The technique of irritating and weakening you (in the guise of loving and helping you) has become highly refined. All this hypocrisy and scientific “dedication to alleviate man’s suffering” tempts you to be angry, judgmental, guilty, inferior, sensitive, reactive, beastly, confused, afraid, and cut off from yourself.

Your ambivalence of “love” and hate toward the hypocrisy serves its purpose—the smiling “benefactors” have triumphed, because they have entangled you in the same tangle they are stuck in.

When a person takes your anxiety away, you still have anxiety but you don’t know that you do. But this false sense of “freedom” from anxiety cannot be sustained without the helper’s services. You begin to feel guilty and “duty bound” as it were to “use” your helper again and again—but it is really you who is being used. (But please don’t consider yourself an innocent victim—you yourself are also using your helper.)

If you don’t burn down society, kill someone or find yourself behind bars through rebellion, you will end up with sickness, conflict and greater guilt than before—and need additional assistance to deal with that (still in the wrong way).

You may somehow sense that your helpers have contributed to your unhappiness and resent them—but that makes you more guilty and draws you even closer to them. Like the fly to the spider.

Penance for your guilt can take very strange forms. You will literally do anything, and pay any price, for a few short-lived moments of approval and comfort and reassurance. Perhaps when you have once again painted yourself into a corner of futility and despair, and when there is no more hope for you, you might just earn one final credit from your doctor by offering your broken corpse to the altar of science to be carved like a sacrificial turkey.

"You may somehow sense that your 'helpers' have contributed to your unhappiness and resent them—but that makes you more guilty..."

We are all products of sick generations and we grow up to seek our parental equivalents as objects to love and hate. And we find them: first in friendships, then in marriage, then at the doctor’s office and lastly at the undertaker’s parlor.

The fact that the “cure” is really an integral part of the sickness, often is not even suspected.

In our blindness, we cannot solve anything. We grow more wretched. All we ever see are more and more symptoms. We are told that the symptoms are the problem, not we ourselves—and we eagerly believe it, like fish taking the worm.

Happily, there is a clue in your feelings that will further verify all of this. As you grow to need your doctor, parent or anyone, their demands upon you grow greater. You become increasingly powerless to refuse them.

You are loath to offend them for fear that they will make you guilty (really the guilt that was never cured returning in full force without the “relief” they offered). You will find you are losing your freedom and must spend more and more time in the labor pains of “love” and therapy. Look again and you will see yourself take out your frustrations on your children—as your parents did on you.

If you will make a careful inspection of your feelings the next time you are “asked” to do something, or when you get your next appointment, see if you don’t catch a fleeting glimpse of hatred followed by guilt—and then comes the decision to oblige or go along with whatever is suggested.