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Show Neurotics Are Numerous and Make Life Unpleasant for the Rest of the Family Then there are the family dictators dicta-tors who rule by direct methods rather than by appeals to sympathy, and pity. They are fathers and mothers who turn their children either into weaklings or into bitter rebels against authority; wives who browbeat their husbands into apologetic apolo-getic "timid souls"; husbands whose wives tremble with fear at their frown. Neurotics are hard to get along with because they find it hard to get along with themselves. Because they are uncomfortable they make others uncomfortable. They haven't really grown up, but get their own way by playing on other people's sympathies or scaring them into submission, just as children do. Whether clinging and sweet or tempestuous tem-pestuous and domineering, they are family tyrants when allowed to be, and neurotics do make cowards of us all. Those difficult people whom we call neurotics are getting plenty of advice nowadays. But bw about those long-sufrering ones who have to live with neurotics? Isn't it time they received a little of the aid and comfort that is being passed around? A nervous invalid can reduce a whole family to serfdom-and what can't one do to the family pocket-book' pocket-book' Countless scores of men and women-more often women-suffer from aches and pains for which no physician can find an organic cause. They wander from one doctor to another looking hopefully for the miracle man who "really understands under-stands my case." Some have "heart spells or gas on the stummick." or throw a mysterious mys-terious kind of fit when they are crossed, writes Raymond G. Fuller in Cosmopolitan Magazine. The handy illness flares up in a family emergency, just when calmness and efficiency are especially needed. When moving day comes or Jota ny breaks his leg, or Aunt Emma arrives for a visit, a headache (or something) sends the fragile one to Ded while more mature members of, the family have to carry on. |