Enabling Quotes

“Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents and young children, but in the best situations, there should be no power struggles by the time those children have become adults - just deep connection, trust, and respect between people who sincerely care about each other.
In disruptive families, children are taught to remain one-up or one-down into adulthood. And this produces immature adults who either seek to dominate others (one-up) or who allow themselves to be dominated (one-down) in their relationships - one powerful and one needy, one enabling and one addicted, one decisive and one confused.
In relationships with these people, manipulation abounds. Especially when they start to feel out of control.”
― Tim Clinton, Break Through: When to Give In, How to Push Back: The Moment that Changes Everything

“It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“To truly motivate others 1) discover what their motives, desires & drivers are 2) genuinely connect with and support them from the heart.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Allowing others to suffer the consequences of their own actions, without enabling them, is the best motivation for them to undertake the difficult task of change.”
― Darlene Lancer

“Most meals, I pay for myself so I can stock up on weeks Aaron goes a little crazy. His therapist calls this enabling. I call it love. She says I'm a problem, and I, for one, have agreed to disagree.”
― David James Poissant, The Heaven of Animals

“If you want someone to be for you, never let him feel he is dependent upon you; rather, in some way, make him feel that you are dependent upon him.”
― George C. Marshal

“There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to acomplish, both in the natural and moral world.”
― Edmund Burke

“In imperial relationships, getting out proves much more complicated than getting in.”
― H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

“Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. – Jim Shepley”
― David Pietrusza, 1960--LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies

“The enabler will love the addict into darkness. The addict becomes a shadow of the person they once were. The enabler love is blind and selfish. Blind, because they cannot see the selfishness, when they cradle their own emotions over the addict’s recovery. It will always be tough love, support and lots of praying to keep an addict clean. The underlined reason for the substance abuse can only be found when the addict is thinking clearly.”
― Ron Baratono

“Enabling is the mortal enemy of consequences.”
― D.C. Hyden, The Sober Addict

“Children love both magic and science for the same reason both are enablers. Both offer power and solutions to impossible problems. But then something shifts when people discover the instability magic brings to existence. It shatters the world that’s been built on predictability and logic. Suddenly the material, the countable, the definable is pulled from underfoot by the capricious, slippery and ego-centric nature of the mind. In that respect it’s the opposite of science, which remains dispassionate and impartial to the observer, predictable no matter what. The laws of motion won’t change because the scientist gets a speeding fine.”
― Jan Golembiewski, Magic

“It doesn’t matter if you’re the spouse, romantic partner, concerned friend, parent, or child, you still bring something precious to the table - something the addict depends on. What do you bring? You bring an “obligation by association.”
― D.C. Hyden, The Sober Addict

“almost all parents of dysfunctional adult children have to some extent become enablers.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Helping is doing something for someone that he is not capable of doing himself.

Enabling is doing for someone what he could and should be doing for himself.

...Simply, enabling creates an atmosphere in which our adult children can comfortably continue their unacceptable behavior.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Only when our adult children are forced to face the consequences of their own actions - their own choices - will it finally begin to sink in how deep their patterns of dependence and avoidance have become. And only then will we as parents be able to take the next step to real healing, forever ending our enabling habits and behaviors.”
― Allison Bottke, Setting Boundaries with Your Adult Children: Six Steps to Hope and Healing for Struggling Parents

“Why is there a perseveration on gender instead of expanding inquiry and addressing all dimensions of a being in distress? Why are we enabling kids to possibly run from something such as past trauma or encouraging distraction from emotional pain by quickly writing a prescription for puberty blockers or a cross-sex hormone on the first or second visit to a clinic?”
― Lisa Shultz, The Trans Train: A Parent's Perspective on Transgender Medicalization and Ideology