Enable and provoke

A beggar comes knocking on your car window at the traffic light. You have two options. Politely ignore the intrusion or be rude and yell at him to go away. You do the latter. As the car pulls away, you feel guilty and start looking for spare change. Where you would have given Rs5, you are now ready to give Rs50. At the next traffic light, you seek out a beggar and literally hang out of your window to give him money. Anything to alleviate the guilt!

If we don’t enable, then we are not in a position to provoke or be provoked. If we don’t provoke, then we don’t enable. If you hadn’t yelled at the beggar at the first light, you wouldn’t have felt guilty. Then you wouldn’t have enabled the next beggar at the second light by handing out money as compensation.

Let’s look at the example of an alcoholic’s wife. She throws away her husband’s bottle of booze so that he doesn’t drink. In turn, she provokes him and enables him to fight with her. Then, after a horrific fight, she feels bad and the need to compensate kicks in. She then gives him money or, worse yet, a replacement bottle. She now further enables him. Evening after evening, she dresses up, looks nice and waits from him to spend a romantic evening with her and reward her for her love and understanding. She thinks that because she has been so wonderful, he will one day just throw the bottle away. But we all know that he never changes and instead, ends up getting drunk and beating her. This is a vicious cycle of unrealistic expectations.

We enable and get provoked which then leads to depression and anger. Often, this results in an unhealthy relationship between two individuals, which is referred to as codependency. What we need to do is to alter our own behaviour rather than trying to change the rest of the universe. We cannot force people to fit into the mould we have created in our minds for them. Everyone has his or her own journey and the only path that we can alter is our own by not enabling and provoking others.

A friend of mine was complaining bitterly about how his very good friend had let him down, yet again, by betraying a confidence. I felt bad for him but the only thing that kept going through my mind was, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ Why continue to enable someone who has repeatedly provoked you in the past?

To quote Newton’s First Law of Motion, every action has an equal reaction but in the opposite direction. So avoid the actions that lead to responses that cause you stress and push you into self-destructive and self-defeating cycles. Focus on goals and the people who truly matter. Let all the unnecessary distractions fade away, so you can ultimately be the best version of yourself. The problem with this approach is that one can run the danger of going too far in the opposite direction. For many of us, our relationships are the most enriching and valuable things in our lives. But every relationship comes at the cost of a certain vulnerability. We cannot keep our relationships and yet avoid enabling others.

As TS Eliot once wrote: “We must love another or die.” The secret, therefore, is to keep a healthy balance in our relationships, so that we get the benefits of intimacy without being unduly dependent upon others.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th,  2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.