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Accountability as an act of love

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Boundaries, Grace, The Shame Cycle, Toxic
Relationships / By Sara Wald / February 5, 2023

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 How enabling causes harm to ourselves
and others
The past two weeks in the Redefining Love Community we talked about
accountability for ourselves and others. Thanks to one of our members, I
realized there was a key accountability point left to discuss…

For many of us, a big roadblock to healthy accountability is the tendency to

carry the weight of other’s mistakes and shortcomings. Many family
systems pass this sense of obligatory self-sacrifice down from generation to
generation, to the point that many of us confuse love with carrying the
burdens of other’s mistakes, or turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.

In reality, this isn’t love at all, but toxic enabling. In order to redefine love,
we must step away from any definition of “love” that requires us to sacrifice
our values and sense of right and wrong. Making excuses for people’s bad
behavior is not loving. It’s enabling, and it’s bad for everyone involved,
including the person who has done wrong.

Culture confuses love with quiet

acceptance.
Culture has taught us that as long as someone performs well in public, we
should ignore it when they shatter other people’s lives or crush other
people’s souls. But that’s not grace. Grace without accountability is
enabling.

When we turn a blind eye to abusive behaviors because someone has

“done so many good things in the world,” we are cheating the person out of
an opportunity to grow, and we are violating our own integrity as well.
Enabling breeds shame in both the enabler and the enabled.
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 A confused definition of love leads to
enabling.
When we care for someone deeply, it can be di"cult to see their faults,
especially if we accept the cultural standard of love as “all or nothing.” If we
believe that love is always warm and tender, then to feel anything other
than adoration means we can no longer love that person. The notion of
holding people accountable is then associated with an immense sense of
loss.

If the other person also views love by the cultural standard, then they view
your holding them accountable as a betrayal. Suddenly, we find ourselves
in a power struggle, where one person carries the burden of responsibility,
and the other person gets a free pass to continue misdeeds with no
consequence. Neither person escapes this situation without a large dose of
shame.
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 Redefining Love creates balance in
relationships.
When we redefine love, everyone carries the weight of their own
responsibilities. We recognize that we can love people through honest
expression of our anger and hurt. We realize that ignoring the weakness in
ourselves and others is actually a far greater betrayal than being honest
about our feelings and experiences. We are able to identify where we end
and the other person begins, untangling ourselves from codependency and
enmeshment.

We recognize what is ours to carry, and what is not, and that allowing
someone to accept responsibility for their actions – good or bad – is the
most loving thing we can do for them. On the flip side, when we take on the
load of other people’s responsibilities, we are robbing of them of a valuable
opportunity to grow.
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 Accountability as an act of love.
Once you have learned what love truly is and what it isn’t, it’s easier to hold
others accountable. When you redefine love, you know that there is
nothing mean about saying, “No! Enough is enough. I deserve better in this
relationship, and so do you!”

I look at it like parenting. If a child is allowed to do anything they want until

the teenage years, it’s going to be a lot harder to enforce boundaries than it
would have been if the parent had enforced appropriate behavior
standards from the beginning of the child’s life.

Unfortunately, many of us find ourselves stuck in toxic relationships for

years before we finally realize what is happening. In order to be fully
accountable, we must admit our place in the shame cycle, take
accountability for ourselves as enablers, and begin working to undo what’s
already been done.
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 The cultural standard of victim blaming.
Within family systems, when one person is estranged they are the “black
sheep,” and assumptions are made about their character, rather than
examining the family dynamics that contributed to the estrangement in the
first place. In reality, behind every black sheep is likely a whole lot of
dysfunction that nobody wants to admit.

This type of thinking ends up re-victimizing, and absolves the others of any
wrongdoing. When people aren’t held accountable, we are empowering the
wrongdoer, and disempowering the wronged.

We have created a culture of enablers and the enabled. After a while,

everyone just takes it for granted that this is the way it should be – some
people are just meant to carry the full weight of all the mistakes and
misbehaviors, regardless of whether they committed the o#ense or not.
This mindset has poisoned families, businesses, governments, and religious
institutions for generations. And the only way to stop it is to stop enabling.
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 Everybody carries their own baggage.
In Redefining Love, we learn that it isn’t our fault that another person has
behaved badly. Being accountable is not simply being honest about our
own shortcomings and failings, but also having the courage to speak up
when someone else has done wrong, and having the self-awareness to
refuse to carry the weight of other people’s responsibilities.

Accountability is the first step to self-love. It is rooting out self-loathing and

self-disgust so you can make room for love of all the wonderful things you
are. You can’t take this crucial step while you are enabling others by
carrying the burdens of their responsibilities as well as your own.

When we release ourselves from the burden of enabling, we can then

recognize maladaptive behaviors within ourselves and others so that we
can avoid falling into toxic relationships in the future, and we release the
other person to grow from their own journey.

When we are trained by culture and family dynamics to be enablers from

the very beginning of our lives, it can be tricky to determine who should be
accountable for what. We will tackle this topic next week, so stay tuned!

Learn more...
To learn more about the Redefining Love Way, I encourage you to browse
the site. Have questions? Feel free to email me at sara@sarabethwald.com.

For more information on how to join the Redefining Love Community,

please visit redefine-love.com/coaching.
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 Related Links
What is Redefining Love?
Boundaries
Accountability
Grace
The Shame Cycle
Toxic Relationships

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