Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing

Eirene: [00:00:00] I've been thinking a lot about how long it took me to understand that the silence around the abuse was also part of the abuse. For a long time, I focused on the person that made the house feel unsafe, but as I got older, I started realizing that what confused me the most wasn't only what happened. It was how everyone moved around it. The way things were explained away, how people acted like certain behaviors were just something we had to accept. The way truth could be sitting right in the middle of the room, and somehow everyone knew how to step around it. That kind of silence does something to a child. It makes you question what you see. It makes you wonder if you're the one making things harder by naming what everyone else keeps avoiding. And when you become the person who tells the truth in a family system built around denial, you learn very quickly that honesty doesn't [00:01:00] always make you feel supported, and that's the part I wanna sit with today. Because when we talk about abuse inside families, the focus usually goes to the most obvious person, the one whose behavior is unpredictable. The one whose anger fills a room, whose drinking, violence, or instability creates fear inside the home. That person is easy to identify. But in many families, the damage doesn't come from one person. It comes from the system that forms around them. Because when someone's behavior repeatedly creates chaos, the people around them begin adjusting in ways that allows life to keep moving forward.

Some people try to calm the situation, to smooth things over. Others ask people to tolerate what is happening so the family doesn't fall apart. Over time, those adjustments become patterns, and one of the most common roles that develops inside those patterns is the role of enabler.

This is Born [00:02:00] Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, a podcast for those of us who grew up in survival mode but are ready to heal and speak our truth. I'm Eirene, a cycle-breaker learning what peace feels like after years of survival. Every episode is an invitation to rest inside your truth, to feel seen, and to remember you are never alone. This is what it sounds like when silence finally breaks.

Before we begin, I want share a gentle reminder. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. If at any point you need to pause or step away, honor that. Your wellbeing matters more than finishing the episode. You are not alone. Take care of yourself while you listen.

Enablers don't always look harmful. Often, they look protective. They explain things away, minimize what happened, and encourage forgiveness before accountability has been acknowledged. Sometimes they say things like, "That's just how they are." "You know how he gets when he drinks." [00:03:00] "Don't make things worse," that one's my favorite.

But what those responses often do, whether intentionally or not, is protect the person causing harm from facing the consequences of their behavior. And when consequences never arrive, the behavior rarely changes. Instead, the responsibility shifts somewhere else, often on the people who are already trying to survive the situation. Today I wanna talk about the role enablers play inside dysfunctional family systems.

Because sometimes the most confusing part about growing up around abuse isn't just the harm itself. It's the silence that surrounds it and the people who keep that silence in place. When people talk about abusive family systems, the focus usually stays on the person causing the harm, the person whose behavior is unpredictable enough to make everyone else feel unsafe.

But in many families, the system doesn't function because of one person alone. It functions [00:04:00] because other people learn how to orbit around the behavior. People who soften it, who excuse it and adjust reality so the abuse can continue without being fully confronted. These people are the enablers.

And sometimes their role inside the system becomes just as powerful as the person causing the harm. Because when abuse happens in isolation, it's easier to see it clearly.

But when abuse is constantly minimized, justified, or covered for by the people around it, the child inside that environment begins to experience something much more confusing. It feels like distortion. I grew up with an alcoholic father. Alcohol was not just something he consumed occasionally.

It shaped the atmosphere in our house. When he drank his behavior became erratic, unpredictable, and aggressive. As a child, you learn to read the room quickly. You learn to notice the tone of their voice, the way they're slurring their words, [00:05:00] their body language, and then your body starts preparing before anything happens. But one of the things I understand more clearly now as an adult is that the drinking didn't exist in isolation. People around him knew. Family members knew he struggled with alcohol. They knew his behavior changed when he drank.

And yet every time someone traveled to the Dominican Republic and came back, there was almost always the same gift waiting for him, a bottle of Brugal. Brugal is a Dominican rum. It's one of the most well-known alcohol brands in the Dominican Republic. For many families, bringing back a bottle is a normal gesture, a way of sharing something from home.

But in my house, that bottle meant something else. When I saw it my stomach dropped because I knew what it meant. I knew the next few days were gonna be unpredictable. The house would feel tense, and I knew that eventually the drinking would escalate.

As a child, I didn't have the language for what was [00:06:00] happening. I just knew that the adults around me understood something about my father's behavior. And yet, the pattern continued. The alcohol kept arriving, and no one ever said the obvious thing. Maybe this isn't a good idea. This is one of the ways enabling works inside family systems. Through small actions that allow destructive patterns to continue without interruption. My mother was also living inside that system. And I wanna acknowledge something important.

She was a victim of my father's abuse, too. She experienced his violence in ways that were real and painful. But even when someone is a victim inside the system, they can still become an enabler within it. Sometimes it's as a survival strategy because confronting the abuser feels too dangerous. And maintaining the illusion of stability feels safer than disrupting it. My mother often tried to smooth things over, to minimize what was happening, and pretend [00:07:00] things were calmer than they were.

It always felt like it was easier for her to manage my reaction to the drinking and the abuse rather than try to manage my father's behavior. When I left to the Navy, I would call home, and before my father ever got on the phone, I would ask her the same question: "Is he drinking?"

And almost every time she would say no. Because if he was drinking, the conversation would always end with him verbally abusing me, and I was trying to protect myself. She would reassure me that everything was fine, that he was sober, that there was nothing to worry about.

But then he would get on the phone, and within a few seconds, I could hear it. I knew he had been drinking, the slurring, the tone of his voice. And in those moments, something very specific happens psychologically. You are no longer just dealing with the person causing harm. You're also dealing with the people protecting the illusion.

Now the environment becomes harder to navigate because you're not only [00:08:00] surviving the abuser, you're also surviving the people who need the abuse to remain unspoken.

And maybe that's because confronting it would force them to confront their own powerlessness. Over time I began to notice another pattern. My sibling started doing something similar. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they began covering for my father's behavior too, explaining it away and minimizing it, framing his actions in ways that made them easier to tolerate.

As a child, I didn't understand these dynamics. I only knew how it felt. It felt like I was trying to survive two things at once. The person causing the harm and the people asking me, directly or indirectly, to stay quiet about it, to keep tolerating it, to normalize it and basically asking me to stop disrupting the story that allowed the family to keep functioning. Growing up in that environment, I learned something very confusing about truth.

That seeing clearly doesn't make you safer. [00:09:00] Sometimes it makes you more isolated because systems built around denial can't easily accommodate to honesty. And that is the part of family dysfunction that people talk about the least.

The way silence becomes a survival strategy. The way enabling becomes normalized and how a child could end up feeling like the problem simply because they're the only one refusing to pretend.

And I'm not saying that my mother agreed with the abuse or approved of it. In many cases, enablers are people who have been harmed by the same person themselves. I understand that enabling behavior grew out of survival, but those survival strategies can create harm. When harmful behavior consistently results in accountability or loss of access to others, the person engaging in that behavior is forced to confront its impact. But when someone repeatedly intervenes to soften the fallout, the consequences never fully reach the person [00:10:00] responsible. The person creating the instability continues operating within the same patterns. This is one of the reasons dysfunctional families often organize themselves in roles. Those roles are rarely discussed within the family, but they shape how people interact. And once those roles are established, the system begins protecting them because if the scapegoat stops accepting the role, the system has to confront something it spent years avoiding: the truth. In many cases, it simply means the family has learned how to keep operating without confronting the underlying problem.

It was confusing as a child because my mother would come across as protective, like she was trying to keep the peace in our house or protecting our family. Other times, I felt like she was protecting my father from judgment from people outside our home. But because there was no accountability, he just continued to behave in the same way.

And everybody else in the home is absorbing the impact of it. So [00:11:00] on one hand, you're exposed to the harmful behavior, but then you're also exposed to the ways the behavior is explained away or denied by the people around it. The harm is visible, but the response to the harm suggests that it's manageable, normal, or something that I should be simply tolerating.

This creates a kind of psychological disorientation. A child sees what's happening, but the environment encourages them to question their interpretation of it. You begin wondering if you're overreacting, if you're too sensitive, or if you're misunderstanding the situation. And over time, this can affect how someone relates to their own perceptions. They learn how to look outward for confirmation. They learn that acknowledging the problem openly can create more tension than remaining silent and in many families, the person who eventually speaks up about the dysfunction becomes perceived as the disruptive one because , they're the ones that are refusing to participate in the silence that [00:12:00] allowed the abuse to continue.

Recognizing these patterns later in life can be complicated. You start noticing how the dynamics you grew up with impact how you show up for yourself and your relationships as an adult. Enabling is psychologically confusing for children. It doesn't only affect how you see the person causing the harm. It also affects how you learn to understand love, connection, and safety itself. Because when a child grows up watching harmful behavior repeatedly minimized, excused, or normalized by the people around them, they begin adapting to emotional inconsistency as though it's a normal part of relationships. They learn to stay connected to people who hurt them, to override discomfort in order to maintain attachment, prioritize keeping the relationship from falling apart over listening to their own instincts.

Those patterns follow people into adulthood. [00:13:00] Many survivors grow up believing that love requires self-abandonment. That closeness means emotional overextension. You're managing people's feelings, walking on eggshells, staying emotionally available no matter how draining or one-sided the relationship becomes. This is something that we learn in childhood because in environments where that behavior is normalized, boundaries can start feeling dangerous. Saying no can feel like rejection. And disappointing someone can feel unsafe because in childhood, you were taught that stability depended on keeping other people emotionally regulated. And when those dynamics are repeated long enough, the nervous system can start confusing familiarity with safety. Children are wired to attach for survival, even to the people who are hurting them. So the body learns to hold closeness and pain at the same time, and later in life, you end up in relationships that are emotionally inconsistent [00:14:00] because that's what feels normal. Those relationships could even be compelling because the nervous system is drawn to them, because it recognizes the dysfunction as connection.

I think one of the hardest parts of healing is developing discernment after growing up in environments where your instincts were repeatedly overridden, learning that not everyone who feels familiar is safe and that not every intense connection is healthy. So you're explaining away red flags, you're normalizing emotional inconsistency, you're prioritizing attachment over self-protection. And this is where healing asks us to rebuild trust in our own nervous system.

We have to learn to notice whether our honesty is respected or punished. Whether your boundaries are allowed to exist without guilt, if connection requires self-betrayal. Because safe relationships do not require you to disappear in order to keep them.

And when [00:15:00] you look closely at where all those patterns begin, they almost always lead back to the environment that taught them in the first place. These dynamics rarely develop in isolation. They are shaped inside family systems that slowly adapt around dysfunction in order to keep functioning. Family dysfunction survives through the system that forms around the behavior. Families are adaptive systems. When instability enters the environment, the people around it begin adjusting in ways that allow daily life to continue. But sometimes those adjustments slowly become something else. They become enabling.

Understanding the role enablers played in my family required me to hold two truths at once. That some of the people who enabled harmful behavior may have also been victims themselves, and that their actions still contributed to the environment where the harm was allowed to continue. Both of those realities can exist at [00:16:00] the same time, and acknowledging it was one of the most difficult parts of understanding the dysfunction in my family.

As I got older and began reflecting on my experiences more carefully, I started noticing the harm didn't happen in isolation. There were other people in the environment who saw pieces of what was happening. People who understood more than they acknowledged, moments where they could have interrupted the pattern, but chose not to. And recognizing that dynamic can bring up a complicated mix of emotions. Because many enablers are not easily categorized as villains, cause they could have been people that are struggling themselves. But when you're the one experiencing the harm, you learn that your safety is not a priority, that maintaining the system matters more, and that realization is painful.

It's not just the abuse itself, it's more like when you look back and you realize there were opportunities that existed to break the pattern. Moments where someone could [00:17:00] have named what was happening, where someone could have chosen the child instead of the system.

For me, understanding enabling is not about assigning blame as much as it is about gaining clarity about why the environment felt so confusing, why speaking up made things worse instead of better. Family systems built around denial require cooperation to survive, and the moment someone stops cooperating with that denial, the system often reacts strongly.

The truth destabilizes the roles everyone has learned to play. That’s why many survivors eventually reach a point where they begin stepping back from those dynamics. They recognize that a system built on silence can’t become healthy unless the silence ends.

And sometimes the first place that silence ends is internally. The moment they allow themselves to name what they experienced without minimizing it, and they recognize that the confusion they carried for years was never a [00:18:00] personal flaw. It was the natural response to living in an environment where the truth was repeatedly denied.

I was only able to get that clarity through reflection and distance. It was a slow process of understanding protecting my own sense of reality was not a betrayal. And for many survivors, that’s where healing truly begins.

Before we close today, I want to acknowledge something that can be difficult to talk about. Recognizing the role of enablers inside a family system can be one of the most painful parts of understanding what you lived through because it expands the picture. It asks you to look beyond the most obvious source of danger, and to notice the environment that allowed that danger to continue.

It can bring up memories to the surface. The moments when someone saw what was happening, the times someone coulda intervened. The conversations where the truth almost came to the open but didn't. Those moments can be difficult to [00:19:00] hold because they introduce a deeper understanding of how family systems protect themselves, sometimes through silence, through loyalty, sometimes through the belief that keeping the family together matters more than confronting what is breaking it. And when a child grows up inside that kind of environment, they learn that naming the truth can make the room uncomfortable, that clarity can disrupt relationships, and that the easiest way for everyone else to stay comfortable is for them to stay quiet.

But healing begins the moment silence loosens its grip. The moment a person allows themselves to see the full picture, not just the behavior that hurt them, but the system that surrounded it. It's about reclaiming your relationship with reality, about allowing your memories, your reactions, and your understanding of what happened to exist without denying it or dismissing it.

Because survivors deserve something that not many of us [00:20:00] had growing up, a life where truth does not have to compete with denial. A life where safety doesn't depend on staying quiet Where your voice no longer has to negotiate with silence just to be heard. And that is part of what this space is for. A space where stories that were once minimized can exist fully.

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it, and take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen. Your review helps more people find the podcast and reminds others they're not alone. Don't forget to subscribe or follow the show so you never miss an episode. You can also join me on Substack, where I share weekly reflections and gentle reminders to help you feel less alone on your healing journey. You'll find the link in the show notes. If you'd like to connect beyond the podcast, you can find me on Instagram and TikTok @borntiredpodcast. I'd love to hear what resonated with you. And if you'd like to support the [00:21:00] podcast, there's a link there to buy me a coffee.

Thank you for being here, for listening with an open heart. Most of all, remember this: your story matters, your voice matters, and you are not alone.

This episode was written and narrated by Eirene Torres. Audio production by Carlos Torres. Original music composed by Carlos Torres.