Turning negative enabling behavior into positive potential:
Negative Enabling Behavior: Minimizing problems
Positive Potential: These people can be given assistance to recognize the magnitude of the problems in which they are enmeshed. They can be given information about the nature of “family” illnesses and the “sick” roles that each family member takes on and how their enabling behaviors are “sick” and can lead to their own physical or mental illness if left unchecked.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Protecting the troubled person from negative consequences
Positive Potential: These people can be taught “tough love” technology. This assists enablers to redirect their efforts to help troubled persons recognize and accept the consequences of their own troubled behavior. In this way the enabler will let the troubled person “face the music” for their problems early on, let them “hit a brick wall” and recognize the need to get help for the problem on their own.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Self-blaming
Positive Potential: When they have learned that there is virtually nothing they can do in reforming a troubled person, they can take themselves off the hook of blame and place the responsibility for the problem back into the hands of the troubled person.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Manipulation
Positive Potential: When they realize that most of their efforts exacerbate the problems, they can stop using threats, bribes, ultimatums and trickery to reform people. They can use honesty, assertiveness, openness, confrontation in getting help for themselves, and then address the troubled behavior of others.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Super-responsible
Positive Potential: By handing the responsibility for the problem back to the troubled person to handle, and by viewing the problem more rationally, they can encourage the troubled person to seek help and assistance for himself, to address his problem, and to be open and vulnerable to change.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Acting out of loyalty
Positive Potential: Enablers need to be guided in their feelings of loyalty to avoid protecting troubled people from the negative consequences of their actions. Redirected loyalty is to encourage the troubled persons to face their problem honestly and to get timely help, preventing the problems from becoming uncontrollable.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Powerlessness
Positive Potential: They can be helped to recognize that practicing “tough love” and helping others accept personal responsibility for their own actions is a powerful behavior, with a more productive outcome than the enabling behavior used previously.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Denial
Positive Potential: Enablers need to hit their own “brick wall” and get help for themselves before they can effectively help others. Such brick walls as the troubled person getting sicker or getting into trouble on the job or with the law is a way to force enablers to give up their denial of the problems forcing them to take corrective measures to alter their enabling strategies.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Sarcasm, nagging, bitching, blaming
Positive Potential: Once they are able to let go of super-responsibility for others' problems, enablers are also able to let go of chronic reminding and reprimanding the troubled persons for having the problems. Enablers can be helped to recognize that this verbal “garbage” is the very behavior that gives the troubled persons the excuse for indulging in the troubled behavior in the first place.
Negative Enabling Behavior: Low self-esteem
Positive Potential: Once enablers are able to let go of the need to solve the problem no matter what, they are able to view themselves in a healthier, more rational way. They can love and respect themselves more and pursue avenues that will make them feel good, allowing them to have fun.
