Do You Love Enough to Leave?

Have you ever loved someone only to discover that your presence in their life was like kryptonite? That your leaving them would be for his and your highest and best good? Author of the groundbreaking book, The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck, offers what I consider one of the best definitions of love that I've heard when he says "love is the willingness to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of oneself and another." 

Anybody who knows anything about drug addiction has heard the term "Enabler." What are Enablers? Enablers are caretakers and codependents and controllers, people who "over take" their loved ones lives with "care" and control. They "over" take care of others to avoid having to face their own emptiness, fears,  loneliness, dragons and demons. We can enable others, people we claim to love, to do more than abuse drugs and alcohol. We can enable a beloved to "use" whatever it is that they over indulge in to keep  from facing their dragons, dragons that must be faced if they are to grow and evolve into the people they are meant to be. Well, I've had a few enablers and I've been an enabler. 

Are you wondering if you're an enabler? You're an Enabler if: 

• you do things for your beloved that they ought to do for themselves. 
• you let a "grown" man or woman move in with you not because he or she is committed to building a life with you but they are homeless or about to be. 
• you never let your beloved hit rock bottom, whatever that is for them. 
• your beloved says he's too sick to report to work and you call in for him. 
• you regularly foot the bill, still your beloved gets to call himself an adult. 

Are you an Enabler? The above "quiz" can't tell you for sure if you're an Enabler but your intuition can, and does. We don't listen and take heed not because we're so in love. We don't listen because, by definition, an enabler is as dependent upon his beloved as she is on him. Only his dependence is emotional. 

Sometimes leaving is the most loving thing you can do for your beloved. Your beloved will never learn to stand on his or her own two feet so long as you carry them. If you can, let them down easy. But don't expect them to leave, at least not until they find another Enabler. No, you must give them and you the gift of leaving...so both of you can grow. 

Smooches!
DeBora
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DeBora M. Ricks, Author/Speaker
www.DeBoraRicks.com