to us, and then to generalize that feeling in the wider world.
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Unsolicited client testimonial
“Dear Jim. … Around session three, the anger just drained out of me. Sessions four and five gave me some great insights and skills. I’m much better with my wife and my kids, and we all enjoy each other’s company so much more. I just feel so much more laid back. I cannot imagine getting angry about the things that used to send me insane!”
H.T., Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. (Five sessions of anger management coaching; plus one of couples therapy).
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Contact details:
Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com; or renata@abc-counselling.org
Telephone: 01422 843 629
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Dr Jim’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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Renata’s Coaching and Counselling Division
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Here’s a little five-minute video clip by Renata, which presents some interesting and to some extent surprising explanations about the benefits of coaching and counselling services:
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Appropriate advice. We provide appropriate advice on how to improve your situation by changing some specific aspect of your thinking, or your behaviour, or your social or physical environment. In particular, we focus on the fact that you are a body-mind that is connected to an environment – and not a ‘floating head’. So we help you to look at what you are putting into your body, and how you are treating your body, as well as how you manage your mind, and how you are managing your relationships. We help you to review your approach to diet (eating, drinking, and supplements), physical exercise, relaxation, meditation, sleep, relationships, communication, and many other factors that affect the quality of your experience of your daily life. When you change your approach to all these factors, and especially those that are most in need of adjustment, your emotions and social-behaviours tend to fall in line, and your happiness levels rise.
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Unsolicited client testimonial
“Dear Renata, Thank you for the coach-counselling session yesterday. I was badly split between warring parts of myself, and feeling very bad about my ‘economic failings’. You helped to knit me back together again, into a much calmer, more integrated, more sensible ‘Me’!”
K.C., Crag Vale. (Two sessions of coach-counselling for despair about career problems).
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Additional benefits of consulting us
When you consult us, you will get all five of those benefits: a listening ear; a teaching/learning experience; reassurance; a secure emotional base; and appropriate advice. In addition, we can help you to:
- Identify what went wrong in your past.
- Understand how that has affected you. And:
- Recognize how to ‘complete your experience’ of what went wrong, so you can ‘re-frame it’, digest it, and let it go. (‘Letting it go’ means, finally, filing the past in the past!)
Sometimes we will also provide you with written materials that provide detailed background information on how particular emotions are created, and how to manage and reduce them; how behaviour is related to thinking; and so on.
You will also get an attentive relationship of care, respect and consideration.
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We counsellors, coaches and therapists promote emotional health (or emotional well-being) in our counselling clients. Dr Oliver James has produced a list of features of emotional health.
This is item 7 in our list so far: Even after you have achieved emotional health, “You may suffer depressions, rages, phobias, all manner of problems, from time to time. You make mistakes. But because of your emotional health, you are able to live in the present and find the value in your existence, whatever is going on, and this makes you resilient”.
Oliver James (2014) How to Develop Emotional Health. Page 2.
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In E-CENT, we would say that slightly differently. Firstly, we agree that emotional health is a situationally variable condition. When stress levels build up in your life, you are likely to fare worse than when things are going well; but if you have a powerful philosophy of life, and a range of coping strategies, and some good, supportive relationships, and a healthy attitude towards diet and exercise; then you only feel ‘reasonably upset’ when things go wrong in your life, instead of totally distressed and distraught, which is a more common state when people are not emotionally healthy. However, we also agree with Oliver James in his implication that it is very difficult to be a healthy body-mind in an unhealthy economy/culture. Not impossible, but very difficult. Just as it is very difficult to have a healthy mind in an unhealthy body. (Not impossible, but very difficult!)
Dr Jim Byrne
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Contact details:
Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com; or renata@abc-counselling.org
Telephone: 01422 843 629 ( Inside the UK)
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Dr Jim’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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Renata’s Coaching and Counselling Division
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Nine major aims of counselling and coaching
Here are a further nine aims and benefits of our coaching and counselling service, to further refine what we have written above. Some of the things you will gain from consulting us will include:
- Insight into how emotional disturbances are caused, and how to think your way out of emotional difficulties.
- Developing the ability to relate better to significant others – to develop relationship skills.
- Becoming more aware of your own thoughts and feelings, so you can manage them better.
- Learning to accept yourself with all your faults and frailties as being okay and acceptable (so long as you are committed to living a broadly moral life).
- Developing solutions to specific problems, and becoming a more effective problem solver.
- Learning psychological models to understand and control your behaviour.
- Learning how to identify and change unrealistic beliefs, or faulty lenses, through which you view your world.
- Learning how to identify and change maladaptive or self-defeating behaviours.
- Learning to be more emotionally intelligent.
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Contact details:
Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com; or renata@abc-counselling.org
Telephone: 01422 843 629 (Inside the UK)
Or 44 1422 843 629 (Outside)
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Dr Jim’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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Renata’s Coaching and Counselling Division
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Outcomes of our counselling and coaching services
More than 85% of our clients experience our service as very good or excellent; and report achieving the result for which they came to see us. Another 10% do not respond to exit questionnaires.
However, it is important to note that the vast majority of people who come to see us, and to work on their problems with us, achieve dramatic results, and find that they quickly, and durably, get over their emotional, behavioural and relationship disturbances. And, as long as they keep reviewing the work we did together, they can continue to help themselves for a lifetime.
Now I want to present a brief video clip on the benefits of counselling:
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Unsolicited client testimonial
“I took an online depression test before I consulted you. I have just re-taken that test, four months later. Huge difference! I went from ‘severely depressed’ to ‘within normal range’! I’m in the clear and feeling good! Thanks”. P.P., Brittany, France.
(Four sessions of telephone counselling).
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There are dozens of testimonials from grateful clients on this website. (See the Unsolicited Client Testimonials page).
Contact details:
Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com; or renata@abc-counselling.org
Telephone: 01422 843 629 (Inside the UK)
Or 44 1422 843 629 (Outside)
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Dr Jim’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Division
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Renata’s Coaching and Counselling Division
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[1] E-CENT is the acronym for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy, which was created by Dr Jim Byrne, with the support of Renata Taylor-Byrne, around 2008 and earlier. For an introduction to E-CENT, please click the following link: What is E-CENT?***
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ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 