Soulshine

Codependents are infamous for engaging in enabling behaviors. These behaviors are always more about us (the codependent) than they are about the other person. We feel inferior and insecure and so we engage in caretaking—a serious form of enabling—in order to feel loved and needed by the other person. We rarely recognize the fact that our caretaking/enabling behavior hurts both us and the other person. We drain ourselves by constantly being “on call” to meet every possible need or to solve every problem of the other person. We also inhibit that person’s ability to be responsible for him/herself, and we allow them to escape all possible consequences for their own behavior or poor choices. How do we know if we are enablers? I have paraphrased a list of enabling characteristics offered by Tom Ferry in his book Life by Design . We are an enabler if we do any of the following: 1.  We worry that someone else can’t handle life situations without our help. 2. ...

What exactly is enabling ? Darlene Lancer, in her book Conquering Shame and Codependency , offers a solid definition. She says “The term enabling can be applied to any form of help that removes the natural consequences of someone else’s behavior.” So when we feel responsible for someone else’s behavior and choose to fix their problems for them, we take away the consequences of what they have done and we let them off the hook. They are then never held accountable for their actions and they never learn to be responsible for their self-destructive behaviors. I remember several years ago a man came to talk to me about his brother, who had a severe gambling problem. This man, we’ll call him Brendan, had been enabling his younger brother’s addiction by bailing him out every time he gambled-away more money than he had in the bank. In effect, Brendan became his brother’s personal banker; and whenever his brother—let’s call him Tom—had money-lenders at a given casino breathing down ...

Manipulation : to control or play-upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage; to force change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose. Every codependent is familiar with manipulation. We have all engaged in manipulative behavior for the express purpose of getting from others what we were not willing to give to ourselves—namely love. In fact, for the non-recovering codependent or addict, manipulation becomes a way of life, a survival skill. We need to be needed or loved and so we engage in manipulative behaviors, like people-pleasing and caretaking. We falsify how we really feel about this or that in order to please (manipulate) someone into loving us. We bend over backwards to meet the needs of another person, not because we truly love and care about him/her, but because we want to manipulate him/her into appreciating us and making us feel good about ourselves. But there are other forms of manipulation that we,...