Are You Helping… or Enabling? The Shift from Saving to Supporting and Setting Boundaries

It can be such a fine line between helping and enabling, between supporting someone we love and trying to save them. When you’re in it, it’s hard to see clearly. You feel their pain, and everything in you wants to make it better.

In this episode, I share from my own experience and from the Recover Your Soul process about what it really means to love someone without trying to fix them. This isn’t about finding the “right” answer, because every relationship and every situation is unique. It’s about turning inward and beginning to recognize when we are acting from fear and discomfort, and when we are responding from a more grounded, soulful place.

So often, our desire to help comes from not wanting to feel the pain of watching someone struggle. But what if peace doesn’t come from changing them? What if it comes from acceptance?

As we shift from saving to supporting, we begin to let go of control and trust that each soul is on its own journey. We can still love deeply, still be present, but from a place of clarity, compassion, and healthier boundaries.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure of how to show up for someone you love, you are not alone. This is the work, and there is another way.

Remember, this isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about recovering the wholeness that has always been within you.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

The Fine Line In Love

Rev Rachel Harrison 0:28

It can be a very fine line at times, the difference between supporting or saving, helping or fixing. And sometimes we just have to look at our own life, our own situation, our own relationship, especially with our adult children, to be able to see this line more clearly. And often we've been doing the helping and enabling because it's hard for us to feel the discomfort of watching somebody else go through something hard. Of course, we love them. Today we're going to talk about it through the recover your soul process and how to empower ourselves with loving detachment and still be present with them in a way that is healthier and more clear to their soul's journey. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recovery Soul Podcast. I'm Rick Rachel. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I want to talk about enabling versus helping, supporting versus saving. And I want to talk about this because it came up in our recent parents of adult children soul circle group coaching. It is a topic that has been so huge in my own life, this constant awareness of how do I show up in my wholeness? How do I show up as my fully resourced, loving, compassionate, peacemaker, helper self in its best way and support, but not enable and not save somebody in my life that I love. And I want to talk about this because you're in it. And when you're in it, it's really hard to see outside of being in it. And one of the things that I can offer is after eight years of being sober and doing this deep, diligent spiritual work, being in the rooms of Al Anon, being in the rooms of AA, becoming a metaphysical minister, really diving into my own personal transformation of healing and awareness that continues to show up on a regular basis, certainly not finished yet. But that I'm looking at my life from an entirely different angle. And so I don't have all the answers for you. Nobody has all the answers for you. You have all the answers for you, by the way. Everything that you need is within you. But what we can see is that when I think back into the years where it was really complicated and difficult in my life with my family, and my oldest son was at his height of struggling. And I kept trying to save him, trying to fix him, trying to make it better for him, to keep him from falling further down. I was not supporting him. I was trying to save him. And oftentimes I was just making it worse. I was actually creating a situation where maybe his soul needed to have the complex feelings that he was having, the situations that he was having, so that he could learn how to pick himself up. But I kept being the one to pick him up. What happened in one of the recent soul circles, and I have these group coaching soul circles that are part of how you can work the nine steps in your own life. And I hope you always feel like I'm not trying to sell you something because I'm not. I really want to give you the opportunity to do this work that's so transformed my life and has transformed hundreds that I've worked with directly and potentially thousands who have listened to the podcast in terms of switching how you see it through this process of a healing and awakening. And there's lots of different ways to do it. So I'm always saying I don't have the only way, I'm not the only answer. But if you've come here, potentially the voice that I have is one that reminds you of your voice, reminds you of where you are in your life. And so this idea that came from this soul circle, which are these group coaching sessions where we're looking at people who are in similar situations. And a lot of people come here because they also have adult children who are dealing with addiction or mental illness or failure to launch, or, you know, this complexity that is in our young adults right now of how to be out in the world in this new world that it is, and how we can be healthier, more aligned, more true to ourselves in it, and how we can lovingly detach them into their own life. And it's not easy. So most of the people that come to recover your soul come because they have somebody who has addiction in their life. I was an addict. I got sober at 48 years old. My husband was an addict. He quit drinking the way that he drank before eight years ago when I got sober, but continued to have his own journey around it. Um, I think he's sober right now. I actually don't pay much attention to it because he's emotionally and spiritually an entirely different person. And my kids have been really on their own recovery journey that has seasons of sobriety, seasons of um less use, seasons of more, seasons of having to hit their own walls. Uh and again, almost like my husband, I'm less and less obsessed and concerned and focusing on and completely attentive to whether they're using or not, and more attentive to how their soul is doing, how they are in their body, how they're showing up in their life, what they're learning about themselves, what responsibilities they're taking for themselves. Well, enabling is a big piece of that because one of the things that I was the master of was immediately jumping in and fixing and trying to make it more comfortable for them because I don't like to be uncomfortable. I really don't like to be uncomfortable. I don't think anybody likes to be uncomfortable. No, that's not true. Tony Robbins had a part of his Unleash the Power Within, which I've done twice, that talked about these different personality styles and needs, emotional needs, I think he called them. And one of them was that some people prefer certainty and some people prefer uncertainty. And uncertainty is adventure, it's like going and not knowing what you're gonna do, and you just get in the car and you just go, and and that feels good to you. And to me, that sounds terrible. Like I want, I want certainty. But we have people who show up in their human experience who want uncertainty. It actually fills them up to have this sort of wild ride adventure. And so the discomfort actually is part of their experience. There's another YouTube channel that I really like to watch called Yes Theory. And it's these young men that travel the world and have these big experiences with strangers, and their uh tagline is seek discomfort. So here I am saying maybe no one wants to be in discomfort. But the truth is for a lot of people, that is actually how they thrive. It's part of their journey, it's part of their um expression. But for many of us who are here, we struggle because we don't like discomfort. And we don't want anyone else to be uncomfortable because for us, that equals that something's wrong, that there's some um break that's gonna happen, that everything's gonna collapse, that it means that um that it's that it's bad. But discomfort isn't necessarily bad. Sometimes discomfort is what helps us to grow, to create change, to do something that's beyond what the stretch of what we thought that we could do. When you're uncomfortable, you have to stretch. And we've spent our entire lives insulating ourselves and creating this system where it's small and safe and quiet. And it isn't that you can't have a life that feels ease-filled, that feels um safe, that feels loving, that feels beautiful. That actually is a desirable thing to have. And I think our souls are actually calling us to have that experience. But for some people, that experience for them is someone who's climbing the rock face of some wild, you know, face of stone. And the rest of us are thinking, what are you doing? And they feel the most themselves in those moments. So coming back to enabling versus helping, saving versus supporting, in my group with um these amazing people that come together twice a month, and we have this group coaching on parents of adult children. One of the members had said that she was coming back to this feeling that was around a child who had had their car impounded, and she wasn't gonna again bail her out. They had given her the car, they had given her money to get the car registered, she hadn't got the car registered. Now it's been impounded. They didn't give her the money to bail it out, and of course, she came back with a whole bunch of victim. You're doing this to me. This is your fault. Why won't you save me? Why won't you help me? I relate to this 100%. And if you're listening, I am pretty sure you relate to this situation as well, whether it's right now or whether it's in the past. When we're in these relationships with people who are on their own journeys, one of the most painful and difficult pieces, especially once your own children, is to step back and let them have the hardship. And that looks different for every single person. One of the things that I think is really important that I hope that I teach in Recover Your Soul, and I want to say this clearly, and so I'm just closing my eyes and letting letting it come just right. Um, there is no one way that is the right way for every situation. There is no one answer that is the answer for everything and everyone. And each one of the situations and each one of the relationships that we're in has its own unique and important flavor and story and healing journey and timeline. And part of what we're learning in this particular spiritual practice is to trust and turn within and be curious about and open to what is the right and correct path for each and every one of you to follow that may be very different from what the people around you are suggesting. And I think this actually speaks to our people pleaser in us, which is not only in the relationships that we have with people where we're dancing this dance of enabling versus supporting, but it comes back to the part that we're really working on here in Recover Your Soul, which is having more clarity and awareness of what is true and right for each of us in our own unique expression. And when we look at our children, when we look at these relationships, what's happening is that we're in a time period where everything is starting to shift and change and all the definitions are shifting and changing. And, you know, the pendulum kind of swings in these very big directions of, you know, for a long time it was tough love, a hundred percent. Never give them anything. Just, you know, if they're they've made their bed, let them lie in it. And then there was this swing over to help at all costs. They need your support, they need your love, they need you to be there to help them do the things. And I think that we're in a balancing period. I think we're in a realignment period in not only in this particular context of these relationships, but as relationships as a whole and human beings and how we're relating to other people and releasing of these old patterns and stories, which is a huge part of the recovery soul process. But it's also about us really having clarity that each situation isn't the same as anyone else's situation, and yet it's all the same. If you have a child who's been struggling for their whole lives, and most of us who have a kid who is in addiction or really in a place where they're having right now intense situations, I would say for the most part, and and again, this might not be true totally, but that if you look back, they've had a struggle of some sort for a long, long, long time. So if we give ourselves grace, what you recognize is that this isn't something that showed up just one day. This has been a slow and steady walk that you've had with this soul. And what I love about recovery your soul is we're actually talking about souls. We're not talking about psychology, we're not talking about um mindset, we're not talking about sort of these categories that you can put people in, because that is our attempt to make things be clean, to have consistency, to have certainty. This child is a click, and that's how you treat them. This child has this, that's how you treat them. On a soul journey, what we're seeing is that each soul comes into form and has this wild ride of being human, which is very dense, very complicated. And I just want to put in there that what you know, it what part of what's happened in Recover Your Soul is as I've changed and as my spiritual journey has gotten bigger and I have more understanding of what comes in for me, I recognize it's very different than what I used to talk about and how I used to talk about it in the seasons before. So one of the things I want to remind you of is there are 500 episodes that you can go back and search topics, start at the beginning, be in places where I didn't have some of these awarenesses or concepts that I have now, because we all learn in this steady awakening process. And they're again just like how I'm talking about each relationship is totally different. Each one of us is totally different in how we absorb information, how we expand, what we're healing, what we're learning, what lights us up versus what somebody else is lit up by. These concepts are not that there's one way. And again, it's not only one way in the people that we work with and have in our lives, but one way in how we have our experience fully. So if you go back and listen to early episodes, and again, I highly recommend because it's a whole, you'll feel it in it. You'll feel it in me and what I'm talking about and how I'm in my own experiences and my relationships because I've been doing this for a long time since 2020. And back in 2020, it was not great. Things were completely not good in my life still. I mean, really hard in my marriage, really hard with my kids. There were situations that happened that were painful and difficult, and I was, I was still trying to navigate how to be myself and how to have a voice and how to set boundaries and how to let go of codependent behaviors and how to let my kids fail. And here I am six years later, and we have an entirely different family system. It's unbelievable to see how much has changed in that time. Not that everybody's perfect, because that is certainly not the case either. But this saving versus supporting has gotten clearer and clearer and clearer to me in my relationship with my children. So back to the uh the soul circle, where we had this beautiful conversation with these parents. Um, right now the soul circle is all women, but it's open to men too. And we're talking about how, as moms, you know, just to watch your child who you want to get their car out of impound. You want to. And if you know my story, I recently did get my son's car out of impound, and it was a big decision for me. He also let his car go out of registration and got enough tickets that it went into impound. I could have let him have that experience. What came back to me was that this was not about anybody else's decision about what is the right or wrong thing. But I needed to look at my son's life, where he was. Um I'm always saying I will only help them to the level in which they were helping themselves. And if they are not helping themselves, or they're leaning to me or looking at me as if I am the bank account that's going to save them, I'm not gonna save them. And that can be a very fine, sticky line. There's no doubt. In that particular situation, I made that decision because it was the decision that was right for my heart, that felt right to me. And partially because he has a family and he's working and he's, you know, doing side hustle jobs and they're just trying to catch up. And there was just no way that he was going to be able to get that car out. And what happened in my situation is I had been giving the kids what I call um residuals for talking about them on the podcast. And so when I gave him the money, I said, I'm not giving you this money. This is not a handout from me. This is a prepayment for any residuals that you make for Recover Your Soul based on what we've been giving you. And so I'm giving you years worth of residuals. And so now there's no more money from me. That's done. That door has closed. He has not asked for any money since then. He has not said, Oh, mom, I know you said, but I am not able to do this, or I still need your help. Does that mean that I haven't thrown them some money every once in a while because I can and I want to, and they have a new baby, and you know, I want to be helpful? No, I have, because that's the generosity that I want to have that's different than saving them. And it's partially because they haven't asked for anything. And I think that one of the things that happened in my situation was that I had such a clarity around how much I was not supporting, I was totally saving, how much I was enabling, that when I had that wall that came up, um, many of you have heard this story, but um, many years ago, probably five, four or four years ago, maybe four or five years ago, for Christmas, I gave them each a little box. And in the box it said, All loans are forgiven. And they were like, Yes, you know, this is like the best Christmas present, because they each owed me, I don't know, a thousand dollars or something like that. And um, and then on the back it said, the bank of mom is closed. And that was a hard decision to make because what I didn't want was to have them know that if they need support, of course we are here to support them, but again, only to the level in which they can support themselves. But this thing that had happened, this loop that had happened where they can manipulate me or or um make me feel bad, you know, guilt me into giving them money, that was done. And it took a couple years of this kind of discomfort. Talk about being able to be in your discomfort. And so part of it was me, a big part of it, all of it, was me being able to sit in what felt uncomfortable. So, this is what came out of the soul circle that I loved so much. Because what I love about the soul circles is I'm doing group coaching, but there's so much wisdom that comes from. Being in a group of people who are in the same boat as you, the same learning situation that you're in, and the wisdom that comes within them. And one of the women said that she had read something in a book that said, When we enable, we disable them. We disable them from being able to resource themselves to be in their own discomfort and to be able to make decisions for themselves if they so choose. If they so choose. And I think this is the part in recover your soul that I hope this has been my journey. I can't choose for them. I can't make them want to be happy. I can't make them want to be well. I can't make them want to have a life that doesn't have some of this suffering and discomfort. But the more that I've had in today's, um I mean, this year's theme in Recover Your Souls podcast is acceptance as a path to peace. When we're not accepting the situation as it is, it means that we in our minds have determined that this isn't okay. And almost all the time, what we are saying is it isn't okay because it doesn't feel good to me. It makes me uncomfortable. And one of the women so beautifully said that she could see, she could see so clearly that most of the decisions that she had done that were in enabling, saving, unhealthy behavior were a compulsive need to fix so that she would have an immediate, like, okay, it's gonna be all right. And most of us are looking for some um magic, I always say magic fairy dust or a magic wand that we're gonna sprinkle on the situation. We're gonna say, this is it. This is gonna be the thing that makes it all better from here on out. Well, when we start really leaning into reality, that's not possible because every single day is a new day. Life is a wild ride, it's gonna be full of challenges and complications, it's sticky. We're human beings with a lot to work on. And so these children, particularly children who we have been dealing with since they were young, and maybe their souls came in with some heaviness, some karma, or some, you know, college level, PhD level soul learning experiences to have, and watching them have trouble with friends or trouble in school, or not having self-esteem, or having a highly sensitive nature we haven't understood because we just want to fit them into the norm. We just want them to be in the herd with all the others. Well, we're in a time now where that doesn't exist anymore. And as a matter of fact, we're being encouraged on a larger level all the time to break out of that limited rigidness that's around safety. And you know what that safety is? It's fear. Fear of being different, fear of being rejected, fear of not following the norms. But what if we're moving into an entirely different way of being that has acceptance, acceptance, acceptance for everything that is, especially when it's outside of the norms. And most people who are in addiction, before it becomes the physical addiction that completely hijacks and takes over, the first level of addiction is an attempt to heal a broken heart, or to have fun, or to be comfortable in their skin, or to um to dampen the feelings that you don't know what to do with. And isn't that understandable? Don't we all do that in some way? And aren't we doing that sometimes by enabling and trying to make them feel better? We're trying to do something to make them feel better. So coming back all the way around to this woman in the group who opted to not help her daughter to get it out of impound. She had a knowing within her that whether she'd gotten it out of impound or not, it would have had the same result in the end based on where her daughter is in her own journey in her own life. And that it was essential and important that she released and allowed her to have whatever that experience was, as painful and difficult as it is, including not having contact with this person, with her child, which is incredibly painful and difficult. But when we move into a soul, we can begin to understand that there's so much more going on than what our human self, our being here as Rachel or as you know, Martha or Joe or, you know, whoever we are embodied, that we can rise up just enough to say, I love you enough, I love you unconditionally enough. I'm letting the judgment go and the conditions go, that I can love you so much that you get to have, and I will allow you, I will accept whatever the situation is. And that when people come and they're ready for support, instead of saving, you're there for them. That you can let go of all of the resentments and all of the judgments and all of the past and be present for somebody when they show up and they say, I'm ready. And that may not mean rehab, it may not being sober, it may not mean all those things, right? Because sobriety is the beautiful top of the iceberg. It is helpful, but it is not 100% necessary for a deep awakening within. And that's what we're really wanting to support people is to remember their own wholeness, to be comfortable in their own skin. And it doesn't always happen, right? So we do this work and we work so hard on our own healing journey and understanding that just because your neighbor did this with their kids doesn't mean that you're gonna do that, because you're gonna think to yourself what is right for my situation with my child that is aligned with me. And even if that means overhelping at times when someone else is rolling their eyes and saying, I can't believe that you're helping them with that. If at that moment that's what feels absolutely within your soul, what is gonna make you the most true to your soul, not that this, not easing the discomfort, right? That you can sit in the discomfort, but in your soul, you're like, this is actually what feels right to me. That's your journey, that's your choice. So it isn't a situation where we can say, if they're doing this, you do that. And if they're doing this, you do that. And this is what tough love looks like, this is what this love looks like. You're in a unique relationship with every single person in your life. And unlike marriages or even siblings or friends, there's something about kids that's different. But we're switching from an old paradigm, which was that you lose yourself, you give yourself away at every cost for a child, which I think used to be the paradigm. We're switching to seeing our children as whole, seeing them as light, seeing their souls as here having an experience, and that we were put together on purpose to help each one of these soul experiences to learn and grow and have the most potential of exploration, of expansion, of healing, everything that ever came before. We cannot move forward into who we are becoming if we continue to drag the wounds and the belief systems from the past with us. And that means also the people in our lives that we continue to drag along all of their stuff too. So saving versus supporting sometimes is a very wobbly, wishy-washy line, and sometimes it's clear. But you know within you, when you begin to clear yourself, when you do your own work, when you connect to your higher power, when you have more understanding with yourself about what is true and right for you, that is not about saving yourself from discomfort, but being able to be in complicated, hard, challenging situations from an awakened state that can make a clear decision from an awareness, from an awakened, awakened being. And what that is for you is what it is for you. And so it's about trusting that part of you that knows. When I look at my life and I look at how far we've come as a family and how my kids are so self-reliant right now, and they're struggling their asses off financially because it's expensive in California. Um, one kid makes way more money than the other one, but it almost doesn't matter because they have just as much struggle. They're entitled to that struggle and they're figuring it out. And I think that I want to be as supportive as I can, but I also want to give them the knowledge that they have what it takes to make the decisions in their life, to create the life that they choose. And in that, I'm getting more and more clarity about choosing the life that is aligned with me. And sometimes those things run side by side, and sometimes they're totally different. And when I'm talking to them and I'm and I'm in relationship with them, it's a very different relationship than what it was that I'm the mom, I know all the answers, I have everything to give to you. You know, listen to me, I know it. No, I'm I'm 56 years old. I'm still figuring it out for me. And I'm also figuring out how to be in relationship with them as adult men, as their own sovereign selves, so that they pick up their own life. And that may mean that they have to eat, you know, cheese sandwiches. Bodhi recently was like, you know, there was a couple months where he was eating soup, you know, and just heating it up or, you know, having very minimal amounts of food because he had to figure out how to make it through. Well, that gave him a strength and an understanding and an appreciation for what he has. And hearing him say those things, the first thing you want to do is deliver some groceries. And, you know, I didn't do it. That's what felt right to me in that moment. For you, that may be a different choice. And both are fine. It's about being clear when you're speaking from your soul self instead of from our ego fear self, who's making that decision and choosing what's right for you. We are all on this beautiful, complicated, wild ride together, and there's something happening within all of us. And if you're here, it's because you're ready to do this incredible, brave, courageous work of letting go of old patterns, old systems, and stepping into a spiritual path of your own decision, your own making that feels right to you, and letting go of what no longer serves you and becoming more aligned into your authentic whole self. That's the whole purpose of Recovery Your Soul. Until next time, Namaste. If something that you just heard resonated with you, I want you to know there's a whole community waiting for you. The recovery soul process is a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life, and there's many ways to walk it together. Start with the free mini workbook at recoveryoursoul.net. It's a beautiful first step. You can join us for the free monthly support group on the first Monday of every month. And if you're ready to go deeper and work the nine steps, you can join the self-study collective or a soul circle or come to one of our in-person retreats or workshops. And if you want to work with me personally one-on-one, coaching is available. You can also find bonus episodes every Friday on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, and I'm on YouTube with new videos that are posted weekly. And grab your copy of the new Recover Your Soul Spiritual Memoir. It is a spiritual journey of healing from addiction, codependency, and people pleasing available on Amazon, and it's our journey of healing through this process. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and all of is recover your soul. Just remember you're not alone in this. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.