Are You Helping or Enabling? Finding Peace with Loving Detachment to Recover Your Soul

Are You Helping or Enabling? Finding Peace in Loving Detachment

It’s such a fine line - the space between helping and enabling - and that line looks different for every one of us.

In this episode, I talk about what it means to love and care for someone without losing ourselves in the process. In the Recover Your Soul journey, we’re learning to see through a new perception - one that honors the soul’s path, both ours and theirs.

Sometimes what we call “helping” is actually keeping someone from the discomfort or consequences they need to experience to grow. And sometimes, it truly is right to offer support. There’s no single answer. The work is to slow down, connect with your higher self, and listen for the truth that comes from your most healed and awakened heart.

As we recover, we begin to understand that suffering to save someone else doesn’t serve them - and it doesn’t serve us either. Real love allows others to walk their own journey while we stay centered in our peace, trust, and compassion.

If you’ve been trying to help someone and feel torn about what’s “right,” this conversation is for you.
Because Recovering Your Soul isn’t about getting it perfect — it’s about learning to love in a new way.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Enabling Or Helping
• 2:34 Welcome And Community Intentions
• 4:16 Defining Enabling Through Awareness
• 8:35 Meaning, Suffering, And Soul Growth
• 12:51 Family History And Enmeshment
• 17:23 Closing The Bank Of Mom
• 21:42 Redefining Support And Boundaries
• 26:40 Tickets, Towing, And A Hard Choice
• 30:54 Holding Your Line With Love
• 39:44 Community Resources And Next Steps

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:00

It can be a very fine line between enabling and helping. Absolutely. Is it a hand up or is it a hand out? In recover your soul, we're looking at things from their soul's perspective. We're looking at things from a place where we're saying, what is the healthiest, most true choice for me and my authentic self? And it may look totally different from one person to the other. We're going to explore the difference between enabling and helping and how we can use the recover your soul concepts to choose in each moment what is right and authentic for you from your higher self. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcast and community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast. I'm Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for spending your time with me here today. I'm so grateful that we are in this community that just continues to grow and continues to bring in people from the desire to connect with others who are in the same space. Maybe you searched something that brought in codependency or having someone in your life who's dealing with addiction. Maybe you just realize you're a people pleaser. Maybe you're ready to step on a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life and you're just ready. You're just ready. And so for whatever reason, I continue to love, love, love that people come into the sessions with me. And I start with, I always start with the prayer and meditation and grounding meditation. And then I ask, how did you find the podcast? And how can I be of service to you? And more and more people are saying, I have no idea how I got here. I don't know what I searched, I don't know how it happened. I just it showed up and I pressed play, and I'm so glad I'm here. So if that's the case with you, welcome. And if you're coming back again and again, I can't tell you how much it means to me to have you in this community. And if you're new, I hope you find some wisdom, some reminding you that you are whole, that it is okay, that you can be okay when the people around you aren't okay. Today I wanted to talk about something that I'm going through in my life right now, which is, you know, how I do this podcast is sharing my own life. And it's the concept of enabling or helping. What's the difference between enabling and helping? And again, I really want to remind you that recover your soul is really around us coming to ourselves. It's around us having more and more clarity about what feels right for us uniquely. And yes, it's important and helpful to have different modalities or different um concepts from different people or different places where we're looking outside of our limited beliefs or our systems or our patterns that we've been doing for a long time or that were handed down to us for such a long time. And this piece that we're doing about stepping outside of those roles, stepping outside of the parts of us that have been on a like a repetitive wheel that we didn't even know was happening. And now we're witnessing just a little bit, we're stepping out just a little bit. You know, Eckhart Tolle over 20 years ago was what brought kind of to the masses this concept to the power of now, which was be here now and witness. Just notice, just have some awareness, just notice what you're thinking. And this awareness, which is step one in the recovery soul process, ready for awakening, recognizing that part of the feelings that we're having are because we have these repetitive beliefs, we have these patterns, we have something that we don't even know is the operating system that's running the show. And enabling, I think, is a big piece of that. That sometimes we're just doing what we've always done because we didn't know better. I remember saying in one of my jobs that I really wanted positive or negative feedback. I wanted, I wanted to know how I was actually doing instead of just sort of having smoke blown up. It was important to me to know what I could be doing better so that I could do better. Because I think sometimes we we've we've created a culture in a way that makes it so that we don't want to hear criticism. We don't want feedback that bumps up against us in some way. And in enabling in some level is interesting because we don't want others to feel the criticism. We don't want them to feel the discomfort. We don't want them to be in a place where they have to be uncomfortable. Most of us are here because for some part of our belief system is a I can't be okay if they're not okay. And making sure that everyone around us is comfortable, we will take the discomfort. So, what is the difference between helping and enabling? What is the difference between a hand up and a hand out? What is the space where we can be most comfortable and feel the safest within our experience? And at the same time be hopefully doing what is in the best long-term good for the person, not potentially, and this is where recover your soul is different than maybe any other place that maybe you've been getting information, but what if we are looking at their soul's journey instead of their physical experience, their incarnation and this body and this experience? I recently finished listening to Victor Frankel's Search for Meaning. I think that's the name of the book. I'm not entirely sure. And we are in the process, uh, Rev Kristal and I are in the process of gathering up the 2026 in-person, once-a-month spiritual community that we've been leading for the last couple years. And we're expanding what we call the Sacred Circle, which has been this beautiful morning circle of about 20 people, where she and I do a teaching and then we do guided meditations and pull oracle cards, super spiritual, super woo, really incredible. So if you're in the dimmer metro area, I really recommend it. And it's been this incredible experience, and so we've loved it so much we wanted to expand it and have an afternoon event that was around spiritual study together, where we're not the teachers as much as we're all in collaboration with each other. And so we want to do spiritual books as a way to grow ourselves and a catalyst for conversation. And in that, we um have been reading all the books that we want to share next year with everyone. And we were thinking about doing Victor Frankel's book, and I'd never listened to it before, but I know that he has some really powerful quotes from being in the concentration camps. He was a psychiatrist by trade, and he was in the concentration camps and survived six years of profound abuse and horrific circumstances, like everyone did, that was in that situation. And I decided that it was, it was an important book to read, but it didn't feel right for the purpose in which we wanted to do the spiritual book study. But one of the things that I found so incredible about reading that book is that the second half of the book, he talks about a theory, a psychological theory that he had been working on prior to the war, which is called Logos Theory. And it is a concept of, you know, you have Freud and you have Jung and you have the other people at that time. And it was really an idea that we need meaning in our life, and that also we grow through struggle. So this was a while ago in a psychological sense, and now we're talking about in a spiritual sense. So if we take it to a soul sense and we start to actually look at what if growth and awakening and our potential to be our fullest and most incredible selves can come from struggle, including the situations that were so horrific and terrible during the Holocaust. And the way that he talks about it was so incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful. And I'm so glad that I read the book, and it really made me think so much about how we in the Recover Your Soul community, how much we're trying to save the people around us from their own discomfort. And I continue to be so curious about the fact that we will take on the discomfort, that we will actually choose for ourselves to suffer in the exchange for someone else's potential suffering. One of the things that he talks about in that book, which I'm gonna go into the enabling versus helping part, but what he talks about in the book is the incredible need that we all have to have meaning in our own life or our own existence, existence. And it hit me really hard that I think for many of us, we've attached our meaning to someone else's happiness, we've attached our life's purpose and meaning to the success and the happiness and the well-being of others. And we've taken on that responsibility of whether they're okay, as if it is our meaning in life. And it isn't that you don't have a meaning in life that you don't show up with the greatness and the fullness of who you are, because absolutely that is essential. Absolutely, it is incredibly essential that you actually recognize the full capacity of the human being, the soul in this human body that you are to show up in all of your incredible ways of being compassionate and loving and empathetic and caring and seeing through the eyes of love and having an open heart, that is essential, absolutely essential. But when we take on the responsibility as if our meaning is the success or the well-being of somebody else, we are actually losing our power of ourselves. We're giving our power to somebody else because we're saying, if you're okay, then I can be okay. Your success means that I've been successful in my meaning in my life. It was so big for me because I continue to be in a state of um really looking at how I interact with my adult sons and what is enabling, what is helping, how do you support without taking away their opportunity to be uncomfortable and to have to push against their own parts of themselves that don't think that they can, that they that they can't make it, or their own limiting beliefs about themselves. And right now I feel like we're in this incredible state, which is called the Great Awakening, of seeing things in a way we've never seen them before on such a grander scale. And we're talking about these things in such a bigger way than we ever have before, ever. So you know my stories with Alex and Bodhi. Alex is 29 and Bodhi is 26. Um, I keep saying he's 27, but I don't think he turns 27 until next year. I think. What year are we at? Yeah, he's 26. And their struggles with their own addiction issues and how enabling I was for years and years and years and years. I mean, it and the suffering that we experienced as a family in like 15 years together that was around Rich and I's alcoholism and our addiction and our inability to parent together, to be on the same page in any way, how much I hated the way that Rich handled the kids. I did not agree with the values in which he was raising the kids. And so I enabled, and it was this, it was this whole enmeshed, really complicated situation with all of us. In the midst of joy, in the midst of love, in the midst of good times. I mean, I talk about this in the memoir that's coming next year. You look at our photo albums, there was lots of beautiful, wonderful, heartfelt moments. I mean, it wasn't horrendous and chaotic all the time, but underneath was this undercurrent of dysfunction and dissatisfaction. And I think I think that's just so normal now that I have had more space to look at it. And part of it was normal because we were dealing with addiction. Rich and I were dealing with our own addiction, and the kids were dealing with their own addictions and way to handle and soothe themselves. In long before they started using drugs and alcohol, they had other ways of dealing with it that had addictive patterns to it. Some of that's genetic. But I was an enabler because I wanted to do whatever it took for them to not be uncomfortable. So, in a way, I participated in the system and the belief systems that they raised were raised on, that they're now disassembling their belief systems. They now get the opportunity as adults to work on their belief systems. And it was, you know, making sure that they had lunch, if they had forgotten their lunch, or making sure they got to school, or missing things that I needed to do or wanted to do because they had made decisions or choices that made it so that I had to save them. And I and I did. I did do those things. So here we are in this new era. I got sober almost eight years ago and really stepped into my Al-Anon, really stepped into my AA, stepped into my recovery, began to truly step into a spiritual path, became a metaphysical minister. Spirituality has become my number one focus. And you know what my number one focus was before? Their happiness. That was my purpose. Going back to the what is your life's purpose? What brings you your purpose in life? Now my purpose in life is my spiritual journey, is really understanding myself more, is stepping fully into my light so that I can bring that out to the world, not in a way that it's my responsibility to fix or change or make anything be different, but my responsibility is to share with light and love, not only for you, but also for my kids. So eight years ago, the amount of time that it took for us to move away from this very intense enabling behavior that I absolutely had, to beginning to see it differently and choose on some level how I could see the difference between hand up versus hand out. And I've told this story before, but I'm gonna tell it again. There was, it was the Christmas, uh, was probably two years after sobriety. And for Christmas, I gave them, they they now both lived in California and were living on their own and were mostly taking care of themselves, but I was still giving them a lot of money, just you know, like the Venmos where you get the request for a Venmo for 20 bucks, right? Can I have 20 bucks? And can I have 20 bucks? Can I have 20 bucks or $100 or whatever it was? And I kept saying yes and adding it to this list that they owed me, this money that they owed me. And the amount that they owed me had gotten pretty substantial and it was creating a lot of resentment in my life because then I was counting and being aware of how they were spending their money, not that I had access to their accounts, but you know, if I saw on Instagram that they went and did something, I'm thinking to myself, oh, well, they have enough money to go do that, but they are not paying me back, right? And and we're in this enmeshed state. And my mom actually forgave me the remaining money that I owed her for our trip to Indonesia. And I thought that was really beautiful. And it I was inspired by that, that she just said, you know, I just I don't want to have to keep thinking about it. And I forgive you for the amount of money that's left over on that trip. And so for Christmas, I gave the boys each a little box, and inside the box it said, you're forgiven of your loans. And on the back of the paper, it said, the bank of mom is closed. And they were so excited to be forgiven of their loans. I don't think they really understood what the bank of mom is closed meant. But that was the part that was the most important part to me. And it was not easy. So in the beginning, they're like, oh yeah, totally fine. That's so good. We're good. We're on our own. Thank you for giving us. That makes a big difference. And they um went off on their lives. Well, you know, for a couple months, they didn't test the boundary. But then a couple months comes in and I get a text or I get a call that's like, hey, you know, I did this and I'm I'm short this, or I owe my rent, or my my accounts withdrawn. Can I have a this? And it was every, I tell you, it was every single thing in me that went against my every part of myself that wanted to save them to say no. Was it easy? No, of course it wasn't easy. It was incredibly excruciating, as a matter of fact. The thought that they would be uncomfortable or that they would not have their rent or that they would be withdrawn, or all the things were was excruciating. And so I held my line. I held my line. And it didn't mean that like for birthdays or you know, something that I didn't toss out a little bit of money, or it also didn't mean that we I think we paid for plane tickets for them to come see us. We did those kinds of things, but I was just saying the bank of, you know, call me for $20 is over. And it created a new system in us. And what I loved about what happened is they figured it out. You know, for the most part, they figured it out. And and I don't know what they did during those years because I haven't asked the questions. Because on some level, I think it's really important for us to not know every detail that's happening in somebody else's life. It's their life to figure out. Do I want someone to come to me and ask me every single detail about my finances and how I'm figuring it out and what I'm deciding? Hell no, I don't want anybody to do that for me. So much of what we want from other people is really their business. And especially when it's our family members, we get all caught up in it. We get all enmeshed in the stories and the parts of it. You know why? Because again, our purpose, we're forgetting what our real purpose is, and we're putting our purpose in somebody else's well-being as being our purpose. And I think this is, I mean, I just love how things are clicking, clicking, clicking more for me. So a couple of years passes and it starts to loosen up a little bit, but it loosens up in a very different way because now they are, they are indeed figuring it out from themselves. And because I held that line, they were being much more successful at making big efforts to be in their own life, being self-supporting through their own contributions, which is a 12-step term from the traditions, self-supporting through their own contributions, because there wasn't this place where there was a catch. And I'm so grateful for this because it changed the relationship that we have with each other with money. So things start to loosen up a little bit. And now what's happened over time is I do provide them with financial resources from time to time, but I do it from a very different place than that old, can you give me 20 bucks? Or I don't have money to go out, or I don't have money for them not to go out, but to, you know, go to the grocery store or whatever. That part is like that's your responsibility. That's your life, your responsibility. Now, what I tell people, both in coaching and I tell my kids and I tell myself is I will only help you to the level in which you are helping yourself. So if they are in a place where they are helping themselves, where I see them actively working on themselves, I see them actively making effort to be in their own life, does it mean they do it perfect? No, of course they don't do it perfect. None of us do it perfect. I'm not expecting perfection. And it's not to my standard either. It's not that I have some sort of expectation or standard that they're supposed to be meeting. It's really from a soul perspective, from a soul's journey, where where are they in that? Then there will be more or less help from me. And again, it's not coasting them. I do not pay for them. It's really, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's it's nuanced. And I think that ultimately the situations that we're in with our family members, whether it's your kids or your sister or your parents or you know, people that you love a lot. This part of us that in a way it's like we'll go without for them to have. That isn't fair. Another situation I have with the kids that I did around this time or maybe before that time, is I needed a new car. I had a car that I couldn't drive outside of city limits for fear that it would break down and I'd be stranded. And I had bought it for, you know, not that much, so I didn't have a payment on it. And I said to Rich, I think we need to get a new family car. And he said, we don't have the budget right now for a car payment. And I remember being really sad about that, that I really felt like what he was saying was I didn't deserve to drive something else. And that was a limiting belief that I had to look at it in my stuff to look at. But that's not what he was saying. He was saying, if you look at our budget right now, we don't have three or four hundred dollars that we can put into a car payment. And he was right. And when I looked at our budget, I was paying for my kids' cell phones and I was paying for their car insurance. And guess how much that was? Three or four hundred dollars. There it was. There was my car payment. And so I had to go to them and say, I love you, I see you, I respect you. It's hard for me to let go of this, but I need to choose myself. I actually need to be in a vehicle that I can afford. This was actually in 2020, it was uh right before they all moved to California, as a matter of fact. Um, and I need you to take these over. And they did. And then I had money to get a carp. And that's how I have my Mazda that I have now. So here we are five years later, and they're in California now. Their lives are totally different. I mean, every five years we're in a completely new chapter of our lives, which I think is so interesting. And they are 99% self-supporting through their own contributions. And I do see them making great efforts. And sometimes I see them fall down and make horrendous choices. Do I want to save them from those choices and save them from the complexity that they have to live from the consequences of those choices? No. But am I gonna create a crisis? One of those seven Al-Anon detachments is to not prevent a crisis and not to create a crisis if it's the natural course of the events. So it's this fine line with enabling, which is like, am I creating a crisis by holding some tight rigid line that says, I don't help you. That's really up to you to decide. So recently, one of my situations was that Alex got too many tickets on his vehicle in California, and you get too many tickets for not doing the street sweeper or the parking in California is crazy. And some level, he made the decision to get those tickets, let's be honest. Um, do you hear me? I was about to just make an excuse for him. Uh, he allowed himself to get enough tickets that his car got towed. And he doesn't have the money to pay for all of those tickets and get his car out of towing. And he called me and he didn't actually call me with the concept of having me pay for it. He just sometimes calls me when something's happening to run it by me because he doesn't know how to handle it at that moment, or he hasn't given himself space in all honesty to think about it and do the research that he's totally capable of doing and does a good portion of the time on things. It just was a shock, so he called me. And then when we got off the phone, I thought about it and I went deep into myself around what I felt comfortable for myself. My initial reaction was different than what it used to be in the past. I actually stopped to think about what is the right thing for me to offer in this situation. Because I do see a child who is a man. Did you hear me a child? I do see a man who is making strides in his life, who I watched in California with his family being present, being a good father, being a good partner. And you know, does it look perfect? No, but I'm super proud of the of the incredible way that he's grown in his life. And is he making mistakes by allowing parking tickets to build up? Absolutely. This is one of the places in his life where if you ignore it, it'll go away. Well, I lived in denial in so much of my life over my years, and it was a huge piece of how I handled what was stressful. So I get it. So when I start to look at these situations from the recover your soul perspective, a lot of it is just about witnessing, looking at patterns, weighing the two sides of everything, and coming from a place that is heartfelt and loving instead of rules or rigid, or this is this is what we do here. And so what I decided was that I was gonna help him. I was gonna provide the money for him to pay for the tickets and get his car out of towing. And the reason why I want to do that is multifaceted, and it comes really down to me. It actually isn't about him. I think the thing that I want to share in this particular part of us moving away from them being our focus and our purpose in life, but really our purpose in life is our own spiritual growth, is our own connection to ourselves. And so much of what we're doing, so much of what we're learning, so much of what we're um creating in our life is around us being safe, being okay, even if they're not okay. And sometimes that means that we have to make the choice like, you're gonna have to do whatever it takes to pay these payments so that I can afford a car payment. That was a choice I made for myself. However, right now I'm in a different financial situation. Am I, you know, have a ton of money? No, I don't have a ton of money, but I have much more money than I used to have five years ago, partially because my kids don't live here and I'm not constantly dishing money out. And I do have the resources to be able to help him in this situation. Am I gonna lend him the money? No. Am I gonna give him the money in a way, no, but in a way, yes. In my own mind, what I worked out is that I speak about my boys in this podcast, and I want them to receive for them being willing for me to talk about them and the way that they have allowed me to talk about them. And so I have in my mind the way that it works for me is we're all benefiting from the flow that comes from being here and present. What I'm doing is not just me, it's us. And so I have been giving Alex a I call it a um a royalty. It's small, you know, $100, $150 a month, a royalty every month as a Thank you for being able to talk about him. And so what I said to him is, I said, I'm going to prepay your royalties and I'm going to pay for you to get this out. But this is your money. This is not a gift from me. This is not a loan. This is the money that you receive as payment for being part of Recover Your Soul. And this is your money. And if you had made different choices, if you had handled this in a different way, you could have been spending this money in a different way. And he's like, I know, mom, you don't have to, you don't have to make me feel bad for what I already know, right? That's his response and powerless over that response. But that felt good to me. It felt like I could be giving him a hand up instead of a hand out. And it is money that would have come to him eventually anyway. And that amount of money makes me feel good. And I give Bodhi money in a similar way because I want this to be something that's helping all of us. And somebody might look at that and say, I totally think that you're enabling, I totally think that you're doing something that is not healthy. I think that you're just fooling yourself. Okay, ultimately, the number one thing is that you have clarity within yourself about what feels good and right to you. And so as this situation has gone on, what I have to work on, and the part that's going to be the bank of mom is closed work that I'm going to have to do is basically for the next year, this royalty money that I very happily have been giving him as a thank you for being able to talk about him, he has prepaid that in this situation to help him. Because having him in a situation where he can't get a vehicle and he is a family man and he has enough going on at his plate for me wasn't worth it. So just as a close, what I want to talk about is when I shared with Rich what my plan was, Rich didn't think that I was making a good choice. He felt like I was enabling. And I sat down with him and I could feel an old energy. And again, what I hope that you're getting out of Recover Your Soul is the only thing that you have power of is yourself and how you see it and how you choose to interact with it. And Rich's belief system and his relationship with his sons is his. And this is what they say, and this is how this works, and you make decisions that are based on this foundation of your strength and your knowing. And it means that sometimes you have to be really uncomfortable holding a boundary, and you have to be willing to let them be uncomfortable. We can get past anything. And if you look back on your life, as time will tell, it's always fascinating to really look back and say, wow, I was, I was just so obsessed on this particular situation. I was so fearful. And you look back and you think, why was I so afraid? Every situation comes and goes. And Alan and Nae, they say, This too shall pass. This too shall pass is both the good and the hard and the lovely and the wonderful. Be present in this moment right now and make sure that your well-being is your number one priority. You're powerless over every single thing outside of yourself, but you're not powerless over how you show up, what you choose to feel, and your inner peace is your number one priority. And you get to decide what you do to maintain and create that inner peace, letting go of everything else, not controlling the circumstances or the people in your life or trying to make them be okay for you to be okay. All right. Well, as always, if you need help with any of this, I hope that you'll visit the website recoveryousoul.net, take advantage of the nine-step recovery soul process in whatever way works for you, either working directly with me in group coaching coming in 2026 or by working the modules on your own. This process does incredible transformation. It's I love seeing how it's working in everyone's lives. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the RecoverYour Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time where I share a little bit more on the RecoverYour Soul journey and we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recovery Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryoursoul.net and you can sign up for email so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcasting community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.