I dedicate today’s song to my Facebook friend, Mary Hogan, who originates from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary but who now lives in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland.
My song today is ‘You’re My World’. This ballad was originally recorded in 1963 as ‘ll Mio Mondo’ (‘My World’) by Umberto Bindi, who co-wrote the Italian version with Gino Paoli. The song was given English lyrics by Carl Sigman as “You're My World”. The song reached No. 1 in Australia (twice), Belgium, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in recordings by Cilla Black: Daryl Braithwaite: Guys and Dolls: Helen Reddy. The versions by Cilla Black and Helen Reddy reached the ‘US Top 40’ in 1964 and 1977, respectively. The song also reached Number 1 in France and Spain in the respective translations ‘Ce monde’ and ‘Mi Mundo’, both sung by Richard Anthony.
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Whenever I hear this song it always reminds me of an emotional problem that bedevils therapists the world over when they meet it in the lives of their clients; ‘loving a person too much'. I suppose when I look at this unusual problem, I would have to say it is less ‘loving a person too much’ and more ‘not loving oneself enough’.
All situations which are difficult to resolve invariably contain an emotional component to them. Allow me to remind you that all behaviour patterns are made up from Thought-Feeling-Action, and it is in that sequence that all our acts start and end, and our behaviour patterns are comprised. First, we ‘Think’ about something, next we formulate a ‘Feeling’ about what we have just thought about, and then our body muscles are instructed automatically to ‘Act’ upon our initial thought.
When our initial thought is a ‘Positive Thought’, the feeling that follows is automatically a ‘Positive Feeling’, and the action that follows is invariably a ‘Positive Action’. Conversely, when our initial thought is a ‘Negative Thought’, the feeling that follows is automatically a ‘Negative Feeling’, and the action that follows is invariably a ‘Negative Action’.
Please note that the action which follows the feeling is ‘invariably’ and not ‘automatically’ of the same quality of the thought and feeling that preceded it. The reason is that the individual has the power to reverse the process at the action stage. By changing their initial ‘thought’ instruction they can reverse the automatic ‘feeling’ that follows, and which invariably produces a corresponding ‘action’.
Next, I would remind you that much of any individual’s daily life is composed of ‘talking to oneself’. This is a mental process that therapists describe as ‘self-talk’. Most of the time, we do not act upon 99 percent of the thoughts that pass through our head, but sometimes we mentally instruct our body muscles to act in a particular way, and to ensure that our body acts as we have mentally instructed it to do, we formulate a corresponding feeling of quality and strength to propel the muscles into action.
So often one or both parties of a loving couple will constantly tell themselves repeatedly (along with the rest of the world), “I love my partner as much as life itself! They are my soulmate and my whole world. They are my sole reason for living and were anything ever to happen that left me without them, it would be so awful I would not be able to stand it, and I would feel like dying without them beside me.”
So many loving couples love their partner ‘too much’ (which means at the expense of them forgetting to love themselves sufficiently). They may have enjoyed fifty years of happily married life before illness takes one of them to the grave. During their lifetime together, one of them might have self-talked in the way described in the previous paragraph; not once or occasionally, but literally hundreds or thousands of times. Often, they will have engaged in a lifetime of such self-talk, believing every word they say to be truthful. When the sad event inevitably happens, their body demands that they pay the price for years and years of instructive self-talk by ensuring that their body now acts like they had been telling themselves for years and years that they expect it to act when left without their loving partner!
Another thing to appreciate about mental/body coordination, instruction, and function is that the mind has a memory box in which it stores all manner of ‘anticipated experiences’, and when the time arrives for those anticipated experiences to be enacted, the thought processes will delve into the memory box where it will find the ‘anticipated experience’ it has stored away repeatedly. Once the ‘anticipated experience’ has been located, the brain then instructs the body how to correspondingly feel in consequence of the anticipated event having happened (the feared death of one’s loving partner). The subject has unknowingly self-hypnotised themselves into future feelings and actions by the strengthening of repeated self-talk of a similar kind over many years. Through constantly saying ‘how they will feel when their loving partner dies', and leaves them on their own, the bereaved person is effectively engaged in the thought-feeling-action process of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell yourself a lie enough times and you will eventually start to believe it!
That is why we should be precise in the use of our language, as every word we tell ourselves has the effect of instructing our body to feel precise (not ‘approximately’ but ‘precisely'), how we told it to feel. In days gone by, our mothers might have told us to ‘walk tall’ or ‘walk proud’. As these two terms effectively mean the same thing our memory banks will have one box marked ‘walk tall’ and a second stored box marked ‘walk proud’. Both thoughts stored in our memory box will instruct our bodies to produce identical feelings (if ever called upon to do so), each of which will lead the body to walk upright.
The other thing that we need to understand is that the mind cannot tell the difference between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagined’. The reason behind this mental phenomenon is that feelings can be generated by an ‘inner image’ as well as a ‘visual sighting’ and that all mental instructions by the mind to the body carry their own corresponding image. Such enables a person to feel ‘inner sensations’ as well as ‘outer sensations’. In imagery terms, the mind and body do not distinguish between what is real (what is experienced by the outside world), and what is imagined (what is believed to be real internally). Consider a hypnotist who can produce body reactions and responses in their hypnotised subject which makes the subject believe what is to the outside audience observing nonsense. Or consider a patient who complains of excruciating pain, which the doctor has to put down to being ‘psychological’ instead of ‘physical’. Because there appears to be no earthly reason for the presence of such pain, a doctor or psychiatrist would assume that it is a mental aberration (a figment of the patient’s mind). The essence here is that to the patient, it matters not as the pain is present in their internal experience, and if another person considers their pain to be imagined, it does not prevent the pain from feeling real to them!
The simple fact is that to our mind and body, ‘truth’ is what we believe it to be. Consider for a moment someone we know as ‘Tom the tramp’ who lives rough and behaves strangely on all occasions and in any situation. Tom wears long shabby robes and a large metal bangle around his head that he calls his crown. Upon examination, a psychiatrist might diagnose ‘Tom’ as being mentally insane, and yet, as far as Tom is concerned, he believes he is King Henry 1V, and therefore he might dress and act as King Henry 1V. In fact, to all intents and purpose, in the experience of Tom, believes that he is King Henry 1V. Tom’s mind and body consider their inhabitant to be no less than King Henry 1V and will act in unison of this belief and the image Tom has of himself.
Indeed, after my childhood traffic accident at the age of 11 years, and three years of being unable to walk, having had four dozen operations on my left leg, I found myself with one leg being three inches shorter than the other leg. I have never worn a built-up boot and I refused to. I wanted my walk to readjust with my body as I grew older. Over the years ahead, I used mental imagery to instruct my body that I was walking with ‘a slight limp’ instead of walking with ‘a pronounced limp’ that would be expected with a three-inch leg-length deficiency! Through enjoining the ‘real’ and’ imagined’ with my own ‘self-talk’ and ‘belief’, I created a ‘new reality’ for myself that my mind and body acted upon. When I walked across the floor, I would imagine myself walking okay but with a 'slight limp’ that suggested one of my legs was one inch shorter than the other, instead of imagining walking with a 'pronounced limp’ that suggested one of my legs was three-inches shorter. Thus, my ‘belief’, my ‘imagination’, my precise ‘self-talk’ mentally instructed my body muscles to walk with a one-inch limp. And if you do not believe me, and you ever get the opportunity, watch me. To put it bluntly, I am walking proof of the validity of the theoretical process I have just espoused! Incidentally, the only time when I limped worse than usual was at the end of a mentally hard day, when my mind and my body were tired. Because of making myself walk with a lesser limp than a three-inch leg-length difference would suggest, over the decades, my two hips realigned themselves to physically enable me to walk in a ‘rolling action’ as opposed to moving ‘one-step-in-front-of-the-other’ action. The effect of this realignment also supported the physical minimisation I wanted in the extent of my limp from one of ‘pronounced’ to one of ‘slight’.
Anyone out there who is still emotionally distressed by the death of a loving partner long after their partner has died is effectively allowing their own belief and self-talk to delay and/prevent their bereavement process from being healthily and emotionally resolved. All those bereaved who always told themselves they could not bear life living without their partner until you start changing your self-talk from the former to something like the paragraph below you will never depart this graveyard memory.
This is the only way that you can healthily negotiate your bereavement period and grieve proportionately to the degree of sorrow you would be feeling today, had you not fed yourself an unhelpful self-fulfilling prophecy for decades through unnecessary and unhelpful self-talk.
Tell yourself this if you want to emotionally move on with your life:
“I loved my bereaved mate more than any man/woman I ever knew, and I am finding it hard to get by without them, but I know I must find a way that keeps them in my fond memory rather than as a living ghost in my actual life. I will always love them and never forget them, and because I never doubted how much they loved me in return, I know that they would want me to start loving myself more in the future. When they lived, they were my world because I made them my world. Rest assured that today, tomorrow, and thereafter, until the day I die, they will remain a very important part of my world, as I learn how to make myself a larger part of my world also.”
Love and peace
Bill xxx
My song today is ‘You’re My World’. This ballad was originally recorded in 1963 as ‘ll Mio Mondo’ (‘My World’) by Umberto Bindi, who co-wrote the Italian version with Gino Paoli. The song was given English lyrics by Carl Sigman as “You're My World”. The song reached No. 1 in Australia (twice), Belgium, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in recordings by Cilla Black: Daryl Braithwaite: Guys and Dolls: Helen Reddy. The versions by Cilla Black and Helen Reddy reached the ‘US Top 40’ in 1964 and 1977, respectively. The song also reached Number 1 in France and Spain in the respective translations ‘Ce monde’ and ‘Mi Mundo’, both sung by Richard Anthony.
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Whenever I hear this song it always reminds me of an emotional problem that bedevils therapists the world over when they meet it in the lives of their clients; ‘loving a person too much'. I suppose when I look at this unusual problem, I would have to say it is less ‘loving a person too much’ and more ‘not loving oneself enough’.
All situations which are difficult to resolve invariably contain an emotional component to them. Allow me to remind you that all behaviour patterns are made up from Thought-Feeling-Action, and it is in that sequence that all our acts start and end, and our behaviour patterns are comprised. First, we ‘Think’ about something, next we formulate a ‘Feeling’ about what we have just thought about, and then our body muscles are instructed automatically to ‘Act’ upon our initial thought.
When our initial thought is a ‘Positive Thought’, the feeling that follows is automatically a ‘Positive Feeling’, and the action that follows is invariably a ‘Positive Action’. Conversely, when our initial thought is a ‘Negative Thought’, the feeling that follows is automatically a ‘Negative Feeling’, and the action that follows is invariably a ‘Negative Action’.
Please note that the action which follows the feeling is ‘invariably’ and not ‘automatically’ of the same quality of the thought and feeling that preceded it. The reason is that the individual has the power to reverse the process at the action stage. By changing their initial ‘thought’ instruction they can reverse the automatic ‘feeling’ that follows, and which invariably produces a corresponding ‘action’.
Next, I would remind you that much of any individual’s daily life is composed of ‘talking to oneself’. This is a mental process that therapists describe as ‘self-talk’. Most of the time, we do not act upon 99 percent of the thoughts that pass through our head, but sometimes we mentally instruct our body muscles to act in a particular way, and to ensure that our body acts as we have mentally instructed it to do, we formulate a corresponding feeling of quality and strength to propel the muscles into action.
So often one or both parties of a loving couple will constantly tell themselves repeatedly (along with the rest of the world), “I love my partner as much as life itself! They are my soulmate and my whole world. They are my sole reason for living and were anything ever to happen that left me without them, it would be so awful I would not be able to stand it, and I would feel like dying without them beside me.”
So many loving couples love their partner ‘too much’ (which means at the expense of them forgetting to love themselves sufficiently). They may have enjoyed fifty years of happily married life before illness takes one of them to the grave. During their lifetime together, one of them might have self-talked in the way described in the previous paragraph; not once or occasionally, but literally hundreds or thousands of times. Often, they will have engaged in a lifetime of such self-talk, believing every word they say to be truthful. When the sad event inevitably happens, their body demands that they pay the price for years and years of instructive self-talk by ensuring that their body now acts like they had been telling themselves for years and years that they expect it to act when left without their loving partner!
Another thing to appreciate about mental/body coordination, instruction, and function is that the mind has a memory box in which it stores all manner of ‘anticipated experiences’, and when the time arrives for those anticipated experiences to be enacted, the thought processes will delve into the memory box where it will find the ‘anticipated experience’ it has stored away repeatedly. Once the ‘anticipated experience’ has been located, the brain then instructs the body how to correspondingly feel in consequence of the anticipated event having happened (the feared death of one’s loving partner). The subject has unknowingly self-hypnotised themselves into future feelings and actions by the strengthening of repeated self-talk of a similar kind over many years. Through constantly saying ‘how they will feel when their loving partner dies', and leaves them on their own, the bereaved person is effectively engaged in the thought-feeling-action process of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell yourself a lie enough times and you will eventually start to believe it!
That is why we should be precise in the use of our language, as every word we tell ourselves has the effect of instructing our body to feel precise (not ‘approximately’ but ‘precisely'), how we told it to feel. In days gone by, our mothers might have told us to ‘walk tall’ or ‘walk proud’. As these two terms effectively mean the same thing our memory banks will have one box marked ‘walk tall’ and a second stored box marked ‘walk proud’. Both thoughts stored in our memory box will instruct our bodies to produce identical feelings (if ever called upon to do so), each of which will lead the body to walk upright.
The other thing that we need to understand is that the mind cannot tell the difference between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘imagined’. The reason behind this mental phenomenon is that feelings can be generated by an ‘inner image’ as well as a ‘visual sighting’ and that all mental instructions by the mind to the body carry their own corresponding image. Such enables a person to feel ‘inner sensations’ as well as ‘outer sensations’. In imagery terms, the mind and body do not distinguish between what is real (what is experienced by the outside world), and what is imagined (what is believed to be real internally). Consider a hypnotist who can produce body reactions and responses in their hypnotised subject which makes the subject believe what is to the outside audience observing nonsense. Or consider a patient who complains of excruciating pain, which the doctor has to put down to being ‘psychological’ instead of ‘physical’. Because there appears to be no earthly reason for the presence of such pain, a doctor or psychiatrist would assume that it is a mental aberration (a figment of the patient’s mind). The essence here is that to the patient, it matters not as the pain is present in their internal experience, and if another person considers their pain to be imagined, it does not prevent the pain from feeling real to them!
The simple fact is that to our mind and body, ‘truth’ is what we believe it to be. Consider for a moment someone we know as ‘Tom the tramp’ who lives rough and behaves strangely on all occasions and in any situation. Tom wears long shabby robes and a large metal bangle around his head that he calls his crown. Upon examination, a psychiatrist might diagnose ‘Tom’ as being mentally insane, and yet, as far as Tom is concerned, he believes he is King Henry 1V, and therefore he might dress and act as King Henry 1V. In fact, to all intents and purpose, in the experience of Tom, believes that he is King Henry 1V. Tom’s mind and body consider their inhabitant to be no less than King Henry 1V and will act in unison of this belief and the image Tom has of himself.
Indeed, after my childhood traffic accident at the age of 11 years, and three years of being unable to walk, having had four dozen operations on my left leg, I found myself with one leg being three inches shorter than the other leg. I have never worn a built-up boot and I refused to. I wanted my walk to readjust with my body as I grew older. Over the years ahead, I used mental imagery to instruct my body that I was walking with ‘a slight limp’ instead of walking with ‘a pronounced limp’ that would be expected with a three-inch leg-length deficiency! Through enjoining the ‘real’ and’ imagined’ with my own ‘self-talk’ and ‘belief’, I created a ‘new reality’ for myself that my mind and body acted upon. When I walked across the floor, I would imagine myself walking okay but with a 'slight limp’ that suggested one of my legs was one inch shorter than the other, instead of imagining walking with a 'pronounced limp’ that suggested one of my legs was three-inches shorter. Thus, my ‘belief’, my ‘imagination’, my precise ‘self-talk’ mentally instructed my body muscles to walk with a one-inch limp. And if you do not believe me, and you ever get the opportunity, watch me. To put it bluntly, I am walking proof of the validity of the theoretical process I have just espoused! Incidentally, the only time when I limped worse than usual was at the end of a mentally hard day, when my mind and my body were tired. Because of making myself walk with a lesser limp than a three-inch leg-length difference would suggest, over the decades, my two hips realigned themselves to physically enable me to walk in a ‘rolling action’ as opposed to moving ‘one-step-in-front-of-the-other’ action. The effect of this realignment also supported the physical minimisation I wanted in the extent of my limp from one of ‘pronounced’ to one of ‘slight’.
Anyone out there who is still emotionally distressed by the death of a loving partner long after their partner has died is effectively allowing their own belief and self-talk to delay and/prevent their bereavement process from being healthily and emotionally resolved. All those bereaved who always told themselves they could not bear life living without their partner until you start changing your self-talk from the former to something like the paragraph below you will never depart this graveyard memory.
This is the only way that you can healthily negotiate your bereavement period and grieve proportionately to the degree of sorrow you would be feeling today, had you not fed yourself an unhelpful self-fulfilling prophecy for decades through unnecessary and unhelpful self-talk.
Tell yourself this if you want to emotionally move on with your life:
“I loved my bereaved mate more than any man/woman I ever knew, and I am finding it hard to get by without them, but I know I must find a way that keeps them in my fond memory rather than as a living ghost in my actual life. I will always love them and never forget them, and because I never doubted how much they loved me in return, I know that they would want me to start loving myself more in the future. When they lived, they were my world because I made them my world. Rest assured that today, tomorrow, and thereafter, until the day I die, they will remain a very important part of my world, as I learn how to make myself a larger part of my world also.”
Love and peace
Bill xxx
