How to Survive Your Parents

loyal, loving, benevolent and worthy, when really he is a cat patiently waiting for the master to leave so he can pounce on his dinner.
    Poor woman, no wonder you are confused! You can­not understand your craving for the kind of man who inspires in you only judgment and contempt. The bully who has contempt for the coward needs the coward to feel secure, because bully is all he knows. But what does that contempt do? Does it awaken the cowardly lion? No, it only frightens him into a more contemptible cowardice, making the bully meaner.
     When grace fails in a man, in that void left where grace no longer is, an evil (which could not otherwise be) manifests in the form of Mr. Mean and masquerades as a Mr. Nice. No matter how these two behave, they turn the wheel of chaos and confusion, of the slave-tyrant rela­tionships that have established on this planet the rule of evil and the Fall.
      Can you see why Mr. Nice is no damn good, and why what you have thought of as good-your good, his good, anyone's good-is nothing but a selfish game of pride? Nice is not necessarily the opposite of mean; your false "good" introduces and reinforces "mean," and mean reinforces phony good. Such goodness is just another form of wickedness; it is the weakness that we have called "the handmaiden of evil."
     So, if you are one of those Mr. Meek and Mild weaklings, expect to have a wild, frustrated wife. And if you are scratching your wooden head wondering what it is she wants from your animal carcass, ask yourself, while you are about it, just why are you so nice? Are you not pleasing her in order to get her devil to grant you a sense

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