See what happens when we don't enable?

[Thursday]

Part of my journey through my life, with BPDSD22 as a part of it, has been to help my husband to quit with the enabling behavior. Long ago this problem was so bad!

This is very ingrained behavior. He still sometimes has a hard time believing that his enabling isn't working to help her. A few days ago, however, we got a nice outcome for his not enabling her and such a concrete example is such a help to her in this process.

SD called with a problem with her car. Dh's first instinct was to run to her assistance. But he didn't and instead gave her regular "dude" advice, a few options for what to do and urged her to call back once she had done a few things. She chose a course of action that reflected listening to his advice and the outcome was that she successfully worked things out for herself. He had a few hours of edginess but she called and it was OVER!

She is so proud of herself and he is proud of her and all of his words of praise are genuine and heartfelt and she can hear that and feel it because she earned it! Boost to self-confidence! Boost to self-esteem! DH gets to be happy about something! I feel validated! SD can see now why we encouraged her to have a savings account!

Win Win (win win win win win)

thursday

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[Rapt Reader]

Wow, Thursday! That's really great 

I love it when concrete examples of the tools we learn about here show that they can work if we are diligent to apply them. Good job!

And, you are right: win for your stepdaughter, win for your husband, win for you, win for the whole family. Thanks for the story... .I tend to enable and need to work on that more than any other thing. I'll keep your story in mind next time something like that turns up. I'm so happy for all of you!