Soulshine

“You saved Richard Callahan’s life. You can’t live it for him.” Helen Pryor, American Dreams We codependents tend to want to live other people’s lives. And it seems to be especially difficult for codependent parents who are now facing the fact that their children are no longer “kids”—they’re grown adults themselves. I gave a series of talks to mostly baby-boomers last week and a recurring theme was their need to control the lives of their adult children, in particular when it comes to God or church. Many baby-boomers are church goers. They grew-up believing that it was sinful to miss out on attending church on Sundays. Now they are faced with children and grandchildren who don’t believe it’s important to attend church. And so these baby-boomers have an intense need to rectify the situation by trying to impose their beliefs onto their adult children and grandchildren. In effect, these baby-boomers want to live their children’s lives for them and so they coerce and n...

“You saved Richard Callahan’s life. You can’t live it for him.” Helen Pryor, American Dreams There’s an episode of the TV series American Dreams where Jack Pryor is attending a reunion with his Navy buddies. It’s late 1963. It’s been 20 years since these men served together during World War II. One of the guys who shows-up for the reunion is Richard Callahan. Jack saved Richard’s life during the war. But, since that time, Richard hadn’t done much with his life. We learn that Richard is an alcoholic, divorced twice and he’s been unable to keep a job for very long. During the episode, he actually looks like a dead man walking, like a zombie. Richard feels guilty to be alive. Jack had two buddies injured in the same attack and he had to make a choice about who to save. The other man had insisted that he was OK and had told Jack to go help Richard. He died while Jack was saving Richard. Richard is portrayed as a man who has never felt like his life was worth living fr...