Enabling: Avoiding Our Pain
I recently read an article that I have continued to roll over in my mind. It spoke about how we as humans avoid pain and seek pleasure. More specifically, it points to how addicts and alcoholics, instead of feeling their pain, will drink or use drugs to relieve it. Relief in itself is a form of pleasure. The article also states how the family members of addicts or alcoholics also deal with the pain created from this disease. What family members do to relieve the pain is enable their loved ones.
As the parent of an addict, I had never looked at enabling in quite that way. I heard something different and it made sense to me. Enabling happens when we are doing for others what they can do for themselves. Although that is true, it just identifies the behavior; it does not let us understand why we are doing it.
With this in mind, I started looking at my own enabling behaviors and how they could be relieving my pain. Just like the rest of this journey, extracting my pain is a process, just as it is for my addict. The pain of not being able to complete my role as a parent definitely contributed to my enabling. I still wanted to have an impact, and it hurt not to be respected, so any time I could make a meal, celebrate a holiday, or give a hug (even at my emotional expense) it gave me a moment of relief that my son was still in my life, even if it was only his physical presence at the time.
Fear for your child is pain in a variety of forms. While in the midst of that person’s early active addiction, and little education, things like jail, accidents, and overdoses are just a few of the fears you begin to feel. Some become your reality. While I could put the financial responsibility on my son for his legal issues (he had to sell his car to pay his attorney), I could not justify a public defender for him till he was in jail for the third time with yet another probation violation. Who was I protecting: him or me? I think both. I was still his parent, and I needed to feel I was not deserting him at a time when he was unable to make good choices. Surprise—he still does not always make good choices. The pain abated, but briefly. Another way my husband and I enabled was to let him return home after treatment. We never were told not to let him come home, but to have firm boundaries in place and remove him if he used. Relief came in the form of having our family back together again. But a few months down the road, pain returned when he had to leave the house. Although a lot of pain comes directly from dealing with the fallout of addiction, it is not the only place it comes from. I believe when my marriage was struggling, it was easier to throw myself into “helping” my son rather than detach and take care of the needs of my marriage. It allowed me to avoid the situation, bury it, and get a temporary reprieve from the pain.
The article I read earlier states that to stop enabling the disease, “We must first find a better way of managing our pain, called ‘detachment.’” Detachment is not easy. Letting go of someone else’s problems while still loving them takes practice. But choosing detachment will keep you away from enabling because you are acting, not reacting to a painful situation. I am thankful to my 12-Step meetings, the family group at the treatment center, my counselor, and my higher power for bringing me to a place to be able to see enabling from this viewpoint.
Addressing rather than avoiding pain is a process that may seem counterintuitive, but when I can understand the pain driving the enabling, I am able to choose a different way to respond. Like me, you may have heard enabling presented in many different ways and have made changes for the better. Being open to hear yet another perspective of enabling allows me to focus on myself and gain a deeper understanding of my own actions. I hope you will take the time and explore how this relates to your journey of recovery.