Helping or Harming?
I am a helper. I love doing things for other people. A lesson I have learned is that you can help too much. Your help becomes a negative influence instead of a positive influence. When your help hurts, it’s called enabling. When my son was alive and in active addiction, I became an enabler. I thought I was helping Andy with my enabling, but I was really crippling him in a round-about way. I was being selfish, actually, and at the same time, neglecting my own needs. That, my friends, is what’s called a lose-lose situation.
When you are helping someone, you are giving them the tools to support themselves and lift themselves out of the pit. I, on the other hand, was trying to control every aspect of my son’s life. I thought I was protecting him. After all, isn’t that what a parent is supposed to do for their children? But the truth is, I was smothering him, and not letting him learn to stand on his own two feet. I wasn’t letting him learn from the consequences of his actions. We family members must learn to do the hard thing which is the right thing for the addict, and that is to let them run their own life. It’s so hard because it goes against the natural parenting instinct, but I know with all my heart that it is what must be done. Over time, I learned a better way.
One of the most important lessons I ever learned in my support group was this: “Do not do for the addict what he can and should be doing for himself.” Let them learn! Let them take responsibility for their own actions and lives. Do not disempower them by taking on the consequences of their actions! Are you paying your child’s legal bills? Then you are an enabler. Are you letting them take advantage of you and walk all over you? Then you are an enabler. Are you constantly putting their needs before your own? Then you are an enabler. Are you sacrificing the other children in your family in the name of “helping” your addict? Then you are an enabler, and you are also cheating your other children of the love, attention, and childhood they deserve.
Here are some ways I have come to distinguish helping from enabling:
- Helping teaches, enabling does it for them
- Helping gives self-esteem, enabling robs self-esteem and cripples growth
- Helping makes the other person feel strong, enabling makes them feel weak
- Helping is motivated by the desire to create growth, enabling is motivated by guilt
- Helping allows the other person to be better, enabling makes YOU feel better
- Helping is done in full view of all, enabling is done in secrecy
- Helping creates a hand up, enabling creates victims
- Helping creates empowerment, enabling creates lifelong dependency
By all means, be a helper. Lord knows, the world needs more helpers. Just don’t be an enabler. When you want to help someone, check those motivations. Are they a desire to lend a hand or are they powered by pity, guilt, and fear? Your heart will know. Helping loves the light and openness, enabling loves the dark and secrecy.
Here is a wonderful way you can help others. Share your story of recovery with us on the Heroes in Recovery website. It’s easy. Just share in one of these two ways:
1) Go to /share and enter your story here. Say Pam sent you.
2) Message me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/#!/pam.katchuk and we can talk in person or you can text me your story.
In love and light,
Pam