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ABC Coaching and Counselling Services. On this site you will find a range of free information pages and video recordings about various systems and models of counselling; plus details of professional counselling services available all over the world by telephone; and face to face in Hebden Bridge and Halifax, West Yorkshire; and in London, Leeds and Manchester; and in Edinburgh, York and Wilmslow. ~~~ Narrative counsellors help their clients to develop an interpretive story about some aspect of the client's life, which empowers the client to integrate and complete previously undigested experiences: "Whereas Freud and other early psychoanalytic therapists believed that free association and dream analysis were unearthing evidence about early childhood conflicts that actually occurred, Spence points out that it is seldom possible to verify in an objective sense whether or not these childhood events took place. He suggests that what therapists do is to help the client to arrive at a narrative truth, a story that makes sense and has significant correspondence with the historical data that are available". John McLeod, An Introduction to Counselling. 2003. Page 230. (4) ~~~
~~~ (1) Information about counselling services
all over the world:
~~~ In the video clip that follows, Dr Jim Byrne presents a brief list of the eleven central principles of his Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT) and counselling system. CENT is a fusion of REBT/CBT, Transactional Analysis and Object Relations, Attachment Theory, Zen Buddhism, moral philosophy and other philosophical elements.
Additional Information Counselling, as practiced by Dr Jim Byrne, amounts to an opportunity to examine:
Counselling has very specific, measurable effects on the lives of counselling clients: ~~~ ~~~ CENT is a holistic system of counselling which includes the care of the whole body/mind of the client.
~~~ Counselling goals cover a broad range. The first is to do with ‘supportive listening': "Attaining this goal requires counsellors and therapists to be skilled at listening to clients, taking their perspectives, and sensitively showing them that they have been heard accurately. Counsellors with good listening skills can comfort, ease suffering, heal psychological wounds and act as sounding boards for moving forward. Furthermore, counsellors should be careful never to underestimate the power of effective listening both for comforting and for empowering clients". From: Richard Nelson-Jones, 2002, Essential Counselling and Therapy Skills: The skilled client model. London: Sage Publications. Page 6. (5). ~~~ I hope you find the information on this web site interesting and useful. There are more than thirty video clips on counselling systems and processes on various pages. And there are dozens of pages on different systems of counselling, and related subjects, like meditation, diet and exercise. And if you need counselling help or support, please do contact me.If you want to escape from the pain of depression and anxiety, or the self-inflicted losses (of relationships, jobs, friends, careers, self respect, etc) resulting from uncontrolled anger, then you could benefit from CENT counselling with me. What I do best is to help you to develop 'narrative competence', so you can re-write the story of your current and past life, which will create a better future for you; one which does not contain the pain and distress of the present moment. We live our lives according to a non-conscious script, and to change our lives we have to change that script. Furthermore, if you try to run away from your problems, they will pursue you. To get rid of them, you have to learn how to 'complete your experience' of them, which 'digests them', and allows them to go into the background of your life, harmlessly. The major developmental challenges for people who are suffering with strong and disturbing negative emotions are: (1) to complete any undigested experiences from your past; (2) to learn how to become securely attached to others; (3) to learn how to 'reframe' your experiences, so they show up in a less disturbing light; and (4) to re-write the story or script that is driving your life in negative directions. I can show you how to tackle those challenges, and how to have a healthier, happier life.
Doctor of Counselling ABC Coaching and Counselling Services01422 843 629 (from inside the UK); 44 1422 843 629 (from outside the UK). ~~~
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~~~ If you like the content of this site, please share it with your social networking
friends (e.g. at Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc). ~~~ Narrative counselling looks at the language of the client and the counsellor in constructing an empowering story: A narrative approach to counselling is ... one that takes seriously all of the dimensions of humanness (intention, relationship, temporality [or time-line], feeling [or emotion] and morality) that are involved in a process of storytelling. More specifically, a narrative approach draws attention to the ways in which people use language and talk to construct their lives. A narrative approach to counselling is one that promotes sensitivity to the use of language on the part both of the person seeking help and of the counsellor who supplies that help". Quotation above from: John McLeod, Counselling Skill, 2007, page 3. (6) ~~~ ~~~ Information about Counselling Here are some video clips to help you to get a flavour of the ABC Coaching and Counselling
Services approach to counselling and therapy:
~~~ Videos on Counselling, plus Information on Counseling Systems Defining, describing and illustrating counselling systems I use the terms counselling, coaching and psychotherapy interchangeably, to mean processes of helping my clients to develop a greater capacity to manage their thoughts, feelings, behaviours and action plans. If you want a more formal definition, then here is Richard Nelson-Jones on the subject:
Some commentators draw a distinction between counselling and therapy, but this distinction is difficult to maintain, and I do not accept that it is valid. As Nelson-Jones says: "Attempts to distinguish counselling from therapy include observations that therapy deals more with mental disorders than counselling, that therapy is longer-term and deeper, and that therapy is predominantly associated with medical settings. However, matters are not this clear-cut. Many counsellors work in medical settings, have clients with recognized mental disorders and do longer-term work that is sometimes of a psychodynamic nature. Counselling and therapy are largely overlapping systems, and it is probably better to see them as part of a common system of helping others: "Syme (2000) rightly suggests that there is huge overlap between counselling and therapy. As an illustration of perceived overlap, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia promulgates 'A definition of counselling and psychotherapy' as a single statement. (Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia, 1997). Both counselling and therapy are psychological processes that use the same theoretical models. Each stresses the need to value the client as a person, to listen carefully and sympathetically to what they have to say, and to foster the capacity for self-help and personal responsibility". Pages 4-5, Essential Counselling and Therapy Skills: The skilled client model. Richard Nelson-Jones, London, Sage Publications, 2002. In the remainder of this section I will introduce a number of ideas about counselling and psychotherapy, using video clips. My intention is to give you a rough idea of what it is like to be counselled by counselors from several different disciplines, including the cognitive behavioural, the psychodynamic (or emotive) approach, the narrative approach, Gestalt and TA, and so on. You will get a sense of some of the differences of emphasis and the areas of overlap in these various schools of counselling. In addition (June 2011 onwards) I intend to add brief summary notes on all the systems of counselling and therapy in which I have been trained, including mini-papers on Questions and Answers on Counselling Systems. This should be helpful for individuals who are curious about the nature of counselling and therapy, including students on counselling and psychotherapy courses. I shall begin today (28th June 2011) with a summary introduction to the process of creating counselling and therapy approaches, as described by Richard Nelson-Jones (2001) Theory and Practice of Counselling and Therapy, Third Edition. London: Continuum.
I will now present a link to my first mini-paper in this series:
~~~ What does counselling look like in practice? If you are already familiar with counselling and therapy, then please skip the 'introduction to counselling' video that follows, and go to the video intro to Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT). If you would like an introduction to the subject of counselling, and to Dr Byrne's own Cognitive Emotive Narrative Counselling, then please see the video clips and links that follow immediately. To view a vido clip, please Click > once on the on-screen arrow: This definition of counselling is further elaborated in the links that follow: The system of counselling that I use is called Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT), and I have produced a brief and general video introduction to this system, which follows. Click > once: Again, if you want further clarification about Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT), then please read the following brief paper on that subject: ~~~ So, I have now defined counselling; and presented a brief introduction to CENT, which is an integration of ideas and techniques from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), Transactional Analysis (TA), Object Relations, and Narrative Therapy. However, before I present you with any more of my own video clips about Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT), I want to break that down into components that are easier to understand. So first I will present a video clip which features a National Health Service (NHS) client who had Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for depression when her husband died. Her testimonial should give you some good insights into what people get from cognitive type therapies: ~~~ Please support the public educational role of this web site by making a small donation:
~~~ Next I want to present a statement from an NHS (National Health Service) expert in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), talking about the benefits to be gained from this kind of counselling and therapy: ~~~ Now I would like to show you a counselling role play session, based on Cognitive Therapy, with a young man who is unhappy with his life: And here is a brief academic paper on Cognitive Therapy (CT) which I wrote for my Rusland Diploma course, in 2003; followed by a Question and Answer Mini-paper, also on CT:
All systems of CBT were inspired by the original form of cognitive behaviour counselling, which was Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), developed by Dr Albert Ellis, in New York City, in the period 1953-1962, and continually updated since that time, up to his death in 2007. See the following documents:
~~~ Although REBT was the original form of cognitive behaviour therapy: "Cognitive therapy (as such) was initially developed in the early 1970s by Dr Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania. The theory postulates that during clients' cognitive development they learn incorrect habits of processing and interpreting information. Cognitive therapists attempt to unravel clients' distortions and help them to learn different and more realistic ways of processing and reality-testing information". ~~~ As a final illustration of the CBT approach to counselling, here is a CBT role play from the Australian Institute of Professional Counselling (AIPC): ~~~ "Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is not a purely intellectual approach to counseling, but strongly emphasizes the interplay of feeling, behaviour and cognition (or thought)". ~~~ There are no really good videos of role plays using Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) - which is a shame. However, here is a video clip in which Dr Jeffrey Guterman presents a one minute excerpt from a telephone counselling session he had with Dr Albert Ellis, the creator of REBT, back in the early 1980s. Jeffrey is on the telephone to the Institute for RET in New York City. It nicely illustrates something about the ABC model of REBT: Further down this page, I have posted a video clip in which I demonstrate that REBT does not have to be delivered in hard-nosed, non-empathic ways, which has sometimes happened in the past. REBT can be, and should be, as sensitive and caring as the most person-centred system of counselling and psychotherapy. The basic difference between general CBT and REBT is that, in CBT the counsellor will be looking to identify your 'automatic thoughts ' - especially over-generalizations, ignoring positives, and producing exaggerations - while in REBT the counsellor looks for what are called 'irrational beliefs', which include demanding the unattainable; exaggerating the degree of badness of your situation; assuming you can not tolerate your problems; and condemning and damningyourself, other people, and the world. To find out more about REBT, try the 'What is REBT?' page. ~~~ So much for the cognitive approach. Now I want to show you a role play session illustrating a more emotive counselling approach - the psycho-dynamic counselling model - in which the counsellor looks for the roots of current problems in the childhood of the client: ~~~ Introduction to Freud's Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud was the great-grandfather of all systems of counselling and psychotherapy. In the 1890s he created a system called psychoanalysis, which set the pattern for one specialist to help one client to work through their emotional distress with a view to making sense of it, and thereby resolve it.
Freud saw the human individual as being split between two major instincts: the life urge (or Eros) and the death urge (or Thanatos). This distinction is preserved in the CENT distinction between our Good Wolf and our Bad Wolf sides. When Freudians talk about 'libido' they are talking about manifestations of the life urge. The human mind is seen to be split three ways in psychoanalysis, between the individual organism as born (which is called the 'it', or 'id); the internalized rules, attitudes and values of the mother/father (which is called the 'over-I', or 'superego'); and the sense of self of the individual (which is called the 'ego', or 'the I'). The psychic energy - or aliveness - of the individual is distributed between these three elements of mind, which may be in harmony with each other, or in significant conflict. The ego holds the tension between the innate urges of the 'it' and the socially-shaped constraining influence of the 'over-I' (or super-ego).
~~~ If you like the content of this site, please share it with your social networking friends (e.g. at Facebook,
Bebo, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc). ~~~ Please support the public educational role of this web site by making a small donation:
~~~ Most systems of counselling and psychotherapy involve the counsellor in asking probing questions. (The exception is the Rogerian system of person-centred counselling, which avoids using leading questions). The reason for probing questions is to allow the therapist to build up a diagnostic picture of the client's problem(s). However, when this kind of questioning is done unskillfully - and sometimes when it is not - the client may respond with irritability. Here is a psycho-dynamic consideration of this issue, which answers the question 'Why put yourself through psychotherapy, given this probing question irritation?: "Since the probing aspect of psychotherapy is so often disliked, why should anyone want to put themselves through encounters of this sort? "One of the reasons is that it is a dull sort of relief indeed to be shut off from one's inner life, which is what is achieved by the excessive use of defenses (against probing questions). It is a greater relief to be able to open up even though doing so is not easy. That is why Aeschylus ... spoke of the 'discipline of suffering' as a 'mercy of the gods'. Psychotherapy at its best can help enlarge the mind, and illuminate its contents. Nor does it all have to be trial by suffering. It is not always recognized that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis aim to increase common sense and a grasp of reality, as well as opening one up to the nuances of emotional and imaginative life. There is an intrinsic pleasure in coming to know what is going on inside oneself and in others, and to grasp more fully many aspects of life, both the practical and the emotional. Moreover it can also be a revelation to recognise the impact of our inner worlds, our psychic reality, upon our thinking, attitudes and perceptions of ourselves, since it is as influential, or even more influential, than the effects of actual childhood events. "Thus in all psychotherapy, although we need to take fully into account historical facts, or the facts of an individual's day-to-day circumstances, it is important to recognize that we have a world within us which powerfully affects how we operate and how we perceive things". Page 169 of 'Talking Cure: Mind and method of the Tavistock Clinic'. David Taylor (editor). Duckworth: 1999. A recent issue of Scientific American contains evidence that psycho-dynamic counseling is highly effective for a range of issues, and that participants in the research not only improved as a result of the counselling, but continued to improve on their own, many months after the counselling sessions ended. The psychodynamic approach to counselling and psychotherapy is also misunderstood because of public prejudices against Freud and his theory of psychosexual stages of development. If you want to experience a review of the modern Freudian theory in an academic context, then take a look at this debate at the University of Richmond: You could also take a look at one of my Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy papers - my CENT Paper No.9, - which integrates Freud and the cognitive-behavioural models of the mind, in a way that helps counsellors and therapists to improve their understanding of the mind of the counselling client. ~~~ We have looked at examples of cognitive and emotive approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, and now we will take a look at a role play demonstrating what Narrative Therapy is like, as a process of counselling:
For counselling and psychotherapy students: If you are a counselling student, then it is important to note that there are three preexisting approaches to narrative counselling and therapy, as described by McLeod (2003), pages 227-238[1]. These are: the psychodynamic approach; the cognitive/constructivist approach; and the social constructionist approach. (1) The psychodynamic approachto the use of narratives in counseling and therapy focuses on the ways that the client’s stories can reveal habitual ways of relating; and the counsellor can thus use those stories to help the client to ‘re-author’ their lives: (Strupp and Binder, 1984[2]; Luborsky and Crits-Christoph, 1990)[3]. The main emphasis in the psychodynamic approach to narrative use in counselling and psychotherapy is in helping to identify the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT). This CCRT then provides the basic agenda for their work of counselling. (2) The cognitive/constructivist approach to the use of narratives in counselling and therapy focuses on two strategies: (A) Identifying stories that conflict with each other, which provides the possibility of using ‘cognitive dissonance’ to help with the challenge of rewriting and integrating conflicted schemas (or frames, scripts, stories) in the client’s long-term memory[4]; and:(B) The use of metaphor. For example: my use of the images of being a ‘little mouse’ and then ‘a big moral cat’, in my Story of Origins. Metaphors can be depowering and empowering, and the therapist can help the client to develop more empowering metaphors for their problem roles, themes, or characters in their most difficult stories[5]. (3) The social constructionist approachto narrative therapy and counseling is based on the idea that we are social beings born into a story-telling culture; that we are surrounded by stories, myths, legends; that these stories preceded our existence, and we take on some of the story roles and themes into which we are thrown at birth. The main contributors to the development of this tradition were White and Epston, a couple of Australasian family therapists: (White and Epston, 1990)[6]. Since people are seen as occupying a family- or community-generated narrative or story, the solution is to ‘externalize’ this story, and get the client to see it as not part of them, so they can step away from the roles specified in the story; or they can re-author their story in various ways. Like CENT therapy, this form of therapy uses both spoken dialogue and written narratives to help the client to unearth their dominant narratives and to change them. CENT counseling and therapy does not fit comfortably within any of the three narrative traditions outlined above. Neither was CENT directly inspired by the creators of any of those three traditions. Nevertheless, we can easily see that CENTinvolves an integration of traditions (1) and (3) – the psychodynamic and the social constructionist. But CENTis much more than that; and is a completely unique approach to narrative use in psychotherapy and counseling, in that we utilize the psychodynamic approach, the cognitive approach, and the social constructionist approach – plus Transactional Analysis and moral philosophy - to inform our understanding of human development and individual functioning in the world. In Chapters 9 and 10, we will explore how the CENT model of the social nature of the individual is constructed.” Extract from Chapter 7 of ‘Therapy After Ellis, Berne, Freud and the Buddha’, by Dr Jim Byrne, in press. [1] McLeod, J. (2003) An Introduction to Counselling.
Third edition. Buckingham: Open University Press. [2]Strupp, H.H. and Binder, J.L. (1984) Psychotherapy
in a New Key: A guide to time-limited dynamic psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. [3]Luborsky, L. and Crits-Christoph, P. (eds)
(1990) Understanding Transference: the CCRT method. New
York: Basic Books. [4]Russell, R.L. and van den Brock, P. (1992) Changing narrative schemas in psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy, 29: 344-354. [5]Gonçalves, O.F. (1995) Hermeneutics,
constructivism and cognitive-behavioural therapies: from the object to the project. In: R.A. Neimeyer and M.J. Mahoney
(eds) Constructivism in psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. ~~~ Obviously, there are lots of overlaps between these systems of counseling and psychotherapy, and some obvious differences. These role plays are a little stilted, since they are not genuine counselling sessions; but they should give you some sense of what would be involved in coming to see me, or another counsellor/therapist, and working on your issues. Before I move on to Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT), I want you see a demonstration of a form of counselling called Gestalt Therapy, developed by Dr Fritz Perls. Again this is a role play, and not a real session, but it conveys the essence of how a Gestalt counsellor would work: I have used Gestalt Therapy in my own life more than once. See, for example, the relevant section of CENT Paper No.10: The Story of Relationship. Another component of CENT counselling and therapy came from Transactional Analysis (TA), which was created by Dr Eric Berne in the post-war period in the mid-twentieth century. Here's a little video clip of Mary Goulding MSW being interviewed about just what TA counsellors do in their sessions with counseling clients:
~~~ Cognitive Emotive Counselling and Therapy (CENT) and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)Now you have a better idea of what is meant by cognitive counselling; cognitive behavioural therapy; psycho-dynamic (or emotive) counselling; Gestalt therapy; Transactional Analysis (TA), and narrative counselling and therapy; you are in a much better position to cope with my presentations on Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT) and Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). My next video clip, which follows below, describes some of the counselling models used in CENT. It begins with the ABC model from REBT, and shows how the counsellor 'debates and disputes' some of the client's unhelpful beliefs and gets them to change them to more rational beliefs. It then moves on to the EFR model of CENT counselling. The E is the Event or Experience that the client has had, about which they are disturbed. The F is the Frame through which they are viewing and interpreting the E. And the R is the Response, or the Result of the E times the F; the emotional and behavioural response. The F in the EFR model differs significantly from the B in the ABC model in that much of the material that makes up the Frame through which the client interpreted the Event is non-conscious! Finally, I briefly introduce the Five Windows Model, and provide some detail on the first three 'windows'. This will be taken further in the second video clip in this series:
~~~ Please support the public educational role of this web site by making a small donation:
~~~ What follows is Part 2 of the video series on Counselling Models used in CENT. This clip is designed to demonstrate the first three 'frames' of the Five Windows Model in some detail, as applied to emotional upsets, and I use the teaching illustration of problems arising out of the economic stresses of redundancy or business decline: Next, in Part 3 of the Models Used in CENT counselling, I explore the use of Windows 4 and 5 to reduce emotional upsets about the same problems as before, arising out of the economic stress of job redundancy or business decline/failure. Please take a look and see how you can apply this system to your own emotional, behavioural and/or relationship problems:
And since CENT originally came out of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), you might also want to consult the following web-page: Some people think that REBT counselling and therapy is too insensitive to the client's needs, and I think that it is important to clarify this issue. Therefore, I made the following video to show that I consider empathy towards the counselling client to be one of the most important principles of good, effective counselling and therapy. This video models how to respond empathetically to a distressing problem presented by a client. Here's the video on The Role of Empathy in REBT:
To see Part 2 of this video series
on the ABCs of REBT, please go here: What is Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)? ~~~ Narrative counselling asks about the story of the client's life: (The) Narrative (approach to counselling) is concerned with the human capacity to tell stories. We use stories to communicate to each other the important or memorable things that happen to us on an everyday basis. Within our heads, and in our own lives, each of us lives out a story or stories, and constructs our identity and sense of self through creating a story of our life, our autobiography. Culturally, the beliefs, value and world-view of a set of people are carried through narrative, in the form of myth, scripture, literature and ‘news'." Quotation above from: John McLeod, Counselling Skill, 2007, page 3. (3) ~~~ If you like the content of this site, please share it with your favourite social networking group (e.g. at
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc).  ~~~ Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com Or call me today on the telephone: 44 1422 843 629 (from outside the UK) 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK) ~~~ Please support the public educational role of this web site by making a small donation:
Thank you for your generous support. ~~~ |
Hello, and welcome to the Counselling Information pages for
In CENT counselling, we do not agree with the Cartesian separation of mind and body. You are a walking mind and a thinking
body. You are a body that has a lifetime of objective/subjective experience mediated through your mind. You are
an experienced brain-mind-body, and your tomorrow is shaped by your subjectively experienced
yesterday. To change your life, you have to somehow change how your experience has wired up
your brain-mind-body. This could involve changing your diet, exercise, or your self-talk (or the story you keep telling
yourself about your life); your location in space-time; your relationships; your attitudes. The changes that we will
work on together in CENT counselling depend upon what your goals are. Where are you trying to get to? What
suffering are you trying to eliminate or avoid? 
Jim Byrne
