Former school Principal and counsellor, Dr Jim O’Shea, pens important academic study

Well known local author Dr Jim O’Shea, The Furze, Thurles has penned a very important acedemic study entitled Emerging from the Darkness - the incredible journey of a woman of more than ordinary courage and her many faces.

Jim, a former teacher in Thurles CBS Secondary School, and retired Principal of Our Lady’s Secondary School in Templemore, has also worked for many years as a qualifed counsellor and has published a number of books in recent times.

However, his latest tome which is printed by Amazon, deals with the daily struggle with Dissociative Identity Disorder - also known as Multiple Personality Disorder of a lady identified only as Margaret.

Jim O’Shea said: “ I cannot find words to convey my thanks to Margaret for allowing the writing of this book. When I mentioned the possibility of writing it, she insisted that it should be done. She did not like the use of the words ‘case study’ because it seems too impersonal and removed from the empathy of our conselling encounters.

“She also feels that the book is about DID or Multiple Personality Disorder and should encourage other women and men, who, when they were young and innocent, suffered at the hands of callous perpstrators, to seek help.

“If a person suffering from quaternary structual dissociation from unspeakable abuse can survive and recover, anyone can. The book is equally about her courage as she struggled daily with the utterly distressing complaint. Margaret’s recovery phase, beginning in March 2021, will be explored in Volume 3,” Dr O’Shea said.

Margaret had suffered much abuse - physical and sexual - and was attending Jim O’Shea for counselling for almost a year before she trusted him enough to tell him her full story.

The book shows how very difficult the life of a person with structural dissociation is on the daily or weekly basis over a long number of years and the struggle it brings to therapy. Its other purpose is to give courage to others who suffer from this debilitating complaint and to show that, with perseverance and patience on the part of the client and the therapist, a good degree of peace can be achieved.

By 2022 Margaret was sporadically beginning to experience this peace. She says: “After being in therapy with Jim for a year, I finally trusted him enough to explain my life to him and because it helped so much for me to understand myself, I asked him to write this book; not to blame or condemn anybody, but to show with petience and perseverance people with DID can be helped and for Jim to illustrate what worked, what did not work, and how it worked for me,” Margaret said.

Margaret’s story is bleak and shocking and she has been hailed as a truly remarkable and courageous woman who had endured appalling abuse, but triumphed as a caring person and as a mother.

“The decision to write a book on her long journey meant that it would be a very big book, which would highlight the counselling used, its successes and failures and the struggle of Margaret and her parts, as well as a brief history of her life. It would only end when her healing was as complete as it could be. The story is about Margaret’s journey in counselling and in her daily life. They are both interwoven because the counselling, however innocuous a session might seem, always had an explosive impact on her,” Jim O’Shea said.

The story, running to almost 800 pages, is a very moving one and is a very important academic piece which will be used by many counsellors as a reference for many years to come.