How to Survive Your Parents

Perhaps you see the same kind of invisible genie forces corrupting your children, acting through their supportive friends. You may see the danger of such friendships, but your children cannot; it is natural for their budding egos to enjoy being stroked. Their thinking is, "What can be so bad about what makes me feel good?"
    No mind involved in pleasure can be possessed of objectivity or foresight. It's up to you to do something to protect your children. But by standing angrily between them and their various craven needs (wants), you make matters worse. Your emotional interference reverses your intent, energizing their determination in favor of foolish endeavors and associations. Yet, if you stand silent, your seeming assent supports their faults in another way. What you do and fail to do will both make matters worse-and this principle holds true for just about any human situation imaginable.
    Likelier than not, if you have a problem, its cause was a milquetoast or violent father. A weak dad sets one up to choose or to become a weak husband. Being a weak man means that you have a lot more of your mother in you than you perhaps care to see, and it is her nature in you that is attracted to the same kind of female spirit (dominant-sup­portive) in a wife. Conversely, female offspring of a domi­nant mother and passive father are attracted to men they can mold and rule (or save)-for exactly the same ego rea­sons the mother had for marrying a weak man.
    As you read on, bear in mind a theme that will recur throughout this text: Dominant and supportive women are one and the same, and weak and violent men are one and the same. These apparent opposites attract and evolve evil between them.

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