Update – Friday 13th November 2015

Re-posted on 6th April 2016

A change of name:

The Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT Institute)

by Dr Jim Byrne and Renata Taylor-Byrne – Copyright (c) 2016

This morning, Renata and I were discussing our new book***, on which we are collaborating; and we realized that the time has come to modify the name of the Institute to take account of the true nature of our system of counselling and psychotherapy.

In our original formulation, we made the mistake of following the pattern set down by Albert Ellis – in which rationality and cognition are elevated above emotion.  His system began with the words ‘Rational Emotive’ and ours began with ‘Cognitive Emotive’.  However, from the beginning, we were of the view that humans are fundamentally physical-emotional beings, with some (limited) capacity to think and reason.

We follow the pattern explored by Antonio Damasio (2000)^[1], in which the body-brain is the fundamental substrate of emotion.  We then elaborate from the theories of Theodore Sarbin^[2], to the effect that our innate feelings, over the first few years of life, become woven together with stories and concepts and themes and scripts which we acquire from our family of origin, and which we co-construct with them.

So, logically, we should have reversed the first two letters of our acronym – from CE (Cognitive-Emotive) to EC (Emotive-Cognitive).

The second problem we realized is that, although the body-brain-mind is the foundation of our understanding of the human subject – the counselling client – the word ‘body’ did not appear in the name of the therapy, nor is it represented in the current acronym.

In E-CENT counselling, we teach our coaching and therapy clients that we are body-minds, and that the mind depends upon diet, exercise and relaxation, etc., in order to function properly: “To keep the body in good health is a duty – otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear”.

The Buddha, from a quotation in Julia Cameron’s (1995) book, The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.

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So we have decided that we should only speak of embodied-narratives, and not the kinds of ‘abstract beliefs and thoughts’ that float around in CBT/REBT.

Therefore, we have concluded that the name of our Institute will henceforth be changed to The Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy – (or E-CENT Institute, for short).

The acronym of the system of therapy has now been changed from CENT to E-CENT.  (It would be too ugly and confusing to hyphenate the letters for Embodied-Narrative).

Welcome to the Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT).

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That’s all for now.

Best wishes,

Renata and Jim

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