There’s a kind of heartbreak that doesn’t come from direct harm, but rather from the silence and excuses that surround that abuse. For a long time, I focused about solely on the person(s) causing the direct damage — the emotional manipulation, the control, the cruelty, the gaslighting — that I didn’t fully recognize the quieter roles others has played and were playing to making it all possible, and make it all continue..

It’s only been with time, distance, and a whole lot of internal unraveling that I’ve come to start to understand the painful, complicated role of the enabler. And truthfully, that realization has been one of the hardest parts of healing so far.

Because it’s one thing to see the harm that is been played out right in front of our faces, but it’s another thing entirely to realize that people who loved you — people you trusted — may have seen it too… and turned away. And not always out of malice, but out of fear. Or habit. Or because they simply didn’t want to disrupt the illusion, admit to the encouragement, or potentially lose others in their life.

What Is Enabling, Really?

Enabling isn’t always obvious. It doesn’t always come in the form of loud defenses, declamations, or harsh pointed fingers. More often, it’s all the other quiet stuff, that when seen, speaks rather loudly. The brushing off. The looking away. The dismissing. The small, constant ways someone helps preserve a lie — not because they’re cruel, but because the truth feels too big, too messy, too dangerous to name.

Enablers are often people who want to keep the peace. Who want things to appear normal, even when everything underneath is cracked and breaking. They smooth things over. They make excuses. They redirect blame. They minimize.

Sometimes, they genuinely don’t see it. Other times, they’ve been doing it for so long that it’s become instinct.

It doesn’t always look like active participation.
Sometimes, it’s the quiet shrug.
The uncomfortable laugh.
The refusal to name what’s happening.
The smile that glosses over someone else’s pain.
The excuses.

And from the outside, it may not look like much. If fact, it may even look like the enabler has valid points!

But from the inside — especially as a child — it’s disorienting, confusing, and profoundly lonely.

It took me years — decades, really — to begin seeing the patterns. The narcissistic behavior was obvious in hindsight: the control, the manipulation, the way everything somehow became about him. But what blindsided me was realizing that someone very close to me — someone I’ve always loved deeply — had helped protect that pattern, even if they didn’t always mean to.

That realization didn’t come with anger at first. It came with grief. A heavy grief.

Because it’s one thing to be hurt by someone you expect it from (at least at this point, though that wasn’t always the case either, but we’ll save that for another article). But it’s another thing entirely to feel abandoned by someone who was supposed to protect you. Someone who should have seen how deeply you were hurting, and instead kept trying to smooth things over, to look away.

I understand now that enabling can be rooted in fear. In survival. In the desperate hope that keeping the peace is better than facing the truth.
But as a child in the middle of it, peace was never something I had.
I just learned how to stay quiet. How to play along. How to accept that my pain would never be the priority.

And that’s the part that still breaks something in me to this very day.

The Excuses That Still Echo

There was always a reason.
He was tired.
He was under stress.
He had a rough childhood.
He didn’t mean it that way.
It’s just how he is.
He is trying his best.

The words shift, but the meaning stays the same: Don’t disrupt the illusion. Don’t make it worse. Don’t make it real.

At some point though, those reasons start to sound less like proper explanations and more like a script. Like a well-worn play that’s been performed so many times no one even questions the lines anymore. And when you’re the one backstage, seeing the whole set fall apart — it’s surreal to watch the rest of the cast pretend nothing is wrong.

What’s hardest to sit with is that many people still don’t see it. Or who knows, maybe they won’t see it. Maybe they don’t want to. And that’s a kind of pain that feels both invisible and enormous simultaneously — knowing the truth in your bones, and watching others choose denial and avoidance instead.

There are moments when I want to shake them all and ask, How do you not see this?!
But I’ve learned that some people would rather keep protecting the story they’ve always told themselves — because that feels safer than rewriting and admitting the truth.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand it.
The choices.
The silences.
The way someone could look away from harm happening right in front of them — especially when it was happening to a child.

And the truth is, I do understand.
I can see the mechanisms now. I can trace the path — how fear twists into silence, how guilt becomes loyalty, how long-term survival can turn into a habit of avoiding anything that feels too real. I can even find empathy for the people who did what they thought they had to do to get by.

But that doesn’t mean I accept it.
Understanding isn’t the same as excusing.

Because at some point, before things got too far, too deep, too automatic — that enabling became a choice.

And that’s the part I struggle with the most.
At some point, someone could have said, This isn’t okay.
At some point, someone could have chosen the truth over comfort.
At some point, someone could have protected me.

They didn’t.

And while I can make peace with why they didn’t — the fear, the conditioning, the trauma of their own — it doesn’t take away the ache of knowing they could have… and still chose not to.

The Ongoing Mental Battle

It’s a constant tug-of-war.
Between compassion, forgiveness, understanding, heartbreak, and betrayal.
Between wanting to understand and wanting to scream, How could you let this happen?

There are days when I can hold that empathy — when I can see that people close to me were doing what they thought was best.
And then there are days when the grief grabs me by the throat. When the memories come rushing back and I wonder why no one stepped in. Why no one said enough. Why love didn’t look more like protection.

There’s guilt in even thinking these thoughts sometimes.
Am I being too hard?
Am I the one rewriting the past to make sense of the hurt?
Or am I just finally being honest — about what it was really like, and what I really needed? What I need here and now.

The truth is, while it is possible to hold space for both things, it’s wildly difficult:

That someone was also trying to survive…
And that their survival sometimes came at the cost of mine.

That they didn’t necessarily mean to hurt me…

And yet, they did.

That I can understand their pain…

And still honor the way it shaped mine.

That two truths can coexist…

But they don’t always live peacefully in the same heart.

I battle with all of that (and more) to this day. Sometimes everyday.
But I’m learning that facing it — all of it — is the only way through.. however slow and painful that road may be.

Moving Forward with Clarity (and Boundaries)

Seeing enabling for what it is has forever changed something deep within me.

It’s changed how I relate to others. How I listen to my own instincts. How I recognize when someone is avoiding the truth — or asking me to avoid it, too. I don’t explain things away anymore. I don’t chase approval where I know I’ll never be fully seen.

And maybe most importantly, though it has bot been easy, I’ve learned how to hold people accountable — not always with confrontation, but sometimes simply through distance. Through silence. Through boundaries that say: I will not step back into that old story just to make you comfortable. I need change. I deserve peace and love and spaces I feel safe in.

Naming what happened — the harm, the enabling, the deep ache of being emotionally abandoned by people I loved — isn’t about blame. And it certainly isn’t easy in the least. But it’s about breaking the cycle, the patterns. About refusing to carry the silence one more generation further.

Healing, for me, has meant letting go of the fantasy that someone else will one day admit the truth.

Instead, it’s meant learning to tell my own — fully, finally, and without apology.