A very common question that comes to me is “Should a husband and wife work on each other?” The tendency has been in the past for husbands and wives not to attempt this. Actually there is no reason why this cannot be done, even when they are antagonistic to each other. If we flatly said that it could not be done we would bar our husbands and wives who are working together with great success. However, there are many husband and wife teams that are not doing well. Maybe twenty to thirty percent of the husband and wife teams fail.

Dianetics is unusual as a mental therapy. One of the reasons is that it works. Another is that it doesn’t require a regular practitioner of Dianetics. This does not include psychotics and insane people in institutions. A Foundation-trained auditor can handle the very difficult cases.

Husbands and wives, knowing this, start to work on each other. After a short time has gone by they will have done some good, but then the team will break up and form two new teams. The reason for this is that husbands and wives practice tacit consent. They like each other and feel sorry for each other, and they say, “If you will leave my engrams alone I will leave your engrams alone.” This is called patty-caking.

Dianetics belongs to the people; it doesn’t belong to a small group. It is developing terminology that we at the Foundation can’t do too much about. The term patty-cake auditing has sprung up for running out things like stubbing toes without getting into the heavy stuff like grief charges. That is the first thing wrong with husband and wife teams.

Another reason husband and wife teams fail is that sometimes they have quarreled. When they go into each other’s pasts they aren’t always able to be tolerant to each other. There are good reasons why they should quarrel. They may have gotten married because their engrams told them to.

One girl had married a man named Tom. She was very dissatisfied with Tom. She very much liked a fellow named George. She separated from Tom and married George. We took her into her past and found that her mother was married to a man named George and was very much afraid that George would leave her. All this was in the poor girl’s engrams. They told her she had to love George and stay with George. There was a person in the case named Tom whom her mother detested. This girl had been in love with about twenty-three men, all named George. This was a reactive mind marriage.

After that it is misery. They don’t love each other. Their engrams tell them to stay together. When they start to audit each other it is dynamite. Sometimes they find these engrams right away, but sometimes they don’t find them, and they disobey the Auditor’s Code. They get angry with each other. They use bad manners, like “You are talking out of your engrams, you’re dramatizing,” and so on. Quarrels can develop which are very serious and definitely impede processing.

If a husband and wife get along together they will be able to audit each other. But they must make up their minds that they have to get rid of each other’s engrams whether it hurts or not. If they can’t get along they had better find somebody else to audit them. That is what experience has taught Us, and you can benefit by that experience.

Parents auditing their children is about the same question. The voices of parents are in the child’s engram bank. When the parent audits the child he restimulates him. If he is particularly able to obey the Auditor’s Code he sometimes can get away with it. But it is better to let thenext-door neighbor audit your child. Of course, she is probably going to find out how you fight with Bill, but is it better to have sane children or keep quiet about how you quarrel?