It's season six of Here to Thrive, which is incredibly exciting, and our first episode this season is pulling apart the difference between compassionate support and enabling bad behavior. The intention of this episode is really to differentiate between these two concepts because the lines between them can get really blurry and get blurry really quickly, and I have found in my experience that some help with the language and being able to really identify these two different concepts has helped me recognize and meter my own giving behavior so that I'm always giving and supporting and helping from a healthy place and hopefully staying out of those less healthy, dangerous, shadow-type enabling behaviors. So let's get going. Welcome to Here to Thrive.
I'm your host, Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast for people who are ready to step up and live a happier life. It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life.
I don't believe we're here to nearly survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive. So let's get going. Now, this topic has been on my heart for a little while, and the reason I wanted to share this is because if you're a good person, you might be prone to over-giving from a desire to be generous or kind of spirit or generally just because you're a good human.
But there are some circumstances where your giving or helping tendency might tip over into places that ultimately do harm to either yourself or the very people you're trying to help. So I wanted to explore this more in a bit of a conversation. Honestly, I share this from a place there is no judgment here because this understanding has been essential to my own well-being. As a recovering people pleaser and someone who tries to be a giving and supportive human, I have to be really aware of this distinction myself.
And I mean really aware. I keep it front of mind. And as I mentioned earlier, having the language for it has been a huge help for me. So I want to dive in and explore it further with you.
To start with, I think it's really important to define these terms so that we have a shared understanding of what the hell I'm even trying to distinguish between here. Ultimately, we're talking about the difference between kind and compassionate helping behavior versus destructive or unhelpful helping behaviors or behaviors that are disguised as helping and support, but ultimately are doing damage. There's a word that when I do a values exercise with some of my coaching clients that often irks people and it has interested me over the years. And that word is tolerance.
Tolerance is one of those words that may indicate that you're tolerating behavior that is actually not okay and hints towards the messy middle or blurry boundary that makes up the difference between compassionate support and enabling. Now, this isn't straightforward. It's not a bright white line, but more of a blurry spot that can easily turn into a very slippery slope if we're not aware of the concepts. So to start with definitions, to be simple, compassionate support is showing up to love and support someone in a way that ultimately empowers them in the longer term.
Enabling is when your compassion or helping goes so far that it is potentially doing either short or long-term harm in some way and is likely undermining their self-responsibility. Building on the point of that slippery slope, people don't set out with the intention to enable or support bad or unhelpful behaviors and others. And I think that is really important to highlight. This is where what starts out as compassion or support often can just down the slippery slope, end up in this dangerous spot.
But people don't start out with the intention to enable bad behavior. They just end up there by accident. And that is often underpinned because those who are in that spot of enabling really don't want someone else to feel pain or guilt or sadness. They want to fix it.
We want to jump in and stop those feelings on the other person's behalf. And listen up, my fellow peacemakers and people pleasers. The other side of this is that we're often driven towards enabling behavior because we want to keep the peace and avoid the hard and uncomfortable situations that we might find ourselves in or the hard and uncomfortable things that people ask of us. So those with tendencies like I do that just want to keep the peace in the moment and make sure everyone is okay.
You may have a tendency to choose the short-term peace over the longer-term well-being that is true support. If you've heard the word codependent before, it absolutely fits here. Licensed therapist Sherry Collier, and yeah, I found that on Google so you can look her up, puts enabling under the umbrella of codependent behaviors. She states, and I quote this, when we find ourselves trying to fix the other person's problem, or if we find ourselves needing to help the other person for our own sense of identity, then we are dealing with codependency.
Enabling someone to ultimately depend on you for whatever reason is codependent behavior. Another way to look at this is more of that support angle rather than the compassion word. So support versus enabling. Clinical psychologist Amy Duramus separates the two this way, and again, I quote, enabling is when you act in ways that help someone maintain harmful behaviors.
Supporting is when you help them avoid harmful behaviors and make it easier to choose healthier behaviors. It can also be when you let someone know that you care about them no matter what, but you cannot support their harmful behaviors. So how exactly does enabling do any harm? The thing with enabling is that it can prolong unhelpful behaviors that ultimately hurt and contribute to long-term suffering.
And this can be in the case of the person that you are attempting to help, but it can also create suffering within you and within the relationship itself. In terms of the suffering, by enabling bad behavior, you are stopping someone from having to face the real consequences of their own behavior. It's like you're putting in this fake buffer around them when ultimately there will come a day when they have to face the choices of their behavior. You're also not allowing someone to build up the self-esteem that they can by working things out independently.
One of the ways we build a sense of self-reliance and self-trust or self-efficacy is by working through hard stuff. It makes us more confident in our capabilities in the future. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that enabling is this type of behavior that shelters others from the reality of the decisions that they're making. And life just doesn't work like that in the long term.
It isn't sustainable. In terms of the helper, which can also be framed as the rescuer, which we'll talk about in a little bit, this can also lead to huge feelings of resentment and frustration within you. So by keeping the peace outside of you, you create internal turmoil, which is just a price that is also too high to pay. So where do we need to be aware that there may be a risk of us moving into enabling type behaviors?
Now, I'm sure if you're already jiving with anything that I have said so far, you're pretty aware of where things can get messy and the relationships in your life that may be more prone to you slipping into the sort of rescuer or enabling type behavior. Obviously, marriages and intimate relationships are a place where this is of incredibly high likelihood. Codependency can easily sneak into a marriage or very close relationship. And when you think of the word enabling, you might automatically think of addiction.
And it is definitely something that comes up in addiction circles when we speak about the behaviors that those closest to an addict inadvertently support. There's also the people that matter most to you, friends and family. As I said earlier, sometimes it can be an ask that goes too far. And it is very hard to say no when you care about people.
And then thinking of myself here, parenting is definitely a trap. And oh my my, my boys are only eight and 10 and more acutely aware of ensuring I help support that natural ability for them to individuate or grow into relying on themselves, not relying on me. And let me tell you, this is so hard for me. I will confess it is not natural at all.
Like I said, I'm a people pleaser who just wants to take care of everything. Waterline control freak, let's be honest. But I have watched people who have in many ways unintentionally disabled their children who then go out into the world and struggle to adjust because they haven't gained the skills or self-esteem to build this sense of self-reliance earlier in life. So yep, less cutting my kids sandwiches for them over here and more making sure they put their own laundry away is for sure my current intention.
So working on it, people, working on it. I would say any relationship where you are trying to be a helper, a good person is also one that you have to be conscious of. I will say as a coach, I'm very clear that I'm here to support my clients and at best I act as a guide or a catalyst. I can't do the work for them.
And I also don't take the responsibility of their lives on personally. I can't fix anyone. I share that simply to say when I was first drawn to psychology in my early 20s, I honestly thought I could fix people and that if I chose this career, it would be my responsibility to fix people. But as individuals, we cannot bear the burden of other people's lives.
And I now very much practice from a place that an individual is ultimately the one that needs to take the tools and information and what they have at their disposal and do what they can with it. I can't make anyone do anything. It's that whole cliche, right? You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink.
So then how do we know if we have crossed over into the space of enabling behavior? I touched on it earlier, but if we're in a position where we are overgiving or enabling bad behavior, we likely feel a sense of internal conflict. It's like a bottle up is a feeling like things are a big ask or resentment and feeling like you are pressured into certain ways of acting or behaving. It's many of the same indications that you would experience when a personal boundary has been crossed.
So look out for any feelings of frustration or resentment. Okay. So, I mean, that's pulling it all apart, but ultimately the question that underpins all of this is how do we get out of the cycle and how can we move away from enabling and getting back into the space of healthy, compassionate support? A couple of pointers for you.
The first one is awareness. You need to be able to step back and recognize and ultimately question whether your behaviors are helping someone in the longterm or potentially hurting them. This takes a willingness to be honest with yourself. And it also means that you need the language and hopefully this has helped to be able to differentiate between these two concepts without the language or understanding.
You can't sort of step out of your experience to assess where you might be on that spectrum. So knowledge is everything and knowledge is the foundation on which you can build awareness. So high five. Hope this very conversation is helping you.
So how to move away from it. Number one, build personal awareness. Number two is hold boundaries. And closely related to this is the willingness to do the hard thing in the short term.
This is where I have previously struggled because I am a peacemaker and a people pleaser. So I will take the short term piece and sacrifice the long term game. Now to stop that slide from compassionate helping into enabling, you have to draw a line that ultimately you need to hold. That line will likely require you to say no at times and will likely require you to be uncomfortable in saying no.
Now, obviously this is especially hard if you have someone who is really content on not taking responsibility or you are deeply enmeshed in a codependent pattern with. I don't pretend to make this sound easy by any means, but recognizing where your boundaries are is absolutely the first step here. To reinforce some of this, I would also recommend listening to episode 132 of the Head to Thrive podcast. So flick back through the catalog.
You'll find one with Nancy Levin called Boundaries and Living Your Truth. Nancy also has a book called Setting Boundaries Will Set You Free, which I highly recommend. So point number two, you need to hold boundaries. And point number three, reframe your helping from that enabling space to being a supporter.
Just that switch can make a big difference. Decide that you are going to show up as a supporter. And honestly, this is a decision. Supporters are thinking about the long-term well-being of the person they are with.
You can frame your response this way too. When I think about your longer-term well-being, I feel like the best situation is for me to work this out with you rather than do it for you, as an example. Or as I quoted Amy Daramis, the clinical psychologist earlier, you can also let someone know that you care about them no matter what, but that you cannot support behaviors that you see as harmful or destructive. There's a book that is one of the most powerful I've ever read.
I love it. It's a great model. The book is called TAD, The Empowerment Dynamic. This is a really complimentary idea to everything we've been talking about here, and I could do a whole podcast on it and probably should, but it talks about how we can get from the dreaded drama triangle and move into more of an empowered place in our relationships.
And the idea that they put forward is that we move from the rescuer mentality to a coach mentality, which is simply another way of framing that moving from an enabling mentality to the supporter mentality. So check it out. It's a great book. I really wish this stuff was easy.
And I know we're talking about human relationships here, and we all know how confusing, nuanced, and messy things get when we're talking about the emotional sphere. But my hope today is that this episode just gave you some language and perhaps a little bit more of an understanding so that you can consider your own behavior and how you're showing up to support the people you love and care about in your life. Are you showing up from a place of true, empowering support, compassion, and help? Or have you unintentionally fallen into the trap of overgiving, rescuing, and enabling bad behavior?
Ultimately, the latter leads to feelings of resentment, frustration, and will likely lead to longer-term suffering in the person you're trying to help, let alone the impact it will help on you in the person. who is trying to give that support if you can recognize yourself in some of this i encourage you to dive deeper into these concepts codependency boundaries enabling behavior as i mentioned there are two books which i would highly recommend nancy levin's setting boundaries will set you free and you can also listen to her on episode 132 if you're ready to dive in right now and also tad the empowerment dynamic which introduces an empowerment dynamic as an alternative to the characters of the dreaded drama triangle i've linked to both of those in the show notes should you want a quick and easy link to them oh my gosh season six uh that concludes our first episode super exciting things happening over here and will be happening i will update you over the next few months so please stay tuned and up to date so proud of myself the other day i worked out that like to follow a podcast on apple podcast you need to go to it and check the little tick slash checkbox top right hand corner so if you're not yet following here to thrive and you've recently stumbled across us please go and follow the podcast so you don't miss out and if you're not on our mailing list head over to the website easy to remember it is here to thrive.com and sign up for our updates you also get a free life planning guide and coming out of the other side of summer that feels like it's a good time to sort of check in touch base so take advantage of that over there and if always if you have appreciated this insight or learned something from here to thrive today please jump over to the review tab and leave us a review i see them all honestly it gives me purpose it makes me know you're there i cannot thank you enough for taking the time to leave them appreciate you all and we're back on schedule week after next so until next time keep thriving beautiful people keep thriving