Enablers in the House
There are supporting players in the life of the alcoholic. These people are enablers. Often they are the very people that you would think would want the drinker to stop drinking. Unfortunately they are caught in the trap of codependency.
Codependency comes from a place of dysfunction guarded by secrets. It is a wall of protection keeping a drinker safe from prying eyes. It circles the family and protects behavior. Guilt, shame, repressed anger, and low self esteem also reside within the walls of codependency.
Codependency can happen to anyone in an alcoholic's family. It can affect a spouse or a child. Because care-taking of the family is traditionally a female role, women often take on the role of the codependent.
Codependents want to fix things; they want to protect. They seek to rescue. They also push their needs and feelings down and only focus on someone else's needs. In the alcoholic family, the alcoholic becomes their focus. They watch the alcoholic and cater to their needs - real and imagined. They protect the alcoholic from discovery and shield them from the consequences of their alcohol problem to keep the status quo.
Often the codependent person is afraid of what may happen if the focus of their attention changes their behavior. What is to become of the codependent when the drinker stops drinking? The codependent has to go through a type of withdrawal and recovery same as the alcoholic. They have to change their life and their relationships.
There are support groups for the codependent. They help the person adjust to the changes in their life as the result of the alcoholic's change. They have to learn to relinquish the control they have had on the family. They have to allow the walls they built around the family to come down and the secrets to come out. They have to learn to readjust their perception of normal and create a new version.
They have to allow the drinker that they have protecting to feel the consequences of their alcohol abuse. Often all of this is too much and the codependent and the drinker or recovering one have to go their separate ways.
Alcoholism affects everyone in the family. Spouses and children cannot escape. Codependency goes hand in hand as it were with alcoholism. It serves as the protection for the disease. It keeps it safe, it allows it to continue. It enables the drinker to carry on and not address their problem. The tragedy of codependency is that is keeps the lie going and keeps the family from really functioning. It tells the lies for the family to protect it from the outside world until the alcoholic family becomes the lie itself.
