In the last article, I spoke of obvious ways that spouses and lovers engage in the enabling process. Parents of alcoholics or drug abusers frequently engage in enabling their late adolescent or young adult children in more open and obvious ways than do spouses and lovers.

From teaching, coaching and counseling, this population of young people between 13 to 18, are a special group of students and present challenges, sometimes beyond belief. Not only do the people that work with this age group have to work with kids whose thinking and feeling patterns are changing daily, but with the parents who have their own set of irrational thinking patterns.

Parents are much more likely to give gifts of money to cover unpaid bills that result from their children’s lack of work or their purchases of alcohol and other drugs. Parents are much more likely to hire attorneys to rescue their children from the legal consequences of drunk driving, assault, or drug trafficking.

Parents are likely to provide housing and other necessities while the person that’s chemically dependent fails to work. Parents are much more likely to believe that they are doing these things for the good of their children. Parents are less likely to see the relationship between their helping behaviors and their child’s alcohol or drug use. Parents are less likely to believe that they benefit in any way from stopping their enabling because of being a parent and if they do not rescue their child from the consequences of alcohol or other drug abuse, they will only suffer and cover the suffering of their children as they start the downward spiral toward hitting bottom.

With adolescents, I have been in charge of the adolescent chemical dependency programs in Gowanda and Derby, N.Y. The group of parents that did not agree to stop enabling kept their kids sick and eventually dropping out of treatment. Education and family sessions for these parents are crucial.

Parents are less likely to believe that they will benefit or improve their life by stopping their enabling role.

They often gave me the arguments that they are parents and will bear any suffering necessary to help their children go straight. The only argument that I found works for such parents to give up their role as an authoritative parent and stop rescuing the child. The rescuing only perpetuates the problem.

Parents’ greatest fear, “that they will suffer a lot watching their child hit bottom when they cease the rescuing,” but parents can endure their discomfort to help their offspring. Getting parents to accept this fact that they are still prone to rescue their children from hitting bottom because of their disturbed emotions of ego anxiety, discomfort anxiety and/or guilt and shame. We in the field of chemical dependency often refer to family dynamics as a family disease. Everyone in this family needs treatment.

Parents suffering “ego anxiety” are likely to believe that their worth as a human being is determined by how their children turn out.

If the child has problems, they were bad parents and errors in parenting are unforgivable and make one an unworthy person. The problem as I see it over 40 years is “self-help parenting books.” In the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s the blueprint for raising children had existed for over 150 years. It was simple. “I’m the parent, you are the child. We are not equal. I’m here to help you, administer support, discipline and teaching the values of “treating others, the way you want to be treated.” My wife and I had five children, three boys and two girls. Each had their own personalities and were not the same. If all five were totally alike, we both would have screamed. We had rules that we usually didn’t back down on. When you make the rules, remember you give them the right to test them also. It is easy to challenge that anyone is totally responsible for the way a person develops and may influence or have influenced their children.

Parents who suffer “discomfort anxiety” often believe that the effect of forcing an “intervention” with their children is too difficult and that they (parents) are too weak to stand the pain of either suffer or tolerate their children’s behavior when the intervention is implemented. The irrational belief here is that a low frustration belief is the belief that their children are too fragile to stand being confronted with their alcohol or other drug abuse, and too fragile to stand the process of detoxification or denial of their desires to keep using.

These parents believe that if they confront their children with an intervention or if they stop enabling, their children will suffer some horrible emotional disturbance from which they will never recover. I used to tell these parents, “What could be worse than what has happened to their children than it already has?” It was important then as now to dispute the parents’ low-frustration thinking, but also in their belief in their children’s inability to tolerate frustration.

Because of the pandemic that we are in at this point in time, the C-19 virus has thrown all of us “out of whack.” There is no doubt that kids are drinking, smoking, vaping, using hard drugs more than ever. How can I prove this, with over 700,000 overdose deaths since 1999. To throw our arms up and say there is nothing we can do is ludicrous. Dare to risk relationships to make them better, not worse.

The greatest generation were the guys that came back from World War II and didn’t now they couldn’t accomplish what they did.

Mike Tramuta has been a CASAC counselor for more than 30 years. Call 983-1592 for more information.