Enabling Forgiveness

On a particularly dark night of the soul . . . 

​​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.

---

​And here was an answer, cutting through all my filters. 
(Because I had no
more filters.)
(​Because they were
​all in tatters.)

​"An enabler is someone who
doesn’t allow other people to take
​responsibility for their own actions."
​

​​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.

---

But I didn't always have to be.  

So:  here is what I’ve come to discover
about the difference between enabling and forgiveness,
about how we abuse forgiveness,
about how we gaslight our own realities--
--all in the name of forgiveness
and all in the service of
not having to stand up
and say, 
​No. This is not okay.
​

Both forgiveness and enabling meet an incredibly deep need for relief from relationship pain.  But they are not the same, and they have very different outcomes.

​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.)
​

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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.


​

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