<p> tags render as &amp;lt;p&amp;gt;

When i enter text into a CCK Text Field, my html tags are rendered as special chars rather than html tags.
This means that viewing the resulting content shows the

tags in the browser. This is because the actual html code has been encoded with special chars <p> instead of outputting <p>, in fact even these special chars are converted to special chars, so the actual result in the source is <p>

Can someone help me resolve this issue before i rip all my hair out?