Below you will find an excerpt for Father Joseph C. Martin about enabling. Families can learn how to stop helping contribute to the problem by not rescuing the alcoholic all of the time.
“To enable means to make it possible for someone to do something. Now I think practically all of us here have been connected at one time or another with an alcoholic and I’m sure that many of the things that we have tried to help them, perhaps over a period of years simply have not worked. They just haven’t worked and we have racked our brain and tried every single thing we could think of – the motive, pure love, pure charity. We want to try to help the alcoholic stop drinking and it simply hasn’t worked.
We wind up feeling, amongst a whole lot of other things, bewildered. There’s just this terrible bewilderment. What in the name of God is wrong? The more I try to make him or her child, spouse, brother, sister, parent, the more I try to make him better, the drunker he gets, the sicker he gets, the worse he gets. What in the name of heavens is wrong?
Usually, somewhere along the line, I have to swallow the pride that has kept me from seeking help. I have to swallow that pride and seek help.
I must not make myself a part of the destruction of someone I love and when I learn and learn and learn, I find out that much of what I’ve been doing has been enabling him to get worse (see Alcoholism Getting Worse) and that’s simply irrational behavior.
But kindness prompts me to do the things that I do for the alcoholic and it is awfully hard for me to see that kind acts can hurt and yet we’ve all heard this haven’t we, long before alcoholism ever came into being? To kill with kindness and we do.”
For more information to help you stop helping an alcoholic all of the time check out the following:
Spouse Of An Alcoholic-Five keys to help you cope with the addict you love. In the more info section of this video on Youtube, you will find a long list of things that can help you be stronger in the face of alcoholism.
Living With An Alcoholic Husband-This video is loaded with information that can help families learn more ways to stop the cycle of obsessing about an addicts behaviors. The key to helping the alcoholic hit bottom is found in getting more educated about how to let go of their behaviors and how to stop enabling. This video has a few tips tips to help you do just that.
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