When I was in high school, I had very little in the way of moral grounding, something I’m not proud of but which is key for understanding the way I acted in the story I’m about to tell you.
This story takes place during my senior year, when I was all the way gone into the party scene.
It was during this time that I dated a lot, and as my senior year wound down, I found myself dating two different girls, possibly at the same time, and both of them older than me. They’d both gone to my high school and had the very same English teacher that I had: Mrs. Diem. But the similarities don’t stop there: they’d also written their senior papers on the same topic: Charlemagne, the famous king of the early Middle Ages.
I knew I was going to have to write my senior paper eventually, and by now you can maybe guess where this story is headed. I managed to use my silver tongue to acquire the electronic versions of both my girlfriends’ senior papers on Charlemagne and then literally copied and pasted different parts of them into one document, and turned it in as an attempt to pass off as my own.
I handed that paper in with about a month left in the school year, and it wasn’t long until my mom received a fairly irate phone call from Mrs. Diem, delivering the news that she was going to fail me in senior English—rendering me unable to graduate—unless I had a new paper to turn in. On the following Monday.
It was a Tuesday.
I had to turn around a brand new, fully cited, 20-30 page research paper, and I had less than a week to do it. And if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t graduate.
I actually panicked. Not because I wanted the grade, but because I wanted to be done with school.
But you know who panicked even more? My dear mother.
She knew me, and what I was capable of at that time in my life. She knew that, if it were up to me and my efforts, that paper wouldn’t even get close to done. She also wanted me to graduate on time, so she decided to help me.
By “help,” I mean “write every word of my senior English paper for me.”
Literally. Every word. I didn’t even type in my name.
To this day, I have vivid memories of seeing her upstairs in the office of our home in Pryor, Oklahoma where I grew up, hard at work at the computer doing research and writing my paper for me.
I’ll admit it: I felt slightly guilty about it at the time, but not enough to run up there and relieve her of the duty. If she wanted to help me, I was going to let her.
Besides, that meant I could go out and party with my friends.
She finished it, I turned it in, and guess what: I got a pretty decent grade on it! Good enough to walk across the stage at my graduation and get that diploma that my mom had earned for me.
God bless her, she was doing the best she knew to do at the time, and I don’t fault her for it one bit.
But while she thought she was helping me, she was actually enabling me.
What Is Enabling?
You cross the line from helping to enabling when you start to shield your addicted loved one from the full consequences of their behavior. My Charlemagne story, while funny, is a perfect example of this.
I should not have graduated. I had slacked off the entire school year, and did not deserve the diploma I got. I was the one who turned in the original plagiarized paper, so I was the one who should’ve had to stay up late for a week, desperately working to create something that would get me a passing grade.
But that’s not what happened. My mom—who is a lovely, lovely person who honestly thought she was doing the right thing—stepped in front of that no-graduate bullet and took it for me.
You can probably understand why. The reason we call these people “loved ones” is because we love them! We want to care for them and meet their needs, but the fact of the matter is: addicts are irrational, and in the throes of a disease that renders them uncaring. When you see them begin to stop caring for themselves, or for the world around them, you do the logical, human, empathetic thing and try to export your caring on to them.
The problem is: that doesn’t work.
Instead, you wind up trying to control your loved one’s behavior, which is always going to be a bad idea.
I know this sounds counterintuitive, because the things you want to do—assist, encourage, fix, protect, support, nurse, serve, accommodate—are all good things.
These are the kinds of things that good spouses do. They’re the kinds of things that good parents do. They’re the kinds of things that good family members do.
But when it comes to the addict, these good things become poison and the exact things that will keep everyone unhealthy.
When you enable, you prevent your addicted loved one from suffering any harmful consequences for their behavior—and if they don’t suffer any consequences, they have no reason to change. Your help becomes something they can depend upon, therefore enabling them to continue living the lie that their disease is feeding them.
Do you see? Is this making sense to you? Are you feeling liberated yet? Is the unbearable weight of making yourself responsible for someone else’s behavior lifting off your shoulders?
I hope so.
Check back next week, when I list several signs that you are enabling your loved one…. or feel free to stop by Amazon and pick up my new book Finding Hope. (all this stuff is in there)
