The E-CENT Publishing Platform
Books about, or informed by, Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT).
The Institute for E-CENT has published, and will continue to publish, a range of books on subjects related to our holistic – whole body-brain-mind-environment – approach to counselling, coaching and psychotherapy.
We currently publish using two imprints:
- The Institute for E-CENT Publications; and:
- Alchemical Press
The E-CENT Publication imprint is our main vehicle for publication. The Alchemical Press imprint’s role is to publish books which are related to fictional autobiography and similar, more personal, non-clinical subjects or genres.
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Updated on 3rd December 2022
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Introduction
Hello,
This is our introductory page of information about our personal and professional development books – which are related to: counselling, coaching, self-help, personal and professional development; and psychotherapy. Topics include: anger; anxiety; depression; couple problems; diet and nutrition; lifestyle counselling and coaching; sleep problems; stress management; relaxation; holistic counselling; trauma; critiques of REBT; and two items of fiction.
We have delegated the task of promoting and distributing our books to ABC Bookstore Online.***
As at today’s date (3rd December 2022) we have published 25 books which are still in print, and a handful which are being rewritten before being reissued.
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For further information, please go to ABC Bookstore Online.***
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Welcome to the Institute for E-CENT Publishing Platform.
Our current range of books – which are informed by, or describe, Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT) – is listed below.
These books are promoted by ABC Coaching and Counselling Services, and sold via The ABC Bookstore Online UK; and ultimately via Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and other Amazon outlets around the world
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Our 23rd book is now available for sale on Amazon. Here’s a quick intro:
Relax Your Way to a Better Life:
Using Dr Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation technique for physical and mental health
By Renata Taylor-Byrne, Lifestyle Coach-Counsellor
Scientific relaxation is not the same as ‘lying around’, ‘sitting around’, getting high or merry, or escaping to a warm holiday resort. None of those activities is truly relaxing, when compared with this technique.
Physical tension is implicated in much bodily illness and emotional misery. But what can you do about it? Life is stressful, and people tense their bodies under pressure!
However, there is a system of physical de-tensing – relaxing – which can reduce your tension to levels which will eliminate pain, emotional misery and physical disease.
This book describes a non-medical process for improving your physical health and emotional well-being. It is a tried and tested technique which was developed over a period of decades It is well-researched, and the results have been written up in the scientific literature. We will guide you through the process of relaxing your body and mind, and restoring your health and happiness.
If you want to have a happier, healthier, more contented life, then please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/jacobsons-progressive-muscle-relaxation-book/
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Cutting through the Worry Knot!
How to Reduce and Control Your Anxiety Level: Using a whole body-brain-mind approach
And without using drugs, alcohol or escapism!
By Dr Jim Byrne and Renata Taylor-Byrne
Anxiety is not a disease; not a mental illness. Anxiety 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.
Trying to get rid of anxiety with drugs is like hanging two overcoats and a duvet over your burglar alarm 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’d mismanaged your alarm system, and that you should therefore switch it off?
Once you understand anxiety correctly, it becomes as useful as a burglar alarm; and you can learn how to manage it correctly.
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 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 anxiety “burglar alarm” reduce your life to misery. Learn how to use it properly!
For more information about this book on anxiety:
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The Bamboo Paradox: The limits of human flexibility in a cruel world – and how to protect, defend and strengthen yourself
Finding the Golden Mean that leads to strength and viable flexibility, in order to be happy, healthy and realistically successful
By Dr Jim Byrne.
With contributed chapters by Renata Taylor-Byrne
The Institute for E-CENT Publications: 2020
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Are human beings like bamboo? Are we designed to withstand unlimited pressure, stress and strain? Is our destiny to be sacrificed on the altar of ‘flexible working arrangements’?
We live in a world in which there are dark forces that wish us to forget that we are fleshy bodies, with physical and mental needs; and physical and mental limitations; and to be willing to function like mere cogs in the wheels of somebody else’s financial or technological empire.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) has played into this narrative, and given it philosophical support, by promoting a form of Extreme Stoicism in the name of therapy and wisdom, which it patently is not. (General Cognitive Behaviour Therapy [CBT] also supports this agenda, but to a lesser degree, or in a less obvious way! And some forms of Extreme Buddhism also advocate ‘detachment’ from material concerns, such as the need for a balanced life!)
In this book, I review the research that we have done on the limits of human endurance, and the determinants of that endurance – as well as identifying a viable philosophy of life – which will help you to optimize your strength and flexibility, while at the same time taking care of your health and happiness.
If you want to take good care of yourself in the modern mad-market, you could benefit from studying this book. It will provide you with both a compass and a suit of armour which will support you with the challenges and battles you will inevitably face.
Click for more information.***
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How to Resolve Conflict and Unhappiness: Especially during Festive Celebrations:
Coping with and resolving frustrations, disappointments and interpersonal clashes at family celebrations like Christmas, Yuletide, Hanukkah, Eid, and Thanksgiving
Dr Jim Byrne (With Renata Taylor-Byrne)
Conflict can happen in families at any time of year. It jut so happens that the first Monday after the Christmas & New Year annual holidays is called ‘Divorce Day’, because that is when the highest number of divorce petitions is issued. And it seems most likely that the other major family holiday times are the runners up in the divorce stakes. However, what is hidden under these divorce statistics is the mountain of personal and social misery that precedes such drastic ‘solutions’ to repeated conflict, disappointments and interpersonal clashes.
But there is a better way to deal with these problems. Rather than letting the misery build up over time, you can take control of both your own mind, and the way you communicate within your family and society. You can insulate your social relationships from constant or repeated misery and unhappiness; and learn to have a wonderful life with your family and friends.
The solutions have been assembled by Dr Jim Byrne in this book about how to re-think/re-feel/re-frame your encounters with your significant others; how to communicate so they will listen; how to listen so they can communicate with you; and how to manage your lifestyle for optimum peace, happiness and success in all your relationships.
PAPERBACK AND eBOOK ON CONFLICT RESOLUTION…
Don’t let your relationships deteriorate. Get the solution today. Click this link for more.***
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Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person:
Or how to integrate nutritional insights, exercise and sleep coaching into talk therapy.
By Dr Jim Byrne, with Renata Taylor-Byrne
This book has been found in practice to be very helpful to counsellors and psychotherapists who want to understand the role of lifestyle factors in human disturbance. Because diet, exercise and sleep are increasingly seen to be important determinants of mental health and emotional well-being, it is now necessary to rethink our models of counselling and therapy.
This book shows counsellors how to incorporate lifestyle coaching and counselling into their system of talk therapy. It will also help self-help enthusiasts to take better care of their own mental and physical health, and emotional well-being.
Prices: from £4.26 GBP (Kindle) to £12.64 (paperback)
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Who Are You, And Where Are You Going?
Transformative insights from psychology and the philosophy of psychotherapy
By Dr Jim Byrne
With Renata Taylor-Byrne
Most people lead lives of quiet desperation. They don’t know who are what they are. They also don’t know what is driving their actions in the world.
Most people skip the challenge of becoming conscious about who and what they are; where they are located in time/history; and what is possible for such an actor in terms of future directions for a viable/enjoyable life.
Most people spend the whole of their life living as largely non-conscious victims of a script 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 outcome for themselves.
This book teaches you who and what you are; and in particular, it helps you to come to know your own personality, and your life script. It shows you how to change your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, including your relationship behaviours, in order to produce a better future for yourself. Change your destiny!
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Holistic Counselling in Practice:
An introduction to the theory and practice of Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy
By Jim Byrne DCoun FISPC
With Renata Taylor-Byrne BSc (Hons) Psychol
This book was the original introduction to Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT), which was created by Dr Jim Byrne in the period 2009-2014, building upon earlier work from 2003. It is of historic importance, but it has been superseded by Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person, above.
Prices from: £5.83p GBP (Kindle) and £15.18p (Paperback)
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Anger, resentment and forgiveness:
How to get your inappropriate anger under reasonable control
By Dr Jim Byrne
This self-help book is based on twenty years’ experience by the author of providing anger management counselling and coaching to hundreds of individuals.
If you wan to stop wrecking your relationships, at home and in work, than this book is a must read.
It is based on a review of some of the most potent techniques and strategies for controlling your temper that were invented by thoughtful philosophers around the world and across the centuries.
It will give you mastery over you emotions, and the ability to forgive those who transgress against you, without being too passive.
Price: £14.75 from Amazon.
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How to Stop Wrecking Your Mental, Physical and Emotional Health:
Answers from the science of sleep
By Renata Taylor-Byrne
This book addresses many important questions about sleep, including the following:
Why should we be concerned about the quantity of hours slept? (Including the physical and mental diseases linked to inadequate sleep).
Why should we be committed to getting high quality, undisturbed sleep? (The physical and mental health benefits).
What causes common sleep problems? And:
How to fix common sleep problems, like insomnia. (This includes looking at foods that promote sleep; and foods that destroy sleep. Plus how to manage your lifestyle in general to promote healthy sleep – which, in turn, gives you a healthy life. And also how to manage your mind, and your sleep environment, to reap the great rewards of regular, nourishing and regenerating sleep experiences).
…For more information about this book, please click this link: Sleep science and your health.***
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By Renata Taylor-Byrne
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How to Quickly Fix your Couple Relationship:
A brief DIY handbook for serious lovers
By Dr Jim Byrne
This self-help book has been specially designed to provide some quick relief up front, for couples in trouble. That means that, right at the start of the book, I share with you some of the most powerful insights into how to have a happy relationships. I then help you to complete a couple of exercises that take five minutes per day, and which will begin to change your relationship situation almost at once.
Your approach to relationship will be transformed.
Kindle: £5.02
Paperback: £12.10
For more information: Learn more
Available in paperback and Kindle eBook formats.
How to Write a New Life for Yourself:
Narrative therapy and the writing solution.
By Dr Jim Byrne, with Renata Taylor-Byrne
Prices: from £4.22 GBP (Kindle) to £13.27 (paperback)
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This how-to book contains in excess of twenty exercises to help you to get more of what you want from your life.
You will become clearer about your goals; and how to work towards them intelligently.
Journal writing, and various forms of writing therapy and reflective writing are included, with specific exercises for specific purposes.
Why not write a new and better life for yourself!
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How to Have a Wonderful, Loving Relationship: Helpful insights for couples and lovers.
By Dr Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling, who has almost 25 years’ experience of helping couples to improve their relationships
Your marriage or couple relationship does not have to be the miserable way it tends to be! Couple relationships can be improved, by improving your understanding of love and relationship; by improving your communications skills; and by working on the perceptions and values that you inherited from your family of origin.
Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, and one in three couples engages in physical violence. This is the tip of the iceberg of a very unhappy state of affairs in marital relations today. This book will give you a unique understanding of love and relationship; and help you to get rid of many myths about relationships. It includes several case studies, to illustrate its teaching points; plus some very helpful teaching of communication strategies that will help you to improve your own relationship. Overall, it will show you in detail how to build a successful couple relationship.
See a page of information about this book.
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Or view the book on Amazon.co.uk
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How to Control Your Anger, Anxiety and Depression:
Using nutrition and physical activity.
By Renata Taylor-Byrne, and Jim Byrne
This book argues that talk therapy is insuficient on its own. Changing your philosophy of life will not control your emotions, unless you also attend to your diet and exercise needs.
It is now increasingly being argued, by cutting edge scientists, that the root cause of physical and mental health problems is inflammation in the body, especially in the guts. The concept of leaky gut giving rise to leaky brain is increasingly being verified; and very often the causes of anxiety, depression and anger are to be found in the client’s diet; or their lack of physical exercise. Of course, sometimes the main cause of human disturbance is that stress levels are too high; or coping resources are too low; or the individual has an unrealistic or unhelpful philosophy of life. Or the individual did not get a good experience of how to manage their emotions in their family of origin. But it is also true that sometimes, the main problem is lack of physical exercise, or sugary diet, or caffeine, or inflammation in the guts and brain.
By Renata Taylor-Byrne and Jim Byrne
Prices: from £3.10 (Kindle) to £9.93 GBP (paperback)
Transforming Traumatic Dragons:
How to recover from a history of trauma – using a whole body-brain-mind approach
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
Foreword
Trauma is all around us. The majority of people experience several traumatic events in life, in childhood or later on. And those traumatic experiences are difficult to digest; to process; and to recover from.
This book will teach you how to slowly and cautiously process, or digest, old emotional traumas, (horrible experiences), so they can be healed. After they have been healed, it will feel like they never happened; or they happened to somebody else; or they exist in a distant, undisturbing past history, which is now over!
You will learn three processes to help with the task of digesting your most awful experiences. These are:
– A process of re-framing, (or changing your thoughts and feelings), which has been derived from very wise modern and ancient philosophies;
– A process of confronting memories in the form of written reflection/ digestion exercises from various highly effective systems of psychotherapy; and:
– A whole-body process of emotional integration (because feelings exist as much in our bodies as they do in our minds).
For more information about this featured book, please click this link: Childhood developmental trauma: Facing and defeating dragons.***
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A counsellor reflects upon models of mind
Integrating the psychological models of Plato, Freud, Berne and Ellis
By Dr Jim Byrne
Prices from: £5.99 (Kindle) and £14.99 GBP (Paperback)
This book explores some significant ways of thinking about the nature of the human brain-mind. Every counsellor needs to think long and hard about their perceptions of their clients. Are they based on ‘common sense’, or have they been subjected to the discipline of considering the theories of great minds that preceded us, like Plato, Freud, Berne and Ellis. (Ellis, of course, oversimplified the SOR model of mind into the simple ABC model, but he is still important because of his impact on the whole CBT theory, which currently dominates the field of counselling and therapy in the US, UK and elsewhere). The author provides a stimulating review of several theories of mind.
Paperback and eBook versions available
Processing Client Stories in Counselling and Psychotherapy:
How to think about and analyze client narratives
Dr Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
The Institute for E-CENT Publications – 2019
Copyright © Jim Byrne, 2019. All rights reserved.
Of all the systems of counselling and therapy, the main ones that pay attention to the body of the client include Gestalt Therapy, and my own system of Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (or E-CENT for short).
In E-CENT counselling, when a client arrives to see us, we see a body-brain-mind-environment-whole enter our room. We agree that this person will begin by telling us a story about their current difficulties; but we recognize that this story is affected, for better or worse, by the quality and duration of their recent sleep patterns; their diet (including caffeine, alcohol, sugary foods, and trans-fats in junk food); and whether or not they do regular physical exercise; and other bodily factors.
However, in this book, we will mainly focus upon the client’s story or narrative; and perhaps remind ourselves occasionally that this story is being told by a physical body-brain-mind which is dependent for optimal functioning upon such factors as diet, exercise, sleep, and so on. We will focus upon the question of the status of autobiographical narratives; and how to analyze the stories our clients tell us.
Available as an eBook only.***
Learn more about this book.***
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The next book – A major critique of REBT – replaces our original critique of REBT – which was titled Unfit for Therapeutic Purposes. We have added a 22 pages Preface which summarizes the bottom line of Dr Byrne’s critique of REBT; plus some detail about the way in which physical and psychological pain are processed through largely overlapping neurology and brain areas.
A Major Critique of REBT:
Revealing the many errors in the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
By Dr Jim Byrne
This book is a devastating critique of the foundations of REBT. There was a need to clarify the bottom line of Dr Byrne’s 500 page critique of REBT, and that has been done in a 22 page preface to this reissued, 2019 edition.
Also, we have added a reference to the research which shows that emotional pain and physical pain are both mediated and processed through significantly overlapping neural networks, which contradicts Dr Ellis’s claim that nobody could hurt you, except by hitting you with a baseball bat or a brick.
This is a comprehensive, scientific and philosophical critique of the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, as developed by Dr Albert Ellis. Almost nothing is left of REBT when the dust settles, apart from the system called Rational Emotive Imagery, which Dr Ellis borrowed from Maxi Maultsby.
Available in paperback only, at the moment.
Price: £23.58 GBP
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If you want to know the essence of our critique of REBT, but you don’t want to have to read 500+ pages, then this 150 page summary should appeal to you:
Discounting Our Bodies:
A brief, critical review of REBT’s flaws
This book is a brief, summary critique of the main errors contained in the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) theory. And especially the invalidity of the ABC model, which asserts that nothing other than beliefs intervenes between a negative experience and an emotional-behavioural reaction. (The body is ignored, een though we know that diet, exercise and sleep patterns all affect our emotional state and our emotional resilience!)
Paperback only (at the moment). Price £9.50 GBP
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The Amoralism of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT):
The mishandling of self-acceptance and unfairness issues by Albert Ellis
By Dr Jim Byrne
By Dr Jim Byrne
This book is an extensive, detailed critique of two of the central ideas of REBT:
(1) The concept of ‘unconditional self-acceptance’; and
(2) The idea that life is fundamentally unfair, and that it should be accepted as such, and never complained about.
In the process we also deal with Albert Ellis’s idea that people should never be blamed for anything; that praise and blame are bad; that guilt and shame are to be eliminated, and never taken to be indicators that we’ve done something wrong. Along the way we have a debate with Dr Michael Edelstein about the role of fairness in couple relationships.
Albert Ellis and the Unhappy Golfer:
A critique of the simplistic ABC model of REBT
By Dr Jim Byrne
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This is a book of reflections upon a case study, presented by Dr Ellis in his 1962 book about the theory of Rational Therapy.
The ‘unhappy golfer’ is in Dr Albert Ellis’s office, in New York City, somewhere around the end of the 1950’s. He tells Dr Ellis that he feels terribly unhappy about being rejected by his golfing peers, and Dr Ellis tells him: This is something you are doing to yourself!
Ellis uses the unhappy golfer to introduce his readers to his simple ABC model of Rational (REB) Therapy, which claims – in those places that matter most – that a person cannot be upset emotionally in any way other than by their own beliefs!
This book sets out to refute this simplistic idea.
Albert Ellis and the Unhappy Golfer.***
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The Disconnected Heart of Daniel O:
A fictionalized-factual life story, combined with a subjective psychological self-analysis of developmental trauma disorder
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling – (and his alter ego, Daniel O’Beeve)
This book is about one young man’s journey away from his homeland and his emotionally barren family and priest-dominated culture, to a place where he might find love, acceptance and personal liberation.
It is a kind of shamanic journey – or Jungian psychological pilgrimage.
Daniel’s heart-wrenching journey to freedom is like a detective novel, a psychological thriller, and a science fiction adventure, all rolled into one. At the end, he shows the reader how to heal their own psychological wounds from childhood, and especially from their relationship with an unskillful or damaged mother.
…For more information, and a substantial extract from the book, please click this link…
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The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
Novels have a power to change the reader that is unparalleled by most non-fiction books. For example, Catch-22 burned a hole through the complacent safety net of this author’s timid little life, back in 1968; and now, in his turn, he lights a bonfire of the vanities under ‘the powers that be’, not just in political and religious circles in Dublin, but in ‘liberal’ circles throughout Europe and the US.
This novel introduces the enigmatic Inspector Glasheen in his forty-eighth year of life, and his twenty-first year as a detective in the Gardai, in Dublin.
A series of murders awaits him at his new posting. And one in particular, the death of a sixteen year old youth, in his bed, at home, in a working-class suburb, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood. The grief-driven war-dances of Sitting Bull’s descendants throb just below the surface of this Irish-Indian story.
For more, please click this link:
The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
Learn more.***
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Paperback only at the moment, for £11.95 GBP
Fiction is a great vehicle for teaching and learning about social relationships, psychological problems, and the law of karma.
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The Institute for Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT) 