Blog post – 17th November 2022
How I recovered from childhood developmental trauma disorder, and found myself in an expected paradise…
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
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Hello, and Welcome.
Our mothers have the most dramatic effect upon our psychical and mental health, and upon our life chanced. So choose your mother carefully!
I have recently written a new version of the first forty years of my life, to explore the journey I had to go on in order to fix the damage that was caused to me in the first two years of life by my incompetent, very young, damaged mother.
In reviewing my life, I thought this was a most important principle:
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
Anais Nin, in her book: ‘D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study’. 1964/1994.
So I explored the various states that I went through; sometimes using factual autobiography, sometimes using fictionalized autobiography, and sometimes using the stories of archetypal characters from my dreams and reveries.
This is how the publisher’s Foreword begins:
“When a child walks away from an abusive parent – when they are old enough to leave – they unknowingly, and unwillingly, carry that abusive parent in their heart and mind. And most often they head off into a life in which they repeat the same kind of abusive relationship with a “love partner”.
When the physical bruises of abusive parenting heal, the psychological scars remain intact, hidden in the subconscious mind of the abused child. And also stored in the physical tensions of body-memory.
Jim Byrne thought he’d walked away. Left it all behind. Sailed into a new life, at the age of eighteen years. But his physically and emotionally abusive childhood relationship with his mother (and his father) came back to haunt him at the age of twenty-two years.
At that point, his life imploded. He’d been over-consuming (“abusing”) sleeping pills for a few weeks, following total rejection by his peer group on a barren military squadron of damaged young men.
Eventually an ambulance came and got him; took him to hospital; where he saw a psychoanalyst for weekly meetings. After three meetings, the analyst told him that he (Jim) needed to examine his relationship with his mother.”
For more, please click this link! The story of Jim’s journey through uncharted territory in search of love!
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Best wishes,
Jim
Dr Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling, and survivor of childhood developmental trauma disorder.
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To see this book online, at an Amazon outlet near you, please click one of the following links. (There may be a couple of days’ delay in appearing on some Amazon outlets).
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Traumatic experiences are those which cannot easily be processed by the person to whom they occur. Most people are probably somewhat traumatized (or greatly traumatized) by their childhood experiences. One estimate – by Dr Felitti, in Dr van der Kolk’s book (The Body Keeps the Score) suggests that about 87% of Americans are somewhat traumatized by their Adverse Childhood Experiences!
I have used writing therapy to heal my own childhood traumas, which has taken a number of years (on and off). I first wrote some articles and papers, and then combined them into a fictionalized autobiographical story – (
Dr Jim Byrne
ABC Bookstore Online UK 