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Page 1 of 2 Every day another person is diagnosed with an addiction, labeled with an –ism or determined to have some behavioral disorder. The nature of our species seems to be to compartmentalize every experience and situation. We want to have a name for it; whatever the problem, our first duty is to give it a name. If we don’t call it something then it doesn’t exist and that would not be acceptable; we want a name for our discomfort.
There is a chronic need for people to go to the doctor in search of a name for the latest ache or pain or for that matter any anomaly. Once we have a name for it then it becomes real, we can take a drug for it. …and forget about it. We take the drug with the belief it is some form of cure. It is commonly accepted in almost every healing circle except the world of government sanctioned medicine that drugs do not cure disease. They only mask the disease or eliminate the symptoms. I remember many years ago when my mother proudly declared that she had “restless leg syndrome”. For years she had spent hours awake every night with strange muscle spasms and twitches. She kept searching for a medical diagnosis. She just wanted someone to say you have _______. Fill in the blank. Why is it so important for human beings to find a name for something rather than give it their own name. It seems important that we as a race be able to commiserate about our apparent helplessness. We think we want sympathy. But more importantly we want someone else to tell us we are truly helpless, and that we have to do what they tell us. We want to believe that someone out there can be more of an expert than we are about ourselves. And the wonder of it all is that we are right. Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t you are right.” When we believe in the power of another over us they will have power over us. If they believe we are ill then, so be it, we shall make them right. My mother had always been given drugs for sleeping but it wasn’t until she was convinced they knew what she had before the drugs were effective. They treated her and masked the symptoms. She still had the deep emotional wounds, the drugs didn’t heal those. She developed a continual stream of conditions after that occasion. She received drugs and surgery, slowly her mobility and quality of life continued to deteriorate.
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