Updated on 29th September 2022
Fictional Books for Psychological Purposes
On this page you will find a short story which I wrote yesterday, 17th September 2022. This is an example of how to use fiction writing as self-therapy. I hope you enjoy it. (And further down the page, you will find a longer statement by me about the links between fiction writing and psychological healing.
Jim Byrne, Sunday 18th September 2022
~~~
Fiction writing as self-therapy
~~~
Blue Boy Karma
By Jim Byrne
September 17th 2022
Copyright © Jim Byrne, 2022
~~~
Vasha Popov screwed his little face up, like a well-squeezed dishcloth. He stared into the big, mottled mirror, looking for the echo of his facial contortions. And there it was. This was him. This blue face, with the sad calf eyes and the down-turned mouth. And there in the apparent ugliness of his blue face was the evidence, it seemed, of why Mamu did not let him touch her, or speak to her, or get close to her.
His blue hair did not help, regimented as it was by Mamu’s daily brushing with her harsh scrubbing brush, with which she would whack him if he did not stand still while she vigorously brushed out the tangles.
When he relaxed his little blue face, it did not seem quite so ugly, but the dark blue hair and the mid-blue skin were an unbecoming combination.
~~~
A book of short stories by Jim Byrne
Wounded hearts wandering hopelessly…
Five short stories about love, sex, passion and parting
Introduction
Let me tell you a story. I’d been living inside of some very depowering stories for nineteen years before I was woken up by reading Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.
Over the subsequent decades, I used the reading of fiction to teach myself about the mysteries of the human heart. and the way stories shape, and reshape us.
We live inside of stories we got from our parents and teachers, right at the start of our lives. And we use those stories, outside of our awareness, as our map of the world. Many of those stories are helpful or benign; but many are false and misleading, and they cause us to crash into all kinds of invisible walls, as we struggle to find or create a viable road through this very difficult world.
The five stories in this collection have the potential to clarify some human values, and to heal some human suffering, by experiencing it to the full for the first time.
I hope you enjoy these five stories, and that they change your life for the better!
Best wishes,
Jim Byrne, Hebden Bridge, September 27th 2022
For more, please click this link.***
~~~
~~~
Vasha had not always been blue. At birth he was as pink and shiny as a well-oiled piglet. The more Mamu abused him, the bluer he became; and she did not notice the changes!
Of course, he could not utter any of these ideas. He was, after all, just four years old, minus about three weeks. We can only know anything about his inner dialogue, and his feelings, because of the observations of Pipat, the little green Martian Pandomo, who watches him constantly from various hiding places.
Pipat – the four-inch tall, bipedal lizard, with the face of a wise high-court judge – was watching him now, from behind the big clock on the mantelpiece; peering through the gloomy light of the parlour room; reading every twitch of shoulder, finger, head, neck forehead, eyes, and mouth. The general emotional slouch of the little distressed body.
Pipat knew that Vasha felt like a little fat cuckoo in the nest of a snooty pelican; which he had to share with the twin daughters of the pelican. The three females – Mamu and the bullying sisters – also hated him because of his maleness; because Mamu had been sexually abused by her own father; and she tended to either hold that against a man, or to want to throw herself into any man’s arms. But Vasha, it seemed to Pipat, was a constant reminder of the pain she felt as a child; and she clearly passed her pain on to him at every opportunity.
~~~
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
This book is about one 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.
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
~~~
Pipat did not need his intelligence quotient of 495, or his emotional intelligence level of 8,600, to be able to read the inequality of parenting in this house. When Mrs Popov looked on her two daughters, her face lit up like a carnival fairground, with lights and music and good cheer oozing from her reverential features. But when she looked at Vasha, her face turned into a wrinkled green and venomous eruption of anger and disdain.
If Pipat had told the little blue boy of his understanding of Vasha’s difficult life, the blue boy would have been nonplussed. For Vasha had a limited vocabulary, and a very low level of emotional intelligence, because Mamu would not speak to him, or look at him when he wanted her to, or allow him to interact with her in any way.
For a very long time, Vasha had been following Mamu around the house each day, trying to cling to her skirt. But she would brush him off and dash away to the next household chore. “Get off”, she’d say in an angry shout, and sometimes push him away with her big, hard hand. Pipat knew that the main refrain of Vasha’s little mind was this: “Mamu; Mamu! Mamu!” Minus a verb or a subject. Merely a visceral desire for the loved object. This was the constant pain of the piercing icicle of maternal rejection.
But now things were going to get worse. Mamu had told him, over and over again, that she was going to take him to the local school, and leave him there all day, five days each week. And that he would just have to get used to being with lots of boys whom he had seen running and jumping and talking and screaming, and yelling and fighting, in the school playground. He had seen them many times now, as Mamu hauled him and the twin girls along the school fence each morning, to drop the girls off at the gates.
But Vasha could never survive in such a place. He could not speak, or yell or scream. He could not run and fight and climb trees and walls. He could not understand other people. He was like a frozen toy in an invisible cardboard box.
~~~
Brief insert: Recommended fictional writing about childhood drama
The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
1960 was a good year for crime in the city. Street robberies were down; family violence was stable; and there had not been single murder between New Year’s Day and the end of August. Then, in September, there was a worrying spate of murders across the city. Public panic set in. What was the pattern in this set of murders?
This novel introduces the enigmatic Detective 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, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood in an Irish-Indian family in Arizona.
How can two deaths be linked across two continents, and more than forty years?
For more, please click this link: The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
~~~
Vasha was in despair. He could not allow himself to be sent to that hell of a school. He wandered out into the back yard, while Mamu was making the beds. He climbed through the fence into the big, wild field, with the cows and the trees and the daisies. He walked down the field towards the woods.
He saw quick flashes of the fur of the red bear, who he had noticed several times before. And he was curious about this animal.
As Vasha entered the wood, the red bear appeared and smiled at him. He seemed like a pleasant animal. The red bear asked him why he had come to the woods; and Vasha told him, in broken sentences, and scrambled images, of his emotional misery; of the impending school; of the bullying by his Mamu and his sisters.
“Would you like to go home?” the bear then asked. “Back to where you were before this nightmare began?”
Vasha’s face lit up. “Yes, sir!” he said.
~~~
A book of short stories by Jim Byrne
Wounded hearts wandering hopelessly…
Five short stories about love, sex, passion and parting
Let me tell you a story. I’d been living inside of some very depowering stories for nineteen years before I was woken up by reading Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.
Over the subsequent decades, I used the reading of fiction to teach myself about the mysteries of the human heart. and the way stories shape, and reshape us.
We live inside of stories we got from our parents and teachers, right at the start of our lives. And we use those stories, outside of our awareness, as our map of the world. Many of those stories are helpful or benign; but many are false and misleading, and they cause us to crash into all kinds of invisible walls, as we struggle to find or create a viable road through this very difficult world.
The five stories in this collection have the potential to clarify some human values, and to heal some human suffering, by experiencing it to the full for the first time.
I hope you enjoy these five stories, and that they change your life for the better!
Best wishes,
Jim Byrne, Hebden Bridge, September 27th 2022
For more, please click this link.***
~~~
The red bear then pulled out a white writing slate and a red writing stick, from his satchel, and wrote down the snippets of information that he could glean from Vasha. He then asked Vasha, “And would you like me to send a message to your Mamu, to let her know where you have gone?”
Vasha agreed, and the red bear made some notes, asking for clarifications of the message as he scribbled on the slate.
The red bear then led Vasha into the very centre of the woods, and showed him the opening to a tunnel of light, that led away towards an unimaginably remote point, where some small figures were congregated.
“Walk towards those people”, the red bear said. “They will guide you home”.
~~~
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
~~~
On 73rd of Zanga, in the season of the fox, Vasha’s Mamu awoke. She’d had a very strange dream. Vasha and her daughters had all disappeared, without trace. It was a nightmare; especially the loss of the girls. She looked for them everywhere, in a hideously distorted dreamland, but could not find them. When they returned, she would scold the girls, but she would beat that little bastard, Vasha, until he screamed.
She swung her legs out of the bed and placed them on the carpet. But the warm carpet had gone. The floorboards were bare and cold.
She opened her eyes fully, and noticed that the wallpaper had gone from the walls. The paint had gone from the woodwork.
She went out on the landing and screamed for her husband. “Illya! Illya!”
But she got no reply. The empty house echoed back her despairing calls.
She ran along the corridor to her twin daughters’ bedroom, but it was empty, and cold and bare.
She dashed next door, to Vasha’s bedroom, but it was also empty and bare. Not even a bed.
She ran down the stairs and phoned the politzi.
~~~
Recommended fictional writing about childhood drama
The Relentless Flow of Fate
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
1960 was a good year for crime in the city. Street robberies were down; family violence was stable; and there had not been single murder between New Year’s Day and the end of August. Then, in September, there was a worrying spate of murders across the city. Public panic set in. What was the pattern in this set of murders?
This novel introduces the enigmatic Detective 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, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood in an Irish-Indian family in Arizona.
How can two deaths be linked across two continents, and more than forty years?
For more, please click this link: The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
~~~
By 75th of Zanga, Mrs Popov had lost two stones of badly needed body weight. There were black bags under her eyes.
The police had searched the woods; dragged the river; and talked to all the usual suspects in the village. But there was no sign of her children.
She prayed to the gods of parenthood, but she felt the hollow echo of their non-response.
~~~
On the morning of 77th of Zanga, Mrs Popov came downstairs in an emaciated, enervated state. She felt like somebody had removed her battery, and filled her head with sawdust. She was deeply depressed, and feeling suicidal.
Suddenly, on the doormat she saw something which caused her heart to skip a beat. It was a message slate. White, with red writing. Hope rose within her. A message of hope, she thought.
She dashed across the hall and picked up the slate. This is what it said:
Message from Vasha, transcribed by a friend (Simon Red Bear):
Dear Mamu, I am going home. I cannot live like this. You do not like me. You do not want me. You do not make me feel safe and happy. So I am going back to where I came from. You will never see me again.
I no longer like you. And you do not deserve to know me.
Screw you, Mamu.
Vasha.
~~~
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
~~~
~~~
Fiction is a great vehicle for teaching and learning about social relationships, psychological problems, and the law of karma.
Posted on 16th June 2019
What are the connections between psychology and psychotherapy, on the one hand, and literature, on the other?
By Dr Jim Byrne
Introduction
I recently posted some comments on LinkedIn on the connections between psychology and literature, and the effects of literature upon my own therapeutic journey.
Sometimes my second thoughts are better than my first; and on this occasion I think there is certainly a need to clarify some of my positions:
Second thoughts
Firstly: When I wrote that I had learned more from literature than I had ever learned from my academic studies, I think this was only true of my life in my twenties and up to the age of 33 years.
In my teens, I had looked at the tens of thousands of books that were stacked from floor to ceiling in some of the book shops along Aston Quay, in Dublin City, and I despaired of ever being able to read even a tiny fraction of that mountain of literary and pulp fiction wordage. So I veered towards reading non-fiction for several years. Indeed, in the main bookshop I used on the quays, I began to buy second-hand books that looked at psychology subjects, and I was very interested in hypnosis, and the inferiority complex.
From about the age of 22 years, I read a lot of economics and politics.
But, around that time, I did find some significant fiction books that had a huge effect upon my emotional development. And, when I was 27 years old, I read Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’; and soon afterwards, I read ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.
Secondly: Beyond the age of 33 years, I began to take seriously the study of psychology, beginning with person-centred counselling; and then Transactional Analysis; and then Gestalt therapy. And eventually studied 13 different systems of counselling and psychotherapy – including REBT/CBT, plus Freud, Jung, Rogers, Perles, Ellis, Beck, and several others.
Years later I studied Claude Steiner’s ‘Achieving Emotional Literacy’, which I found to be very effective teaching of emotional intelligence, including the development of empathy. However, nobody who has read any novels by Charles Dickens would try to deny that Dickens teaches empathy by evoking it, while Steiner teaches empathy by delineating it.
Carl Rogers’ writings call for empathy, but I learned how to feel it from reading Dickens, Donna Tartt, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, and many others; including Dostoevsky and Graham Green. And also books like Jack Kornfield’s, The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness and Peace.
Thirdly: Here is the bit that I missed in my earlier posts. The discipline of ‘literature creation’ is always informed (in my view) by the leakage of psychological theory into the public domain.
~~~
One of our novels is a good example of how literature can be a form of psychotherapy, for the author and the reader:
The Relentless Flow of Fate, by Kurt Llama Byron: Buy 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 India |
| Amazon Japan | Amazon Singapore |
~~~
How can I support this claim?
The influence of psychology upon literature and art
One way to do so is to look at D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Sons and Lovers, which suggested that the main character had an ‘Oedipus complex’ about his mother. I wrote about this in my own semi-autobiographical novel like this:
‘When Sigmund Freud saw the play, Oedipus Rex, in Vienna, in the late 1890’s, he found himself believing that he, personally, had lusted after his own mother. He then subsequently inferred that this must be a universal law of sexual development, which applies to all sons – which it is not.
‘Because D.H. Lawrence adopted this idea of Freud’s, in his semi-autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers, the idea has become generalized that young men commonly suffer from an Oedipus complex. But Lawrence did not get this idea from reflecting upon his actual relationship with his mother. He got it from his wife Frieda, who had got it from Otto Gross, “an early disciple of Freud’s”.[1] And he misleadingly inserted it into the heads of his readers, thus distorting their understanding of the most fundamental relationship in human society.”
So let us wash this psychobabble out of English/Irish/World literature for all time. A young boy is perfectly capable of pure feelings of love for his mother; and a mother is perfectly capable of feeling pure love for her son – provided she is emotionally well, with a secure attachment style.
~~~
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
~~~
~~~
The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
1960 was a good year for crime in the city. Street robberies were down; family violence was stable; and there had not been single murder between New Year’s Day and the end of August. Then, in September, there was a worrying spate of murders across the city. Public panic set in. What was the pattern in this set of murders?
This novel introduces the enigmatic Detective 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, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood in an Irish-Indian family in Arizona.
How can two deaths be linked across two continents, and more than forty years?
For more, please click this link: The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
~~~
~~~
In this case, the psychologist – Freud – misleads us, because he was influenced by his misreading of *Greek Literature* into believing in the universal lusting of sons for their mothers. (The Greek myth does not claim that this is a universal tendency, but that it was a most unfortunate accident which befell Oedipus, which was facilitated because he had been misled by his servants into thinking his mother and father were dead).
On the other hand, I got a much better sense of guidance on healthy love between a mother and her son from Donna Tartt’s novel, The Goldfinch. And, again, I wrote about this in my own semi-autobiographical novel (or story), like this:
Extract: >>>
~~~
Because of my own experience of the linkages between fiction and psychology, I now write fiction (when I get the time) and promote the reading of fiction, if it is of the right type and quality.
~~~
Key concepts: Literature and psychology; biography and psychotherapy; novels and the humanizing of the human heart…
~~~
One of our novels is a good example of how literature can be a form of psychotherapy, for the author and the reader:
The Relentless Flow of Fate, by Kurt Llama Byron: Buy 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 India |
| Amazon Japan | Amazon Singapore |
~~~
Part Two: More on ‘What are the linkages between psychology and psychotherapy, on the one hand, and literature, on the other’?
~~~
Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, July 2018: Posted here on 9th January 2019
~~~
Introduction
Recently, I’ve been blogging about some of the important linkages, or overlaps, between psychology, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.
For examples: I have written about:
(1) Some of the books that helped to grow my emotional intelligence; or to help me to ‘complete’ (or process) some early, traumatic experience;
(2) My own story about the life of Daniel O’Beeve – and how this is legitimate psychotherapy for the reader, as well as the writer;
(3) How to “write a new life for yourself” – in the form of a new paperback book about a system of psychotherapy, which I have developed over a number of years.
(4) How psychological insights seep into literature; and how literature in turn influences, or humanizes, psychology and psychotherapy.
Today, I want to describe some experiences with literature that I’ve had over the past couple of days.
~~~
Visiting bookshops in Bradford
Two days ago – on Saturday 21st July – Renata and I took some time out and went to Bradford for lunch, and to take a look around the shops, including two bookshops and the main DVD/movie outlet (HMV, in the new arcade).
In Waterstones’ bookshop, towards the end of our visit, I was looking for something which would help me to reflect some more upon the linkages between psychology and literature.
There was nothing of any relevance in the Psychology section.
Then I went looking for a Literature section. The best I could find were two adjacent book cases, one on Poetry, and one on Drama. (Bradford is not a particularly big city).
In the drama section, there were a few books on literature, including one by Julian Barnes: Through the Window – Seventeen essays (and one short story); London; Vintage Books; 2012.
The blurb on the back of this book suggested it was exactly what I was seeking. It began like this: “Novels tell us the most truth about life…”
I bought it, and brought it home, and dived into the Preface, which describes ‘a Sempé cartoon’, which shows three sections of a bookshop. On the left, the Philosophy section; on the right, the History section; and in the middle, a window that looks out at a man and a woman who are approaching each other from roughly the locations of those two sections, and who are inevitably (and accidentally) going to meet in front of the middle section, which is the Fiction section.
For Julian Barnes, this cartoon describes his own beliefs about the central role of fiction in our lives.
“Fiction, more than any other written form, explains and expands life”, he writes, with great assurance. “Biology, of course, also explains life; so do biography and biochemistry and biophysics and biomechanics and biopsychology. But all the biosciences yield no biofiction. Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, how it goes wrong, and how we lose it. Novels speak to and from the mind, the heart, the eye, the genitals, the skin; the conscious and the subconscious. What it is to be an individual, what it means to be part of a society. What it means to be alone. …” Etcetera.
~~~
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
This book is about one 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.
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He shares all of this information with the reader so that they too can complete any unfinished business from childhood which may be hampering their social or emotional performance in the world.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
~~~
~~~
The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
1960 was a good year for crime in the city. Street robberies were down; family violence was stable; and there had not been single murder between New Year’s Day and the end of August. Then, in September, there was a worrying spate of murders across the city. Public panic set in. What was the pattern in this set of murders?
This novel introduces the enigmatic Detective 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, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood in an Irish-Indian family in Arizona.
How can two deaths be linked across two continents, and more than forty years?
For more, please click this link: The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
~~~
Back to Julian Barnes
Earlier I quoted a very strong argument by Julian Barnes, from the Preface of his book, Through the Window; in which he said: “Novels tell us the most truth about life…”.
However, if you read your texts closely, you will often be rewarded with insights like this: Barnes was inconsistent.
Really? In what way?
Well, just 45 words after the end of his strong claims about novels telling the most truth, we read this statement; the final statement of the Preface:
“The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well”. (Emphasis added, JWB).
So, if we put his two main ideas together, we get this:
Novels tell us the most truth, but not in the form of answers; only in the form of questions!
Does that make any sense? No.
Why not?
Because the novel actually presents imaginary scenarios as history. Reading those scenarios – and taking them at face value – the reader finds that certain questions automatically form within their body-brain-mind, based on their socialization; their past experiences; and their current circumstances.
The author cannot control which questions will form in the mind of the reader.
But what is the value of the questions that are thus formed by fictional writing?
The value is huge! Why? Because questions are the first and most essential part of what some people call ‘thinking’, but which I call ‘overt, conscious perfinking’ – where ‘perfinking’ means perceiving- feeling- thinking, all in one grasp of the mind.
So, novels impact us, by bringing up new thoughts/feelings, and especially questions, which, if we pursue them, may produce dramatic answers that shunt us out of a current reality into a range of new possibilities! In this sense, novels are potentially hugely therapeutic!
For this reason, I recommend novels – the very best novels – to my counselling clients; and to my supervisees – counsellors who need to keep growing their hearts and minds; and improving thereby their body-brain-mind-environment-complexity!
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One of our novels is a good example of how literature can be a form of psychotherapy, for the author and the reader:
The Relentless Flow of Fate, by Kurt Llama Byron: Buy 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 India |
| Amazon Japan | Amazon Singapore |
How did the body get into the previous statement?
It might have been difficult to answer the question – ‘What does the body have to do with reading and/or writing novels?’
Except, while I was scanning the pages of John Fowles’ Mantissa, Renata came over to me and showed me a book she had found: ‘The Anatomy of Change: A way to move through life’s transitions’. This book was written by Richard Strozzi Heckler (1993), a teacher of Aikido (which is a system of Japanese unarmed combat – which I studied briefly at the Dublin Judo Club, in 1991-’62). Heckler’s philosophy of life can be summed up like this:
Renata pointed me at a section on Living in the Body; in which Heckler describes how he was once hired by a juvenile detention centre, where he was to work with difficult juveniles who were violent offenders. He worked with one, physically huge, and very angry young man who expressed the desire to kill somebody, because he was so angry. Heckler, intuitively, and pragmatically, told this youth that he could show him precisely how to kill somebody. The youth was hooked, and they began to work on the Aikido pressure points. But this youth’s physical energies prevented him easily learning what needed to be learned; and so Heckler began to work on his body, to get him to the state where he could master the Aikido pressure points that he wanted to learn. However, through the process of focusing his attention on his own body, and learning to release tensions, this youth lost his interest in killing anybody. He was beginning to live in his body; and he realized it was more interesting to find out about himself than to kill anybody.
Moving a muscle can change a thought, and/or an emotion. Physical training is profoundly stress reducing. It teaches physical self-confidence. And, the softening of ‘body armouring’ can release the person’s feelings, intuitions, and compassion, and, according to Heckler, it can heal our physical and emotional wounds. (That certainly lines up with my own experience at the Dublin Judo Club [which was actually called the Irish Judo Association at the point when I joined]). Our experiences shape our body-brain-mind; and we can begin to loosen and reframe our most troubling experiences by working from the body-side of our body-brain-mind, or from the mind-side of our body-brain-mind.
Conclusion
Reading a novel on the way to and from your equivalent of the Judo Club will double your progress in healing your body-brain-mind; and seeing a good, wise, broadminded counsellor, at some point each week, will also help!
Earlier Writing by Dr Jim Byrne
Book description
The author describes the traumatic events of his childhood, and the bleakness of life in Ireland at a time when the Catholic religion dominated the culture; and in a context where he and his family were country immigrants into an excluding city culture.
Much of his early childhood was repressed out of his conscious awareness, but his life did not work, in school, or as a teenager, because of the unconscious forces that made it difficult for him to relate to others, especially to girls.
In order to try to reconstruct his childhood, he uses a number of ingenious strategies…
These strategies enabled him to re-experience and fully complete the previously non-conscious emotional wounds that had been hampering his personal development and his emotional and creative self-expression.
He also writes about his dreams and reveries, which contain various archetypal messages about the terrible suffering of his ancestors, which was passed down to his parents, and from them to him.
This is the story of that journey of digging up his childhood history and mythology, so he can digest it and understand it and draw its sting; and it is followed by advice about what you can do to heal your own early childhood emotional trauma; and to grow to the full capacity of your innate potential.
This book is written from the heart; woven out of metaphorical language of multi-faceted images; and haunting emotional scenarios.
For more information, and a substantial extract from this book, please click this link: https://abc-bookstore.com/childhood-developmental-trauma-autobiography/
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The Relentless Flow of Fate
By Kurt Llama Byron
An Inspector Glasheen Mystery
1960 was a good year for crime in the city. Street robberies were down; family violence was stable; and there had not been single murder between New Year’s Day and the end of August. Then, in September, there was a worrying spate of murders across the city. Public panic set in. What was the pattern in this set of murders?
This novel introduces the enigmatic Detective 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, is destined to bring up Glasheen’s own demons, from a very disturbed childhood in an Irish-Indian family in Arizona.
How can two deaths be linked across two continents, and more than forty years?
For more, please click this link:
The Relentless Flow of Fate.***
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ABC Bookstore Online UK 