Blog post – 20th October 2022
If you are a writer, what should you write? Thoughts about books and writing…
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
~~~
Books about life scripts and problematical mothers…
~~~
Are you aware of your own life script?
It is not easy for a writer to know what to write.
There are so many books in the world, and so very few readers.
More than 25 of the many books which are queuing for your attention were written (or co-authored) by me.
Recently I thought it would be good to write a book entitled ‘What is your Life Script – and how to change your destiny’.
It took quite a while for me to realize that this would duplicate a large part of a book which I have already written. Here is a brief extract:
“Most people spend the whole of their life living as largely non-conscious victims of a script that they wrote for themselves, with the aid of their parents, when they were less than seven years old, when they hadn’t got enough sense to write a really good script for themselves.”
(Source: https://abc-bookstore.com/personality-and-destiny-how-to-change-them/)
That book is titled as follows: Who Are You, And Where Are You Going? Transformative insights from psychology and the philosophy of psychotherapy.
~~~
The Mother Wound
Anyway, before I could make much headway with sketching out the content of a new volume on life script, I was overtaken by the desire to write a book about the way in which many humans are harmed, in the most vulnerable period of their lives – in the first three or four years – by damaged or difficult or unskillful mothers.
(Of course, motherhood is an impossible job in the modern world [and perhaps it always was!]; and it always surprises me that it works out as well as it does, for the exploited and oppressed mothers and their strangely resilient children!)
This volume would be like a cheese sandwich, with my Story of the Relationship with my Own Mother as the cheese; and with an opening slice of bread that would explore the nature of “mother wounding”, the symptoms resulting; and how to heal a “mother wound”. The final slice of bread would be about how you can assess whether or not you have a “mother wound”; and,if so, how to heal your own “mother wound”, resulting from neglect, abuse or abandonment (physically or psychologically).
However, in the process I overloaded myself, and had to mothball this project for a quieter time in my later life.
And, in any case, I have written at great length about my relationship with my mother, in my fictionalized autobiography: Metal Dog – Long Road Home.***
The writing of that book was a significant part of my own personal-therapy journey – and it came close of healing my “mother wound” – with just a few bits left over which has since been cleaned up.
The extract from Metal Dog shown on the ABC Bookstore does not focus on my relationship with my mother; but the core of my fictionalized autobiography is about that relationship, and the aftermath of its dysfunctionality.
~~~
The compulsion to write – as it anybody gave a tish!
And this morning – Thursday 20th October – I awoke with an uncontrollable urge to write something about books and the arts of reading and writing; and also about the frustrations and difficulties of living in a world in which there are too many books, and not enough readers; and not enough time to read all those things we could benefit from reading. For more, please go to this blog post: Too many books will never be enough; The books that build us up and tear us down!
~~~
That’s all for now.
Best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy Services
The Institute for E-CENT Counselling
~~~
As Covid-19 lockdown draws to an end – scheduled for 19th July 2021 (in the UK) – some individuals will celebrate by getting out and about, taking off for holidays (vacations), and generally adding to the population of the world through “enjoyable social activities”!
Covid-19 is the most dramatic crisis to hit the world since the First and/or Second World War. It threatens all of our futures to varying degrees. It wakes us up to something we had tried to forget for decades: That we are already/always insecure, as human beings, living on Planet Earth.
Most of us have probably worked very hard to suppress that awareness for most of our lives – that life is insecure, fragile, and always ends in death. So it is not surprising that being woken up to this reality by Covid-19 has made most of us very anxious; and some of us very angry and/or depressed. And the anxiety may get worse, for many of us, when the lockdown is phased out.
One of the things that I do to control my mind and to manage my life is to write things down. At the moment, I spend about half an hour each morning writing what Julia Cameron called ‘Morning Pages’; about three pages of stream of consciousness; which provide an opportunity to chew through what went wrong (or right) yesterday; and what I want to (or need to) do today.
When they were getting very close to us, I suddenly looked him in the face, angrily, with the intention of ‘willing him’ to move further over the road, away from us (so he could not infect us with Covid-19, if he was infectious). Then, when he was about two metres before the point at which he would pass me by, and without realizing that I would speak, I said (in a fairly quiet, but angry voice): “Move over, you c**t!” These words just popped out of my mouth, unbidden.
As I write these notes this morning, I realize that this is a major learning experience for me. I realize that I am quite demanding that people should and must follow the government’s guidelines in an intelligent manner, and never get closer than two metres from me. (I also realize that this has been building up over time. This is not the first time I’ve felt angry towards somebody who mindlessly walked too close to me. But I failed to pay sufficient attention to what was happening (inside of me, in response to those ‘invasions’); and I made excuses – I distinctly remember – for my aggressive responses – instead of correcting myself).
Dr Jim Byrne, 
Because of the very great seriousness of the present situation regarding Covid-19, we all need to stay in our homes as much as possible, to stop the spread of this virus.
Most people don’t realise that they become increasingly physically tense as they try to solve the daily problems of their lives. They use up lots of their physical energy just maintaining that tension. Because of this phenomenon, of accumulation, or building up of tensions in the body’s muscles, day in and day out, people develop anxiety, depression, and various physical illnesses.
What Dr Jacobson developed was a simple technique which, if you practise it daily, will reduce your physical tension. It won’t work if you just do it from time to time. The system is very simple, and involves tensing a particular set of muscles, holding it for a few seconds, and then releasing the tension. Each day, as you are doing the tension and release exercises, you will become more aware of what it feels like when you have tension in different parts of your body. And then you can slowly learn to release that tension. Day by day, your tension level reduces as you become aware of what you are doing to your body, as you go about your daily life.
Jacobson’s theory was that clients experienced tension because they had hyperactive bodies and minds, and that the build-up of tension in the body resulted in the following symptoms: anxiety, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disorders, nervous indigestion, peptic ulcers and spastic colon. People were trying to cope with a very fast and constantly changing society, and the problem was that their efforts to cope were using up lots of energy.
“I was shocked to find that 40% of the top executives of one leading corporation had blood vessels that were beyond cure. They were paying with their lives for their years of energy extravagance.”
But if we don’t give ourselves time to recover in-between these stressful events, we stop the natural recovery process from taking place. Our bodies experience more and more stress without this safety valve, or recovery stage, to dissipate it. Then there is a gradual accumulation of tension in our muscles, and stress hormones build up in our blood and body tissues.
Jacobson’s progressive relaxation technique has been acknowledged by health care professionals throughout the world as being very effective in many different healthcare environments. It’s a very straightforward technique that anyone can learn and use for themselves, and this increases their sense of self-efficacy and control over their bodies, and also increases their energy level. It’s a lot cheaper than drugs, medical or otherwise, and doesn’t have any negative side effects either!
It teaches you to raise your awareness of the muscles in your body; and you learn to notice the tension, and how to let go of it, in each of the main muscles of your body. If this is done regularly (daily is best), you become more and more skilled at spotting the tension in your muscles as it arises. Then you can relax the tension immediately after you have created it, instead of letting the tension accumulate in your body. And the more you practise, the more you can automatically spot and release unnecessary tension.
We are here, and it is now. And it seems this now, where we are, is the same now we were in before the Christmas and New Year fantasies arrived to try to sweep us off our feet.
In this book, I have presented a very powerful ‘technology’ for overcoming emotional distress – regardless of the cause. I have also included special advice for couples about how to communicate so as to avoid conflict – or to manage that conflict better; plus special sections on insights into how to communicate more effectively with loved ones; and how to understand and improve your own ‘conflict style’.
Doctor of Counselling
This is the second blog post, in a series of posts, about systems of counselling and psychotherapy. Last week I wrote about 
Then, in 1979, back in the UK, I stumbled upon Roger’s book, ‘On Becoming a Person’, which I enjoyed enormously. (Later, I realized that it was somewhat amoral – or lacking in moral sense – in that it elevated the needs of the individual above the social relationships found in a situation, in every case, as a matter of principle; whereas, in my moral judgement, social commitments and responsibilities are also important, and have to be balanced against the needs of the individual, on a case by case basis).
For Carl Rogers, the creator of person-centred counselling, the subjective self-concept, when it’s psychologically healthy, is a result of the ways in which the individual perceives and defines themselves. By contrast, when they internalize the values of others, this is seen by Rogers as a ‘distorted sense of self’, which is psychologically unhealthy. This perspective of Rogers’ is reminiscent of Jean Piaget’s view of the individual as essentially capable of autonomous activity from birth, with an urge (which Rogers calls the ‘actualizing tendency’) to explore the world. But this is completely unrealistic, which is why Piaget’s perspective was eventually replaced (for most educational psychologists) by that of Vygotsky, who recognized the role of ‘instruction’, and other socializing influences, upon the shape taken by the developing child.
By Dr Jim Byrne
Dr Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
Because Carl Rogers didn’t understand the inescapably social nature of the so-called ‘individual’, he created a system of counselling in which the client is left to ‘self-manage’ their therapeutic journey, with the counsellor providing nothing but a ‘mirror’ and ‘sounding board’, both of which provide essentially or primarily non-verbal feedback under the false banner of being ‘a facilitating environment’!
The model of communication that I utilize in my emotive-cognitive, embodied narrative therapy work is similar to that described by Stephen Covey
Rogers thought that therapy was ‘too directive’ and, as a reaction against it, he developed a completely non-directive system of therapy (which does not involve fully-human communication – as explained above). But he was wrong to think that a non-directive form of therapy would ‘liberate’ the ‘inner self’ of the client, because the ‘inner self’ of the client is precisely the ‘socialized self’ which carries the wounds that need to be healed.
Clearly, Carl Rogers had a very simplistic model of the human body-brain-mind-environment which we call ‘a counselling client’. To help a client to resolve their emotional, behavioural and relationship problems is normally going to take a whole lot more than listening, listening, listening!
I’ve been using ‘expressive’ or ‘therapeutic’ writing for many years: resulting in priceless personal and professional insights. Most recently, I’ve been writing on a daily basis for many weeks now. Before that time, I wrote in my journal perhaps 3 or 4 times per week, for many months. And before that time, I wrote intermittently – sometimes being regular and frequent, and sometimes being more hit and miss.
Dr Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
In science as well as popular culture, the body and mind have long been pulled apart, and treated as separate entities.
If you are interested in the impact of lifestyle practices on mental health and emotional states, then you will enjoy 
– a summary of 
Many of the human tragedies that clients bring to our counselling and psychology consulting rooms have pure social-psychological roots. These include:
But all of this is now complicated by the existence of
PS: If you want to see the kind of range of ideas that I write about, please go to 
Renata and I did a lot of research and reflection on the subject of the impact of diet and exercise upon mental health and emotional wellbeing. 
Every day, I discover some new problem that I have to solve, for important, self-defined reasons.
My Writing Journal is my *anchor* and *compass* in the turbulent seas of life. At least when it comes to processing my negative experiences.
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 