Private psychiatric practice
with Cabinet for psychotherapy
Dr. Sandic
Tel.: ++ 387 33 645 112
Psychotherapist's diary
About neurosis
Borne along by the current of everyday happenings, we live by inertia. Living in a human community, one experiences joy and despair, we react emotionally to whatever is happening to us at the given moment. In this spontaneous mode of life, our most frequent preoccupation is the causes of our own unease and anxieties.
A breakdown in the way we function is usually expressed in the painful experience of the symptoms caused by mental illness. People who are unhappy at the way others behave towards them generally fail to realize that it is in fact their own attitudes and behaviour that provoke others to behave towards them as they do. Others, when dissatisfied with their relationships with their parents, spouse or friends, change both themselves and others. In open confrontation or, if possible, friendly dialogue and discussion, they compel both others and themselves to correct the way they have been behaving. This enables them to establish good relations with them and to attain harmony in their everyday lives.
Quite a few people who are unhappy with their lives, though, are passively resigned to their fates, resigned to living like that. We often hear them complaining that the people around them do not understand them, that other people exploit them. People like this can be heard saying: ‘I’m a good person, and everyone knows it. That’s why they take advantage of me. I forget myself in pleasing others.’ Beneath this dissatisfaction at their own ‘goodness’, however, lies the ‘weakness’ of an immature personality. Such personalities have not attained the inner freedom to live in harmony with their own needs, nor the spiritual maturity to interact with others in a mature and healthy manner.
Human beings are not born as social beings, but are genetically coded to become such as they grow and develop. A social being is only built through exchanges of experience with others. These exchanges and interactions take place from the very moment of birth and continue until death.
In the developmental period, children inevitably experience deprivation as well as the satisfaction of their needs. They are rewarded for obedience, and punished when they deserve it. And thus, in contact with the world around them, children – and indeed adults – experience feelings of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Interpersonal relations are dynamic, and inclined to constant change. It is only in contact with nature and other beings that we can be happy and fulfilled, imbued with feelings of love, tranquillity, security and self-respect. And conversely, we react to the deprivations to which we are exposed from the day of our birth until the day we die with feelings of anger, rage, overt or covert hatred of the people we feel threatened by. We may also be overwhelmed by feelings of our own impotence.
What does our mental health depend on?
A mentally healthy child or adult depends on the quality of relations with his or her parents, spouse, children, friends and colleagues at work.
Mentally healthy people are determined primarily by the ability of parents to monitor and encourage the psychological development of their children. It is desirable for parents to follow the inherited nature. Only this will create the conditions needed for their children to develop into mature personalities. Parents may also experience their children as personalities that are not distinct from themselves. Such parents raise their children according to their own stereotypes, and pave the way for them to become alienated personalities. This is what parents do who offer their children love and raise them strictly, with too much emphasis on principle and too little understandingn for the true needs and potential of their children.
For this very reason I should like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that we should never forget that each child is a distinct personality, and as such demands a distinctive approach. The mental health of both children and adults depends on the extent to which their parents, in bringing them up, have responded to their individual needs and potential. If parents, intuitively understanding their children, succeed in this task, society gains a healthy, mature individual. Conversely, in deluding themselves in their emotional and pedagogical approach to their children, parents make them weak, vulnerable and liable to mental illness.
I am therefore directly addressing the readers of this book, inviting them, as they read it, to see themselves and the members of their family, as well as other people they come into contact, with, from a different angle, a different perspective. I hope that this book will be a signpost to them in their journey towards a better understanding of themselves and others, and that it will enable them to discover new abilities within themselves and to change what does not suit them.