Enabling
April 15, 2010 – 7:54 am
If I have to pay taxes at least that means I earned money last year. Thanks to all of you who contributed to my income. I sincerely appreciate your business!!!
Just think, today we get to send money to Uncle Sam and hope that he spends it wisely….Ha Ha Ha! Of course, with my warped sense of humor paying taxes makes me think of the term Enable.
Recently I’ve learned that to enable someone is to do something for them that they should or could do for themselves. Most of the time we disguise this help as an act of love but if we were truly honest with ourselves, we would begin to see that sometimes we help others for the wrong reasons. We help because we think that they cannot do it themselves, because we don’t like the way they do it or because we want to feel needed.
Examples:
- Doing the dishes that your husband promised to do because you don’t like the way he stacks them in the dishwasher and you want them done now.
- Loaning money to your daughter because she spent all of hers on a new outfit and now can’t pay her car insurance. After all, she’s just getting started paying her own bills and may need your help until she can stand on her own feet financially.
- Putting away your neighbor’s trashcan. After all, it’s no trouble for you and they may leave it out there for days before they remember to put it away.
- Cooking breakfast for your grown son because his wife is too lazy to lift a finger. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
- Fixing the copy machine at work because its easier for you to do it than have to explain for the umpteenth time how to reload the paper. After all, not all of your coworkers are as smart as you.
Isn’t it funny how we rationalize our “good deeds” with reasons that seem logical. In fact, many of you may be reading this and asking, “what’s the big deal?” Chances are that we’ve all done one or two of these things at one time or another. Used to be that I would be the first one to rush in to “help” all the while thinking that I was doing a good deed. But now I know better, or at least I try to do better. Now I am more honest about the function of my behavior.
Now I understand that if I do someone else’s job it’s not usually because I want to help. It’s more honestly because I do not like the way they do the job and I am making a choice to do for them out of judgement. I am judging another person’s actions and deeming them unfit for my preferences. Wouldn’t it be better for me to simply accept that their system is different than mine? It would certainly save me from having to do everything.
Guys, you might think that women have a much harder time with this, but my experience has been that men are just as bad. They simply choose to direct their enabling actions in other ways. I know a guy that calls himself Mr. Fix-it. Got a problem? He’ll fix it! Even if it’s not his problem in the first place. Even if it means that you will never learn how to fix it yourself.
Enabling someone is like the old proverb of fishing. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Except that the modern version of this proverb goes more like this: “I have to give this poor sucker a fish because he’s too messed up to provide for himself. I don’t have time to teach him how to fish because I’m too busy to trying to feed everybody under my care.”
At some point, if we’re really lucky, we exhaust ourselves trying to ”feed everybody.” At that point we begin to realize that feeding others is not our job and that we only did it because we wanted to feel important, we needed to have others see us as good samaritans or because we really wanted to control the way other people did things.
Whatever the reason, if we can instead remember that what goes on outside of ourselves is really none of our business, we may begin to take better care of ourselves and mind our own business. Of course, it all starts with recognizing when and why we enable in the first place.
When a friend told me that enabling others was robbing them of the ability to learn how to do for themselves, the light bulb went on. I then began to notice how often I was jumping into other people’s business under the guise of help and love.
Just for today, try to notice how often you jump into other people’s stuff. Then ask yourself the following questions:
Am I doing this because they are truly helpless?
Am I doing this because I think they can’t do it “right?”
Am I doing this in order to look good?
Am I doing this because it’s easier than watching them struggle to learn how to do it themselves or teaching them how?
Are my actions really helping or just keeping them needy?
Food for thought.
Happy day,
3 Responses to “Enabling”
Very good and well thought out article. Will share with a few friends. Thanks for enabling.
By John Sikes on Apr 15, 2010
I hope you feel that your roads, the funding for workmen’s comp for the jobless in this recession, and the federal funding of medic-aid programs are worthwhile. Let’s stop spending $30 billion a month on war, bring the troops home and put that money towards domestic programs that satisfy needs which our system neglects to address adequately. There are working poor who can never get out of the cycle of poverty. We are paying the lowest federal taxes ever in the last 50 years. Check out the following article:
Tax Day Fact Check: Most Americans Got A Tax Cut This Year
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
Congratulations one making money this year! I know you earned it…and you were probably still able to enjoy a lifestyle that is better than average. Consider those who don’t have the same abilities or opportunities, and are exploited at every turn!
We have our own “Darfur” here at home…
By Lynn Meffert on Apr 15, 2010
Fortunately for me, I am able to see the good things our government provides to its citizens. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through education and equal opportunity.
Despite these opportunities, I still question the long-term mentality of entitlement that we have created with some of our well-intentioned programs. I am a Democrat at heart and yet I sometimes wonder what Roosevelt would say about our social security system. What Kennedy would say about our welfare programs. I am the first person to help someone who honestly and earnestly needs a hand. But I find it very sad to witness third generation welfare recipients and citizens who demand their “fair share” of freebies when they do not contribute to the greater good of our country. Personally I’d like to see us bring back the CCC, refuse welfare to any able-bodied person under 40 who can work an honest day’s labor, penalize contractors who hire illegal workers and give them incentives to hire welfare recipients instead.
We won’t let our banks fail because they shore up an entire economy that requires constant growth in order to stay afloat, yet we’ll allow citizens to fail by offering them credit that they cannot possibly afford and then protect them from foreclosure when that’s the natural consequence of bad decisions.
Perhaps we could start teaching our children economics again…real economics based on earning money, doing without and saving up for what they want.
I applaud this administration’s efforts to reign in the banking industry’s high-risk loans, control credit card company interest rate fee schedules and provide economic stimulus to the housing industry. I only wish we could extend that level of control to reduce spending for those who do not contribute to our country’s growth (including military spending to countries with whom we will never recoup benefits.)
In a nutshell, I wish that we could provide assistance to people in a way that helps them help themselves to rise from poverty instead of continuing their dependence on our hand-outs. If we could solve that problem, we could see REAL change in our country.
I also wish we could reign in the pharmaceutical companies who have created an entire generation of Americans who are convinced that if they fail at anything it must be because they have some illness. Can’t pay attention? You must be ADHD. Can’t focus? You need Ginko Biloba. Everything has become a disorder and as long as we see ourselves as sick the modern conclusion has become that we are no longer responsible for our bad behavior. It’s a sad state of affairs when 27 million Americans take anti-depressants, a statistic that doubled over a 10-year period.
Americans don’t need anti-depressants. We need anti-oppresants. We need encouragement to work hard, incentives to save money and tax incentives to bring back industry rather than outsourcing it.
More than my two cents worth of soap box.
By Trish on Apr 16, 2010