Are you an “Enabler”

Posted on Saturday, 20th October 2007 by User Image Bcarter

I was watching Judge Judy yesterday and there was a case on where a boyfriend of a young girl was an extreme compulsive gambler. He had already ruined the financial ties to his family so he started asking this girl’s to ask her mother for money to bail him out. The whole time I was watching this I’m thinking “You poor girl, I really hope that you don’t follow the path to a bunch of losers like this.” I called Q in to watch the show, but the time he got his butt in the office, it was over. I wanted him to see what this guy was putting the poor girl through.

This show gave me the idea for my next blog post about enabling. Of course, you know I’m not an expert, but I wanted to find a useful article on it which you can read here. Taking a look at this was very insightful for me because I realized that not only was I enabling Q financially, but I was also enabling him in other ways. A big one that I have done in the past is try to control Q’s behavior. I have changed all checking accounts to my own name, told him to “be productive” when I leave for work and given him lists of things to do while I was gone at work. I have also gone as far as hunting him down at the casino and calling security on him because he has “voluntarily” banned himself. I have never really been a control freak before, but this was our financial future that he was messing with so I felt I had to do something, all the time I thought I was doing this to protect myself, I was really helping him continue gambling.

Until next time.