T - Tenderhearted

I am super excited to have gotten this far in this A-Z challenge. It's been fun and it has definitely been challenging. The empathy part has been the most difficult, but I have truly enjoyed coming up with a daily topic. I hope you get something out of my T -word as I have drawn from my ministry days from many years ago. 

Have you ever tried to help someone who just didn't want to do the work it takes to make some changes? It's true that we can't help someone who doesn't want help. For those people we really do have to just wait until they're ready, it's so hard to watch especially if they are a family member. We are sometimes more understanding with strangers than we are with our own family or friends who are having a hard time. 

There can be a fine line between empathy and enabling. It's good to be understanding and helpful but we can help too much, making it easy for the person to stay stuck in their cycle (of alcoholism, drug addiction, or whatever the vice). When the person is your spouse or child it can be extra challenging, because it's in your face every day and can affect your emotional security, spiritual security, and financial security (especially if it's spouse).  All the person helping really wants is for that person to be well. 

I know a woman who has a really hard time deciphering between being helpful and being an enabler, it's so bad she doesn't see that she is enabling. She will "rescue" the people in her life whenever they call. They have convinced her that they cannot work because of their "ailments" so they constantly need money to "buy food." The rest of her family sees what she cannot - she is funding the addiction. I have a friend who counsels at a recovery center, he tells people who do that, "You're loving them to death."  The more you fund them the more they do not have to stop their behavior. It's such a hard thing to look at because the enabler is just being tenderhearted, wanting so badly for the person to be a healthy, productive member of society.  The sad truth is, until they are, as AA says, sick and tired of being sick and tired, it's not going to happen. 

I used help run a recovery night at my old church with two other women. My area was codependence, while they were helping women with alcohol and drug addictions. There was one woman in particular who would come to the meetings who seemed so put-together. If you met this woman, you would never suspect that she had any issues at all. She met a man who was "in the program" and soon was helping him, doing all sorts of things for him, paying his bills, giving him money...no matter how much we tried to help her see what that she was being manipulated by him and that she was enabling his behavior, she would not see it. She eventually stopped coming to the meetings because she felt we were being too tough on her.  My two friends said, "I have never understood how codependence really works until I watched it firsthand like that." She truly believed that she was being kind - and she was - but it wasn't going to help him learn to take responsibility for his behavior. 

Being kind and compassionate are very good qualities, we just have to be careful not to get mowed over by the person we're trying to help. 

The lesson: Empathy and tenderheartedness sometimes involves saying, "I love you, but no."

Pouring hope, 
Nen♥

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you." Eph 4:32