There are many things in this world that cause great neurosis in people, and the want for perfection is at the top of the list.
There are many psychological issues that have been labelled and regarded as mental disease. In our understanding of disease I feel that the labels are unfair, and seek to make the human organism out to be faulty.
Yes there is much dis-ease in the world, for the world does not promote the idea of taking it easy, and to say that somebody who is labeled with obsessive compulsive disorder has an illness, is like saying that someone who is imprisoned for a crime is sick. Both have been failed by the society ideology.
The growing mind is a phenomenon beyond comprehension, and the most impressionable mind is of course the mind of a child.
I have coached many people who have suffered from OCD, and inquiring into their past, it doesn’t take long to find that their presenting behaviour is simply a stress response to a situation, or the way they were raised. This is not an illness. It is a trauma.
We have all been traumatised in one way or another, and to varying degrees, and it is our innate self preserving response that become the cause for many of our psychological neurotic expression.
I have found that OCD has a commonality among people for the need to control their environment or self to give a sense of security. Anxiety, the impending doom of what may or may not happen, from the inability to be present to the moment. Depression, the heaviness of regret or guilt, becoming a ball and chain on the life that cannot break free of the story of the past.
These are not illnesses, these are established, neurological habits built within the self in response to parenting, culture and society’s insistence that you must conform, improve, submit, surrender and act according to their ideas and fears.
Most of the damage is done through parenting, and the well meaning parent can be just as damaging to the child as the neglectful parent.
All too often a child has grown up with a fear and anxiety response to life from pressure to perform, or create the perfect life that the parent has outlined for them. I have even coached young troubled teens who find life too difficult to navigate as a result of the parents providing too much assistance, resulting in a lack of self confidence. Again, the outcome is anxiety. Quite possibly the greatest dis-ease in the world along side depression.
To the parents that I coach, I always inform them that no matter what they do, they will screw their children up in someway, and the safest roll to play in their child’s life is not the main roll, but a supporting roll.
The greatest mistake we can make, is to claim that we know what’s best for our children. How can we know that, when most of the time we don’t know what is best for ourselves.
The healthy way for us to raise our humanity, and especially those of the next generation, is to encourage risk taking, allow expressions, accept our differences, and understand that there is no right or wrong way to raise our children, and that maybe is not about raising them as much as it is about allowing them to be the full expression of themselves. Much like the natural unfolding and blooming of a flower.
Once we accept that nothing is perfect, and let our children understand that we ourselves are fumbling through this life… Maybe then, the human being may break free of labels and pressure to be anything other than who they already are, and who they are naturally becoming.
Let there be light
Saddhanta Ananda
LIVING ESSENCE 