Dynamics of Caring
A deeper look at how we lose ourselves in relationships
I have been thinking a lot lately about the difference between care taking, enabling and supporting. Obviously the ideal way to be a friend, partner, or healer is to be a support. Support is easy, right? We act as our own authentic selves to offer exactly what we think we can in a way that is either taken up or not by the person who is in need. Support is enlivening, not tiring. Support feels mutual. Support is appreciated and, even better, reciprocated.
Many of us do not know how to positively relate to support. We’ll think the people around us just don't know how to give support or, on the receiving end, how to metabolize support when it is offered. Real support is hard to give and hard to take in. We need to learn more about the dynamics of support inside ourselves to understand how to relate to support in a positive way. A lot of times when we think we are giving support, we are caretaking or enabling. When we are on the receiving end of support, what we are asking for is in our comfort zone but not necessarily received to the depth of metabolism that we really need to experience it.
The kind of support that most of us default to thinking we are giving support is actually care taking. Care taking is an easy one to look at if you enjoy taking self responsibility. Care taking occurs when an uncomfortable emotion within ourselves makes us offer help. This can be so many different emotions - shame, guilt, low self worth, a need to be loved, a need to be seen, or just even an inability to handle negative or positive emotions. We help because we care but often at the expense of our own being. Care taking is exhausting. Care taking is lonely. Care taking is not reciprocal. Those of us who care take as a default often look around at our friendships when we need help and have no one to call.
Take a moment to sit with your emotional body. Breathe into your body and see if you can expand your sense of feeling emotions. What emotions come up right away? Which emotions are you comfortable with feeling yourself?
Now bring someone into your senses that you deeply care about. What happens inside you when they are having a problem? What is happening inside you that you are trying to avoid? Do you have a tension or discomfort that is taking you out of your body in some way? Slow down and notice what is different, what are you avoiding?
Enabling comes from a different place inside us. When we enable, we are protecting others from their own negative emotions, often shame or guilt. These emotions link into an inability to feel loved, insecurities, or low self esteem. We take on someone's fears and try to control them to prevent them from feeling too much. Of course, this is because we are also afraid of the consequences of their actions. We do not trust them with their own choices. This can be a really comfortable stagnation zone in relationship...until we try to change the patterns. We enable to control. We also enable to prevent suffering. By enabling we allow people we are close to to not take responsibility for their own actions or emotions. We sense a fragility about a person, or an inability for them to contain their emotions, and we do the work for them. This keeps them from negatively emoting towards us, which in turn keeps us safe.
Enabling makes us feel needed and gives us a false sense of relating. Our ego gets nourished more than our deeper needs and desires in the area that we enable from. Perhaps we want to feel in control and enable to know that the people around us are acting the way we want. Perhaps we want to ensure that the people we love are safe and in the process smother their own ability to choose. Perhaps we use enabling to prevent our own growth. We enable so that we do not have to feel responsibility for our own negative choices. It is important to note that we often sense a person’s inability to contain their emotions or actions and we enable only in that area. We can have a healthy relationship with someone in most areas, and then enable in another area.
Addictions and suicide threats are the most extreme versions where we can find enabling in relationship. It is easy to fall into a savior's complex and believe that we are truly helping a person we love be a better human being. But once we start to trust them with their own choices, consequences, and emotions we break a pattern that can lead to more harmful behavior, It doesn't tend to go so well. Often what we have been protecting a person from, happens. Alternately, the relationship ends because the person who has been enabling is never truly valued and the person they have been enabling knows that a different person can be found who will enable them.
Deepen again into your body’s emotional sensations. If you have someone in your life who you want to protect from themselves, bring them into your awareness. Notice if any thoughts or emotions come up here. What are you protecting this person from? Why? What is the story you tell yourself about how and why you are needed? What are you avoiding?
How do we break these patterns and move from enabling and caretaking into supporting? The first thing to note is that these can be quiet energetics that rule a relationship in shadow. So one person might want to change the pattern, but without the consent and involvement of the other, it rarely goes well. The enabler/caretaker needs to out themselves to the person they are doing this to. It is necessary to allow the person who is receiving caretaking or enabling to know there is a conscious decision happening to break a pattern. Otherwise the person will metabolize boundaries being set and support itself into feelings of rejection. The resulting emotions and physical consequences in the relationship can now be felt in a clearer way. This might look like telling someone how worried you are about them or how hurt you are by their actions. When we let the person we are in relationship with feel us, we enter into a realm of honesty that can allow change to occur.
Of course, this is not easy. When we are working with insecurity, shame, guilt, low self esteem the person we are entering into a more honest relationship with metabolizes our own honesty within the known and comforting negative feelings. Pointing out to a person that your actions have been based in love and regard for them can help. Ultimately though it is the person's choice to change their story. If that isn't possible and they are not interested in support, it can't go well. You cannot force someone to take in support. All you can do is let someone know it is there and have them decide what to do with it. Some people will see a potential for change, some will not.
Supporting is honest. Supporting when changing the patterns of caretaking and enabling can feel like a relief but also a stress. If we caretake as a default, we have to start to feel our own feelings and sit with them in discomfort. If we are more an enabler, we have to witness people we care about messing up their lives or having negative emotions without controlling it. We have to practice acceptance and allowing people to have their own relationship to their choices and how they live their lives. In the end though, when we know how to support without draining ourselves, we have relationships that feel nourishing and caring instead of draining and one-sided.
Being supported is the other side of supporting. Learning how to ask for what we think we need and then notice when it is being acted upon by another is something that is easy to resist. There are so many ways that we can resist support. We can shut off emotionally and go through the motions. We can feel the support as an infiltration of intimacy and shut down. We can get disinterested or disassociated. Accepting embodied support into our beings in an attempt to heal ourselves and feel more attached and whole something we have to work on. We have to breathe into the support and let it flow into those places that are tensing against support. We need to open ourselves emotionally to support. We have to allow support to be BELIEVED in our cellular being and emotional body.
There is no ease when we start to address the discomfort in the dynamics of caretaking, supporting, and enabling. We have to get used to the comfort of discomfort, emotions that we do not normally feel or embrace, and allowing ourselves to slow down and ask the question, “Why?” before we act and react to an other’s being. We enter into a realm of self awareness and the unknown.
If you want to spend a bit more time with this dynamic, sit with a difficult relationship you have in your life or who came to mind when you were reading. Just sit and breathe into where your body tenses and relaxes. Notice thoughts that flow and see if you can figure out where they come from in your body. What tensions are saying reach out? What tensions are saying take control?
Can you stay in your body as you feel the dynamics moving through you?
Do you want to move outwards towards this person to help them? Do you want to take them inside you and change their actions to match what you would do?
Last see if you can find a place of trust inside you for this person. Can you listen to its voice as it arises? Can you let the other person go and trust their own life path? Notice what relaxes and what tenses inside you at the thought of letting go? Can you find a place where you can imagine being in support?