: Upon reflection
I posted last week (wait, shit, two weeks ago?) about this manchild guy in my office who has awful coping mechanisms and likes to terrorize other people. That post was written from a place of frustration with some of my female colleagues, who have their own maladaptive coping mechanisms to deal with the manchild, namely, they baby and coddle him in a way that reinforces the bad behavior.
I got a lot of feedback on that post, both on the 32-bit Cafe forum and when discussing the ideas in it with people IRL. Some people took pains to point out to me something that I already knew (but didn’t take time to emphasize in the post), which is that I should have compassion for the fact that these women are likely bringing their own past/trauma into the interaction and I can’t hold them responsible for fixing the manchild. Of course I can’t! The purpose of my post was not to assign blame; it was to describe a social phenomenon. The real enemy in this situation is the manchild; let’s be clear about that.
What I did come to appreciate, though, from the discussions that spun out of that post, is that I, too, am a victim and enabler of the manchild’s antics as well. xixxii pointed this out. I clocked this guy as a difficult colleague pretty early on, and developed a strategy of engaging with him a little bit and mostly leaving him to his devices that minimizes our negative interactions and has prevented our relationship from deteriorating to the point where words like “accountability” would enter the picture. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a victim, because in fact I have to operate around him in a hypervigilant state, watching my words and actions to avoid setting him off this is unnecessary emotional labor that he imposes on me. And it’s enabling in the sense that I could give him even less positive feedback than I do now, at the risk of forcing a confrontation that might put myself on the line.
My thoughts on this aren’t completely settled. Clearly, there is a spectrum of enablement and victimhood; I think that my colleagues’ behavior is more encouraging of the manchild’s abuse than (for example) mine is, but I also recognize that the extent of their enablement probably reflects the extent of their victimhood (both from him and from people before him who taught them these responses).
It’s difficult to write about Enablement as a topic in any sort of particular way. We all know that narcissists, psychopaths, and abusers benefit from circles of enablers who supply the abuser with positive reinforcement, whether it’s because they seek some myopic gain by allying themselves with the Big Guy or because they have formed a trauma bond. We all recognize this as a social phenomenon.
But once you start to talk about the particulars, it’s hard to say anything specific without wading into controversy. Here is a particular abuser; here is his victim; here is how the abuser garners sympathy (he was abused as a child; he has a disability); here is how others, including the victim, enable him. Just stating those simple facts already begins to sound like victim blaming, even if your intention is to elucidate facts and identify a path to ending the abuse.