Screwtape and Wormwood

Holy cow! The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is one of the most profound books I've ever read...and I'm only on chapter 4! It's amazing. It's a little tough to read, you have to wrap your mind around it to understand what it's saying and you probably won't pick up on it if you are easily distracted, but HOLY MOLEY, it's so worth reading. For anyone who is not familiar with the book. It's a series of letters, it's a satire, between Screwtape, a world-wise old devil (literally) and his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon. Screwtape is writing to Wormwood and encouraging him in his attempts to secure the damnation of an ordinary young man. It's a book about temptation written from the vantage point of the ENEMY. It's really creative and SO profound.
Here is a chapter from it, this one struck home, hardcore!

My dear Wormwood,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviou to the old lady at any moment. You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with out colleague Clubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settles habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks. The following methods are useful.
1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind--or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful himan characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very 'spiritual', that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person, and it will be your takst to make that imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person faily less and less like the real mother--the sharp-tounged old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his pryaers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moments notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into consciousness of your patient that particular list of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy--if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.

4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all this own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time juding all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hense from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing; 'I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a tempter.' Once this habit is established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken. Finally, tell me something that the old lady's religious positition. Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son's life?--at all piqued that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such a good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of 'fuss' about it--or that he's getting in on very terms? Remember the elder brother in the Enemy's story?

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape