The Story of Max and Addicition

This story is intense. When I read this, I asked myself, "If I met "Max" would I have any idea what he carried inside or the "why" of what he inherited when he was born?" What do you carry inside? When our own story of shame is hidden so deeply within, it is no wonder why we struggle so much. Where does culture offer a safe place to deal with what we carry inside? Where does someone like Max go? My only answer is the more I deal with my story, the better I am to walk with someone else and offer solution and compassion. How many people like Max do we walk by or judge each day? How many might sit right beside us at work or church or...? The compassion we would have for Max as you read is also the compassion we need to have for ourselves.


John Bradshaw shares the following:
Max was what Pat Games, in his book Out Of The Shadows, calls a Level I and II sex addict.
*Max is a composite symbol — a sort of Everyman of Toxic Shame. I have taken bits and pieces
from the tragic lives of actual shame-based people. One of them is now dead — a tragic victim
of toxic shame.

Max's Story 
Max was perhaps the most tragic figure I encountered over a 20-year period of counseling. He came to me at age 44. I liked him instantly. Everyone seemed to like him. His problem was one I had never heard of before. Max ran away. He had done it nine times. At certain points in his life, most often when he was doing very well and the pressures of success were mounting, he would just pack up his car with a few necessities and start driving. He would leave everything — clothes, furnishings, family and job. Max was a Sales Engineer.

On the ninth runaway, he left his five children, all under 17. They had come to live with Max after he divorced his third wife. Three children were from his first marriage, the fourth from his second, the fifth from his third. As I talked to Max, the deep hurt and pain of his life was apparent. His shame was more apparent. In fact, Max's life was a metaphor of internalized shame.

He embodied many of the faces of shame and was the product of the major sources of shame. He also acted out many of the major cover-ups of shame.

He broke eye contact continually when he talked. He frequently blushed. He was painfully self-conscious and hypervigilant. Sometimes he would defiantly look me in the eyes and make matter of fact statements about the things he had done, severely condemning himself. And then he would follow this with long delusional descriptions of how he had been responsible and successful. When I gently confronted his denials, he would become energetically reactive and defensive and sometimes go into a rage. What became clear to me was his despair, his desperate loneliness and his shame-based hopelessness. Although he was gifted intellectually and evidently a skilled salesman and engineer, he would subject himself to the most demeaning jobs during his runaways. He had been a janitor, a dishwasher, a garbageman's helper, a lumberjack, a stagehand, a short-order cook and on his last "trip", as he referred to it, he collected and sold aluminum cans.

Max, although quite attractive to women, always stayed alone and celibate on his trips. He was tall, 6'3" and handsome. By the time he saw me, he was impotent with women. This was partly due to years of isolation, marijuana smoking and sexualizing.

Level I sexual addiction involves the following: Multiple affairs or sex partners
Compulsive masturbation with or without pornography Chronic cruising of either a homosexual or heterosexual nature Fetish behavior, bestiality and prostitution

Level II involves voyeurism, exhibitionism, indecent liberties and lewd phone calls.
Carnes also speaks of Level III sexual addiction which includes incest, rape and molestation. The levels refer to the level of victimization and legal punishment accompanying the sexual act. Levels II and III always have a victim and are punishable by law.

In Max's case he had multiple affairs during his three marriages. During the early part of his second marriage he had engaged in voyeurism. He described the voyeurism with a great feeling of degradation and shame. On one occasion he hid in the branches of a tree for three hours to get a two-minute glimpse of a young woman in her bra and panties.

Max also cruised shopping malls, engaging in subtle forms of indecent liberties. By the time Max came to me for counseling, he had completely given up any relationship with women. He was isolated, and without any real relationships of any kind. He had resigned himself to a menial job as a bookkeeper in a hardware store.
Max's children were all addicts. His oldest was already in her second marriage at 26 years of age. She was a severe caretaker co-dependent who confused love with pity. She found men who were down and out and nourished them back to health. Her second husband was an ex-European drug dealer who had served time for drug dealing in France. Max's two sons and the daughter from his second marriage were all serious drug addicts and had major problems with sex and relationships. The youngest, a male child from his third marriage, had been arrested and jailed four times for violent alcohol and drug-related behavior by age 13.

I saw Max off and on for almost seven years. Just when I thought we were making progress, Max would quit (run away from me). I became more involved with Max than any counselor should. Max hooked my own shame and co-dependency. I wanted to help Max so much that I was overly invested in the outcome of our work. In September of 1974, Max died at the age of 52. This was the exact age his own father had died.

Max had a grandiose melodramatic quality to his personality. At the same time, there was true generosity and nobleness about him. His compassion for the suffering of others was boundless. He died of emphysema in the back ward of a public county hospital. At his funeral, I wept in a way I could not have imagined.

Max represented all of us shame-based people. I said he died of emphysema. What he really died of was toxic shame. His internalized shame was the source of his co-dependency, chemical and sex addictions. Max was the Everyman of Toxic Shame. His life, from beginning to end, illustrated the sources and the demonic power of toxic shame.

His father, Jerome, was a full-fledged alcoholic and womanizing sex addict. Jerome was shame-based. He had been abandoned by his own father and raised by an emotionally incesting alcoholic mother. Max's description of his grandmother was frightening.

By the time Max was eight, his mother Felicia had divorced his father Jerome. From eight years on, Max was neglected emotionally and financially. His older brother Ralph took over the role of being Max's father. His older sister Maxine also took on a parenting role. They were his Little Parents.

Max's mom and dad married at ages 17 and 18. They married because they were pregnant with Max's older sister Maxine. Felicia came from a staunchly religious Christian family. The family demanded that Jerome marry Felicia. Felicia was extremely prudish and shut down emotionally. She carried her mother's repressed sexuality. Her mother had been sexually violated by her own father (also an alcoholic) and two of her nine brothers.

Felicia's mother had never dealt with her incest issues and carried them as her shame secret. Felicia, while ostensibly proper and prudish, had "acted out" the sexual shame of her mother by getting pregnant at 17. Felicia had also been sexually violated by her maternal grandfather.  Felicia was her father's emotional spouse. She became his little woman and confidante after her mother withdrew with hypochondria.

Jerome was also the emotional caretaker of his mother. He was her little man and became her Surrogate Spouse. Both of Max's parents were Surrogate Spouses. This means they both were emotional incest victims. Both were severely shame-based, co-dependent and addicted. Max's mother was dutiful but cold and nonsensual. Max was born five years after Jerome and Felicia were married. He was not planned and not really wanted. He was an accidental pregnancy. Max was what is called the Lost Child in family systems theory.

Both Max and his older sister Maxine were Lost Children. Max's brother, Ralph, was a family Star or Hero, i.e., he superachieved to give his shame-based alcoholic family a sense of dignity. Max's older brother and sister became Max's Little Parents.

As Jerome became more and more alcoholic, he abandoned all his children. Since the family system had no father, Ralph took on that role and became Max's Little Father. Since the family had no Marriage (chief component), Ralph took on the role and became Felicia's Surrogate Spouse. The system had no money earner, so Ralph and Maxine became Super-responsible Caretakers.

As a child, Max was sheltered from his father's drinking by being taken to the homes of relatives. He was The Protected One. He experienced this as abandonment. It's crucial to see that all these roles are cover-ups for shame.

Ralph covered up his shame by playing his Star Hero role. He also acted shameless towards Max by demanding that Max be perfect. He tried to over-discipline Max, continually measuring him with shoulds and oughts. Ralph was a constant source of shame for Max. Max loved and admired his older brother. He willingly accepted his brother's interpersonal transfer of shame. Ralph was also extremely religious. He studied to be a Christian minister. He used religious righteousness as a cover-up for his shame and dumped it on Max by moralizing and making judgments of him.

When the fear, hurt and loneliness of the shame in a dysfunctional family reaches high levels of intensity, one person, often the most sensitive, becomes the family Scapegoat. The function of this role is to lessen the pain all the members are in. At first Maxine took on this role for Felicia. She became Mom's Scapegoat. Later Ralph became the Scapegoat due to his active alcoholism in his teenage years. Ralph repented and went into the ministry. This left the job for Max. Max started his drinking and running away at age 15. His first major disappearance was for four days, winding up on a beach in New Orleans. As his bizarre runaways continued, the family focused more and more on him. By discussing and obsessing on Max, everyone in the family system could avoid his own pain.

Max became like the sacrificial goat in the Jewish Atonement Ritual. In that Ritual the goat is smeared with blood and is sent into the desert. In this way the scapegoat atones for the people's sins. Max became the sacrificial goat. He literally went to his death carrying the shame of several generations of his family.

All of the roles in Max's family system were played as a way to control the distress of Jerome's alcohol addiction and Felicia's co-dependent addiction. In functional families the roles are chosen and are flexible. The members have the choice of giving up the roles. In dysfunctional families the roles are rigid.

Max's mother and father had both come from shame-based families. Felicia's mother came from an alcoholic incestuous family. Felicia's mother was an untreated shame-based co-dependent in acute stages of her addiction. She was agoraphobic and a hypochondriac. Felicia's father enabled her mother's shame by allowing her to be sick. He also set Felicia up in the Sunogate Spouse role. Felicia was an untreated emotional and physical incest victim, who repressed her sexuality and carried her mother's unresolved incest issues. She unconsciously acted it out by being seductive to both Ralph and Max. Ralph, as oldest son, became Felicia's Surrogate, repeating the incest. Felicia idealized her dad and enabled his severe co-dependency and work addiction. Felicia's three sisters all married dysfunctional men. Each daughter carried her mother's unresolved sexualized rage.

Felcia's mother continuously bad-mouthed men from her sick bed. Max reported that as a boy he remembered that one of her favorite sayings was, "Men only want one thing. They think with their penis." This statement, said in the presence of a young male, is sexually abusive. Ralph and Max were both victimized by Felicia's unconscious sexual rage and contempt for men.

When Felicia got pregnant with Jerome, she was "acting out" her mother's unresolved sexual shame. Max reenacted Felicia's acting out by getting his first wife Bridget pregnant when he was 17. Ralph also married pregnant.

Jerome's mother saw her own mother burn to death when she was seven years old. She was abandoned by her father. He sent her to live with her two man-hating aunts. She rebelled against this situation by continually getting into trouble.

She acted out sexually at an early age. I always suspected that her promiscuity was an acting out of some form of sexual abuse. Max had no data on her side of the family. So I was never able to verify this. Max greatly disliked his grandmother and had never even seen his grandfather. Jerome's mother married at age 16. Her husband died a tragic death before age 30. He was electrocuted while working at a power plant. Jerome's mother received a large amount of money as the surviving widow. She boozed and partied for the next few years. She seemed to have been genetically alcoholic.

She married Jerome's father pregnant, and after a stormy seven years, he divorced her. Jerome was eight years old. He only saw his father twice from that point on. Once he hitchhiked 300 miles to see him, only to be disappointed by being put on a bus and sent home. The other time was a chance run in. Jerome read of his father's death in a newspaper. He went to the funeral and was asked to leave, being told that it was too awkward for him to be there. His father had remarried, and had three children by his second marriage.

So Jerome grew up with no father, and was enmeshed with his alcoholic sex addict mother. He was her emotional incest victim. Max would "act out" these multi-generational abandonment patterns in his runaways Both his parents, Jerome and Felicia, had been abandoned by their parents of the same sex. Both were used for their parents' needs, rather than their parents being there for them.

Max met his first wife, Bridget, in college. She was an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACA) and the apple of her dad's eye. An only child, she was beautiful and smart. She was the family Star and was cross-generationally bonded with both her parents.

Max was the third child in the birth order position. Third children often carry the dynamics of their parent's marriage. Max literally reenacted his parents' pregnancy and early marriage. He later abandoned his children as his father had abandoned him. Max felt the loneliness and isolation his parents experienced in their marriage.
Bridget was the Caretaker in her family. She literally took care of her father's sadness, deep-seated isolation and depression. She did this by always being up and cheerful. She was a high school cheerleader. This role became so chronic, she lost any contact with her authentic self.

On one occasion Max asked me to see her because of their oldest daughter. I had suggested to Max that Bridget seemed to be in an enabling relationship with their daughter. She had bailed her out of jams on numerous occasions and was always giving her money she couldn't afford. When Bridget spoke to me, I had the uneasy feeling of not knowing who I was talking to. She had a parrotlike vocabulary and was "acting". The role was so sealed, she had no idea she was in an act. Figure 2.4 gives you a visual picture of Max's own family system. The oldest child was clearly a Lost Child who gave her all to take care of everybody. Each of the other children was acting out the family system's shame. The middle sons were severely alcoholic. The fourth child was also alcoholic and hooked on pills. The youngest son was acting out Max's internalized rage in offender behavior.

In summary, I hope the reader can feel the power of the multi-generational patterns in Max's background. I hope you can see how Max reenacted those patterns and passed them on to his children. In Max's five generation genogram there are five generations of alcoholism, physical and emotional abandonment and co-dependency. There are four generations of sexual abuse and sexual addiction. There are early pregnancies, multiple marriages and divorces. Max was abandoned by his father Jerome at exactly the same age Jerome was abandoned by his father. Max died at exactly the same age his father died. Max's five-generation family map is not atypical of shame-based families.