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
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Books about life scripts and problematical mothers…
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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It has been said that if you do not have goals for yourself and your life, you will get used by people who have goals in which they can use you to their own ends.
At least three or four mornings per week – (it should be six or seven, but I am busy, and also distracted at times!) – I sit down and try to follow Julia Cameron’s advice to write three A4 pages of “stream of consciousness”. That means, whatever pops up in my mind gets written on the page, including “I don’t know what to write”; “I have slight pain in my leg”; or whatever comes up.
Jim had a dreadful headache during the night which disrupted his sleep – three times. Why did he not take a painkiller?
Although Jim treated the Candida symptoms topically, he also has a plan to monitor the link between those symptoms and his high GI deviations from his usual diet. If the Candida problem persists, he will reduce those high GI foods, and find some other way to gain weight!
Sleep disruption is a significant disturbance to normal mood states. See Renata’s book, 
My advice to the readers of this blog is this:
In this blog post, I have tried to draw attention to the importance of conscious self-management, if you want to be happy, healthy, successful and wealthy. (Having lots of money is not wealth, if you do not have your physical and mental health, and emotional wellbeing!)
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 
That’s all for now.
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. 
PS: If you want to see the kind of range of ideas that I write about, please go to 
Why did I not buy my own painkillers from the chemist? Because most of the painkillers used today are what are called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). And the problem with NSAIDs is that they cause ‘leaky gut syndrome’, which not only allows whole molecules of food to enter the bloodstream, and trigger various forms of inflammation in the body (paradox of paradoxes!), but they also compromise the blood/brain barrier, which can precipitate mood disturbances!
Let me now describe the exercises that I went on to do, after meditating:
Finally I did some strength training using the Powerspin rotator, to build arm, shoulder and upper body strength.
If you want me to help you to figure out how to live a happier, healthier, more emotionally buoyant life, then please contact me:
So how, in such a demanding environment, do we manage our energy successfully? So that we optimise our productivity, but conserve our energy and protect our physical and mental health.
Each day, at the end of the final teaching session, I would wipe the whiteboard clean of all the information that was on it, and I would remember all the outstanding events of the day, good and bad, and wipe them away in my mind at the same time.
The other aspect of this approach was this: I was asserting my boundaries with my job. In other words, I was taking responsibility for managing upwards. I was not allowing myself to develop ‘leaky boundaries’ through which outside forces could use up my precious reserves of energy!
Some years ago I found this idea was used by Olympic athletes. After they had been working on the skills they wanted to develop, then they needed time to rest and recover. The human body needs proper recovery for sustained and improved performance, for development, and even for preventing injuries.
My job as a coach/counsellor is to help my clients become strong, confident and healthy. And if I find information that will help people achieve that goal, then it’s my job to spread the good news.
A blog post by Dr Jim Byrne, 22nd June 2016
By Jim Byrne DCoun FISPC
The content of this book has been a long time incubating, at the very least since 2001 when I first tried to defend the ABC model of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)/ Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) by relating it to the three core components of Freud’s model of the mind (or psyche): (1) the Id (or It [or baby-at-birth]); the Ego (or sense of self, or personality); and the Superego (or internalized other, including social and moral rules). The more I tried to defend REBT, the more its core models fell apart in my hands!
Into this mix, at some point, Attachment theory arrived, and that helped to make more sense of the mix. Attachment theory and Object relations theory eventually formed the core of my model of the mother-baby dyad, and the way in which the mind of the baby was born out of the interpenetration (or overlapping interactions) of the physical baby and the cultural mother.
But even beyond those developments, I also became increasingly aware that, because we are body-minds, our experience of sleep, diet, exercise, alcohol, water consumption, and socio-economic circumstances – (in addition to current and historic relationships) – have as much to do with our emotional disturbances (very often) as do our psychological habits of mind.
Counselling and therapy systems have normally ignored the convincing evidence that exercise and diet can change our emotional states. For example, in Woolfe, Dryden and Strawbridge’s (2003) book on counselling psychology, there are no references in the index to diet or physical exercise
In the past, I have written a good deal on the subject of the importance of morality in counselling and therapy. See:
And one of the ways in which Albert Ellis’s amorality took shape in his philosophy of counselling and psychotherapy was in his development – following Carl Rogers’ model – of Unconditional Self-Acceptance, and Unconditional Acceptance of Others (People). If we advocate unconditional acceptance of others, and we mean it literally, we cannot object no matter how badly they mistreat us. This ideology could threaten not just our comfort, dignity and wellbeing, but our very survival – and hence it cannot be accommodated within a real, living community: (as opposed to surviving inside the scattered brains of Rogers and Ellis!). And again, I have written extensive critiques of Rogers and Ellis on the topic of Acceptance and Regard:
About two weeks ago, I got an urgent phone call from a man in South Wales. He wanted to come up and talk to me about anger management issues. He had seen 
I taught Jack the errors of his way: of assuming that ‘might is right’, which is the lesson he had learned from his own violent father.
After about three or four minutes of crying, I remembered that there was a big baked potato with baked beans and a large Americano with cold milk waiting for me at Watergate Café. I smiled. Dried my eyes. Laughed out loud, and headed off into sunny Hebden Bridge.
Dr Jim Byrne
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 