Chapter 1: Hate Your Parents, Hurt Your Kids

Let’s face the facts and take a good, hard look at where all your troubles began—in your home! The great majority of parents are completely deranged, if not criminally insane. At the very least, they have a streak of madness in them a mile long. For the most part, parents are impossible, con-fusing, dangerous creatures with whom to deal. There is only one cure, which, if it doesn’t help your parents, will at least help you. That cure is love.

Love is what most parents need more than anything in this world. They were never given love when they were young, because their parents didn’t have any to give. In fact, the present miserable, loveless state of humanity can be traced all the way back to antiquity, to the original failing of a man to extend a correcting love toward a woman. Adam might have said, “Eve, don’t tempt. Be a good girl and put that apple down.” But he didn’t. One man’s failing resulted in mankind being born under the tyranny of unloved and unloving authorities. We are infected with fear, hate and madness from the day we are born. There is no escape except through love. But because no one has real love to give, we are hurt and confused about what love is.

It seems strange to say that children need to love their parents, because tradition has it the other way around. But what if the love from which children need to draw is nowhere to be found? Then, maturing to the role of parents ourselves, what are we to do? Are we doomed forever be-cause we have never known love and therefore cannot give it? Of course not! The truth is that the love you are seeking comes more from loving others than from being loved yourself. It must be the kind of love that does not expect to be loved in return.

Ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of all parents were emotionally crippled in their formative years. They had violent, impatient or sticky sweet parents who “laid a trip” on them which rendered them incapable of extending love to their children. The emotional traumas of childhood not only psychologically blocked your parents’ ability to love you, but also compelled them to pass a kind of mental burden on to you. They have been driven to set you upon a path from which all your problems arise: problems with your parents, yourself, your own family and with all the world. You are so caught up in your mind with the struggle that you now find yourself behaving just as inhumanly toward your offspring as your parents did to you, and their parents did to them.

How could your parents not be impatient? How could they not be resentful? Violence is all they have ever known, just as impatience is all your children will know from you unless you awaken.

We, the unloved, are all born under an ancient hypnotic curse. The Bible tells us that the sins (failures) of the fathers are projected to the third and fourth generations, but His mercy is extended to those thousands who yearn for God and keep His laws. The Creator’s law is love. His love is not the kind you get by wanting it from people; neither is it the supportive kind of love you give in order to get people to love you in return. It is much more profound than that.

The conflict you feel raging within you and within your own family began with your reaction to some kind of traumatic parental tease or pressure. No matter how hard you try to compensate for the harm your parents did by emotionalizing you, you cannot help being the impatient, cruel extension of their nature. Whether you are hurting from being hated or from being corrupted through spoiling love, you are under a compulsion to pass emotional and psychological confusion on to succeeding generations.

The world is mad—or haven’t you noticed?

Everyone you meet on your journey through life is mad in his or her own unique style. The formula for dealing with every twisted personality quirk in people is the same as that for dealing with your parents.

If you can’t deal with your parents properly, you become progressively unable to cope with anyone or anything else. Sooner or later you feel the full effect of the curse. You will fail, blame your parents and hurt your own children. Perhaps you will knock them down to build yourself up, or build their egos up to bolster your own ailing pride, taking credit for what you have motivated them to do. You always play a role! You are the one who gets hurt, and then you become the one who does the hurting.

Patience is the way to perfect love. By not responding to a parental tease, you express correcting love, which lifts you out of the age-old system of chain-reaction response. Patience is love for children, as well as for parents. Patience is love for mankind.

Patience is the evidence of love maturing, and it is this kind of unselfish love that points the way to maturity for those around you. So, you see, filial love, parental love and brotherly love should all reduce to the one agape, Godly love—patience.

May the Creator bless you to see that your parents are out of control, that something in them is driving them to hurt you. If you are able to see this clearly, you will not feel the hurt or the need to relieve your pain by hurting others. You will also feel relief in realizing that you are not mad for seeing what is wrong with them. With compassion comes patience and, through patience, the good which overcomes evil.

A soul inclined toward good, will see clearly that it has no alternative except to be patient. It is not a matter of conscious control, but of being so close to reality—so objective, so distant to emotion—that you become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Patience is the gift of the Spirit, given through under-standing. Understanding the spiritual agony others suffer in their cruelty toward you will help you have compassion for them, rather than feelings of resentment. You will no longer feel such hatred or cry so many tears.

Patience is the perfect offense and the perfect defense. With patience to sustain you under trial, the unholy spirit that drives your parents cannot get through you to hurt others ever again. Your patience can free even those who try to hurt you with their impatience.

Parents are like oversized kids who have never outgrown their selfishness. Your patience is the love, which might help them to see that. Regardless of whether they ever see it or not, your patience will keep you safe from the sick, unspeakable thing that has made a home in them. The naughty, love-starved child (in you) is corrected each moment you stand firm with patience. Each precious moment in which you give to others the patient love that you would have them give to you, you will find welling up in yourself the substance of good for which you have always hungered.

Slowly but surely you will be set free from the mental torment of getting either too much attention or not enough. When you do not reach out for the love of the world, when you begin instead to have compassion, God rewards you with the infilling warmth of His friendship. You see, seeking the ego-supporting affection of the world has made you an enemy of God.

When my father died, I cried. I missed him. There was an emptiness in my life; I couldn’t believe he was gone. In futility, I sought him in other people. Then one day a pro-found thought occurred to me that saved me from sadness: the man who died was not my real father. God is my only true father. It was He who revealed this truth to me; believing in it comforted my soul, and I have been growing in His truth ever since.

The ultimate purpose of love is to correct another’s ego-needs and cravings, to set him free from the need of personal and social ego-support. All of us must eventually find our own ground of being. We must be strong from within. Paul said that the more I love (correct) you, the less you love (need) me.

If you are to survive the holocaust of life and receive the prize of salvation, you must deal with unreasonable pressures in a reasonable way—that is, with patience, from the ground of your inner being. Without patience for others, you cannot be patient with your own inherited faults (sins), or those that have slipped in through the sin of impatience.

Are you stubborn in your pride? Then you will be stubborn in the belief that you must have love from the world, because your guilt makes you a desperado, demanding sympathy and affection. Don’t harden your heart, or then you will be unable to believe the truth, and that unfortunate state will set you more firmly upon the path of futility, until your torment finally awakens you (if you let it).

Just as impatience is the primitive energy of pride, so is patience the force behind humility.

Because of their proclivity toward pride, people can be tempted by cruelty to be impatient and resentful. Impatience tempted and trained you to be resentful as a child and so reinforced the nature of pride, which now feeds impatiently on the reactions of your own resentful, fearful victims. Just as resentment toward parental impatience made you the inferior projection of the wickedness lurking in them, now as a parent yourself you find you are pulling rank in the same miserable chain gang of command.

Perhaps you can realize what love is, if only by observing what you have suffered from its lack. Upon reaching maturity, you find yourself at the threshold of understanding—but it is a negative experience, whereas, if your parents had known how to love you, it might have cultivated your relationship with truth in a positive way. If your parents had loved you as they should have—patiently, with a firm, no-nonsense approach—they might have stopped the error growing inside you dead in its tracks. Through the persistence of their patience, you could have eventually felt their divine concern toward you. Loving the good in them, you would have matured toward the origin of goodness to become a friend of God. Unfortunately, you have grown so corrupt that your conscience now seems to be the enemy. Your present resentment toward the “enemy” makes it impossible to take that one step beyond resentment to peace and freedom from sin.

Even if your parents had been perfect, you might have hated them just the same for not letting you have your own way. Through their long-suffering (not hating you back),you would have been privileged to feel the redeeming shame of your own conscience. Instead, you now feel only the pain of conflict, accompanied by a need to escape from reality into the false redemption of pleasure, resentment and blame. The trick you are using is this: if everything wrong is all their fault, it follows that there is no fault in you!

Resentment, bitterness and blame, supported by a real reason, can sustain a judgment. In other words, you tend to fixate on other people as the cause of your problems to avoid seeing the manifestation of error in yourself. If your parents had been patient, it would have pulled the rug from under you and made you face yourself, for your judgment would have been without a cause. We all owe our children the opportunity to experience “judgment-without-a-cause.”

If you hadn’t resented your own awakening, you might have been shamed into reconciliation with your conscience, and conscience would have become your friend. It is this sort of inner contact that causes men to share with one another the greater life and wisdom of their Creator.

Beware of trying to figure out what makes people act the way they do. Fall into this trap and you will become as mad as they are! It is sufficient to realize that there is something eating your parents’ minds away from the inside and trying its damnedest to make a new home in you.

See it, know it and never doubt it. Be objective. Have compassion and, above all, be patient. Hate the sin by not hating its victim, the sinner.

Hold fast to the faith. Respond only with patience and your innocence will be preserved. Old guilts, fears and shortcomings will bubble up to the light to be resolved and you will find then that you can be patient with yourself.

A knowledge of the whys and wherefores of cruel or unnatural behavior is not what you need—not to begin with, anyway. What you need more than anything is patience, patience that comes from seeing clearly and not doubting what is revealed.

Patience is the foundation and heartbeat of the new being. Impatience has built the problem-personality, but patience will tear down the sin-self and make way for the salvation of the Lord.

Impatience is strong before the weak and weak before the strong. The unholy response to impatience is resentment, wherein the victim swells up in judgment and also in conflict with the Divine Will.

Resolving your resentment and impatience is the key to just about every problem you have, mental, emotional and physical.

Address yourself to the weaknesses of resentment and impatience, and all other symptoms that have grown out of them will disappear. For example, if your overweight problem comes from being upset, then you must address yourself to the upset before the overeating problem can be truly overcome.

An impatient person’s need for judgment-food can project as violence in his or her children. Through resentment, the beast of pride grows and uses impatience to have its prideful way with the weak. Impatience projects, while resentment has a way of accepting what is projected. Impatience thrives on hurting and resentment thrives on being hurt. A good example of this is the complaining, resentful wife who secretly thrives on the judgment she feels toward the violent and cruel husband whom she has cultivated to take liberties with her.

Fail to cope with impatience patiently just one time and you will become a permanent victim. What is set up is a psychological treadmill of morbid thinking, feeling and compensating that sustains the wickedness of others, then projects misery and suffering without end.

You may try to cope with unreasonable people but, without the virtue of patience, their temptation proves too much for you. Your soul’s failing emerges as resentment, which becomes violence, suppressed or expressed.

The guilt of your failing causes you to hide from reality in the jungle of your thoughts. You become a fearful psychotic, a people-pleaser who is subject to all manner of wicked authorities. Or you try to overcome your fear of authority by evolving to become that authority. You are no longer the one who gets ulcers—you become the one who gives them.

Being lost in your emotions and thoughts is what allows the harm of hell to come through. The prideful nature in parents projects problems through the children’s egos and then refuses to see where those problems originated.

Children often carry a heavy burden of blame all their lives. They learn to take the blame themselves or, as their parents did to them, they compel others to take up their guilts in order to relive their own burden. However, it never works. In the process of struggling to accomplish either one of these wretched ends, they only accumulate more guilt that further addicts them to the guilty process of blaming and accepting blame.

We carry complexes, strange suggestions, guilts, fears and inferiorities that loveless authorities have pressed into our heads. It is only natural to feel that love can cure them, because it could, if only we knew exactly for what we should be looking.

Deprived of this elusive love, you have developed into a very guilty, selfish person indeed—much worse than just a little child who couldn’t grow up. The conscience you now feel exists not only because of the pain of not being loved and corrected, but also because of the sin of pride which has slipped in through resentment. Through judgment and blame, the sin-nature continues to mushroom in you. Resentment, impatience and blame have become part of a cycle of accepting sin and projecting it.

Resentment cheats you out of love. Resentment is the classic response to temptation. It is this that deprives you of life and substance and makes you into a nothing that tries desperately to be a something. More determined (and more willful) than ever, you begin manipulating for love. Alas, you end up being manipulated through your own maneuvering. Your efforts backfire and make you ever more resentful. For example, you are so ambitious for approval that you can become too obliging; the idea being that others will be obligated to give you love. All this does is give people the power to take advantage of you which, in turn, makes you angry and causes the pain that compels you to try harder to get approval. Perhaps you will try to be perfect so as to be worthy of love, but this sham of perfection often frightens people off and leads to another rejection.

The love you need can never come, as you foolishly think it will, through people-pleasing. Furthermore, you can no more make people love you, when you have resentment toward them, than your parents could straighten you out by resenting and being impatient with you.

How could your parents not be impatient? How could they not be resentful? Violence is all they have ever known, just as impatience is all your children will ever know from you unless you awaken.

At best you will only receive something that looks like love, which your impatience sometimes obliges people to give you. Their hostile reaction to you makes them feel guilty and that can cause them to seek your approval to assuage the guilt. Approval, whether from them or for them, is destructive. Approval is never a corrective form of love. This kind of closeness is a spoiling, supporting love for everything that is secretly wrong with both of you.

Approval reinforces error, which in turn breeds dependence. Contempt and resentment grow from that dependence because your dependence is evidence that neither one of you has enough real love to set the other free. Resentment is what leads back to dependence on the love which enslaves, and a vicious cycle is formed which leads from “love” to hate and back again.

Through impatience and resentment you lose understanding as a positive, constructive force, and gain it back in the negative form of a guilty conscience.

This is the pain you are foolishly trying to resolve through supporting and being supported by others.

Let me remind you again that one can only experience true love and real gain through patience; failing that, you experience only sin and loss. Therefore, be patient with the cruelty and treachery, the greeds and needs of others; then you can be patient with your own shortcomings. Patience cures everything. Any feeling of loss or inferiority, of becoming a “nothing” while striving to be a “something,” is caused by your hostile response to impatient authority.

Patience will help one transcend sin and mortal weak-ness, beginning with the infantile ego-need for mother’s love and ending with the sexual love for mother-wife.

Remember those two forms of love. One kind of love is worldly, supportive of and sympathetic to the failing of pride, plus all the sickness symptoms that have wormed their way into you through resentment. The other, true love is divine. It is made manifest as patience, which rebukes sin and disease (the symptom of sin).

Patient admonishment is all you will ever need. The fulfillment of patience is God’s reward in you for not looking to the world for love to comfort your pride.

Patience works as a creative power, whether others are patient with you or you are patient with them. There is benefit to both parties, whether it is you who appreciates the patience and so receives the good, or whether it is you who is being patient.

A baby requires the warm body and the ego-comforting, ego-supporting love of mother. But too much affection is a deadly temptation to the ego of the child and can weaken its personality.

Seeing to it that the child transcends his need for mother’s enslaving love is the father’s job. A father must have special powers to wean his child away from a female-centered existence and cultivate in him an independent and God-centered life. Unfortunately, most men are like drunks, addicted to the nectar of female love. They are insecure, pathetic, selfish creatures who wallow in the reassurance they get from making mothers out of wives. These selfish sons of witches are impotent as far as true love is concerned.

Mother’s affection, without the overriding, corrective influence of a father’s firm, no-nonsense, patient presence, tends to build the child’s ego-identity beyond its natural state and, by doing so, unwittingly tempts the child to become spoiled and prideful. Escaping guilt through a sense of power is the usual motive for spoiling a child. Getting high on the worship you require is an attempt to make good the loss and pain you formerly experienced at the hands of your hateful parents. The sin that has made you a loser now impatiently cries out for its own victim to feed upon.

Mother’s love is a selfish, ego-supporting, crippling need-to-be-needed that can only tempt, so that her own ego will in turn be supported by a weak, obedient, psychotic victim. This love is always destructive. It can never correct.

It will no more correct the child’s ego-need than bartenders or dope pushers will correct their victims’ needs. Behind every need-to-be-needed is a victim seeking someone to victimize.

The vampires who seek to possess may bring about their own rejection. When rejection causes resentment, the im-patient vampire becomes the resentful victim and everything turns around.

Because selfish love always hurts (both to give and to receive), it always metamorphoses into resentment. Just as resentment addicts us to needing, impatience addicts us to being needed. So it comes to pass that we hate what we need and need what we hate. Psychology calls this contradictory condition “ambivalence,” because psychology doesn’t differentiate between need and love. One cannot love and hate at the same time, simply because true love transcends hate. But you can hate and need at the same time! Notice how “love” is purposely confused with need. The prideful cannot admit that theirs is the wrong kind of love—it has to be the only love there is.

Loving and being loved, hating and being hated; your whole life revolves around sin. When sin grows up inside you and starts to hurt (conflict), it cries out for comfort— sympathy and “understanding” for what it is. While some people enjoy controlling you through frustrating that need, others simply can’t resist rising to the occasion to comfort you, like angels from heaven (and controlling you that way).

For this reason, no woman in her wrong mind, craving “love” herself, will correct a child—she wouldn’t do it even if she had the power. She will impatiently cripple and spoil her child for what her tormented soul craves. Often she rejects her baby for demanding something from her, some-thing she herself wants from him. In her wrath, she teases and terrorizes the child to worship her and rewards its weakness with false affection. A female child may grow up to be like mother; the male child will seek a mother. And that is the hell into which we were all born.

A noble child or husband cannot and will not provide the feedback of worship, but they are called “cold,” “un-friendly” and other uncomplimentary names. The attention-seeking witch has little tolerance for anyone’s need but her own, and she is threatened by those whom she cannot destroy to feed her ego’s need.

Were you resentful at being rejected? If so, that was where the spirit of your mother succeeded in getting inside and making you a loser—a nothing trying to be a something. To this day, everyone who accepts you uses you just as your mother did. You bow and scrape, hoping upon hope to get approval, but all you do is give your guts for tidbits, pats on the head. You are locked into this stupid mistake over and over again. You are under a compulsion, a hypnotic spell. Eventually, you may be driven to be cruel to get “by crook” what you can’t get “by hook.”

And there you go again, hurt becomes resentment and resentment changes to guilt. The pain of guilt whets your need, or your need-to-be-needed, and the world calls it “love”.

Behind this kind of love is resentment.

Now do you see why you are so frustrated, angry and riddled-through with problems? Your soul, needing divine love, has made the classic error of seeking supporting love for the original sin-self rather than reproving love that would correct you from the ways of pride. You need to be chastened from this unholy need. You need to be corrected. Only the serpent will love you as you are.

It is common for a woman to mistake a bully’s power for the manly strength she needs in a husband. Such women-corrupted men delight in putting women down, trying to get back what they lost to their mothers.

Gentlemen, it is too late for you to seek the salvation of a warm body. You are beyond the point where momma’s reassurance would have a value. Look! Underneath every need for sexual reassurance is that other ego-need for momma’s body-love for baby. Wean yourself away from both these needs, before you make a mother out of your wife. Destroy your woman with your selfish, infantile need and she will destroy you with her “love.” Resentment is the key. Needful love, whether fulfilled or frustrated, takes more than it gives.

Contempt goes to the winner, resentment to the loser, while guilt accumulates to both of you. And what does guilt do when we won’t face our faults? It drives us to “love” with need and with the need to be needed.

Indeed, any guilt you may presently feel in relation to your parents can cause you to take the blame for whatever happens to them. Let us say, for example, that your father was a drunk and you resented him. In this case, you could be compelled to feel that what happens to him is all your fault for not giving him the love he wanted from you, for not being the “good” dutiful child. Perhaps you have been nagged with the notorious line, “You will be the death of me yet!” Granted, you may well be a problem child, but only because of your parents’ impatience, cruelty and seductive “loving.” But parents have the power to slyly turn it around the other way, to lay all the burden of their sickness and tragedy on you. God! How you resented that! It was through your own resentment that the burden was laid upon you.

Think of it! The guilt you feel as a result of your resentment at being rejected can be turned around so that you accept responsibility for your parents’ sickness and failure. Guilt (through the emotion of resentment) now compels you to give your guts for your parents’ approval. But no matter how good you are to them, you can never make them happy. Everything you do makes them more miserable, for which they blame you! Indeed, some of the blame is yours—you are making them worse by giving them sympathy instead of compassion, which is corrective.

Like an alcoholic dreams of drink, so have you dreamed of love. You have been high on love and high on rejection. You are like a gambler, always challenged to get even with the house, but losing to it again and again. At long last, when you can no longer pay up, you get your legs broken to satisfy the debt. There is no end to what you have to give in order to get, and all you get is got! Just like the gambler, once you lose, the loss challenges, fixates and fascinates you (resentfully) to win, if only to prove you can beat the system, even if you lose your soul. It’s all you nothings have left to trade for becoming somethings.

The bottom line is this: the basis of all sin lies in being deceived. So when your sinning ego keeps wanting the glorifying, sustaining, justifying “love” that you have been (deceived into) wanting, you must keep sinning and struggling to get back what you have lost in the deception.

Frustration always arises when you will into being that which you think is important. As soon as you welcome the truth—which is that you shouldn’t need worldly love—your anxieties will begin to disappear. Not only will anxiety vanish, as understanding neutralizes the frustration of reaching in the wrong direction, but, going deeper, understanding will also take away all the resentment, blame and emotional needs which masquerade as love.

Foreward

“Children are imprinted by the personality of the dominant parent at an early age, and they will show the same behavior subconsciously in their later lives toward their own children and spouse. People unknowingly set themselves up to reproduce the trauma of their earlier lives and thus imprint their own children and pass their problem on from generation to generation.

By using the meditation technique as taught by Roy Masters, the individual can overcome his problem by becoming objective and by understanding it, and therefore is able to overcome his compulsive tendency to respond to the world around him, to his spouse, and to his own children in the manner of the past generation.”

—Irene A. Royko, M.D.

“As a pediatrician I believe that as a parent you are potentially more dangerous to your own child than are any germs. If your child is having physical or emotional problems, it is a signal to you that you are doing something wrong. Most parents would rather blame vitamins, diet, the weather or the stars for their children’s problems. Some parents intuitively feel responsible for their children’s problems but can‘t see clearly where their failing lies. If you want to learn how to truly love your children (that is, protect them from harm, both from yourself as well as from others) then I prescribe the ‘medicine’ in Roy Masters’ book, How To Survive Your Parents.”

—Richard Mittleman, M.D.