I dedicate my song today to Coleen Milton who lives in Ramsgate, England. Coleen celebrates her birthday today. Enjoy your special day, Coleen, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. An American rock and roll singer and songwriter during the 1950s, Buddy was born in 1936, Buddy died in a fatal airplane crash in 1959, along with singers, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
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Buddy Holly was probably one of the most surprising heart-throb singers of the early 1950s, yet this bespectacled rock and roll singer knew how to get his female fan feet tapping with the unusual and distinctive sound of his voice and the backing music of his group, 'The Crickets'.
I have often wondered which group constitutes the greater number. Is it the people who are ‘looking for love’, or the people ‘who have found love’, or those people who found love before losing it?
I could never imagine a world without love. I imagine such as an impossibility in my mind. We may currently live in a world that holds insufficient love but whatever degree of love the world is lacking, it is without the heart of mankind where the fault rests and not within it. All that resides in the heart of other lives in hope. The purpose of a heart is for pulsating life through the body. Allow another to enter your heart, and you effectively invite them into your life. Once your heart is open to them, a living relationship of meaning exists between you that requires no explanation.
From the many hundreds and thousands of unhappy and problematic people with whom I have worked and known during my life, and from the different kinds of problems presented to me, one problem stood out head and shoulders above all others. This problem came from an army of unhappy individuals who had always ‘felt unloved’. ‘Feeling unloved’ is one of the most destructive experiences any individual can have. Invariably rooted in the problematic childhood of a person, ‘feeling unloved’ produces negative feelings of ‘unworthiness’ , to the extent that whatever the reason they feel ‘unloved’, the individual believes that they have brought this upon themselves. They believe it to be because they do not deserve to be loved. Whatever the fault, they believe it is within themselves. Some believe that they must have been a bad child or had done something bad during their childhood which made them ‘unlovable’ to their parents; something that never left them and which stayed with them throughout life like a demonic shadow forever in their wake, like a harbinger of unhappiness and doom. First felt during their childhood years, many individuals would sadly go through their lives feeling ‘unlovable’. They would carry this burden on their back and be buried alongside such feelings of eternal torment.
Invariably, feelings of being unloved would originate in the family home. They would have life breathed into their presence, not by what their parents ever said or did, but by the words that were never spoken and the actions that were never done. From Victorian times onward, until well after the memories of the ‘Second World War’ had started to fade, the British people from every social sector of society (be they born into the upper or the lower classes) were expected to ‘know their place’ and to behave in a certain way and to conform to certain customs. Great store was placed upon ‘character building’ and specific responses would be frowned upon socially. Terms like ‘grin and bear it’: ‘big boys don’t cry’ and ‘men do not show their feelings’ were commonplace, and their practice was universal.
Following their return from the wars, men would invariably keep their bad wartime experiences bottled up and never speak of them with their nearest and dearest. So many times have I heard some family member of a war veteran speak about the regular nightmares, the dry tears cried into muffled pillows, the silent screams of having seen their army buddies blown to pieces before their eyes. The men of the time genuinely believed that they could best protect their wives and families from the horrors of war by not talking about it. Such behaviour, many men believed was ‘manly’ behaviour. Unfortunately, bad war experiences were gradually extended into every bad experience a man might have, and men were the first to break the feeling/communication chain within family circles
It took nearly one hundred years between 1880 and 1980 before it was recognised as being okay for men to cry, and that the shedding of their tears by a male made him no less of a man. It was not until the 1950s before women felt comfortable enough to seek all manner of personal advice from other women who were professional in this area of counselling or communication or that. Meanwhile, millions of children were growing up feeling that their mother or father did not love them because they never told them so directly or ever showed them by giving them a cuddle or a kiss.
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So many people with whom I worked between 1970-2000 would tell me that they ‘felt unloved’ and believed themselves to be ‘unlovable’. I found this particular problem one of the hardest to personally believe and one of the most intransigent to work with. I had been born into a large immigrant family who came from Ireland to England during b the latter years of the ‘Second World War’ for a more prosperous life.
Though we were poor in material assets, we were raised as Kings and Queens whenever it came to being emotionally expressive. I cannot remember one day growing up when I ever doubted that either parent did not love me. I cannot recall one day of my childhood that did not begin or end with my mother physically saying, “Billy, I love you”. While dad showed us that he loved us by holding our hands during family walks, laughing with us/ at us, licking the same ice-cream cornet as us, or carrying us on his huge shoulders, I can literally remember the few occasions throughout my life when I heard him say “I love you”, and there was only one time when I saw tears in his eyes. My dad, along with millions of other dads would have been among the last generation to hide their feelings, believing that was the best thing for them to do!
The problematic people I would deal with might have been brought up with both parents being unable to physically say to their children the words “I love you”. It was not usually the case that the parents did not love the child, but rather that they displayed a non-assertive response pattern which militated against the emotional expression of their feelings. As our first models of the behaviour patterns children adopt, most children invariably grow into adults like their parents.
Unfortunately, in some instances, many children would grow up believing in the existence of inappropriate associations between love and sex. I have known fathers and uncles engaging in indecent acts, and even full sexual activity with a child (a son or a daughter) not yet in their teens. I have known children whose experience of prolonged sexual abuse they experienced as a child, led to them growing into adulthood as abusers of children themselves. Paradoxically, they would go on to sexually assault children who were their age when they were first violated. It would often prove easier to follow the abusive pattern than break it, and it was not unusual for abused daughters to become abused wives and partners. I have even known abused mothers go on to abuse their own daughters or the children of other adults. Many daughters grew up in a household where sex and physical violence became part of the same love-making process. They often were the women who would stay half their lifetimes with a string of wife beaters, have children to them, and still love them however horribly and cruelly they were mistreated in return.
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I recall working two years with a large group of women who were serving life in a ‘New Hall Prison', Wakefield. At the time, because I was one of the most prominent Relaxation Trainers in the country, after much negotiation with the prison authority, I was granted permission to teach a group of women who were serving long or life sentences, ‘Relaxation and Assertion Training’ over a two-year period. Some of these women had killed a child or had killed another woman who had stolen her man. There was not one woman in the group of two dozen prisoners who had ever heard the words “ I love you” spoken to them by their parents or had subsequently told their own children that they were loved. The women in the group would speak the ‘I love you’ words to a man on occasion, but only because of its close association they had learned it had with sex. The words were never spoken to any man as they were meant to be spoken but were instead seductively voiced as a “come on and give-it-to-me now!” exhortation by the woman.
Apart from everything I was able to teach the women prisoners within their two-yearly course of weekly meetings in the prison, the accomplishment I am most proud of was persuading them to start and end each weekly session in a particular way. The ideal start and conclusion of every group session did not occur until the group had entered its second year of contact. We would hold the Relaxation session in the prison chapel weekly and to start our session, all women would be asked to form a circle, embrace the woman at each side of them with a smile, and after looking into their eyes say, “I love you” (insert their Christian name). It took many weeks into the New Year before the women prisoners would form the first ‘1 love you’ circle, and then many more weeks passed before we ever managed fewer than three circles formed. I would love to say the group formed just one circle at Christmas time on the year our contact ended, but it did not. Even at the end of one hundred weekly sessions, even then, there were a few prisoners who could not bring themselves to say those three words to an inmate they did not like or had a long-standing war of enmity with.
Because of prison fallouts between inmates between one week and the next, regarding all kinds of matters (either illegal or personal) some women would not/could not embrace another prisoner specifically. Working on the principle that half a loaf is infinitely better than having no loaf at all, I persisted. Some weeks we would finish up with two or three ‘I love you’ circles at the start and end of weekly sessions. On a few occasions, we might start with three ‘I love you’ circles and end up with two circles. This would be considered a remarkable success by myself.
I will never forget the second year of the group. It was December and the course was ending. It would not run again as the prison staff hierarchy questioned its value after they had noticed some inmates taking too much pride in themselves. Such noticeable change was also frowned upon by other inmates who were not on ‘Rule 43’ segregation. The Deputy Governor of the prison considered that several female inmates were beginning to regard themselves as ‘individuals of worth’. He did not phrase his feelings in these specific words. He described some of the group as ‘growing too big for their boots but that is not what he meant. I was obviously (like most good workers wanting to effect a positive change of significance) in danger of being too progressive.
These women in the Relaxation and Assertion Training Group were essentially referred to openly by the general prison population as being ‘animals’, and the ‘lowest of the low’ They were perceived as being prisoners who ought to be fed on bread and water only with no daily exercise, let alone be given the privilege of attending ‘Relaxation and Assertion Training’ classes by soft-headed Probation Officers. These women had committed despicable offences, sometimes against innocent and helpless children whom they had physically or sexually violated or had killed. Or they had killed other women in moments of jealousy and revenge, or God forbid, some poor chap who was only trying to show them a bit of ‘love’.
As far as the prison hierarchy was concerned, the bottom line was that Relaxation and Assertion Training, along with informing them of their individual and personal rights did not accord with keeping the institution running smoothly. Also, it was viewed as abhorrent by some prison staff and even some prisoners with non-sexual crimes that they were accorded such a privilege of escaping prison routine once weekly. This was why all the women in my group were Rule 43 prisoners. Because of their crimes of child abuse or child-killing, had they not been segregated from the general prison population, their lives and physical safety would be placed at daily risk!
When the week prior to Christmas arrived, the Welfare Officer who then served at New Hall Women’s Prison, Wakefield took a special ride down to the Huddersfield Probation Office to see me. It had initially been because of his positive influence with a new Prison Governor that I had even been granted the rare opportunity of getting my courses brought inside prison walls with lifers. He felt bad that the prison authorities had stopped the continuation of these innovative Relaxation Training courses (the only known ones in the country) without just cause. The Welfare Officer, Mike gave me a large, brown envelope, and inside was a few dozen self—made Christmas cards by every female on my course. The cards were childlike in their drawing and misspelled in some of their messages.. On one side of every card was written the words, “Merry Xmas. Mr. Forde. Thank you. I love you.”
These cards represent the finest cards I would ever receive in my life, and as I read each card with tears streaming down my face, I whispered the words, “And I love you too……”. Such sad women who would never rid their mind of the despicable crimes they had committed; every one of them who had never heard from their parents the words, “I love you”.
Love and peace
Bill xxx
My song today is “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. An American rock and roll singer and songwriter during the 1950s, Buddy was born in 1936, Buddy died in a fatal airplane crash in 1959, along with singers, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Buddy Holly was probably one of the most surprising heart-throb singers of the early 1950s, yet this bespectacled rock and roll singer knew how to get his female fan feet tapping with the unusual and distinctive sound of his voice and the backing music of his group, 'The Crickets'.
I have often wondered which group constitutes the greater number. Is it the people who are ‘looking for love’, or the people ‘who have found love’, or those people who found love before losing it?
I could never imagine a world without love. I imagine such as an impossibility in my mind. We may currently live in a world that holds insufficient love but whatever degree of love the world is lacking, it is without the heart of mankind where the fault rests and not within it. All that resides in the heart of other lives in hope. The purpose of a heart is for pulsating life through the body. Allow another to enter your heart, and you effectively invite them into your life. Once your heart is open to them, a living relationship of meaning exists between you that requires no explanation.
From the many hundreds and thousands of unhappy and problematic people with whom I have worked and known during my life, and from the different kinds of problems presented to me, one problem stood out head and shoulders above all others. This problem came from an army of unhappy individuals who had always ‘felt unloved’. ‘Feeling unloved’ is one of the most destructive experiences any individual can have. Invariably rooted in the problematic childhood of a person, ‘feeling unloved’ produces negative feelings of ‘unworthiness’ , to the extent that whatever the reason they feel ‘unloved’, the individual believes that they have brought this upon themselves. They believe it to be because they do not deserve to be loved. Whatever the fault, they believe it is within themselves. Some believe that they must have been a bad child or had done something bad during their childhood which made them ‘unlovable’ to their parents; something that never left them and which stayed with them throughout life like a demonic shadow forever in their wake, like a harbinger of unhappiness and doom. First felt during their childhood years, many individuals would sadly go through their lives feeling ‘unlovable’. They would carry this burden on their back and be buried alongside such feelings of eternal torment.
Invariably, feelings of being unloved would originate in the family home. They would have life breathed into their presence, not by what their parents ever said or did, but by the words that were never spoken and the actions that were never done. From Victorian times onward, until well after the memories of the ‘Second World War’ had started to fade, the British people from every social sector of society (be they born into the upper or the lower classes) were expected to ‘know their place’ and to behave in a certain way and to conform to certain customs. Great store was placed upon ‘character building’ and specific responses would be frowned upon socially. Terms like ‘grin and bear it’: ‘big boys don’t cry’ and ‘men do not show their feelings’ were commonplace, and their practice was universal.
Following their return from the wars, men would invariably keep their bad wartime experiences bottled up and never speak of them with their nearest and dearest. So many times have I heard some family member of a war veteran speak about the regular nightmares, the dry tears cried into muffled pillows, the silent screams of having seen their army buddies blown to pieces before their eyes. The men of the time genuinely believed that they could best protect their wives and families from the horrors of war by not talking about it. Such behaviour, many men believed was ‘manly’ behaviour. Unfortunately, bad war experiences were gradually extended into every bad experience a man might have, and men were the first to break the feeling/communication chain within family circles
It took nearly one hundred years between 1880 and 1980 before it was recognised as being okay for men to cry, and that the shedding of their tears by a male made him no less of a man. It was not until the 1950s before women felt comfortable enough to seek all manner of personal advice from other women who were professional in this area of counselling or communication or that. Meanwhile, millions of children were growing up feeling that their mother or father did not love them because they never told them so directly or ever showed them by giving them a cuddle or a kiss.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
So many people with whom I worked between 1970-2000 would tell me that they ‘felt unloved’ and believed themselves to be ‘unlovable’. I found this particular problem one of the hardest to personally believe and one of the most intransigent to work with. I had been born into a large immigrant family who came from Ireland to England during b the latter years of the ‘Second World War’ for a more prosperous life.
Though we were poor in material assets, we were raised as Kings and Queens whenever it came to being emotionally expressive. I cannot remember one day growing up when I ever doubted that either parent did not love me. I cannot recall one day of my childhood that did not begin or end with my mother physically saying, “Billy, I love you”. While dad showed us that he loved us by holding our hands during family walks, laughing with us/ at us, licking the same ice-cream cornet as us, or carrying us on his huge shoulders, I can literally remember the few occasions throughout my life when I heard him say “I love you”, and there was only one time when I saw tears in his eyes. My dad, along with millions of other dads would have been among the last generation to hide their feelings, believing that was the best thing for them to do!
The problematic people I would deal with might have been brought up with both parents being unable to physically say to their children the words “I love you”. It was not usually the case that the parents did not love the child, but rather that they displayed a non-assertive response pattern which militated against the emotional expression of their feelings. As our first models of the behaviour patterns children adopt, most children invariably grow into adults like their parents.
Unfortunately, in some instances, many children would grow up believing in the existence of inappropriate associations between love and sex. I have known fathers and uncles engaging in indecent acts, and even full sexual activity with a child (a son or a daughter) not yet in their teens. I have known children whose experience of prolonged sexual abuse they experienced as a child, led to them growing into adulthood as abusers of children themselves. Paradoxically, they would go on to sexually assault children who were their age when they were first violated. It would often prove easier to follow the abusive pattern than break it, and it was not unusual for abused daughters to become abused wives and partners. I have even known abused mothers go on to abuse their own daughters or the children of other adults. Many daughters grew up in a household where sex and physical violence became part of the same love-making process. They often were the women who would stay half their lifetimes with a string of wife beaters, have children to them, and still love them however horribly and cruelly they were mistreated in return.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I recall working two years with a large group of women who were serving life in a ‘New Hall Prison', Wakefield. At the time, because I was one of the most prominent Relaxation Trainers in the country, after much negotiation with the prison authority, I was granted permission to teach a group of women who were serving long or life sentences, ‘Relaxation and Assertion Training’ over a two-year period. Some of these women had killed a child or had killed another woman who had stolen her man. There was not one woman in the group of two dozen prisoners who had ever heard the words “ I love you” spoken to them by their parents or had subsequently told their own children that they were loved. The women in the group would speak the ‘I love you’ words to a man on occasion, but only because of its close association they had learned it had with sex. The words were never spoken to any man as they were meant to be spoken but were instead seductively voiced as a “come on and give-it-to-me now!” exhortation by the woman.
Apart from everything I was able to teach the women prisoners within their two-yearly course of weekly meetings in the prison, the accomplishment I am most proud of was persuading them to start and end each weekly session in a particular way. The ideal start and conclusion of every group session did not occur until the group had entered its second year of contact. We would hold the Relaxation session in the prison chapel weekly and to start our session, all women would be asked to form a circle, embrace the woman at each side of them with a smile, and after looking into their eyes say, “I love you” (insert their Christian name). It took many weeks into the New Year before the women prisoners would form the first ‘1 love you’ circle, and then many more weeks passed before we ever managed fewer than three circles formed. I would love to say the group formed just one circle at Christmas time on the year our contact ended, but it did not. Even at the end of one hundred weekly sessions, even then, there were a few prisoners who could not bring themselves to say those three words to an inmate they did not like or had a long-standing war of enmity with.
Because of prison fallouts between inmates between one week and the next, regarding all kinds of matters (either illegal or personal) some women would not/could not embrace another prisoner specifically. Working on the principle that half a loaf is infinitely better than having no loaf at all, I persisted. Some weeks we would finish up with two or three ‘I love you’ circles at the start and end of weekly sessions. On a few occasions, we might start with three ‘I love you’ circles and end up with two circles. This would be considered a remarkable success by myself.
I will never forget the second year of the group. It was December and the course was ending. It would not run again as the prison staff hierarchy questioned its value after they had noticed some inmates taking too much pride in themselves. Such noticeable change was also frowned upon by other inmates who were not on ‘Rule 43’ segregation. The Deputy Governor of the prison considered that several female inmates were beginning to regard themselves as ‘individuals of worth’. He did not phrase his feelings in these specific words. He described some of the group as ‘growing too big for their boots but that is not what he meant. I was obviously (like most good workers wanting to effect a positive change of significance) in danger of being too progressive.
These women in the Relaxation and Assertion Training Group were essentially referred to openly by the general prison population as being ‘animals’, and the ‘lowest of the low’ They were perceived as being prisoners who ought to be fed on bread and water only with no daily exercise, let alone be given the privilege of attending ‘Relaxation and Assertion Training’ classes by soft-headed Probation Officers. These women had committed despicable offences, sometimes against innocent and helpless children whom they had physically or sexually violated or had killed. Or they had killed other women in moments of jealousy and revenge, or God forbid, some poor chap who was only trying to show them a bit of ‘love’.
As far as the prison hierarchy was concerned, the bottom line was that Relaxation and Assertion Training, along with informing them of their individual and personal rights did not accord with keeping the institution running smoothly. Also, it was viewed as abhorrent by some prison staff and even some prisoners with non-sexual crimes that they were accorded such a privilege of escaping prison routine once weekly. This was why all the women in my group were Rule 43 prisoners. Because of their crimes of child abuse or child-killing, had they not been segregated from the general prison population, their lives and physical safety would be placed at daily risk!
When the week prior to Christmas arrived, the Welfare Officer who then served at New Hall Women’s Prison, Wakefield took a special ride down to the Huddersfield Probation Office to see me. It had initially been because of his positive influence with a new Prison Governor that I had even been granted the rare opportunity of getting my courses brought inside prison walls with lifers. He felt bad that the prison authorities had stopped the continuation of these innovative Relaxation Training courses (the only known ones in the country) without just cause. The Welfare Officer, Mike gave me a large, brown envelope, and inside was a few dozen self—made Christmas cards by every female on my course. The cards were childlike in their drawing and misspelled in some of their messages.. On one side of every card was written the words, “Merry Xmas. Mr. Forde. Thank you. I love you.”
These cards represent the finest cards I would ever receive in my life, and as I read each card with tears streaming down my face, I whispered the words, “And I love you too……”. Such sad women who would never rid their mind of the despicable crimes they had committed; every one of them who had never heard from their parents the words, “I love you”.
Love and peace
Bill xxx
