Enablers?

by Lucy S.

I put the post below up last weekend, but have been wondering if some of my statements were too harsh, so I am adding this at the top.  When I say that “I’ve always disliked the rampant sloppy use of pop-psychology lingo,” I don’t mean that I dislike people who use these terms. A close friend of mine reads and refers to those ideas quite a lot. She is a wise, generous, and warm person with whom I have had many great marathon conversations and some life-changing visits. And I have people in my life who have studied psychology, and I know that a term like “enabler” is not only a pop-psychology term, but is used by those in the field as well. For that matter, a great deal of what I might call pop-psychology terms have become integral parts of our speech. (How many of us have said, “He’s in denial”?)  I am sorry if I have hurt or offended those of you who do use that and other terms and/or have studied psychology or work in the field. I would like to explain the context.

As I say below, I wrote most of this as a branch of an essay on “The Parvenu.” I realized a day later that it was a dead end, a painful dead end, because it had cost me a very long day. The essay was the last of three long ones to finish up my first semester in graduate school, and it was two weeks late when I finally emailed it. For about thirty days straight, I had written every day from early morning until after midnight, except for the evenings of Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the mornings of Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. I have done similar stints, but this came at the end of a grueling semester and at a hard time in my life.

My uncle died the day after Thanksgiving, so I flew out to California a day later to be with my family. He died of a neurological disease that put him and my Aunt Dolores through hell. I visited for two weeks in 2011, and experienced a bit of it. It’s hard to convey what my uncle was to me, some combination of another parent and one of my best friends. I had worked for him at times and lived with him and my Aunt Dolores and the family. For so many years, we would talk on the phone every week for hours about what we called “the issues of the ages” – our attempts to talk our way to some answers to so many Big Questions. These were always interspersed with stories – he was such a good storyteller – and laughter, debates, discussions about movies and songs, and talk about whatever was going on in our lives or those close to us. He had no sense of normal sleeping hours; he would call me at 2 am my time, but I’d just wake up and go with it. I couldn’t stand to shame him for calling late. When I lived in California, we often met for lunch every week. A horrible guilt remains in me for moving away. I feel that I abandoned my uncle and others I love there. I remember when I told him in 1998 that we were moving back to California, and he said, “That’s GREAT news!”

I am only saying that this was a particularly painful loss.

When I returned home, I had to begin writing. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to produce the papers and would lose my fellowship. My education has assumed somewhat mythological proportions in my mind; you could say I had a college education on a pedestal for years, waiting to get back to it, believing in its capacity for such great meaning. Perhaps paradoxically (or not), at the same time, I kept fearing that what I was trying to do or reach was a kind of mirage. At any rate, I needed to have time to talk with my kids or other family members, to talk with my dad on the phone, since it was his identical twin brother who had died, and he also was grieving. Or I needed to relax and think, or walk, but I was so behind on the papers, so I wrote from early morning until late at night. Or I tried to write. I’d stare at the screen crying with books all around me, trying to think of the next sentence or line of thought, typing, erasing, thinking, sometimes demanding to myself, “Produce. Damn it, produce.” To be honest, academic writing can be that way anyway, but that went on so long and as I said, at a time when I was not psychologically up to it.

I began struggling with physical problems, shaking for hours when I tried to sleep. I fainted twice – hit the wall and the ground hard. That was connected to some strange episodes in which I had to lay on the floor for hours, unable to get up, sinking into a weird darkness and extreme nausea, shaking. It was not low blood sugar (I know that feeling and used to sometimes faint from it years ago.) I don’t really know what this was.

The grad student who said Fanny was an enabler – you will see what I mean below – that was just his take on her character. But I have a pet peeve against that word, as it is. If someone is giving alcohol to an alcoholic, the concept may be valid – depending on the situation (though I will always dislike that word). But people freely diagnose each other with that and other terms in ways that become short-cuts and substitutes for seeing someone in their particularity. These diagnoses are meaningless. And I see them slapped on to label people dealing with difficult dilemmas. My uncle could have been called an enabler, and probably would have been by that student, since, like Fanny, he tried to keep his extended family safe. I could be called one, too, I suppose, especially by that student’s standards.

What I’m saying is that the term made me so mad and hurt that I wrote those pages wanting to smack down what I felt was disdainful, mean, cold thinking. I wasn’t thinking of people like my warm friend, but about crisply delivered assessments that sum up people and their lives too easily – the very opposite of what my friend and other loved ones I know who sometimes use these terms do. As for why I put the essay up now – maybe it’s because I’m struggling through this last semester of my program for some reason, and I’m thankful for any “enabling” people have to offer right now (especially in its root meaning), and because kindness has always moved me so much more than harshness. Yet I may have been harsh myself in putting it up in the way that I did, and if so, I am sorry.  

***

Someone said, “I think she’s an enabler.” I had what I thought were an acceptable ten pages as a start to a final paper on Mary Shelley’s 1836 short story, “The Parvenue,” in the fall of 2011, that first semester in graduate school, but that fellow student’s comment about Fanny, the first-person protagonist in the story, kept nagging at me.  I’ve always disliked the rampant sloppy use of pop-psychology lingo.  This set me off on another potential branch for the essay, a branch which I later realized was, for that essay, a dead end. It did not fit into the overall analysis I was doing.  Yet that branch comes to mind at times. This is a slightly modified form of that essay fragment.  

I am going to leave aside a discussion of “The Parvenue” itself, because to do it justice would take up a great deal of space. And I will probably put that essay up soon for those who are curious about it.  Right now, I want to swing the lens around to examine the potential reader of that story or any other, because how we read matters. We all bring ideologies to our readings of everything and everyone.  And the ideologies we bring to those readings create the meanings we take from them.

I cannot posit one representational contemporary reader – and I am not asking the fellow student who called Fanny an enabler to take on this role –  so I want to close-read that oh so common pop-psychology term which inundates our societal language now. I will bring in one of the many popular books on enabling, appropriately titled The Enabler: When Helping Hurts the Ones You Love by Angelyn Miller, allowing the book to represent at least one dominant artery pulsing through our society and its ideas about this topic. Our broad-based familiarity with particular kinds of pop-psychology lingo is one manifestation of a society grounded in an ideology of individualism that must bow to profit. Our most popularized versions of psychology both echo and speak the doctrine of deal-making, exchange-value, capitalist relations. These invade even our most intimate relationships, as I believe Millers book reveals.

That student’s reading of Fanny as an “enabler” unsurprisingly emerges from a society immersed in either/or binaries – dilemmas that always masquerade as free choices. Within these false choices, Fanny then either is an enabler or she is not. And labeling is what objectifies the doctrine into what feels, to many people, like a fact. The labels create or recast words by which members of this society then interpret the world. They become the lenses through which people see everything.        

The diagnoses and solutions feel so obvious. Pseudo-scientific auras surround these words, as if someone had been given a blood-test and had, in fact, turned up positive for ‘enabling’ or ‘co-dependency.’ Amateur would-be psychologists most seriously pronounce the diagnoses, utterly confident in their own assessments. In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser explains some of the obviousness this way:

Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word “name a thing” or “have a meaning” …the “obviousness” that you and I are subjects – and that that does not cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “small, still voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” (1268)

In the case of Fanny or anyone, then, dominant ideology leads us to see her as a “subject,” and by that we mean, says Althusser, someone “endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes” (1266).  But how freely can one form ideas if she is always looking through a particular kind of lens, a lens which normalizes or de-normalizes everything according to the prevailing notions and societal structure in which she is ensconced?

The word to “name a thing” (in this instance a supposed behavior of Fanny’s which has been made in concrete fashion into what she is) is “enabler.” That is one way to categorize the character, Fanny.  But applying this word, “enabler,” to what Fanny is reduces the complexities of her story, and the act of doing so is also, in Althusser’s terms, “an ideological effect.” For many, it feels like common sense; it feels obvious.

The problem is not only the more common objection or plea from the neatly summed up person: the belief that if others knew the whole story, or could ‘walk in their shoes,’ they would understand and in some sense absolve that person. The larger issue is that those who ‘read’ Fanny read their own ideology onto her, and that ideology, as Althusser points out, always makes their own conclusions seem so obvious. Thus, they do not see insightfully, beyond the overly confident banalities of their pop-culture.

         

I want to examine this word “enabler” that has been made to “name a thing.” Jacques Derrida writes that “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (919). Can I employ a bit of this Derridean approach to see what it is within this word “enabler” which necessitates its own critique?

An online dictionary defines the word in its totality this way: “one that enables another to achieve an end; especially, one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (as substance abuse) by providing excuses or making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior” (Merriam-Webster).

The prefix “en-” is “used to form verbs which mean to cause to become something” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online).

Here are definitions for “able”: “used for saying that it is possible to do something; to have a particular physical or mental skill; to succeed in doing something on a particular occasion; to have enough money, time, or freedom to do something” (Macmillan Online Dictionary).

Lastly, that ending which turns what Fanny allegedly does into something Fanny is: “-er.” The applicable usage is: “a suffix serving as the regular English formative of agent nouns, being attached to verbs of any origin (bearer, creeper…) (Dictionary.com). 

So constructing “enable” this way would mean: to cause someone to find it possible to do something or to have a skill or succeed or have enough means to do something. And an “enabler” by all rights should be a person who acts to do this, who manifests agency in this sense of ‘doing’ what this verb entails. What does it say, then, that our popular culture has inverted this word into a meaning so at odds with what the word meant before this appropriation?

But I want to dig further into popular notions of an “enabler.” The second chapter of Miller’s book, “Portrait of an Enabler,” spotlights the former her in that identity of enabler. Miller starts off “coughing and wheezing” as she and her sons clean out a basement “filled with an assortment of junk.” In this last step of a two-week-long move, her husband has “refused” to help, reminding her that he hates moving, that seeing the old home would make him feel bad. “Moving made Stan depressed,” she writes. “He had a hard time letting go of things, especially houses.” The presumption, of course, is that he should have an easier time letting go of “things.” Houses, moreover, are simply things like everything else, commodities to buy and sell without becoming too emotionally attached to them.

The father’s absence angers one son, so Miller finally lets the boys out of the work, one by one, and ends up finishing it alone. When she finally pulls into the driveway of the new home, a note says that Stan and two of the kids are bike riding. “I was angry that they had the leisure to play while I did not,” she continues. “Yet I had been the one who had let them off the hook.” (5-7)

This ‘letting off the hook’ is what currently gets someone labeled an “enabler.” In Miller’s case, her implied point regarding what she should have done is obvious: she should have forced her husband and kids to help equally with the work. The binaries are: they work together cleaning the junk-mass out of the basement to move to another home, or, someone (Miller) bears the load disproportionately. She has seesawed over to the other side of her dichotomy – thus, her book – but she cannot stop reading her story within those parameters.

Miller’s third chapter, “Portrait of a Dependent,” continues her diagnosing, this time of Stan as the ‘enablee’ rather than herself as the enabler. From the beginning, even before they marry or have children, there is a sense from this author that she is entitled to take charge of this other person’s life, since he does not know how to adequately perform according to her mainstream notions of adulthood in this society. She writes that during their college years, she “spent hours talking him through what had come to be his main concern – what he wanted to do with his life …. What he said he wanted was vague and not specific enough for me. He talked philosophically, while I spoke in practical terms” (10).  Notice that in Miller’s wording, they are not people talking with one another; she is talking him through what it seems (if my reading of disdain is correct) should apparently not be his main concern: “what he wanted to do with his life.”

Miller’s impatience with Stan’s larger questions slips through along with her ingrained belief that practicality means ‘getting on with it’ with ‘it’ being “the uphill battle of developing an adult life” (11). Here the capitalist doctrine of fighting one’s individual way ‘up’ is particularly laid bare.  And adult life requires never settling too deeply into one’s days (never loving this particular home or anything else too much), because one must always be on the way “through,” moving “uphill.” What then do we call life when one is not ‘getting on with it,’ when one is thinking and questioning rather than accumulating ever more status and material goods?

Stan, she tells readers, “seemed to have been born with a mid-life crisis. He was never sure that he was doing what he was meant to do in life…” They had children in rapid succession, and at some point, Stan finished graduate school. This “should have brought him relief and rejoicing, but instead, it brought a job decision – which translated into a life decision – and Stan faltered” (12). Once again, as with his attachment to the house, we see Stan, in Miller’s view, not feeling what he “should” feel.  And he falters rather than remaining steadily on the move.  

When offered “a lucrative post on the West Coast,” Stan was “paralyzed,” because of his “submerged feelings of confusion.” Stan had spent his childhood moving repeatedly and thus “had grown to fear any household move.” He struggled to decide between keeping his existing job and taking the new one with the attendant move. “Neither option, however, offered the opportunity to contribute to society in the grandiose manner that he had envisioned, and he was sucked back into his ‘meaning of life’ trauma.” In case readers had any doubt before, Miller’s disdain fully takes the stage here in her summation of his efforts to find a greater purpose in life than the middle-class path of upwardness for its own sake. Her partner’s wish for and pain at the absence of better options – more deeply meaningful work which doesn’t require cross-country moves –  is clearly impractical and ridiculous, in her view, all sarcastically reduced to “his ‘meaning of life’ trauma.” (8-12) 

But this is the cured Miller writing, the ‘non-enabler.’ We are meant to believe that the earlier Miller focused on ‘fixing’ everything for her spouse, that she didn’t ‘allow him to be responsible for himself,’ to paraphrase the terminology of a later chapter (44). What comes across most of all in Miller’s writing is a conviction that people should play by the rules of a mainstream societal game and, moreover, that they should feel pretty good about it. Because Stan did not feel very good about it, she was willing to take up some slack for him as long as they kept moving around the board following the ‘obvious’ steps – but no more.

 Her epiphany was not about to bring with it any profound questioning of her society. That questioning was Stan’s very problem, she believed. She was not about to “participate in his sadness” or “support his emotional drama” (14). This is pop-psychology lingo meaning that she was not about to empathize with her partner. Nor was she about to value him as an equal enough to stop dictating constructed choices and have non-end-based conversations with him about the dilemmas many of us struggle with and mourn in this society.

But Miller is convinced there is nothing wrong with mainstream society. The next chapter includes her summation of its, in her opinion, healthy, normal interdependency: “Our society prides itself on maintaining a balance that allows individuals their personal independence within an environment of cultural interdependence” (15). Which part of “our society” prides itself on this balance, and how well is this balance actually working?

We see her conceptions further developed in this passage, dripping with a lecturing, prescriptive moralism and a chilling hollowness:

Helping others through temporary emotional distress is also part of our ethic. People do get sick, die, have accidents, and experience any number of tragedies. These vicissitudes are part of life, and people recognize it is likely that some disaster will happen to them at one time or another. Grief over tragic events or any kind of devastating loss is normal. Still, after an appropriate length of time, people are expected to face their situation and move on with their personal and professional lives […] People who use their disability, grief, or adversity as an excuse to avoid doing what they can are emotionally dependent, and emotional dependence can be even more deadly than economic dependence. (16)  

In this machinelike manifesto, Miller lays out her no-nonsense (and to my sensibility, eerily cold) normative declarations regarding “our ethic” and what “people are expected” to do by some omniscient arbiter of “normal” behavior. Dying oddly lines up between sickness and accidents as “part of life.” (“Ho-hum, yes, dying…”) While she does not quantify the days or weeks which constitute “an appropriate length of time” for “grief” or any “temporary emotional distress,” it is clear that people should not stop or slow down for too long. They must get back to the onward “move” in their “personal and professional lives.” But who or what is the organism for whom life is ultimately important here? Is it not the capitalist system itself, rather than any actual humans? I am not saying that Miller herself cannot feel, but that she is in a sense ‘occupied’ or colonized by capitalist ideology, so that the ideology speaks through her. She is utterly convinced of her own rightness because it always feels so obvious.

My point is not to cast Miller as a villain and her partner as a victim, but to highlight the all too familiar framing of this story, and some of the reasons they do not develop a deeper relationship. It seems that her partner exists primarily to play a supporting member role in her relentlessly mainstream life, whether he likes it or not. The choice she never recognizes is a sustained ethic and practice of mutual care. And rather than insisting on pointless climbs ‘up,’ she does not discover, or help her readers discover, the far more meaningful commitment to growth bound to seriously questioning the inherent dilemmas of a profit-centered society in which nothing and no one is meaningful for their own sake.  

But again, the ‘choices’ Miller constructs are the typical definitions of enabling versus not enabling. What she never seems to consider as an option is a deep engagement with that other person’s yearnings. Where is the curiosity to know another person, without conversations and everything else simply being a means to an end?

 

 Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

Miller, Angelyn. The Enabler: When Helping Hurts the One You Love. Tucson: Wheatmark, 2008.