​​On a particularly dark night of the soul, when my husband was with his new love, I exploded from sleep, drawn to my computer as if it were oxygen, not yet aware that I was awake, yet typing in the words:  ”What is an enabler?” 


​
Just days before, upon discovering the thing between them (the thing that would someday have a name--affair--but which was presently was just a terror devouring my universe), I had snapped at my husband, trying to stay in touch with the deepest place in my soul, a thing that I thought would be an investment toward healing our marriage:  “The forgiveness is in place and ongoing.”
 
And I meant it with all fury of wisdom, righteous truth, and comic justice.
 
Still, there was all this pain, all this emergence of disconnected pieces from the recesses of memory coming together and forming patterns, fatal flaws, and tragic consequences.  All this realizing, over and over again, that even with the support of friends, I was really and deeply alone in this.
 

​I had been toying lightly with this concept for some time:  joking with my husband and friends about certain "enabling tendencies" and feeling good that I had accurately, openly, and without shame identified a key characteristic of my intricate inner survival system.
 
But that was before I knew how fully I have been betrayed.  And not only by my husband and friend, but also by my own innocent, intentional blindness.

Now there was only a pounding, tunnel-vision urgency define what went wrong, to understand how I had created this mess, and to figure out how to escape the flames.

​​Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.  A dozen memories surfaced at once, from early childhood to adolescence and college, into professorhood and marriage and motherhood.
 
Yes. I did this.
I was this.
I did not have "enabling tendencies."
I was an [expletive deleted] enabler!
I have always been like this.

​Forgiveness feels good.
And so does enabling.

The relief associated with releasing anger, coming into equilibrium, restoring relationship, and helping life becomes sweet again is powerful.

Forgiveness brings relief. 
​And so does enabling.
​
Both meet  an incredibly deep need for relief from relationship pain.    

​And it is often literally impossible to tell the difference.
​
On the school bus, when I was a very little girl, a boy started hitting me over the head with a book--a very heavy textbook. I had no defense but enduring and not responding.  (Yes--classic Enneagram 9.) 

All my instincts told me that eventually, he would get bored and stop.
Which he did. 
But it took a long, long, long time.

And the relief of him finally, finally stopping was so great that for a brief half-second I literally wanted him to start hitting me again, just to feel how good it felt when he stopped. 

​​In that buzzed-out place of dissociation, relief is all that matters.  And relief happens naturally  when we let go, even when we let go of the need to be treated with deep respect.  Thus it is that enabling (not letting others take responsibility) disguises itself as forgiveness (letting go of what no longer serves.)
​

Those of us with “enabling tendencies” are therefore called to a deeper responsibility than we are used to taking on.  We are called to

1. Notice where in our relationships we are over-functioning:  when we are not letting others take responsibility for their own words and actions
2. Tune in to our body's intelligence, and learn to hear and honor our own no.

 
And here is the scary part:  we are called to see our own abusing of forgiveness.

Please do not imagine that I take this work to be simple, surface-level adjustments. I tried these ("silly me, yes:  I have enabling tendencies"), and they were a first micro-step.  But only that.

But neither does the work have to be hard or traumatizing. Trauma clearly is not a path to freedom. 
 
We must take the body to a safe and clear place, deeply present and alive.  And then (think of Maslow's hierarchy here):  safety of the body becomes our baseline--the place that feels normal, the place of grounding to make any deep shifts that your own wisdom is calling you to make. 

​​The call is into your own ocean, into your own bleached coral reefs.

Being with the damage.

• Witnessing what is.
• Knowing what you know.
• Remembering what deep presence feels like.
• Knowing that you already know how to shift back to wholeness.

There are reliable ways to shift back to wholeness

• Know your true needs at any a rising moment, including the need for both respect and release.
• Find your natural boundaries. And honor them.
• Forgive by releasing what no longer serves.
• Know in your bones whether enabling actually works for you, to express your highest self in the world.
•  Use your breath and body wisdom to shift.

Yep.  I can teach you these ways.  I sought out wisdom and the tools that I now teach when I was in desperation.  I practiced and honed and cried and died and came back to life and somehow went on healing.   I found out what really, really worked, and sloughed off all the rest.  Then I got myself trained to teach and coach and challenge and support others. 

I take this stuff very seriously.
And also very playfully. 

Because life is the thing we are freeing in ourselves, and love is what flows through.


​

So I tried.  I really did. 
And everyone applauded me.
Everyone except my furious, scared-to-death daughter.  Every time I got strong enough to spark, she attacked me with every bit of rejection-laced fury that her tough little body and tongue could hurl out at me. 

I reeled.
I retreated.
And I knew in a vague and fuzzy kind of way that my daughter needed me to expand my dang consciousness. 

I'm just so tired, said the echo of my patterns.

But by now it was just the two of us in the house, and my inner sanctum was wearing thin. My daughter felt rejected, exposed, unsafe.
 
My daughter will not become a thug.
Here are the words that I read and reread, fiercely determined to keep myself from falling back into stupor:  Eights become more aggressive and belligerent, demanding that their energy be met. Nines respond by not responding: they go on emotional strike.
 
I kept finding the will to stop the bullying as it arose.
​ No. This will not happen. My daughter will not become a thug.

Seeing how destructive type-patterns might play out in my daughter’s  life gave me the courage to stand and bear and confront her torrents of anger.
 
The paradoxical nature of living unstuck was playing itself out in me. 
 
It was terrifying.  It took every bit of strength and will and goodness and determination inside me.  And it still would not have happened except that I loved my daughter with a fierceness beyond words, and her well-being mattered way more than my own false sense of who I was and what I was capable of doing.

Here's the short-course version of what I did:

• Asking her how it felt when I retreated, and hearing her  say — like you don’t love me.

• Tending my own wounds in her presence, in the path of her anger, instead of retreating every time.

• Telling myself she feels unsafe when you back off.  And standing my ground.

• Saying: She feels betrayed when you don’t do what you say.  So I began to follow through every time instead of sometimes.

• Knowing: She will think it is okay to yell at her dearest love ones if you let her get away with this. So I stopped letting her yell at me. 

A thousand-thousand tiny moments of clarity and awareness and pain in the present for blindness in the past.
 
And then – more lasting shifts.
​

Here is a big one.
 
I was at a dance. My daugher was with me because she was still just barely too young to stay by herself.  She wanted to leave, and she was snapping at me, desperate to get me to do what she wanted.
 
But I was not about to leave. Dancing was bringing me back to life. She had her phone and some books, but this was not what she wanted. So she was being rude and obnoxious, snarling at me in front of my friends and fellow dancers.
 
Finally, I snarled back:  “We are not going. And I am not going to speak to you until the end of the dance. You are being incredibly disrespectful.”
 
She fled in a controlled rage and stood in the doorway.  A dancer I don’t know very well began to upbraid me for basic bad parenting. I looked him in the eye and told him he had no idea what he was talking about.  He left, and I looked for my daughter, still in the doorway, still across the room from me.  She was in full-out the protection mode:  arms crossed, face a mask of toughness, body armored in her own energetic force-field. 
 
I caught her eye. So bundled and tight, such a thick shell.

She saw me soften, saw me almost rise to approach her, to speak to her, to tell her how much I loved her.
Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.
Don’t. You. dare. Talk to me. 
So I sat down. 

She needed to trust me. I had said I would not talk to her till the end of the dance, and I had darn well better follow through. Trust is a big one for 8s. 
 
And by now I knew it.
 
So, as I said, I sat down.
 
And I saw my daughter relax across the room, where she stayed in the doorway until the dance was over.  Then and only then, she approached and cheerfully helped me pack away my things.
 
I treated her during that time in ways that would’ve killed me if I were that age and in her shoes.
 But her core fear (of being controlled) is very different from my core fear (of loss and separation).

And once I understood both my core fear and hers, I was able to act more skillfully, even though it meant dipping my toes into waters that felt me as if they would annihilate me.
 
This is why I said that the Enneagram gave me back my daughter.
(Who, by the way, is amazing.)

And maybe my son.
 The jury is still out on that one. My son was in a Russian orphanage before my former husband and I adopted him at the age of 8. His life was not at all supported in any normal way. On the Enneagram, he’s a 4, which means all kinds of ambivalence around both the nurturing and the protective elements of relationship.
 
My part in making it probable to have an adult relationship with my son stands not entirely, but in a good amount, from the myriad forms of consciousness work that I’ve done, especially with the Enneagram, and from both of us understanding that even though my 9 patterns and his 4 patterns may want to run the show, we are free in any moment we choose not the patterned response to life, but life itself, as it emerges.