(Karen), and brother to my granddaughter, Olivia Forde (daughter to Karen and my son, Adam). Shaun lives in Mirfield, West Yorkshire. I also dedicate today’s song to Joanne Lynch who lives in Hereford, Herefordshire. Both Shaun and Joanna celebrate their birthday today. Have a smashing day.
My song today is, ‘Here You Come Again’. This song was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The song was recorded by American entertainer, Dolly Parton. It was released as a single in September 1977 as the title track from Parton's album of the same name, and it topped the U.S. ‘Country Singles Chart’ and won the 1979 Grammy award for ‘Best Female Country Vocal Performance. It also reached Number 3 on the U.S. ‘Billboard Hot 100’, representing Parton's first significant pop crossover hit. ‘Here You Come Again’ was the centrepiece of her now-famous pop crossover move in the late 1970s.
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I was 35 years old when this record was first released by Dolly Parton. I had been in love with all Country & Western music since I spent a couple of years in Canada and travelled around some of the United States during the early 1960s. At the age of 35 years old, I was getting myself well established as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield as a pioneering worker in Anger Management, Assertive Training and Relaxation Training within the country. My name and pioneering work had been mentioned in a few social-work books and magazines in Great Britain, and in France and Sweden.
I worked with people with a wide array of personal problems; but mostly problems related to high levels of fear, anxiety, tension, and anger; all of which produced the display of involuntary behaviour patterns. Outside this category, I would also work with people who were repeatedly abused, and who found themselves unable to extricate themselves from the life and presence of their abuser. As a rule, the abuser would be a man and the abused person would be a woman (but not always so). The nature of the abuse might be psychological, emotional, physical, or sexual.
While endeavouring to persuade any abused person to leave their situation and their abuser, their reluctance and inability to extricate themselves from the abuse was not always influenced by fear of reprisal. Sometimes the very emotion that often prevented them from making this progressive move was ‘a feeling of love’ they claimed that they still held for their abusive partners.
I have known battered wives who continued to stay with their abusing husbands and partners because they still loved them and hoped that they could one day change them. I have worked with women who viewed the fact that their jealous partner regular beat them badly as being an expression of their concern for them! I have worked with abused women who would be beaten mercilessly if they were so much as ten minutes late coming back home, or if they looked or spoke with another man when they were out together. The abuser invariably explained his controlling nature as representing the love and concern he felt for her. I have worked with teenage girls who believed for years that the despicable acts their father or stepfather did to them, and have them perform on him (acts of sexual abuse), was, in fact, his way of showing love for them. Sometimes, during the early stages of their sexual abuse, they would view their compliant response as their way of retaining his loving attention and affection.
This song, however, reminds me of a much of more common problem that I worked with, and a problem which I hear of so often today. I refer to a more subtle problem that is often much harder to discern as it does not involve physical or sexual abuse. However, as within all abusive relationships, it does involve the abuse of power within a relationship. I speak of the relationship between a man and a woman (or any gay couple) where the man keeps breaking off his contact with the woman for no apparent reason she can discern. She becomes highly distressed and emotionally unsettled each time he breaks up with her, and then (presumably because he does not want to lose any sexual privileges which the relationship gives him), he renews contact with his woman friend, and she takes him back again. Once she is settled back in their relationship, he does it again, and however many times she takes him back, he repeats the pattern. And the reason that she keeps going back for more and giving him another chance (as this song tells you, ‘Your messing up my mind and filling up my senses’) is that a part of her tells her that ‘she still loves him’ and he will change for the better, however much of an emotionally abusive rat he is!
My only advice to any woman who finds herself in such a position is to get out of that relationship quick, and stay out if you place any value on preserving any semblance of self-respect, and maintaining any hope for future happiness and health! No more ‘Here we go again’. Stop the merry go round of this emotional power abuse and ‘get off it’ now, so that he can no longer ‘get off on it’ as he has for so long!
Love and peace Bill xxx