Confronting Enabling Behavior

When Christmas nears I often reflect on the previous year and its significant events. Although New Year’s is the time when most people do it, I start doing it leading up to Christmas.

In looking back, there are positive and negative events. Some events bring up smiles and others trigger tears.

Among the event I find most challenging are those where I realize I was enabling to one degree or another. Although the intentional enabling is tough, I find the unintentional enabling even tougher to admit and face.

Let’s us Claudia Black’s definition as “any behavior supporting the addict’s delusion that their drug or behavior is not the problem and aids them in avoiding responsibility for their behavior“.  In using this definition, I realize I’ve done my share of enabling.

There were times I thought I was protecting the feelings of others, when in reality, I was enabling them. When I see it, I start correcting it. It’s just that my mind doesn’t always want to admit it.

In a similar way, when it comes to the affair or possible sexual addiction, you may have been an enabler at times. It’s not that you caused the affair. Let me repeat that, ‘the affair is not your fault”.

The cheater has to assume responsibility for what they chose to do. In terms of cleaning up the affair, you have to clean up your own side of the street. When it comes to enabling, you may have turned a blind eye to some things that enabled them to not view their sexual behavior as ‘the problem’.

Now is a good time for making changes including ending your enabling. When cheater’s refuse accepting responsibility, there’s a good chance some enabling is happening somewhere.

Now is a good time for stopping those behaviors that aren’t helping your recovery from the affair. A good place to start talking about it is at Restored Lifestyle. There you’ll find a safe place to talk along with videos guiding you as to what to do, when to do it and how to do it.

Keeping It Real,

Jeff