Most everyone these days understands something about enablers.  An enabler is a person, usually a family member, who unwittingly assists in the destructive behavior of an addict or a neurotic.  The enabler does this by covering up for the addict, giving him money, making excuses for him, or otherwise "helping" him.  As a result of these actions, the addict never has any motivation to break free from his addiction or recover his health.  A good discussion of enabling is at Gateway Recovery.

The classic example of an enabler is the wife of an alcoholic husband.  She is the one who keeps him going, cleans up after him, and lies her head off for him to keep him employed.  What most people don't realize is that enablers don't just cover up for the addict, they also do a lot of psychological "propping up."  The addict's wife repeatedly has to bolster her husband's ego in order to keep him functional.  This kind of propping up is always very uncomplicated.  It is usually done with five simple words, which are surely spoken several million times each day by enablers to their addicts.  The words are:  honey, it's not your fault.

If you are ever unfortunate enough to spend any length of time in the vicinity of an addict, there is one thing you will immediately discover, namely that the only thing that ever comes out of his mouth are excuses.  Addicts (like sociopaths) live, breathe, and thrive upon excuses.  Absolutely nothing, and I do mean nothing, is ever their fault.  Try spending five minutes alone with this kind of personality, and all you will hear is stuff such as I can't quit now--I'm under too much stress, or they're jealous of me at work which is why I'm being unfairly treated, or it wasn't my fault I got started on the drugs--my brother tricked me into it...

What's interesting about all this is that the addict's enabler eventually starts spouting the same kind of excuses which are always coming out of the addict's mouth.  She reaches a point where she is so emotionally caught up in his soap opera dramas that she will make as many excuses about her addict as he makes about himself.  The enabler's excuses will never be silly or unpersuasive, either.  They will always be absolutely valid, completely legitimate, and perfectly rational.  No one in their right mind would dare to argue with them.

And so our addict will forever be excused and absolved and propped up and propped up.  He will get himself into yet another mess, and then another, but he will always have his honey around to tell him yet one more time that it's not your fault.  For her part, whenever she performs her absolution, our enabler will congratulate herself time and time again on all the good she is doing by helping.

Helping.  Such a nice little word.  Isn't it wonderful when we can help others?  And it gives our lives such incredible purpose and meaning, doesn't it?  Tra la la la la....  There is nothing on this wide green earth more difficult than trying to persuade an enabler caught up in this sweet little fantasy that she is at the absolute limit of self-delusion.  I should know--I speak from very bitter experience.  A propper-upper of an addict is doing something which is as bad as it gets:  with the very best of intentions, she is bringing about the complete destruction of a human being.

What's almost comical here is that both the addict and enabler inevitably forget all the previous excuses and propping-ups which have occurred throughout the years.  We're talking years here. The passage of time--months, years, decades--is always invisible to both the enabler and the addict.  Indeed, if years upon years go by without any kind of significant change in the addict, it's always a dead giveaway that there are enablers lurking somewhere in the background.  It also means that the addict in question doesn't have a prayer of quitting the booze, the smokes, the food addiction, the gambling, the pills, the whatever--all the propping up he is getting will destroy any incentive he has to bring about meaningful change in his life.  He remain in his own special addictive hell to the end of his days, which won't be that far off...

It is also important to understand is that there are numerous organizations around these days which spew forth as much destructive enablement as your average family "helper".  And the organizations I intend to single out as particularly harmful are those current New Age/alternative spirituality groups which can be found in every state of the union.  I am talking about those upright and earnest individuals who conduct workshops, hold retreats, live in intentional communities, perform rituals--and whose paying customers get nothing for their money but enablement.  I am not familiar with retreats or workshops operated by more mainstream religions, but my guess is that they dish out the exact same kind of propping-up for their customers.  These are groups where everything is wrong, but where the people running things are constantly telling themselves that they're doing everything right.

I used to attend a spiritual retreat for several years, and at this retreat I was pleased to meet some of the most screwed up human beings I have ever known in my life.  Now I am the first to admit that I am myself not the most completely rational or successful member of the human species, but at least I'm willing take responsibility for my weaknesses, and I try to do something about them.  These attitudes weren't present, needless to say, in the assorted addicts, neurotics, narcissists, and misfits I would encounter at the retreat.  Every year I would meet many of the same people, and every year I would discover that nothing had changed about them during the past twelve months.  They were still stuck in the same addictions, hysteria, negative behavior patterns, and self-destructive relationships that they had been sunk in the year before--and the year before that.  These were people who were without inner resources of any sort and who were completely unable to break into fresh perspectives or try something new.  Year after year would go by, but nothing about these people would ever change.  All of this was particularly frustrating since the professed goal of the retreat was transformation.  You theoretically went to the retreat to be changed into a different sort of person.  Everyone, owners and customers alike, expended huge amounts of time and energy planning and carrying out various therapeutic rituals to create this transformation.  But no change was ever perceptible in the people who needed it the most, not for year after year after year.

Which meant, in short, that the paying customers at this place were being enabled.  The people who operated the retreat weren't helping anyone, nor were they healing or supporting.  They were enabling.  They were expending all their energies in propping up their customers just a little here and a little there, making them feel good about themselves and assuring them that they were indeed getting better all the time.  Of course, the owners would have genuinely believed it, in the same way that your classic enabler always quite honestly believes that her pet addict is getting better.  My guess is that the vast majority of New Age/alternative spirituality groups all over the country do exactly the same--whenever I look at the websites of intentional communities or retreats, all I ever see between the lines is here there be enablers...

The word that matters here, however, is not enabler, but customer.  The people who operate New Age/alternative spirituality retreats happen to be in business.  And it's not a very profitable or secure business, either, which is the problem.  No matter how frequently the owners try to persuade themselves that the business is on solid ground, and that there really will be money for the kid's college education or a secure retirement, in their heart of hearts they don't believe it.  Indeed, they should not.  Trying to run a New Age business in this day and age is exceedingly risky.  You are providing a luxury service, and there isn't always extra money for luxuries in the American middle class.  If you want to earn your income from a New Age business, you must live out your life with a permanent wolf at your door.

All of which means that the people who are trying to make money out of alternative spirituality are constantly making compromises.  All those nagging worries about unpaid bills, car repair, health insurance and so on, means that New Age businesspeople will never give their customers what they need, but only what they want.  Helping people isn't the core reality of a New Age enterprise--keeping the meal tickets coming back for more is.  Not that New Age business owners can bear to admit any of this to themselves.  They will constantly go through tortuous and agonized pseudo-rationalizations to persuade themselves that, in the end, they really aren't acting like a Main Street Babbitt.  They will tell themselves over and over and over that all the problems, including the fact that their most screwed-up customers never show any signs of improvement, are only temporary.

This also means that when it's a group running the show, instead of a single individual, there are continual and quite hysterical catfights about the best way to keep the meal tickets coming back.  Once I found a website for a New Age retreat where the owner actually admitted that members of his group were "occasionally contentious."  Translation:  All of us enlightened beings living in this bucolic intentional community are at each other's throats about 95% of the time.  But you would never be able to persuade this do-gooder that his problems are more than "occasional", that things in his group are only getting worse and worse, and that the quarrels will last as long as the intentional community does.  On the contrary, he will repeatedly persuade himself that the problems are only temporary, and that if everyone simply tried harder the fights would end.

The observant reader will perceive that this New Age owner is exhibiting the same kind of denial that a woman in an abusive relationship always displays (he doesn't really want to hit me...  I know if if tried harder he'd stop...  things aren't as bad now as they were last year...)  The woman pronouncing this nonsense will believe it with her whole heart, which is why so many abused women never manage to break free of their tormenters.  But our New Age owner has even less of a chance to break free of his illusions, since he thinks he is actually doing good in the world.  He simply cannot allow himself to think he is generating harm.  He knows that the people coming to his retreat are getting better.  He knows his intentions are for the best.  But didn't somebody ever tell him what happens on the pavement on the road to Hell...

So our owner and all the members of his group will turn a blind eye to the fact that the customers who keep coming back year after year never show any sign of improvement.  And there is no chance whatsoever, for example, that he or anyone else might someday utter the following words:  "Bridget, you've been coming here for ten years now, but you still weigh three hundred pounds.  Maybe next year instead of coming to our events, you need to spend your money on some weight loss therapy."  Or better still:  "Mildred, you've been coming here every summer since I can remember, but you're still a ________ (fill in the blank with:  bad-tempered shrew, back-stabbing bitch, self-obsessed narcissist, hysterical basket case, co-dependent mess, resentful incompetent, whiny self-pitying bimbo, overly-emotional neurotic).  Obviously we're not helping you, so you need to forget everything you've ever learned from us and pretend you've never been here.  Not that we want you to stop coming, of course--you just need to start wearing ear plugs when you attend our seminars.  Now what do you mean you want your money back?"

Well, you don't say such things to your meal tickets, not if you've got a brain in your head.  So Bridget and Mildred will continue to be milked for everything they're worth--they will be coddled and pampered and flattered, anything to keep them writing their checks.  Several years down the road, when Bridget prematurely expires from heart disease or diabetes, at her funeral everyone will say what a wonderful woman she was and we did everything we could for her.  The eternal enabler fantasy.  P.S. With her last breath Bridget will, of course, request that that her ashes be scattered on the retreat grounds she loved so much--by the exact same people who have enabled her right into her coffin.

Nowadays I thank my lucky stars that paid employment has constituted my working life.  If I had ever made the mistake of trying to operate a New Age business, I can see now that I would have ended up making all the little compromises that I have seen in every alternative spirituality leader I have ever met.  I might have done a bit of good here or there, but the main thing I would have done is enabling--and the harm, misery, and ruin which goes with it.