Do we get something out of enabling our grown kids?

[recoveringenabler]

Great discussion MWM, thanks for starting it.

Did I make the child troubled? Did we create a mental illness in one child and mishandle our son to the point that drug use was more attractive to him than conventional reality?

I wholeheartedly do not believe that to be true. I don't believe we create our troubled kids, I believe we respond to their issues in different ways which may give their issues more power over us, but I do not see any of it as a reason to blame ourselves or even, to blame them. Feeling that way in any way shape or form is guilt over something that just is. How we cope with the is-ness of it, speaks more about us then about them. I do not believe there is blame in this. I also don't believe there is judgement in this.

I have a problem though, with accusing ourselves of enabling, like it was a bad thing we did on purpose.

I guess I see that differently then "accusing" ourselves of enabling. I see it as understanding a dynamic that doesn't work and as a result of that awareness, being able to correct it. We are only human and we do the best we can with what we have. When we figure out a better way, most of us do it. To turn around and blame ourselves for what we did because we didn't know any better is cruel. I did enough of that already.

I watched a video last night on suffering by Eckhart Tolle. It was very enlightening. He said suffering begins when we argue with reality. It was a real ah ha moment for me. He said that human suffering is mostly self induced and when we have had enough we can stop it. I've had enough. I punished myself enough for what happened to my bio family and what happened to my daughter. I won't do it anymore. It isn't my fault nor am I blaming her. I had to remove myself from her sphere of influence over me and stop my part in that.

Detachment theory appeals to me because there is a slim chance that it might work. I could no more not care what happens next than ~ I just couldn't do it.

I don't look at detachment as something that "might work" for my daughter at all, I look at it as a way of me learning new skills to keep myself removed from a situation where I have no control, it is about taking care of me. Believing that it "will work" seems like an attachment to the outcome, the hope that if I detach, then my kids will be okay. Is that what you mean Cedar? For me, detachment means letting go of the outcome. Certainly not because I don't care, but because I have no power to change the outcome. And, the realization that no matter what I have done or will do will change the outcome. It isn't within my power to do that.

But on the martyrdom / setting the kids up to fail so we could be martyrs...though that sounds just sick enough to be something that could happen, I think that is not correct.

Geez, I don't believe any of us set our kids up to fail so we could be a martyr. I do believe that there are dynamics between people which have payoffs for both, and I believe that does happen with our kids. They can manipulate us and we can be martyrs. No one (or mostly no one) does that consciously or maliciously, it is what we've learned to get our needs met, the way we've learned to survive. These unhealthy dynamics between people aren't choices we consciously make, they are dynamics we've all learned, and they all have payoffs or we wouldn't do it. We believe we are doing the right thing, with the best intentions, but my belief is that our thinking is flawed and unhealthy and when we operate out of these dynamics unconsciously, that is when the problems begin......and continue. Becoming conscious of the part we play allows us to correct OUR part in it. That's all we can do. The outcome is not something we can control. Thinking we can in some manner control the outcome by something WE can do is enabling. When we accept that there is nothing we can do, then the enabling stops. Otherwise we're hooked in to the unhealthy dynamic trying to fix it.

In fact, I respect myself and my children and my family and the life we created more than ever to consider this question, again. Tragedy is tragedy. It is real.

Tragedy is most assuredly real. However tragedy happens very often without reason, without a way of pointing to a way it could have been avoided. I think it is a very human thing to make every attempt in our minds to find a reason, to find the culprit, to figure out why, to make it clear to ourselves that somehow this whole mess could have been stopped had something else happened. I think that may be the most difficult thing of all for us to accept, that bad things happen and it is no ones fault and there is nothing I can do about it. I think that is what acceptance is .............acknowledging that this happened, acknowledging that no one made it happen and that I can 't do anything to fix it. That is the tall order. The rest is how we judge it, how our minds need to find the right and wrong of it and place the mantel of responsibility on someone or something.

Detachment theory appeals to me because there is a slim chance that it might work. I could no more not care what happens next than ~ I just couldn't do it.

I don't believe detaching means we don't care. On the contrary, I believe it means we care enough to let go, we care enough about ourselves to not continue the destructive dance, we care enough about our kids to let them go in to their own destiny, whatever that is, which may look remarkably different then what we would judge as okay.

I think I have a very different perspective on enabling, detachment and my own part in my daughter's going off the rails. I believe I was as good a mother as I could have been. I believe I did everything possible to help my daughter and nothing I did worked. I believe there is a point in that where I needed to let go. Letting go did not negate my good mothering or my love for my daughter, it was simply the next step for both of us. My love is still intact, it's just different. I think the greatest lesson I learned is acceptance of what is. Enabling doesn't allow one to get to that point, it keeps us stuck in a cycle of continuing to try and try and try to evoke an outcome which is out of our control. It is an exercise in futility. Martyrdom is a stance we take in our misguided attempts to be right and it does harm to those around us and to ourselves, but I don't believe it is intentional or even conscious. It is an unhealthy dynamic born out of dysfunctional upbringings.

I think that the info here is more for people dealing with either a difficult child with a personality disorder (unable to change basic personality) or the mentally ill unwilling to help themselves. Either way once things become abusive we need to answer for ourselves - WHY and how we stay involved w

I agree. I think that is a very good way of putting it.

Unfortunately I think I tried to over-compensate and, with hindsight, my own behaviour was as dysfunctional as theirs, but at least it was done with love and care, albeit too much love and care bordering on control.

I think that is a very good point Lucy. I took a parenting course when my granddaughter came to live with me. One thing it brought home was that, in the model they taught out of, there were 3 types of parenting, punitive, permissive and democratic. That model was used to show us that when you grow up in a punitive environment, often you will be a permissive parent. Growing up permissive, you often choose to be punitive. They are opposite unhealthy parenting styles which often go back and forth in generations. I think we do try to overcompensate for the ways in which we believe our parents messed up. Clearly I was a permissive parent. I came out of a very punitive childhood. One interesting thing I learned though about my permissive stance is that kids don't feel safe without boundaries. Wow. That blew me away. And, in my healing from enabling, I had to recognize how much I needed to create boundaries, not just with my daughter, but with the world. And, it changed my life in every. single. way. Enabling doesn't have boundaries. No one is safe.

 

[recoveringenabler]

Sheesh, I actually overran the amount allowed to write!!!

So, anyway, here is the rest.........

I think recovering from an enabling stance is a very difficult thing to do. I think it is not a stance we just take with our kids, but a lifestyle we enter in to unknowingly and unconsciously and get all tangled up in. I had an enormous amount of therapy and help before I even got to the core of the enabling part. And, once I entered that Codependency program, it took almost 2 years of intensive therapy for me to recover from it. That's how powerful a dynamic this is. It is like a web that runs throughout your entire life and it is usually out of our awareness so that it feels like it is just who we are and how we act. It took me a long time to be able to see how it all worked and how much it infiltrated my life. It took a lot of support and guidance for me to get myself out of it. And, it made me angry a lot too. It felt like an attack on my own self and the choices I made. Because a big part of it is the judging, blaming and self cruelty. Fortunately for me, I had an incredible therapist with a sense of humor who could poke at me with her stick of truth and little by little I began to understand just how ensconced I was in the whole dynamic of codependency, enabling, rescuing, whatever name you want to call it............suffice to say, an unhealthy way of relating to intimacy and connection where control rules but real authentic, nourishing self love and love of others is compromised.

This is my journey. This is how I perceive it. I am not presuming to be right or to know what is right for anyone else, all I can do is share what has happened to me and what has worked for me. We all have our own lessons to learn. This one in particular, for me, has been the greatest lesson of my life because it started out by involving the person I love the most, my own daughter. But it lead me to a bigger picture of a way I related to the world in general which I came to discover, was not only not serving me, but in fact harming me and harming those around me. It was the most difficult journey I have ever taken, the hardest to open to and learn from...........but in the end it changed my whole life in ways that I never even imagined. Learning to let go of enabling, learning to detach from not only my daughter but to anything I have no control over, and to accept what is, has been the greatest gift of my life. I am eternally grateful to have taken this journey because in almost every way, I think it gave me my real life and although the jury is still actually out, I believe it gave my daughter her real life too, whatever that is........

 

[BusynMember]

I thought carefully about what to say before I responded to you, Suzir.

If your son does all the things mine did, you are a more loving, better person than me to be able to live with the danger. I just can't so I guess that makes you a better person than I am.

Actually, I probably wouldn't like your difficult child. You wouldn't like mine either. I love him very much, but often don't like him.

Although I don't like it when my son calls me the c*word he hardly was kicked out for that.

I would not care for anyone, even a relative with cancer, if they physically abused me (or others who lived with me) or constantly verbally abused me. There is no excuse for abuse, in my opinion. Even illness is not an excuse. But maybe it's just my nature. So again you are a better, kinder, more compassionate person than I am. Since I am so inferior to you, I am no longer going to read what you have to say because it makes me feel like a bad person. And I didn't come here for that. So anything you respond with will not be read by me.

That's all.

 

[SuZir]

MWM I know you will not be reading this. I also know that you know that I'm not a better person than you. I'm sure most would consider it to be other way around. However this is not about that. Nor is it in our choices on how we deal with our troubled loved ones. I'm sure none of us do what ever we decide to do with them because we want to be better persons. What we do are choices between hard places and rocks and we do those choices for love for our troubled loved ones, other loved ones and for yourself. Who we are, what we value the most, how we think things should go, what we consider extremely important and what little less important are things that in many ways will dictate those choices. I'm sure none of these choices are any easier to others than they tend to be for me. Deciding factors and circumstances will vary in those choices, but I strongly believe we must stay true to ourselves and what we want from life to be able to live those difficult and heartbreaking choices most of us have had to make time and again. And that is what it is about.

 

[recoveringenabler]

I came across these articles which have some good info on the topic we're discussing.......food for thought...............

http://www.familytreecounseling.com/nancysblog/?p=100

http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Am-A-Codependent/4963205

http://www.livestrong.com/article/14675-enabling-personality

http://joy2meu.com/tough_love.htm

 

[BusynMember]

Wow!

Powerful stuff, RE. Thank you.

 

[recoveringenabler]

MWM, when I read the following I thought of you, you have referred to yourself as the scapegoat or black sheep.........it was so interesting to read that the scapegoat "is the most emotionally honest." My sister held that role and she was clearly incredibly honest. Which doesn't always work well in a dysfunctional family! You are/were a courageous soul MWM, then and now.

"the scapegoat - is the most emotionally honest child in the dysfunctional family."

 

[BusynMember]

RE, I have read that also. I was the one who used to point out the problems of our family and call people in on their stuff. I wasn't supposed to notice or bring it up.

That really resonated with me.

I don't think of myself as courageous, RE, but thank you very much. It's funny. That's how I feel about YOU...lol. And Cedar. And so many of t he wonderful folks on the PE board

Is it too early in the morning for tears?

 

[recoveringenabler]

MWM, you ARE courageous. Here's the irony for me now, I was the 'good one' in my family..........here is the quote from the same source.......

"actually the good child - the family hero role -who is the most emotionally dishonest and out of touch with him/herself"

Getting out of that good girl role was a massive challenge, because I had no 'self,' I had to learn how to be as honest as you always were. My sister was that honest and she got hurt. I was the good one, I was "above" that. I was expected to be perfect and damn if I didn't try to be. I edited myself, held myself back, lied to myself, I was as far away from real as I could have gone........it was a LONG WAY HOME.

My sister once told me that being the 'good girl' was the worst role in the family because I was locked in and had absolutely no freedom to be anything but what was expected of me. It blew me away. That was a long time ago and she was so right and I heard her too. Thank God I was willing to listen and to change.

We're so fortunate we had the intense commitment to heal MWM, because we have. YAY!

 

[BusynMember]

RE, I hear ya. My sister had that role...or maybe she was the lost child. She chose to be quiet and detach from the family, but, in the end, desperately wanted to be loved by both of our parents. To do that, she had to turn on me, which s he has done on and off for years. My brother was the Golden Child. My parents paid his college in full and he went to a very expensive college...Northwestern University in Chicago. He got his Masters. My sister went to college too, but she had to pay in full. No wonder she has turned out like she did. Yet she is still in denial about our family and says, "Oh, our family wasn't that different than most families. They all have problems."

Which is true.

But ours lacked the basic unconditional love that all children need. We behaved by acting like everything was all right or we were ostracized. My sister was ostracized until her late twenties when she decided she wanted our mother to love her and she became another Good Child, if not the Golden Child...nobody could take the place of my brother. Funnily, the Golden Child for my grandmother (mother's mother) was her son as well. Why were these two men both the Golden Children, although both, especially my uncle, were terribly flawed? Well, because my mother called the shots in our family (father was narcicisstic and largely absent) and both of these men protected their mothers to the end. My uncle even divorced a woman for speaking her mind to his mother (my grandma). And my grandma was EXTREMELY bossy, manipulative, and protective of her son, even in his 40's, even while he was married. The wife simply told the grandmother that she would rather do the laundry herself and that her son could do his own laundry, as he usually did. She was trying to wash his clothes for him. Wife was upset because Uncle was very entitled. His mother took care of him like he was still a toddler whenever he visited her. Wife was trying to get Uncle to do his share of the housework as they both worked fulltime. Well, she dared to challenge his mother and the family gossip buzzed with hate. She was a terrible person. SHE TALKED BACK TO GRANDMA. He divorced her.

Several years later he married somebody who kissed his mother's feet. It wouldn't have worked out any other way. "Love me, love my mother even more." Understand, she was a difficult woman.

There was a gender component there too. My mother's mantra was, "Girls don't have to be smart. They just have to be beautiful." Ummmmmmmmmmmmm, right. Of course Uncle had gotten a PhD at Illinois Institute of Technology, paid for by his parents, and Mother had been forbidden to go to college because "woman don't need college."

Amazing how t he cycle in our family was a replay.

At least, as the black sheep, I did see the problem and this dynamic did not play out in my family. In fact, my kids don't even know my family of origin as t hey bowed out early. It waas good that they did. I swore it would not be that way in my family. 36 was difficult from Day One, but he does give me kudoes as a parent and says, "I had a good childhood." That is unusual for a difficult child, but there you go. I went into overdrive trying to make my kids all feel loved and wanted. Equally. Maybe that's why I was a doormat and why 36 felt so entitled himself. I don't know.

Anyhow, if you read this rant, lol, I hope it didn't put you to sleep. What you said triggered deep feelings from way back.

I think all roles in dysfunctional, conditional love families are hard. It is hard to try to be THAT GOOD so that you're not rejected too. It is hard to be the ghost who does disappear to escape notice. It is hard to be the blacksheep and be unable to block out the sickness and have foot-in-mouth disease so that you feel a need to talk about it.

Everything is hard when a family does not love unconditionally.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Learning mindfulness, radical acceptance, and other coping skills was so helpful

Yes.

I am practicing radical acceptance.

A cold and a broken halleluiah.

The focus was external not internal.

Enabling doesn't have boundaries where there is a clear delineation between the self and others.

I remember you posting to me once that we would know we were enabling when we resented what we were giving.

And that was very true.

my belief is that if we take the stance of enabling we won't be producing easy child kids

In the time when I was raising kids, it was Dr. Lee Salk (all about raising kids with high self esteem) and Dr Ben Spock.

The friend whose son is the professor?

Selfish, self centered, generous, courageous as the day is long.

Definitely not the self sacrificial mommy type.

I don't define enabling as in any way shape or form as a viable, loving, nurturing, healthy way of connection.

It's a continuum, Recovering.

There is enabling which results in the mother feeling wonderful because her baby is clean, rash-free, strong and happy.

And there is the enabling that keeps a self-centered child who believes the sun rises and sets on him or her feeling happy.

So the power structure essential to a healthy childhood is overturned and the child is not safe to explore his or her world.

It's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Remember those bad kids?

So...that is what happened to my family.

No wonder I couldn't see it.

I was looking for something more overtly awful.

We can spend our lives trying to find a reason or a person to blame, but there may be no reason, there may be no person to blame.

There is never blame once you unravel the meaning of a thing.

I get that piece.

It is only while we are figuring our way to the center of a thing that we throw off blame like sparks of lightning and blast this or that person or thing to smithereens. Once we get it, once we know what happened, we can let it be, we can let it go.

And it just is what it is.

Except for the consequences.

I am like, rage-fixated this morning.

How does that old Tom Petty song go?

Reveling in my abandon.

And of course, the rest of the song is true, as well.

I don't have to be a refugee.

That's the kicker.

But I still say that at the beginning, helping a child redraw a life is not enabling. And when the kids are self-destructing? Not enabling changes nothing, either.

The terrible consequences seem less personal if we have not been directly involved.

In many ways, that was the crux of it for me, the judging of right and wrong.

But when you are the parent, you are the responsible one in every way. Judging, judgment, strength of purpose ~ all these are required.

It is, again, about balance.

Which is about perception.

There is no way to make any of this okay.

When I can step out of that stance, I can begin to see more, I can find my compassion for myself and then for others. Within the judging, I either had to blame someone or blame myself, someone had to be at fault. Well, maybe no one is at fault, maybe it really just is what it is and we have to accept it.

I don't see a conscious fault. I see a helpless working through.

Had I not tried so hard to be the mom I wanted to be?

My kids might be...well, my son for sure would be.

Huh.

I don't know what I'm talking about again.

Jeez, I hate when that happens.

Responding from a place of being all knowing offered a sort of false superiority, a "better then" perspective which I believe strokes the ego and offers temporary satisfaction in an enabling connection. However the message sent to the other is that they are less then, there is a clear negative implication which in my own enabling tendencies

Wholehearted agreement on this.

Very true.

Me, too.

I did that, I still do that.

I am learning just to listen.

And I am learning how to declare a stop to listening time.

And not only that, but a sense of isolation, of presence. That is the interesting thing, to me. That sense of isolation, of privacy, of quiet and awakeness.

So for me, the enabling stance, although it kind of looks good in the social arena, really kept me apart, kept me in my superior state, but lacking in a real intimacy, a real connection.


***

My brother-in-law is a counselor and he says I get something emotionally from my son, even if it is negative. And negative attention is better than no attention.

I say we do not seek negative attention. Negative attention is what we get. It is not what we want, hope for, expect, or deserve.

Shame on that counselor for blaming you for your son's unacceptable behavior.

I get it that what he wants you to do is stand up to your son for yourself.

I need to do that, too.

He should just have told you so.

I'm not sure he's right but in the past i was just so desperate to hear my son's voice, hoping this call would be the one he told me he changed.

But the lies piled upon lies.

Now he is homeless. And he needs money for shelter. I don't know if he's using or if he ever stopped. I just know I can't enable anymore. I want to have joy again.

I am sorry this is happening.

It hurts, and it's confusing and tears us apart at the heart level.

I am so sorry this is happening to you.

But here is the thing I don't like about when we beat ourselves up for enabling. It is a right thing to trust our children. It is a right thing to love them, to believe in them.

So let me change that to: I am sorry your child betrayed your trust.

You do not deserve this.

Drug use is a terrible thing. It (drug use) destroys everything it touches.

What did I get? I think I just wanted so badly for my son to know that he could have a different life

That's the thing. Though we get drawn deeper and deeper into unbelievable and unbelievably painful experiences, we did not set out to create our situations.

It is true that changing our behaviors now will change the natures of our interactions with our children.

So I am still thinking about what that means for the genesis of the problem in the first place.

***Added this morning***

The genesis of the experience is drug use.

Even mentally ill people lose track of whatever the threads were that might have kept them together when drugs enter the picture.

I just wanted so desperately for him to love me and just be a good human being.

Me, too.

And I wanted one of those FTD bouquets on the holidays.

And I still do.

And then, I want the kids to come home and for everything to be alright.

I think my enabling behaviour was down to not wanting my relationship with my son to reach the pits of my own relationship with my parents

For absolutely certain.

My relationship to my parents determined the nature of my parenting. No question.

Maybe what I got out of it was, therefore, some way of finding closure about my feelings about my own parents and their dysfunctional parenting

I rode really high on that one, while everything still looked pretty good.

And then it all fell apart.

And my mother said, "Well, I guess you weren't such a good mother after all, were you."

She was such a poop.

Unfortunately I think I tried to over-compensate and, with hindsight, my own behaviour was as dysfunctional as theirs, but at least it was done with love and care, albeit too much love and care bordering on control.

Yes, I can see that, too. husband says that about me. That I wasn't strict enough with them, that I cleaned their rooms and hung up their coats and so on.

I still remember when they went to kindergarten?

And sure enough, they were able to hang up their jackets just fine.

***

Great thread, MWM.

I tried to post this yesterday. I had over the limit of words I could use.

!

So I went through and edited, this morning.

Thank you all so much. I am working through it all at lightning speed.

That is why we are here. I think we forget sometimes, why we all come here. It is to learn how to survive the devastation of losing our children while still they live.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Bone Weary and Lucy, my responses to you are trapped in the quote part of the last response.

Cedar

 

[recoveringenabler]

There is enabling which results in the mother feeling wonderful because her baby is clean, rash-free, strong and happy.
And there is the enabling that keeps a self-centered child who believes the sun rises and sets on him or her feeling happy.

For me, the term enabling has an unhealthy definition. I think enabling is a stance we take in the world, not just with our kids. It becomes such a strong presence on some of our lives that we can't distinguish it within ourselves separate from ourselves, we think it is us. So, I do not agree with your statement, because enabling is harmful it is not loving. That is what I had to begin to understand about it and to learn how to identify it within me and heal it. In my opinion it is learned behavior from a dysfunctional childhood where love is based on what you do not who you are. That had to be drilled in to me by therapist because like you I defended my right to be an enabler because I confused it with loving kindness. But it isn't so black and white either, it isn't that I was always an enabler and couldn't love or be a good mom, it was a part of my loving which I had the power to eradicate and fill that empty space with a more unconditional and accepting kind of love, the kind I didn't myself have. In my opinion, there is no enabling which results in anyone feeling wonderful. That is the distinction for me. We slip in and out of enabling. It is usually routed through our whole systems as adults and needs to be recognized so that it can be corrected. Like an anger problem, or someone who is aggressive.......first you have to see it within yourself, recognize it, see what it cost you to be that way, see how it doesn't work and then find a different way to respond. It's a healing of a mechanism which does not work.

But when you are the parent, you are the responsible one in every way. Judging, judgment, strength of purpose ~ all these are required.

I wouldn't call that judging, I would call it discerning what is best for the child when you are in the responsible years. Judgement is about right/wrong/blame/ discernment is guidance and clarity. Judgement has a different intent, its more controlling and righteous, rather then guiding and offering options. When you take a righteous stance with anybody, their natural resistance appears and they fight it. There is a very different stance in judgement and it does not feel good to the one being judged.

How do we define love, that might be a better word to utilize. Love at its very best has no judgment , it is accepting. And, love has boundaries. And with our kids, love has a point where we let them go, where we naturally detach. We are forced here to detach, but in healthy families, detachment is a natural occurrence, it is time for the child to go use his own wings, and he/she is trusted to do that. Our kids are troubled, so that process is thwarted by our own fears for them. We lock in to a very different way of being then. Now the judging begins. And the blame. And the enabling. It's fear based, not love based.