Parents usually want to do what is best for their children but often confuse their own wishes to be liked and avoid confrontation with what a child needs to experience in order to develop management of stress, frustration tolerance, anxiety, and learning from their own experience.experience. Children of these parents who have grown up without a model for structure or proper discipline and the cycle gets repeated in the next generation.
To give anyone what they ask for, especially when you have serious doubt as the efficacy of outcome or out of fear of their anger…or worse yet, that they may stop loving you, is enabling.
To try to make someone aware of the pitfalls they may face if they proceed on their chosen path, then when warnings have not been heeded, to support them to learn how to pick up the pieces, patch the broken parts, and plan ways to avoid a similar outcome in the future,that is support.
To show anger at someone because they cannot learn from your accidents, failures and misjudgments is inappropriate, yet we see it happening everywhere. An “I-told-you-not-to-do-that”, or, “You-shouldn’t-have-done-that” are among the many useless sayings often said. Asking what the choices had been and why that was their choice helps, not only to understand what is in someone else’s head but to give a basis for discussion and to examine other possible ways to cope or handle a dilemma, problem, or difficult situation.
The person who always gives in to temper tantrums is an emotional coward. (Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is a wonderful example of an enabler who allows his daughter, Lydia at 15, to go off to be the particular friend of a December-June marriage of the Colonel of a regiment of Red Coats. Despite the warnings and pleadings of his daughter Elizabeth, he allows Lydia to go to Brighton with the Colonel and his young wife because he says Lydia would not give them any peace until she would be allowed to go. She leaves.. Lydia later elopes with a man she thinks will marry her. He cares for her only as yet another sexual conquest and ignores the inevitable family shame and loss of reputation which will befall the four older sisters, as well. Their reputation faces ruining their chances of ever marrying well, or at all. In this instance Mr. Bennett has acted out of selfishness, not wanting to hear Lydia plead, whine and display her temper, thus enabling behavior which threatens the entire family.)
Intimidation is a favorite tool used by those who care little about consequences to others. People are threatened by the alcoholics demand for money or liquor; the spendthrift’s demand for money beyond any reasonable portion, suicide threats or doing something self-destructive or shaming the family, ignoring thefts by the selfish and willful, maintaining denial in face of inebriation, drug use or dangers to their health all are reasons to feel intimidated. Providing the users with whatever they wish rather than face denying them or dealing with the truth of what they are, to their face, and setting clear limits, is enabling. Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon have dealt for many years most effectively defining enabling but it remains a concept which many people continue to avoid because it requires people to brave anger, threats of loss of love and sometimes bodily injury.
As the proverb says: Give me a fish and I will eat for a day; teach me to fish and I will eat every day. Giving in to demands rather than helping a person develop ability to restrain their own excesses is enabling, not support. It is easier to enable; very tiring and difficult to support which requires patience, knowledge, listening, and responding with kindness and firmness. Twenty or thirty years ago this allowed some to develop and nourish the concept of ‘tough love’.
Whether one uses gentle or tough love, one must carefully examine whether one is using enabling, denial; or love, emotional support and wise counsel.
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