Last week, I wrote about the Godfather and the parallels of his life of addiction and real people’s addictions, such as addictions that clients often suffer from who seek therapy.\u00a0The addiction is not\u00a0the only issue to address in someone’s life. Addictions point to\u00a0deeper, underlying issues within a person and influences families and loved ones. The person\u00a0who is suffering from addiction can still be intelligent, highly functioning, financially successful, and gain approval from peers.\u00a0\u00a0A person does not have to lose everything to\u00a0understand that\u00a0they are suffering from an\u00a0addiction or an addictive personality. Losing everything that matters to a person is\u00a0simply part of the final stages of an addiction once it has taken over.\u00a0Noticing the addiction at this time is very late in the game.\u00a0Having denial about masking or pain killing real feelings such as\u00a0abandonment, shame, guilt, and other emotional struggles allows the addictive behavior ro run out of control.<\/p>\n
Once an addiction is unraveled,\u00a0understood, and accepted,\u00a0the process of\u00a0understanding the feelings that trigger the need to pain kill can be seen and felt more clearly.\u00a0The type of addiction, the details and frequency are critical to understanding yourself. Abandonment, shame, and guilt can create a cycle that feels\u00a0unending, helpless, and hopeless. When the Godfather abandons his needs for real love that he feels for his girlfriend\u00a0and trades\u00a0this for approval from his father and his family, he does so out of guilt and shame. A client recently\u00a0began unraveling his addiction to approval from other people and more poignantly, of other women. In last week’s blog, I shared\u00a0the Godfather’s family influences that pushed him further into addiction. As he grew further and further away from his own identity, essentially abandoning himself, by abandoning\u00a0his needs, his new life\u00a0provided opportunities\u00a0for him to latch onto activities that recreated his pain and fed his pain killing activities.\u00a0Similarly, my client\u00a0recreated a life that mimics his childhood, even though he consciously knew he never wanted some of those events to be repeated. But the little boy in him, that feels hurt by the losses he felt as a child is all too familiar with seeking out relationships that are empty and void of love and affirmation, feeding the beast even more into a cycle of shame and abandonment.<\/p>\n
There\u00a0is a scene in the\u00a0Godfather\u00a0during a family dinner, where the Don (Marlon Brando)\u00a0and all his sons are eating together. The youngest son, Al Pacino,\u00a0has no interest in getting into the family business. He had fallen in love with a girl, was disgusted by his father’s behavior and saw himself as different\u00a0from his brothers. However, his conscious desire to have something different in life, different from\u00a0a mafia family, wasn’t big enough to overcome\u00a0his childhood woundings. Something begins to chip away at his ability to self-differentiate, his ability to choose to be himself, true to his needs and his gifts, to be\u00a0different.\u00a0\u00a0Each time he felt pressure from his family, such as the time he\u00a0gets a call from his family to join them for a holiday. He ditches the\u00a0family holiday to instead spend time with his girlfriend. This comes back to haunt him as he hears about his father’s illness and he is\u00a0triggered by shame, guilt, and remorse for being so distant from the family, especially from his father. It is in these moments that he\u00a0begins saying things to himself that pull him away from his own needs.\u00a0Needs\u00a0that are healthy and self-differentiating and he instead chooses to become closer to\u00a0his family through guilt and shame. His desires are not based in a healthy honesty about himself and his experiences, they are built on a foundation of shame and abandonment. He learned this type of abandonment and shame from his father, played by Marlon Brando, who watches his mother be killed by a Don mafia leader in Italy. The revenge and power his father needs is built-in from the his real feelings of loss of power and abandonment of his family. His triggers were based in his young boyhood.<\/p>\n
![\"the-godfather\"](\"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/the-godfather-300x200.jpg\")
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The sins of the father were certainly passed down, generationally, in this family even if the events were never discussed or shared with the children.\u00a0Guilt, shame, powerlessness, and severe abandonment\u00a0are the triggers that drove the Don to\u00a0 become such a power-hungry person. The addictions they both shared as\u00a0the Godfather and the Don, were all a cover\u00a0for losing family members and growing up without real intimacy.<\/p>\n
After his father passes away,\u00a0we see the Godfather making different choices.\u00a0There is a sudden change in character. He can no longer feel intimate with his wife, the woman he fell in love with, the woman he married. He changes his path in life to include everything his father wanted from him, instead of being his own person. Eventually, his life spirals out of control with affairs, power, and corruption. He loses his wife, his unborn child, and most of all, he loses himself. This is what abandonment, shame, and guilt can create and destroy in a\u00a0marriage and in a family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, I wrote about the Godfather and the parallels of his life of addiction and real people’s addictions, such as addictions that clients often suffer from who seek therapy.\u00a0The addiction is not\u00a0the only issue to address in someone’s life. Addictions point to\u00a0deeper, underlying issues within a person and influences families and loved ones. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3740,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[394,661,399,466,469,510,471,472,576,474,396,1185,475,578,490,407,408,481,484,436,485,486],"class_list":["post-3739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marital-therapy","tag-abandonment","tag-addictions","tag-affairs","tag-anxiety","tag-communication-issues","tag-controlling","tag-couples-counseling","tag-cut-off","tag-depression","tag-disconnect","tag-divorce","tag-emotional","tag-emotional-affairs","tag-family","tag-fighting","tag-indianapolis-marriage-counseling","tag-infidelity","tag-marital-counseling-indianapolis","tag-separation","tag-shame","tag-therapy","tag-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4364,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739\/revisions\/4364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healingheartsofindy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}