CENT Postition Paper No.4: 

A JOURNEY THROUGH MODELS OF MIND

The Story of My Personal Origins

Copyright (c) Dr Jim Byrne, July 2009 

Foreword

This paper began as an attempt to draft an article that would describe the birth of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).  (If you have not read a description of CENT yet, then please check here: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id75.html) However, it grew with such rapidity that I realized I have a book on my hands.  Or rather, I have enough themes and plots and descriptions to create several books, or to boil it all down into one major book.  In the meantime, I want to keep people informed about the development of CENT, and so I want to publish this incomplete paper here.  It is only incomplete in the sense that it is not the "whole story": not the whole book.  But it has an integrity and coherence of its own, and hopefully a value to the reader.  That value to the reader consists of the following points:

•   This is a personal narrative about my origins; the beginnings of my life; and the struggles I had to ‘become a person’.  As such it could give you some points of reference for your own life.

•   In CENT, I increasingly encourage my clients to have at least one email counselling session, so that they can take the time to reflect upon their most disturbed narrative, and to write it up in detail.  This allows me to read it, reflect upon it, re-read it, and then provide some analysis and developmental feedback.  This is much more detailed and helpful than verbal presentation of the same material, followed by verbal feedback, in face to face counselling or telephone counselling.  This paper is an example of such a narrative.

•   I have identified several important narratives, or stories, which often cause problems for counselling clients.  These include: The story of origins; the story of relationship; the story of transitions; the story of career difficulties.  These can also be broken down into: The story of childhood; the story of teenage years; the story of adulthood; the story of drug use; and so on.  There are no hard and fast boundaries between all of these stories, and the one the client chooses to work on depends upon their actual trajectory through life, and where and when their major difficulties in life began.  This paper is an example of a Story of Origins.

•   This paper can act as a model for clients who want to know “how to write a story for analysis”.  Of course, it does not have to be as developed or as polished as mine, below.  I am, after all, much older and much more experienced than most of my clients; and I am an accomplished author.  But the structure, depth and detail of my story can give some clues to clients as to how to proceed in structuring their own narrative; at their own standard, of course.

•   In sharing this story, I am also modelling ‘emotional honesty’, which is very important to personal development and emotional wellbeing.  Of course, I am taking some risks here, as there are undoubtedly some Bad Wolves out there who will enjoy having insights into my troubled development.  But their perverse pleasures cannot stop me wanting to help others.  Perhaps 85% of the population of any country will have developmental difficulties at least as difficult as mine.  And the Bad Wolves will be counted amongst us.  But the Bad Wolves deny their own emotional distress, and project it into their environments, and attack it in others.  We cannot live our lives in fear of the big Bad Wolves!

Introduction

During my more than eleven years in private practice as a counsellor, psychological coach and psychotherapist, I have been on a continuous journey of self discovery and personal/professional development.  Out of this journey has come a new fusion of therapeutic ideas called Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT): which is essentially a new model of mind, build largely from preexisting ideas.

I now want to write about CENT, to share this new model with my counselling and therapy peers, with counselling students and interested members of the general public.  But where should I begin?  Certainly I must write it as a case study - the study of my own journey through maps and models of the mind.  (This journey actually began long before I became a counsellor, way back in 1968, and even earlier [in my childhood]; and it got richer and more productive down through the decades). 

This paper will cover just Part One of my journey, of which there will probably be five parts.  So most of the CENT innovations will appear in the later papers.  But some of the flavour of CENT should begin to emerge in this first paper.

The temptation in writing professional papers is to want to present it as more than just a story - more than just a narrative by a person.  This temptation results from the status of science in the modern world.  Or rather, it comes from our fantasies about science, and our denigration of mere philosophy.  There seems to be a powerful delusion in our western cultures about the possibility of ‘certain knowledge' (meaning knowledge which is certain, or absolute), or ‘unquestionable truths'.  This paper will deliberately veer away from this temptation and will unselfconsciously reveal its status as the story of one man's journey from confusion, pain, virtual autism, towards mental peace, psychological clarity, and even ‘enlightenment', in the Zen sense of that term.

From Humble Origins

I would love to be able to model myself on Dr Albert Ellis, and announce that I began, in my teens, with a couple of fears and weaknesses, but that I strongly worked against them, and quickly became so strong that nobody could feel anything but admiration for my great achievements at such a young age (of 16 and/or 19 years).  A couple of years ago, I began to examine my past to see if I could find parallel experiences in my own life, so I could look and feel "cool".  I could not find any.  My story is very different from that of Albert Ellis.  So I will have to settle for the unvarnished truth of a very ordinary struggle to make sense of life.

My parents were poorly educated and poverty stricken ‘small farmers' - or ‘smallholders' - who became bankrupt and had to move to the big city - when I was two years old - in search of employment and housing.  I grew up within their impoverished rural cultural heritage, but went to school, at the age of four years, in a different, partly middle class, urban cultural tradition.  Those two cultural traditions were significantly antagonistic towards each other, and so I got to experience being a total outsider from the age of four to fourteen years, during which time I did not make a single friend.  In some respects I showed up as largely autistic, though I was always in the top three in my class on annual test results for school subjects.  In the school playground I was called "Mr Know-all", or "The little professor", or the "Country bumpkin", and pushed from pillar to post; punched; stolen from; verbally abused; and even urinated upon.

I was dumped into school, against my will.  I was not consulted.  I wanted to stay at home with my mother. 

I was beaten at home and at school.  I was malnourished.

I did not have a model of mind at that time.  If I had a model of life it was this:  "I am like a little mouse, frightened and weak.  Everybody else is like a cat, with sharp claws and vicious tempers.  Fortunately most of the cats are sleepwalking most of the time, or blind.  All I have to do is to move slowly, quietly, make no sound, and I will not get savaged to death!"

My school teachers taught me that I have an immortal soul, which I imagined was in my heart.  My job was to keep my immortal soul free from sin, to avoid the fires of hell.  I committed myself to do that, and largely succeeded.

My predominant emotions were sadness and fear.  (I would discover years later that my anger was repressed out of awareness, to prevent conflict in which I believed I would surely die).

Freedom from School

From the age of fourteen to eighteen years I worked as a metal jewellery apprentice in a city firm.  This was less oppressive than school.  I discovered bookshops and judo, and enjoyed them both, filling up most of my time with reading and judo practice, or running in the park.  I also discovered girls, but could not speak to them.

At the age of fifteen years, I found some old copies of ‘Psychology Today' in a second-hand bookshop.  I read them and tried to make sense of them.  The only things I recall from that experience were developing a desire to be able to hypnotize people - which came to nothing - and the discovery of the ‘inferiority complex'.  I immediately recognized ‘my self' in this concept, but I did not learn how to correct the problem.  To an extent I thought: ‘I am a country boy and I should be a city kid'.  This seemed to be so true.  I could not see that the ‘should' was gratuitous nonsense. 

From the age of fourteen to eighteen I had a couple of acquaintances - fellow judo players.  Not that I conversedwith them.  I was often ‘with them' for periods of time - even going camping with them a couple of times - but not in any kind of contact.  Just Being!

I even collected the membership dues at the judo club for a couple of years, when seventeen/eighteen years old.  I asked for the dues.  Anybody who agreed to pay up paid up.  Anybody who told me to get lost got rid of me.  No come back, no comment.  No contact.  No computation.  No reflection.  No relationship to the dues payers or the club committee. 

Back in the Soup

At the age of eighteen years I emigrated to a new country, to get away from.... something: The Pain - the ‘Hollowness' - the Nothingness!

However, as an immigrant I was back in familiar, early territory, just like the first few years at school.  (Repetition compulsion?)  I moved around quietly, and avoided all the ‘cats'.

At the age of nineteen I joined the armed forces, to get a free education/training, and found I was right back in the first few years of ‘home life' once again.   The cruel, brutal, totalitarian control system bore down on my vulnerability.  More cats, more claws.  I had nobody to turn to for comfort or support.  I did not even envisage that such a possibility could exist, even in theory.  I had severed all connections with my family, even refusing to write to my mother when ordered to do so by my commanding officer. 

Despite my best efforts to remain invisible, I made some enemies who gave me a hard time.  At the age of twenty-two I cracked under the strain of brutal, extreme male harshness - vicious peer group pressure and victimization - and went into Freudian analysis.  My analyst was very nice, gentle, concerned.  He analyzed my paintings, poems, journal entries, dreams and word associations.  He determined that my problems with my peers were linked to how my parents had related to each other, and to me and my siblings (of which there were six).  (My parents had a loveless, arranged marriage, and there was a big age gap between them.  My mother had a few lovers to my certain knowledge.  My parents could not afford to feed us properly, and I suffered from extreme malnutrition up to the age of fourteen years.  They were cold and harsh and distant, punitive and retaliatory, in the main - though dutiful in many practical respects). 

My analyst announced my challenge at the final session we had together:  "You need to examine your relationship with your mother in particular".  This was where the analysis failed.  Why?  Because I had no ‘schema', or map, definition, or any other ‘handle' on the concept of "relationship".  I had no awareness of having something called "a relationship with my mother".  I had no idea what it could possibly mean to "examine" something called "a relationship".  And even more shocking (for me now) is that I had no capacity to communicate with my analyst to say: "What do you mean?"  "What is a relationship?"  "How could I examine one?"  I could not benefit from the analysis of my inability to relate to others because of my inability to relate to others!  Double bind!  (Why did my analyst not spot this?  Can an analyst see beyond their own cultural schemas?  What schemas of our clients do we all miss every day, in our professional counselling and therapy work?)

So I walked away from psychoanalysis, and left the armed forces.  What I had learned is that I seem to be partly conscious, and partly unconscious.  I seem to have three bits to my ‘mind': my physical self (id); my ego (or self image); and my superego (or internal police officer).  And there is something about me and my mother that is linked to my current problems with others.  I went into the nearest town and drank too much whisky. 

A Dawning Peace

My psychoanalysis lasted several weeks, and I also did a lot of relaxation therapy, music therapy, art therapy, and so on.  I wrote nonsense poems, and linked lots of random words to each other in what seemed to me to be random order.  And I had a strange experience.  The block in which I lived was so far from the nearest shops that we had a mobile shop that visited the block every day.  Every morning about 7.00am, the van would arrive, carrying newspapers, cigarettes, sweets, soft drinks, and so on.  So, each morning, after breakfast, I would go outside, and wait for the van.  This was from spring into early summer.  Nobody else bothered to wait for the van.  Some would rush out when it arrived.  But I was always 30 minutes early, and I stood on the lawn, on my own, among the big old trees, where I could smell the ground, and the tree wood, and the leaves.  The sky was often clear and bright, and yellow sunshine poured down through the branches above.  (I was twenty-two years old at this time).  Sometimes a bird would chirp or sing.  One particular day - a chirp!  And then it happened.  The silence deepened, and my mind disappeared!  My mind?  But I had not known it was there.  My soul was in my chest, but my mind, it seemed, was in my head.  Now I spotted it, seemingly for the first time: chattering away, churning up emotions.  Lamenting, lamenting, bewailing, and expressing the forlorn hopes of a frightened mouse. Then the bird chirped, and the mind disappeared.  The pain was gone:  Washed away, not by the sound of the bird, but by the silence revealed by the gap between chirps.  The gap; the present moment!  My heart leaped in my chest.  The depth of the silence.  The stillness.  And there in the middle of it - Love.  (I had not known that word!)  Love for me?  Love from me?  Who is me? Or who am I?  What is that?  What is anything?  What is ‘is'?  The silence!  The stillness!  The Hope of a better life!  My heart swelled and warmed: an expansion of my soul occurred.  Out of the pain of utter defeat, extreme public shaming and denigration, came the hope of a new birth.  I was everywhere.  I was everything!  I no longer existed.

The Worm Turns

Immediately after returning to civilian life, I discovered Marxism, with its theory that the individual has no role in history.  Only social classes count in historical materialism, and they are driven by the foundations of their economic system.  The cultural superstructure of capitalistic society (including education, literature, the arts, and so on) is assumed to be a reflection of the economic base, and consciousness is dominated by the ideology of the ruling class.  Inequality and exploitation are the hallmarks of capitalistic society, and unhappiness and alienation are the emotional lot of the working classes.

Now I knew who the enemy was, and I turned on the capitalistic patriarchy with a negative energy and vitality I had never known before.  I became a fulltime revolutionary, studying and writing for the revolution.  (I even went to college to study labour history, politics, economics and philosophy to develop my knowledge and skills for this new role).  Once the proletarian revolution had been achieved, all human minds would be liberated by the restructuring of the economic base of a socialist society.  It was a beautiful vision.

I went from being a mouse to being a Big Moral Cat, and I was going to punish the ruling class (or Social Father) for their (his) sins.  I would willingly have put my mother up against the wall and shot her, for the sake of the revolution.  (Or was it for some other reason?)  For six years I worked in this mode, and formed a new personality, which was just as autistic as the old one, only this one spoke, and wrote, eloquently, of class hatred and rebellion, and a future utopia.

During this period, I married a fellow revolutionary, and then proceeded to turn her into ‘my mother'.  This allowed me to feel the familiar feelings of despair and denigration, hurt and pain.  After six years of this pattern, she found something better to do, and left me.  (I now think: Thank God.  I made my escape.  But back then, it seemed like the end of the world!)  I went into a sense of grief that must have replicated some earlier sense of loss of my mother.  I was in emotional agony.  But I continued to wage class war, and in fact turned my anger inside the political organisation of which I was a member.   This resulted in a showdown at the headquarters in my district, and the district organizer was called in to whip me into shape. 

The district organizer set up a special meeting of the branch.  At that branch meeting, the arguments raged.  I was the most extreme speaker, but I had a few milder supporters.  I could certainly give the district organizer a run for his money.  I spoke and sat down.  Then the clouds outside parted, and the late afternoon sun glinted through the front windows of the bookshop in which the meeting was happening, and extended about six feet into the room, low and sharply angled.  It struck the carpet, brightening the colour, and creating a kind of halo above the carpet, in which some specks of dust now floated.  It was like a radio switch.  All the sound drained from the room.  The dust rose so, so very slowly, upwards, upwards, swirling in a micro world in which dust was the most important resident.  And zip, I entered that space again - that Love/Peace/Bliss.  And it was as if two taps in the back of my heels were opened, and all the hateful, angry bile poured out of my body.  And I was drained, and the light from the sun warmed my empty body, and filled it with light; and the revolution was over.  I did not care what anybody said from that point onwards.  It was over.  I waited to the end of the meeting, said goodbye to my ex-wife and her lover, and glanced at the twin girls that had been born to my wife three months after we had split!  Yes!  Three months!  (It would be ten years before the first grief-stricken tears would force themselves from eyes about those little girls).  And I walked out of there and turned my back on politics forever.  I went back to my attic to sit and sit and sit, with a warmly open mind that focussed on nothing.

I then turned to the guitar, sang and played songs by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dillon, and was ‘directed' to go overseas by a female associate who befriended me, gave me a room in her home, and then directed me to a new career overseas.

Model of Mind at that time:  I don't think or decide.  My mind has no influence in the world.  Thoughts and decisions are performed for me by others.  Sometimes bliss comes; and then it quickly goes again.

I was driven to the airport by my female friend/associate.  I got on the plane.  Goodbye ‘Mother'!  Hours later I was soaring over cotton wool clouds, bound for south Asia.  (Who's idea was this?!)

A New Life in Bangladesh

I arrived in Bangladesh in January 1977.  I was a little more than thirty years old.  I was assigned to a United Nations project with one colleague.  We were vocational training instructors/consultants.  He has become a lifelong friend.  Not in the sense that some people have friends.  It was limited, from my side; but very much better than anything that had gone before it. 

I met a South American couple who had been through the training in person centred and Gestalt therapy at Big Sur, in California.  I learned a new narrative from them, which was about respecting persons, and personal autonomy, and caring and sharing. 

Early on, Carla said she would teach me how to love.  (She said this to some other people who were present).  I accidentally overheard this statement.  What could she mean?  What is love?  How will she teach me?  What will it amount to?  Will it hurt?

Carla listened to my story, of my childhood, of my pains and sorrows.  She drew them out of me.  She was genuinely interested in knowing who I was, where I ‘came from' psychologically; what made me tick.  We drank tea together, wrote poems for each other.  She put down my story in a set of poems that were so poignant, and so sensitive and respectful of my ‘personhood', that I was shocked into a kind of rebirth; a new kind of life awoke within me.  She drew graphic word pictures of the wounds in my psyche that allowed me to see myself for the first time, to know myself for the first time.  She loved me - not in the carnal sense - she injected love into me.  She awoke flames of love within me - not in the carnal sense - but in the sense of feeling for another.  Like a painful watchfulness on their behalf. 

One evening Carla asked me: "How does your mind work?"

I immediately had this image of a set of floorboards that ran back from behind my eyebrows to the back of my head, splitting my cranium into two chambers.  The lower chamber was inaccessible.  The upper chamber had a wooden floor, in which there were a series of holes, and a set of cartoon snakes bobbed up and down through those holes.  Each snake had a rolled parchment wrapped around it, containing a message.  Whenever my environment required a response from me, an inner hand reached across to one of the cartoon snakes, picked it up, unrolled the parchment, and read off or acted upon the message which was written upon it.

This image might have been inspired by my psychoanalysis, but it also seemed to be more poetic or artistic than philosophical.  Years later I would wonder how the inner hand knows which snake to select.  The answer came immediately.  The inner arm is connected to the lower chamber.  The intelligence in the lower chamber tells the inner arm which snake to choose.  So the whole thing is unconscious, and there is only the illusion of a conscious actor performing some part of the cognitive functioning that is illustrated here.

Carla and I worked together for almost two years, and I gained enormously from my relationship with her.  But it had to end because she had more important priorities in life.  We worked together in Bangladesh and in Thailand, and then I returned to the UK. 

Arriving in Hebden Bridge

My arrival in Hebden Bridge was accidental.  I thought I was going to Bradford City.  I stayed with a friend in Hebden Bridge for a while, and thought I would go back to Thailand when new project funding became available from Washington, later in 1979.  However, the funding never arrived, and I got stuck in Hebden Bridge.  So I found myself a flat and decided to live on my own for a few years to strengthen myself, so I would never again fall into a Mother-Son relationship with a sex-love partner, as had happened with my first marriage.  I began to read books on psychology.  I met Renata, who later became my girlfriend, and then my wife, and with whom I have had thirty years of blissful living (overall, and omitting reference to our early difficulties which took us to marriage guidance).

Renata introduced me to Zen meditation and Gestalt therapy, and a whole host of other ideas.  I got into Transactional Analysis on my own.

Towards the end of 1979, I was reading a book by Al Koran which sparked off an idea in my mind.  Why don't I write a poem about my mind, my psyche, my inner workings?  So I sat down with an A4 pad of paper and a pen, and wrote this title on the top of the page:  "On first looking inside myself".  I then doodled while I ‘looked'.  And ‘looked'.  And ‘looked'.  And nothing came into view.  I could not see anything inside myself.  I could not find any ideas, or processes, or thoughts, or feelings inside myself.  I was apparently totally empty.  That was a big shock.  I realized that I am totally opaque to myself:  That I am totally non-conscious.  I must have thoughts and feelings, but they do not bother to consult "me" - the conscious part of me - about their presence, their existence, their nature, or their plans.  I am a grow-bot!

I began to meditate in 1980, after reading Alan Watts' book, ‘The Way of Zen' and something by Suzuki, Christmas Humphreys, and Chogyam Trungpa.  I had a very strange reaction to meditation at first.  A lot of psychological pain came up, and I prostrated myself on the floor, on my belly, and submitted to LIFE.  (I had not realized that I had been holding out against life - trying to be the one who runs the universe!)  I then had an ego reaction against that act of surrender, and gave the Watts book back to Renata.  The next day I went around and borrowed it again.  I meditated from 1980 to 1993, and from 2001 onwards.  I did a good deal of Gestalt therapy on myself, with Renata's support and facilitation.  The combination of Zen and Gestalt had the effect of grounding me, and making my mind clearer and less volatile, less of a flip flop.  I did lots of Gestalt chair work with my projections of my mum and my dad.

Model of mind: Language is misleading, and our emotions are linked to words.  If we can calm down and control our languaging, we can change our emotional existence.  If we focus our awareness in the Now, by focusing on our breathing, then we are not focused on linguistic/emotive problems in the past or the future.  The mind is calmed by Watching It.  If I am watching my mind, I cannot at the same time be identified with it - or functioning as if ‘I am my Mind'.  (However, you cannot directly watch your mind.  When you look, it disappears.  When you stop looking, it reappears.  So when I say Watch Your Mind, I really mean, Switch It Off by Paying Attention).

Provisional Conclusion

I cannot write a proper conclusion at this point, as this is just Part One of my journey.  More will be published later.  For example, the period of learning REBT, and then studying psychology and then studying for my doctorate in counselling.  All of this is part of the journey.  But in this paper I have presented enough on my origins.  The next part will be based around the Story of relationship.

In a little while I will publish Paper No.3, which will be a couple of extracts from my doctoral thesis on the nature of the human mind, and especially the fragility of human autobiographical memory.

One interesting thing that comes out of this first paper is this:  My origins were so complicated that it took a lot of time and effort to untangle myself from the emotional disturbances that were generated from just two aspects: the cross cultural conflict of being a country boy in a city school; and the sense of being abandoned by my mother, resulting in an insecure attachment to her.  (I should write a more detailed analysis of the dynamics of this story, and post them somewhere near this paper.  This will serve as an illustration of how CENT analyzes Stories for clients).

If you are a potential client of counselling, and you are suffering because of a complicated Story of Origins, then you will see that there is a good deal of work to be done.  Some of that can be done by reading; some by talking about it; some by taking various kinds of actions; and some by re-framing your situation.  (Again the importance of re-framing our stories will be brought out in a subsequent paper.  But for the moment, you can see how CENT helps to re-frame problems, with the ‘Mind Hut' model, also called the ‘Four Windows' mode, here: http://www.abc-counselling.com/2009.08.01_arch.html#1250251161668).  Give yourself plenty of time to grow, to change, and to untangle your narrative threads.  Do not beat yourself up for the slowness of personal emotional growth.  It takes however long it takes.  And remember to enjoy what you can of your life.  Life is short. 

When you were reading my story of origins, did you get any ideas of how to write your own?  Do you want to write your own story of origins and have it analyzed?  If so, please check out my email counselling service, here: http://www.abc-counselling.com/id92.html.

We will return to analyze my Story of Origins later; and I will keep working on the other stories, and post them here.  I hope they are of some value to you.

POSTSCRIPT

One of the reasons I can write down all of this negative Story of Origin is that lots of positive things have occurred in my later life. Becasue I took responsibility for my life, I was able to turn my life around. And I have developed ways of coping with the bad stuff.  If you've had a serious trauma in your life, learn some coping self-statements before you begin to write about the traumatic period of your life.  If you want to get into using writing therapy, try writing for three minutes at a time, and end the session with some positive statements.  Such as: I survived!  I am well today!  It wasn't the end of the f***ing world!  Life is difficult, so why wouldn't I have some problems in my past!  Remind yourself that you are able to handle having these negative things in your past life.  It won't kill you.  It's in the past, so: No use crying over spilled milk.  If you must cry, then cry, and recognize that crying is like emptying an inkwell.  It only contains so many tears, and when they are gone, they are gone!  Then the sun comes out. The inkwell may fill up again tomorrow, but today it is now empty!  Great!

~~~

To reference this paper, please use the following citation:

~~~

If you feel distressed, get professional help from a good counsellor or psychotherapist.

Dr Jim Byrne

July 2009

jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

http://www.abc-counselling.com/

~~~