Dr Jim’s Blog Post
22nd April 2020
Updated on 13th October 2025
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Can counsellors become truly holistic – truly polymathic – or are they permanently stuck in the ruts created by Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers?
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Introduction
In 1959, Charles Percy Snow declared that there was a serious gulf of incomprehension between scientists and humanists; and this has only got worse over the years. On January 11th, 2020, writing in The Lancet – Correspondence section – Michael Araki declared that, “We have been in the age of the two cultures for too long – the losses, as Snow foreshadowed 60 years ago, are taking their toll. To face today’s daunting problems, our institutions must go beyond their old, crippling strategies, and design novel structures that leverage the power of polymathy. By allowing polymathic thinking to flourish, society will be in a much better position to reach the innovation required to tackle our most pressing challenges”. (Page 114).
And the problems that I am most concerned with have to do with the fact that, while economic policy and environmental stresses and strains (as well as lifestyle factors) affect mental health, happiness and emotional well-being, most counsellors and psychotherapists are still ignoring those aspects of their client’s situation; and focussing on such narrow issues as: “What are you telling yourself?” and “How did your mother treat you?” – to the exclusion of diet, exercise, sleep, relaxation, housing conditions, economic circumstances, current relationships, personality adaptations, and a whole host of stressors coming from growing inequality and insecurity of employment.
Some of those factors are beyond the control of the counsellor and the client; but the lifestyle factors can, to at least some extent, be brought under the control of the client, if the counsellor would only address their importance.
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Adding back the body to the disembodied mind
As early as 1948, Merleau-Ponty was drawing attention to the disastrous way in which the followers of Descartes (rather than Descartes himself) had misled us into dumping the body, and focusing exclusively on the mind (as if it was not a function of a body-brain, linked to an inescapable space-time environment).
This is what he wrote on that subject:
“We are once more learning to see the world around us, the same world which had turned away from in the conviction that our senses had nothing worthwhile to tell us, sure as we were that only strictly objective knowledge was worth holding onto. We are rediscovering our interest in the space in which we are situated. Though we see it only from a limited perspective – our perspective – this space is nevertheless where we reside and we relate to it through our bodies”. (Page 53, The World of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1948; republished in London in 2008 by Routledge.
But there is very little evidence today that most counsellors and therapists have discovered “an interest in the space in which we are situated”. (Gestalt therapists are the obvious exception!)
The frequently overlooked fact is this: We relate to the world in which we live, through our bodies; or, as we say in E-CENT; we relate to our social and physical environment through our body-brain-mind (as sustained or undermined by our diet, exercise, sleep, self-talk, relaxation, and our historic and current relationships; the state of the economy and society in which we live; and so on).
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Emotions are embodied realities, with positive functions
We have, yesterday, released our latest book, which is built upon our comprehensive, polymathic approach to human biology and culture. The subject is how to control your anxiety; but it is a far cry from the trite ‘ABC’s of anxiety’ promoted by the CBT/REBT community. Here is how we announced it:
Foreword
By Dr Jim Byrne
Preamble
Many people live lives which are tied up in knots of worry, anxiety, fear, apprehension and dread. They can hardly remember what it was like to feel relaxed, happy and at ease. This book will teach you how to cut through these kinds of emotional knots, from various angles, one at a time, to produce a state of greatly improved relaxation and ease.
This book will show you how to tackle one thing at a time; one aspect of your anxiety problem(s) at a time; so you do not become overloaded or overwhelmed.
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We have all heard of a ‘Gordian knot’, which is a very difficult or intractable problem. Many of our problems consist of getting ourselves tied up in knots, trying to avoid the unavoidable difficulties of life. We also tend to tie ourselves in knots trying to avoid the necessity to take responsibility for our own lives. And we weave some knotty, tangled webs when we fail to be scrupulously honest with ourselves. (But, of course, our early childhood, which is normally something of a nightmare, tends to throw us into a tangle of knots, which are not of our own making!)
And all of this tangling and knotting goes on as we sleepwalk through our lives. The important thing is to wake up, and to address the knots in our emotions, and to begin to untangle them, one by one.
Most people would agree that anxiety is a state of feeling fear, fright, alarm, or intense worry[1]. It is an intense emotion, which pains us in a way which is comparable to a physical pain. It is not easy to ignore or brush off. It can tighten our breathing, and make us tremble and become clammy. We often feel we are out of control, and in great danger.
Get your paperback copy today, from one of the following Amazon outlets:
| Amazon US and worldwide | Amazon UK and Ireland |
| Amazon Canada | Amazon France |
| Amazon Germany | Amazon Italy |
| Amazon Spain | Amazon Japan |
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Or you can buy a Kindle eBook version of this book from one of the following Amazon outlets:
| Amazon.com, US+ | Amazon UK + Ireland | Amazon Germany |
| Amazon Spain | Amazon Italy | Amazon Nether-lands |
| Amazon Japan | Amazon Brazil | Amazon Canada |
| Amazon Mexico | Amazon Australia | Amazon India |
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We go on to elaborate as follows:
Anxiety is not a disease; not a mental illness. Anxiety – at its best – is part of our normal, innate, mental signalling system which tells us what is happening to us, and what to do about it. That is to say, it is part of our emotional wiring. Our emotional intelligence. (For an official definition of anxiety, please see this endnote)[2]. But – at its worst – anxiety, in the body-brain-mind of an individual human being, often proves to be a complex knot of non-conscious self-mismanagement!
Trying to get rid of anxiety with drugs is like hanging two overcoats and a duvet over your burglar alarm bell when it goes off. The burglar alarm is designed to give you helpful information, which you can then use to guide your action. Should you check to see if a burglar has got into your house? Or call the police? Or realize that you’ve mismanaged your alarm system, producing a false alarm, and that you should therefore switch it off?
Getting rid of the alarm signal, by dampening it down, defeats the whole object of having it in the first place!
Once you understand anxiety correctly, it becomes as useful as a burglar alarm; and you can learn how to manage it correctly. (It’s just the exaggerated knotting of strands of anxiety, worry and stress that you need to cut through!)
When you buy a burglar alarm, it comes with a little Instruction Book about how to set it; calibrate it; monitor it; reset it; and switch it on and off.
You should have got just such an Instruction Book about your anxiety alarm, from your parents, when you were very young – and some people did. But if your alarm goes off at all times of day and night, in unhelpful ways, then I guess you were one of the unlucky ones who did not get your Instruction Book. This current book contains your Instruction Book, plus lots of other backup information, which will help to make you the master of your anxiety, instead of its quaking slave.
Don’t let your burglar alarm make your life a misery. Learn how to use it properly! (Learn how to cut the inappropriately alarming connections that do not serve you well).
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You can read some more on this subject here: https://abc-bookstore.com/how-to-reduce-and-control-your-anxiety/
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That’s all for now.
Sincere best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Joint Director, the Institute for E-CENT
Joint Director, the ABC Bookstore Online UK.
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At the age of thirty-four years, I woke up. Woke up for the first time. Became conscious of the fact that I was living a life that did not really work for me – which had never really worked in a fully satisfactory way. At that point, I began to seek wisdom – to examine my life – and to explore better ways of living a fuller, more satisfying life.
Like a bamboo, you can learn to bend in strong winds of change or challenge; and to sway in the frequent breezes of trial and tribulation. (But that will not be enough for you to optimize your surviving and thriving potential!) You can develop a solid foundation, but one which allows you to stay flexible, and to respond to the forces that assail you with a judo-like yielding and returning. (But, unlike the bamboo, the Judoka uses strength and well as flexibility; speed of mental processing – which has no bamboo equivalent; and skilful mind-body coordination!) Bend in harmony with the forces around you, without resisting rigidly, and thus avoid being broken. Go with the flow, when the flow is irresistible; but swim against the tide if you need to, when the tide is not too powerful. Eventually, the forces around you may grow tired, and you will be fresh and ready to move forward, when resistance is at its lowest. (But remember: Running away, or fighting back are important options for a human being. Also, a bamboo has no such thing as “personal boundaries”, but each human needs to have strong personal boundaries, and to defend them again those who would take advantage of them, abuse them, use them, or otherwise harm them!)
In this blog I want to write about the ways in which counselling practice may evolve, in the hands of a counsellor who has learning as their top value in action, as I have. In the process I will reflect briefly on my journey through Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). I will also look at the kind of body-mind-environment approach to counselling that came out of my progression. And I will look at the impact of diet, exercise and sleep on emotional well-being and mental health.
I began to study Rational therapy (REBT) in 1992, during a career crisis; kept up that study; and then set up in private practice as an REBT coach/counsellors, in November 1998. At that time I was convinced that REBT was a complete system of therapy, which lacked nothing, and had superseded all other systems of counselling and therapy. (How deluded we can be, even after studying for a Master’s degree!)
But it was not any of this that caused me to begin to move dramatically away from REBT. No. It was the fact that I often had clients who seemed to be very depressed, or very anxious, but who could not come up with any real or symbolic losses, failures, threats or dangers, to account for their psychological symptoms. But they had one thing in common; a swollen belly; red eyes and white tongues; or a tendency to scratch at their crotches. They each had a problem of gut disbiosis, called Candidiasis, or systemic overgrowth of Candida Albicans in their large intestine. I recognized these symptoms, because I had wrestled with this condition myself, for a couple of decades by that time. So I helped them to address their problems with Candida, and their depression and/or anxiety cleared up. (Recent research suggests that Candida Albicans [and gluten; and stress] can cause a condition called ‘leaky gut’, which allows who molecules of food, or toxic wastes, to pass through the gut wall, and into the bloodstream. This also causes [or co-occurs with] ‘leaky brain’, whereby the blood-brain barrier becomes porous, allowing toxins into the brain, and affecting mood and emotions!)
Eventually, all of my accumulated learning became combined with a disillusionment with REBT, especially after 2005-2007, when the Albert Ellis Institute melted into infighting between two factions, the larger of which (rationally/irrationally???) ousted Albert Ellis.
The first book on this subject was titled 
We already had a lot of material on diet and exercise; and so Renata began to research sleep science, books and papers. And we generated a preliminary book chapter on sleep in relation to emotional stability from that work.
We also had a lot of material on the various historical approaches to understanding the human mind and emotions. So we began to collate the materials which might make a compatible range of book chapters. We included or approach to re-framing problems, derived from moderate Buddhism and moderate Stoicism; but excluding all extreme elements. We then compiled a chapter on the use of the E-CENT models for a counselling session, shaped by the Jungian standard structure. And then, in Chapter 9, we presented a set of guidelines on how to incorporate lifestyle and health coaching into any system of talk therapy. The resulting book was titled 
“People who are deprived of sleep have been shown, in laboratory experiments, to be unable to accurately assess the emotional messages on photographs of people’s faces, ranging from happy to angry. This is because sleep-deprivation reduces our emotional intelligence. This has implications for many people working in the emergency and security services, where highly skilled assessment of human behaviour is needed, and people can be working without sufficient sleep to meet the demands of the job.
Renata’s book, which was published three weeks ago, is titled: 
In science as well as popular culture, the body and mind have long been pulled apart, and treated as separate entities. And when they are treated as being connected – as in the modern psychiatric theory of ‘brain chemistry imbalances’ causing negative moods and emotions, the ‘brain chemistry’ in question is taken to be unrelated to how you use your body; what you eat; how well you sleep. It is assumed to be ‘special brain chemistry’ – separate and apart from Lifestyle Factors – which can only be fixed by consuming dangerous drugs!
I have often discussed with Renata (my wife and porfessional service partner) the barriers that people put in the way of doing their therapy – of cleaning up their childhood history – and of learning to relate in the present moment in a loving and enjoyable way. Here is one of the biggest barriers to entering counselling and therapy, as outlined by M. Scott Peck
When a new client arrives with an emotionally disturbing problem, we do not try to talk the client out of their perceptions and feelings. We take it as read that their reactions are proportionate to the problem as they see it. We look at them and their problems with the eyes of emotional empathy and understanding. We engage in non-possessive caring, like many client-centred counsellors do. But we go further in affirming the client as an emotional being. We follow the guidance of Dr Robert Hobson in that we speak to our clients in a ‘feeling language’.
“Ian Suttie … regarded psychotherapy as a quest for a ‘companionship’ with the client. He drew attention to the embarrassed ‘taboo on tenderness’ which scares us all, especially ‘scientific’ psychotherapists. There is no more effective barrier to treatment (in counselling and therapy). Tenderness is akin to that of the loving relationship between the child and mother which is formed ‘with the intention of severance’. The therapist needs to be a ‘mother’ (and a ‘father’), but s/he must move towards ‘friendship’, a more equal personal relationship”. (Page 212).
As pointed out by Dr David Wallin, if this does not happen in the client’s actual childhood, then they develop insecure attachment style; but their brain-mind remains malleable, and they can get this missing ‘secure base’ in counselling and therapy relationships, during their adult lives:
“Problems in personal relationships cannot be solved by talking about them, by explaining them from outside. They can only be explored and tackled effectively in the experience of being within a relationship”. (Hobson, Page 183).
E-CENT counselling teaches that there are many helpful perspectives on life, some of which come from Buddhism and some from Stoic philosophy. One of those perspectives was popularized in the 1980s by M. Scott Peck. This is it: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters”. (Scott Peck, 1990, page 13).
I have wanted to write a blog for several days now, but I find it hard to free up the time. Therefore, in this blog, I am going to take some short-cuts by updating you regarding some of the things I’ve been writing about.
In this appendix, I will outline the four main processes that we recommend in E-CENT counselling for anger management control. Briefly, these are: better management of (1) your diet, (2) physical exercise, (3) self-talk (or inner dialogue), and (4) relaxation/meditation. But you will also need to work on (5) your relationships and (6) your communication skills.
Healthy anger is present-time defence of your legitimate rights in the face of inappropriate behaviour by another person. Healthy or reasonable anger is the fuel that drives our assertive behaviours. It pushes us to engage in constructive conflict, when that is necessary!
Because counsellors and psychotherapists deal with their clients’ emotions – (as well as their behaviours, goals, relationships and environmental stressors) – every system of counselling and therapy has to have a theory of emotion. This, however, is problematical.
So our thoughts (about our experiences) do not act alone; they are not the sole determinant of our lives.
According to Julia Cameron, and Dr James Pennebaker, there are great cognitive and emotional gains to be made from spending a few minutes each morning writing out our stream of consciousness – our thoughts, feelings, reflections, plans for the day, worries and goals and so on.
I recently resolved to make the Daily Pages a daily habit for the rest of my life, because of the obvious advantages. On 20th April I constructed a list of the Benefits of writing my Daily Pages – three pages of stream of consciousness – and the Costs of not writing those pages.
It is really hard to learn new ideas, and to change old habits. We have to review them over and over and over again. This most likely results from what I call ‘frozen schemas’: packets of knowledge or information from the past which are resistant to change. The best illustration I can think of is the resistance of a racist’s schemas for race-related information. No amount of positive information about a minority ethnic person seems to dissolve the prejudices of a racist. A similar phenomenon is found with nationalism, tribalism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia, etc.So if we want to change and grow, we have to keep reviewing our habitual behaviours (which reveal [by implication or inference] our habitual thoughts-feelings-attitudes). Then we have to work very hard, and intelligently, to change those behaviours-thoughts-feelings-attitudes.
When I decided to construct a list of the Benefits of writing my daily pages, every day, I was using the language and logic based functions of my left frontal lobe. When I sit down each morning, and review those lists of Benefits and Costs, I am operating from my wilful, intentional, left frontal lobe, and the upper region of my left OFC. And slowly, slowly, the upper region of my left OFC is influencing the lower, more emotional region of my left OFC.
However, since I cannot see inside my own brain-mind, in order to corroborate any of these conclusions, I must also ask: Is there any other possible explanation for my strange (apparently self-sabotaging) behaviour this morning, after 12 days of success?
The Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT) 