Enabling,

 

There is an enormous difference between helping and enabling. When you enable someone, you give him or her the authority or means to do something. If you give money to your drug-addicted teenager, you are enabling your child’s bad behavior. It would be helpful, if you could empower your loved one to recover from this habit and do something healthy and productive. Many people – unknowingly, due to how they deal with their language – have a problem determining the difference between enabling and supporting someone. It is well known, that people who are recovering from mental health problems or substance abuse, are benefitted from building and maintaining positive social relationships. However, as long as these so-called support systems are still based on Disembodied Language (DL), they are not effective. Despite all our good intentions, because of our unconscious, negative DL, we, inadvertently, enable unhelpful, self-defeating behaviors in others.

 

The difference between enabling and being helpful is in how we use our language. We need to stop our DL, which should be called the language of enabling, so that we can finally have Embodied Language (EL) and truly provide – but also receive – the support that is needed, to get out of any behavior, which is destroying our lives. It is language that determines how we deal with behavior, so once our language changes, all our other behavior will change with it.

 

When we facilitate someone’s potentially harmful behavior, we are enabling. Everyday, we condone each other’s DL and justify our own, we are enabling and, simultaneously, we prevent ourselves as well as each other from engaging in supportive, positive, productive behavior. DL, our usual automatic way of dealing with our language, prevents us from acting and from doing what is absolutely necessary. All the chaos and conflict, we see in the world, is due to DL.

 

Everyone who engages in DL is each other’s enabler. To stop our own DL – rather than each other’s – it is of utmost importance, we become familiar with the main characteristics of our enabling behavior. As enablers, we protect those, we believe to love, from the consequences of their own behavior. Simply put, DL is abusive behavior and those who go along with it, endlessly invite more abuse. However, the abuse works both ways. DL communicators abuse other DL communicators, but they abuse themselves as well.

 

The only way to stop DL abuse, is by talking alone with yourself and by letting yourself know, how you feel about it. Another symptom of enabling and DL is that we are constantly walking on eggshells. We don’t speak our truth, but we are defensive, and we keep secrets. Supposedly, we do this, to keep the peace. We all know that we aren’t really talking, and the negative consequences are piling up during our uncomfortable silence. Sooner or later, we are going to have an inevitable escalation, because our lack of boundaries is always part of our enabling. Although we are all very demanding with our DL, we have no clear expectations of ourselves or each other. Even if we tried to, we never follow through, as it involves a confrontation with our DL. We keep making excuses, for why we still continue with our DL, even though we really don’t want to, but we don’t know how to stop it. We simply deny, we engage in DL, every day.

 

We are enabling each other’s DL and, therefore, we are codependent. Furthermore, enablers are always blamed by the enabled, because they are obviously part of the problem. Since it is our conditioning, DL is actually very much like an addiction and when – as I am doing in this writing – we are pointing out the irrefutable fact, that we are enabling each other, it can feel, as if I am blaming people for having DL. I only write about enabling, however, because my wife Bonnie happened to mention to me, this morning, that the Biden administration is enabling so much divisive problem behavior. It was because she used that word, that I suddenly felt like writing about it.  

 

Once we have switched from DL to EL and we have EL together, we will be enabling ongoing EL in each other and – yes, I am not kidding – we will become addicted to EL, as it allows us to be totally ourselves. Our EL brings us in touch with our own intelligence and it is amazing what happens, when all our other behavior becomes controlled by our EL instead of by our DL. With our EL, we get rid of all behavior, which came about and was maintained by our DL. EL is the gift that keeps on giving, as it reveals to us, what life is like, when our behavior is effective, which means, we don’t need to change it, we can continue with it, because it works. We are so fulfilled by having EL and we call our great satisfaction in having correct and, therefore, successful behavior, our Language Enlightenment (LE). Our addiction to EL pays off, as it prepares us for the important task of enabling our own and each other’s LE. We care as much about each other’s EL and LE, as we care about our own.