“Confusing enabling with helping hurts everyone — every time.”
Lisa Merlo-Booth
People feel good when they have a sense of mastery over their life. Taking care of life’s everyday challenges helps you feel a sense of accomplishment, pride, and confidence that you can handle what life throws at you. And those times when you don’t want to pay the damn bills, or get a job, or clean the house, yet you do it anyway — those times teach you the most.
Don’t take someone’s opportunity to master life’s challenges away from them by doing their tasks for them. Your over-doing teaches them to under-do.
- Don’t grow quiet about a key problem out of fear of the other person’s reactions. Your silence enables the behavior to continue.
- Don’t keep chasing after your partner when they shut down and refuse to speak to you. Your chasing teaches them that shutting down works — and enables a pattern of toxic withdrawal.
- Don’t continually apologize when your spouse snaps at you. Your apologies send the message that your behavior caused their reaction and further enable their reactivity.
- Don’t keep agreeing to do things a certain way just to calm your partner’s anxiety (i.e., load the dishwasher a certain way, dress a certain way, return texts within 5 minutes, etc.). Allow them to manage their own anxiety rather than doing everything their way so they feel less anxious.
If you truly want to help the people you love, empower them to step up and take control of their lives. Allow children to drop the ball, fail, and try again on as many issues as possible. Let them feel the impact of their mistakes on the journey to adulting. Do the same for the adults in your life. Refuse to do things for others that they are able to do for themselves. If they choose not to manage their life, allow them to feel the consequences of their choices rather than cushioning them from life’s lessons.
Challenge: Next time you go to “help” someone, be sure you’re truly helping them move forward — and not enabling them to stay stuck skills to address them when and where they happen, because any other approach guarantees they will get worse.
