Is the enabler as bad as the abuser?

No, and the answer matters because the question is usually asked from a place of trying to absolve one parent or to flatten both parents into a single villain. The abusive parent generated the harm. The enabling parent held the responsibility of stopping it and did not. Those are two different responsibilities and they are not equivalent. The abusive parent operated with intact reality testing and chose to harm. The enabling parent operated with intact reality testing and chose to accommodate the person harming. Both were responsible for what happened. The enabling parent's responsibility is not absolved by being smaller in scope, and the abusive parent's responsibility is not absolved by the enabling parent's complicity. In clinical work, survivors often spend years trying to settle this question by ranking the parents against each other. The work is not to rank them. The work is to hold each parent's responsibility separately and let the grief about each one have its own room.

My enabling parent is the only one who showed me any warmth. How do I make sense of that?

The split-loyalty experience you are describing is an accurate response to a contradictory parent. The enabling parent often was warm and the warmth was real. The enabling parent also held the line that protected the abusive parent and that line cost you protection. Both are true. The brain does not metabolize this contradiction easily because attachment systems are built for clear signals. When the only available source of warmth is also the source of structural betrayal, the experience inside the child is a kind of permanent dissonance. The clinical work is not to resolve the contradiction by picking a side. The work is to hold both. The warmth was real. The accommodation was also real. You can grieve both and you can be in relationship with the parts of the parent that were warm without erasing the parts that were complicit.

Can the enabler change in old age?

Sometimes, and the conditions matter. The enabling parent can change when the abusive partner is removed from the system through divorce, separation, or death; when a puncturing event makes the cost of accommodation visible in a way the parent cannot defend against; when outside relationships model that something different is possible; and when the parent is willing to feel the historical weight of what the accommodation cost the children. Without those conditions, the pattern usually persists because the accommodation was the survival strategy that organized the parent's adult life. Asking the enabling parent to change without those conditions is asking them to disassemble the structure that has held them together for decades. Some parents can do that work. Many cannot. Hoping for it is reasonable. Building your life around it is usually not.

Is codependent still the right word for this?

Codependent is the term that came out of Al-Anon and the addiction literature in the 1980s and it has limits. It originated in the context of families organized around an alcoholic and was extended to families organized around a personality-disordered member. The term carries useful clinical recognition and also some baggage about pathologizing the partner of the person with the primary disorder. Modern clinical and trauma literature has moved toward a more layered set of frames including accommodation, betrayal-trauma compliance, frozen bystander response, learned helplessness, trauma-bonded compliance, and the sequelae of growing up in a family where one parent's regulation was the central organizing demand. Different frames fit different presentations. In this article I have used several. The point is not which word is right. The point is to see the structure clearly enough that the survivor can name what happened to them without flattening it.

My enabling parent is now the abusive parent's caregiver. Am I obligated to help?

Clinically, your enabling parent's choice to remain in the role of caregiver to the person who harmed you does not transfer that protective responsibility to you. There are multiple legitimate positions an adult survivor can take when this question arises. Some adult children stay engaged at a logistical distance because they have processed enough of the original family system that contact does not destabilize them. Some adult children stay engaged with the enabling parent and decline contact with the abusive parent. Some adult children disengage from both because the system keeps reorganizing around the abuser regardless of who is technically in the caregiver role. None of these positions is the wrong answer. This is not legal advice. Filial responsibility statutes exist in some states and have specific applications that an elder-law attorney in your state can assess if that becomes a practical question. Clinically, the work is to make the choice from a place of present-day capacity and not from a place of inherited family obligation that was assigned to you when you had no power to refuse it.

Clinical Commentary · Family Systems · Personality-Disordered Households

The Silent Enabler: How One Parent Builds the System That Protects the Other

In a personality-disordered family, the abusive parent builds the harm and the enabling parent builds the system that lets the harm keep running. A clinical field guide to the silent partner.

By M. Sexton, LCSW, NATC · Published May 2026 · ~16 min read

The first thing to say plainly is that the silent enabler is not a victim and not the equal aggressor. The enabler is the structural partner. In a family organized around a personality-disordered member, one parent generates the harm and one parent builds the system that lets the harm keep running. Without the system, the harm cannot be sustained at the volume it is sustained. The system is the enabler's contribution. That contribution is not loud. It rarely involves direct cruelty. It almost always involves a long pattern of accommodation, deflection, minimization, and the protective management of the abuser's reputation inside the family and outside it. By the time the adult child enters clinical work, the enabling parent is often the harder parent to see clearly, because the harm was quieter and the relationship was the only available source of warmth.¹

I am writing this because of a pattern I have seen repeatedly in caseload, and a pattern I see surfacing in the broader public conversation about narcissistic abuse and personality-disordered families. The conversation usually focuses on the abusive parent. That focus is correct as a starting place because the abusive parent generated the primary harm and is most often the parent whose actions the survivor can name. The enabling parent comes into focus later. Frequently, the enabling parent comes into focus only after the abusive parent dies, which removes the perceived reason for the accommodation and reveals what was always underneath. Survivors describe this as the second wave. The first wave was naming the abuser. The second wave is naming the parent who held the line.²

This piece is for survivors who are arriving at the second wave. It is also for clinicians who are noticing it in the room and looking for language that holds both parents accountable without collapsing them into a single villain or absolving the enabler in a misplaced effort to protect the surviving parent. The clinical work depends on holding the structure exactly as it was, with each parent's responsibility clearly named and not equated.

Defining the Role: Enabler, Accommodator, Codependent, Or Frozen Bystander

The clinical literature has used several terms for this role, each with limits. The term enabler emerged from the addiction literature and was applied broadly to family members whose behavior allowed an addicted person's use to continue. Its strength is recognizability. Its limit is that it can collapse into blame, suggesting the partner caused the addiction. The term accommodator is more precise in family-systems writing. It names the behavior without the moral overlay. The accommodator adjusts their own life and the family's life to fit the personality-disordered member's demands, regulation needs, and reality distortions.³

The term codependent originated in Al-Anon and was extended to families organized around personality disorder. It carries clinical recognition and some baggage. Modern trauma literature has added the frame of frozen bystander response, drawing from the broader bystander research, to describe the parent who could see what was happening, could see the cost to the children, and could not move because their own threat-detection system had been exhausted by years of attempting to manage the abusive partner. Learned helplessness, trauma-bonded compliance, and the betrayal-trauma compliance described by Jennifer Freyd are also active in many of these systems.⁴

None of these terms is fully sufficient on its own. In the clinical work, the most useful approach is to use them in combination, depending on which feature is dominant in the particular parent. Some enabling parents are primarily accommodators, organized around managing the abuser's regulation. Some are primarily frozen bystanders, organized around survival inside an unsafe partnership. Some are primarily trauma-bonded, organized around an attachment to the abuser that overrode their attachment to the children. Most are some mixture. The clinical task is to see the mixture clearly enough that it can be named without flattening it into a single archetype.⁵

How the Role Functions Inside the Family

The enabling parent's job, structurally, is to hold the system together while the abusive parent generates the chaos. The job has several components. The first is real-time crisis management. When the abusive parent has an episode of explosive anger, sustained punishment, public humiliation directed at one of the children, or any other outburst that would destabilize a normal family, the enabling parent is the one who softens it, redirects it, manages the children's response, and absorbs the residual.⁶

The second is reputation management outside the family. The enabling parent is usually the one who maintains the family's public face. The school knows the family from the enabling parent. The neighbors interact with the enabling parent. The extended family hears about the family from the enabling parent. The version that goes outside is the version the enabling parent constructs. That version typically does not include the abusive parent's actual behavior. It includes a version that protects the abusive parent's standing and protects the family unit from exposure.⁷

The third is internal narrative management. The enabling parent constructs and maintains the family's story about itself. The abusive parent is described in the language the enabling parent provides. He had a hard day. She is under so much pressure at work. They love you, they just have a difficult way of showing it. He didn't mean it. She is going through something. The narrative is the floor the children walk on, and it is built and maintained by the enabling parent. The narrative is what makes the harm metabolizable in the moment and what makes it impossible to name accurately later.

The fourth is the management of the children themselves. The enabling parent typically becomes the channel through which the children are taught to accommodate the abuser. The instructions are usually framed as protective. Don't make him angry. Don't set her off. Just let it pass. Just say you're sorry. Do it for me. Do it so the rest of the day can be okay. The child learns to suppress their own perception of what just happened in order to preserve the enabling parent's capacity to keep functioning. The child becomes a co-accommodator long before they have any framework for what they are doing.⁸

The Developmental Cost in the Child

The developmental cost of growing up in this system is specific and is well-described in the attachment literature, the betrayal-trauma literature, and the complex PTSD literature. The child's primary attachment figures were both unsafe in different ways. The abusive parent was unsafe through the direct generation of harm. The enabling parent was unsafe through the structural failure to interrupt the harm. The child's attachment system attempts to organize a coherent strategy for closeness with both parents and cannot, because the parents' behavior is not coherent. The child's solution is typically a disorganized attachment pattern in which closeness and avoidance both feel necessary and both feel dangerous.⁹

The cost is also epistemic. The child's reality testing is calibrated against the enabling parent's narrative, and the enabling parent's narrative does not match what the child experienced. The child sees the abusive parent generate harm, hears the enabling parent describe the same event in language that softens or denies the harm, and learns that their own perception is unreliable. This is the substrate of the betrayal trauma described in Jennifer Freyd's work. The trauma is not only what the abusive parent did. The trauma is also that the secondary attachment figure, the one whose function was to be the corroborating witness, instead corroborated the abuser's version. The child loses both the protector and the witness in the same set of events.¹⁰

The somatic cost is documented in the broader trauma literature. Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, Pete Walker, and Gabor Maté have all described the long-term physical sequelae of growing up in a household organized around a destabilizing parent. The child's nervous system spends formative years in chronic threat-detection. The body learns to hold the threat. As an adult, the survivor presents with the constellation of complex PTSD: attachment dysregulation, chronic anxiety, dissociative episodes, somatic symptoms with no clear medical etiology, identity confusion, difficulty trusting their own perception, and a sustained difficulty in adult relationships organized around the same dynamic of accommodating the partner's regulation needs at the cost of their own.¹¹

The clinical presentation often includes a layered grief about both parents that the survivor cannot easily access. The grief about the abusive parent is usually accessible first because it is sharper. The grief about the enabling parent is usually accessible later because the enabling parent's harm was structural rather than acute. Survivors often describe the second grief as harder, because the enabling parent was the one they were taught to protect.¹²

Why the Enabler Becomes an Enabler

The question of how a person becomes the enabling parent is not the same as the question of whether they bear responsibility. The two questions can be held separately. Most enabling parents have a developmental history that organized them for the role. Many grew up in households where one parent's regulation was the central demand and where their own role as a child was to manage that parent. Many learned that their safety, their access to love, and their access to a coherent family life depended on accommodating an unstable adult. Many entered adulthood with the accommodation already operational as a baseline relational strategy. They selected a partner whose presentation matched the developmental pattern they were already wired to manage.¹³

This is not absolution. It is a description of the mechanism. The enabling parent's history explains how the role became possible. It does not erase the responsibility the enabling parent had as an adult to interrupt the pattern when their children were the cost. Every adult in a destabilizing partnership has the option to seek consultation, to acknowledge what is happening, to consider separation, to bring outside witnesses into the system. Most enabling parents do not exercise these options. The reason most do not exercise them is usually the same reason they entered the partnership in the first place. The accommodation is the survival strategy that has organized their adult life and disassembling it would require facing the cost it produced.¹⁴

The enabling parent often genuinely cannot see, in the moment, what is being done to the children. The accommodation is partially a perceptual strategy. To see clearly would be to accept the full weight of what continuing the partnership costs the children, and that weight is unbearable to a person whose entire adult identity has been organized around managing the partnership. The accommodation includes a perceptual filter that allows the parent to continue functioning. The filter is what the children inherit and what they later have to dismantle in clinical work in order to see the family system as it actually was.

The Difference Between Accommodation and Complicity

One of the harder distinctions in this work is between accommodation and complicity. Both result in the abuser's harm continuing. They are not the same. Accommodation is the parent who could not see clearly because the perceptual cost was unbearable. Complicity is the parent who could see clearly and chose the partnership over the children. Most enabling parents are some combination, with the proportions shifting over time and across specific events.¹⁵

The clinical reason this distinction matters is that the survivor's grief and accountability work is different in each case. With accommodation, the work includes a recognition that the parent was operating from a developmental position that had been laid down decades earlier and that the accommodation was, in part, an unconscious survival strategy. The grief is for what the child needed and could not have, and for what the parent could not provide because of their own history. With complicity, the work includes a recognition that the parent had moments of clarity and chose against the children. The grief in those cases is closer to the grief about the abusive parent. The recognition is harder. It is also necessary, because survivors who try to protect the enabling parent from the recognition that they had moments of clear sight and chose against them often cannot finish the grief work.¹⁶

The honest position in most cases is that both were operating. The enabling parent had decades of accommodation that was largely unconscious and constrained by their own history. They also had moments of clear sight, usually triggered by an event that was too direct to deflect, in which they had the option to interrupt and chose not to. Most survivors carry both kinds of memories about the enabling parent. The clinical work is to hold both rather than collapse to either pole.

The Enabler After the Abuser Dies

One of the predictable patterns in personality-disordered family systems is what happens when the abusive parent dies. The enabling parent is suddenly free of the regulation demand that organized their adult life. In some cases the parent is genuinely relieved and begins to access a version of themselves that the partnership had suppressed. In some cases the parent shows immediate cognitive change, including spontaneous recall of events they had previously denied, increased clarity about the partnership, and a willingness to acknowledge what the children had been telling them. The accommodation falls away because the reason for it has stopped being present.¹⁷

In other cases the pattern persists or even intensifies. The enabling parent reorganizes the abusive parent's memory upward, describes the partnership in terms of love and grief that erase the actual conduct, becomes hostile to any adult child who attempts to introduce the actual record into the post-death narrative, and selects the next relational figure (often an adult child) to occupy the role the abusive parent occupied. This is the pattern survivors describe as inheriting the role. The enabling parent has lost the partner whose regulation organized them and is now seeking the next person to accommodate. The adult child who is closest geographically or most willing to engage often becomes that person.¹⁸

This is the moment when many adult survivors first see the enabling parent clearly. The abusive parent is no longer present to be the focus of attention. The enabling parent's behavior is no longer maskable as protective management of the abuser. The adult child sees the parent operating on their own and recognizes patterns that were previously hidden behind the louder pattern of the abusive parent. The recognition is often the trigger for the second wave of grief work and, in many cases, the trigger for a reassessment of contact.¹⁹

The Clinical Work of Seeing the Enabler Clearly

The clinical work of seeing the enabling parent clearly is a sustained operation. It usually requires that the survivor first complete substantial work on the abusive parent so that the protective frame around the enabling parent can come down without flooding. Survivors who attempt to see the enabling parent clearly before completing the abuser-focused work often find the recognition unbearable, because the enabling parent was the only available source of warmth in childhood and naming the structural betrayal feels like losing the last piece of the family.²⁰

The pacing matters. The work proceeds best when the survivor can hold the enabling parent's warmth and the enabling parent's structural failure as both true at the same time. This is a both-and operation, not a select-one operation. The warmth was real. The accommodation was real. The protection was real. The failure to interrupt was real. The grief is for both at once. The integration is for both at once. The choice about contact in the present is informed by both at once.

The work often includes a specific kind of mourning that survivors describe as harder than the mourning for the abusive parent. The mourning for the abusive parent is mourning for what the parent never was. The mourning for the enabling parent is mourning for what the parent could have been if they had been able to interrupt the pattern. There was a person inside the accommodation who knew what was happening to the children. That person did not act. The mourning is for the version of the parent who, in some moment, had the option to act and did not.²¹

The clinical work also includes a specific present-day operation, which is the recognition that the survivor is no longer required to be the co-accommodator they were trained to be in childhood. The role was assigned to them when they had no power to refuse it. As an adult, they do have the power to refuse it. Refusing the role often means changing the structural position they hold inside the family system, which the family system will resist. The resistance is not evidence that the refusal is wrong. The resistance is evidence that the refusal is structurally accurate.²²

The Goldwater Rule and the Clinical Frame

This article has not used a public-figure case as its anchor. The pattern described here is a structural pattern in personality-disordered family systems and applies in the clinical generic, not to any specific named person. Where I refer to dynamics involving a parent, I am describing a pattern from clinical literature and aggregated caseload, not a specific identifiable family. Ethically I cannot diagnose someone I have not personally evaluated. What I can do is name the observable pattern. The pattern in this article is a clinical pattern, not a diagnostic claim about any particular parent in any particular reader's life.²³

If a reader recognizes their own parent in this description, that recognition is the reader's clinical observation about their own family. It is not my professional opinion about that parent. If the reader is in a clinical relationship with a therapist, that recognition is appropriate material for that work. If the reader is not in a clinical relationship and the recognition is destabilizing, the appropriate next step is to find one. The work of seeing both parents clearly in a personality-disordered family system is not work that should be undertaken without a clinical container, particularly if the abusive parent is still living or if contact with either parent is still active.

When the Enabler Is the Only Parent Left

The clinical situation that arrives most often in the second wave is the survivor whose abusive parent has died and whose enabling parent is now the only parent left. The survivor's task in this configuration is twofold. The first task is the historical work of seeing the family system as it actually was, including the enabling parent's structural role. The second task is the present-day work of deciding what relationship, if any, the survivor wants with the enabling parent now. These two tasks are related and not the same. Naming what the enabling parent did does not automatically determine what the present-day contact should be.²⁴

Some survivors find that they can hold the historical recognition and stay engaged with the enabling parent at a logistical distance. The contact is bounded, the topics are limited, the visits are short. The historical reality is held privately and is not relitigated with the parent in real time. This works for some survivors and not others. It depends on whether the present-day enabling parent is now generating the same accommodation demand that organized the original family system. If they are, contact at any volume usually destabilizes the survivor's capacity to hold the historical reality. If they are not, contact at a low volume may be sustainable.

Other survivors find that contact with the enabling parent reactivates the role they were assigned in childhood and that the only viable position is significant distance or no contact. This is not a failure of the work. It is a recognition that the role assignment is structural and that the survivor cannot hold the role without becoming the role. The decision is informed by present-day capacity, not by inherited family obligation. Different survivors arrive at different decisions and the variation is appropriate to the variation in the underlying systems.²⁵

The clinical work is not to push the survivor toward any particular decision. The clinical work is to support the survivor in seeing the system clearly, in feeling the historical weight without it overwhelming the present, and in choosing the present-day relationship from a place of capacity rather than from a place of inherited obligation.

What This Means for Clinical Work

For clinicians in the room with adult survivors of personality-disordered family systems, the silent enabler is the part of the work that is easiest to miss and the part that often determines whether the survivor can complete the integration. The abusive parent is named first because the abusive parent is louder. The work on the abusive parent is necessary and is usually substantial. The work on the enabling parent is the second wave. It is often quieter, longer, and harder, because the enabling parent was the source of the warmth the survivor still has access to and naming the structural failure feels like losing it.²⁶

The clinical instinct to protect the surviving parent, particularly when the abusive parent has died, sometimes leads clinicians to soften the recognition. The softening usually does not serve the survivor. The survivor is doing the recognition work because the recognition is structurally accurate. Softening it leaves the survivor in the same position they were in as a child, which is the position of holding the family narrative together at the cost of their own perception. The clinical room is the place where the survivor has the opportunity to see the system as it actually was without having to maintain the family's preferred version. Softening that recognition removes the reason the survivor came into the work.

The clinical position is to hold both parents clearly. The abusive parent generated the harm. The enabling parent built the structure that made the harm sustainable. Both responsibilities are real. Neither is absolved by the other. The survivor's grief is for both, and the present-day decisions about contact, relationship, and family role are made from a place of recognizing both clearly. That is the work. It takes time. It is the foundation of the integration that allows the survivor to live an adult life that is not organized around the role assigned to them when they had no power to refuse it.

References

Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674068063 ↩
Freyd, J. J., & Birrell, P. J. (2013). Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren't Being Fooled. Wiley. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118420683 ↩
Beattie, M. (2022). Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (Revised & Updated ed.). Hazelden. https://www.hazelden.org/store/item/8530?Codependent-No-More ↩
Cermak, T. L. (1986). Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence: A Guide for Professionals. Johnson Institute Books. https://www.worldcat.org/title/15015859 ↩
Whitfield, C. L. (1991). Co-Dependence: Healing the Human Condition. Health Communications. https://www.hcibooks.com/p-1149-co-dependence-healing-the-human-condition.aspx ↩
DePrince, A. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2007). Trauma-induced dissociation. In M. J. Friedman, T. M. Keane, & P. A. Resick (Eds.), Handbook of PTSD: Science and Practice (pp. 135-150). Guilford. https://www.guilford.com/books/Handbook-of-PTSD/Friedman-Keane-Resick/9781462547074 ↩
Schwartz, R. C. (2020). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True. https://www.soundstrue.com/products/no-bad-parts ↩
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence (Updated ed.). Basic Books. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/judith-l-herman/trauma-and-recovery/9780465061716/ ↩
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation, Anxiety, and Anger. Basic Books. https://www.worldcat.org/title/728842 ↩
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press. (See chapter on betrayal blindness in attachment systems.) https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674068063 ↩
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313183/the-body-keeps-the-score-by-bessel-van-der-kolk-md/ ↩
Walker, P. (2017). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote. https://www.pete-walker.com/complex_ptsd_book.html ↩
Maté, G. (2010). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. North Atlantic Books. https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/ ↩
Beattie, M. (2022). Codependent No More (Revised & Updated ed.). Hazelden. (See chapters on the developmental origins of accommodation.) https://www.hazelden.org/store/item/8530?Codependent-No-More ↩
Briere, J., & Scott, C. (2015). Principles of Trauma Therapy: A Guide to Symptoms, Evaluation, and Treatment (2nd ed.). Sage. https://www.sagepub.com/books/Book238389 ↩
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and Recovery (Updated ed.). Basic Books. (See chapter on perpetrator-victim-bystander dynamics in family systems.) https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/judith-l-herman/trauma-and-recovery/9780465061716/ ↩
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books. https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/in-an-unspoken-voice/ ↩
Walker, P. (2017). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote. (See sections on the surviving parent in personality-disordered families.) https://www.pete-walker.com/complex_ptsd_book.html ↩
Schwartz, R. C. (2020). No Bad Parts. Sounds True. (See sections on parts work with surviving parents after the death of the destabilizing parent.) https://www.soundstrue.com/products/no-bad-parts ↩
Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford. https://www.guilford.com/books/Eye-Movement-Desensitization-and-Reprocessing-EMDR-Therapy/Francine-Shapiro/9781462532766 ↩
Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and Recovery (Updated ed.). Basic Books. (See chapter on mourning what could have been.) https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/judith-l-herman/trauma-and-recovery/9780465061716/ ↩
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking. (See chapters on adult survivors and the renegotiation of family roles.) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313183/the-body-keeps-the-score-by-bessel-van-der-kolk-md/ ↩
American Psychiatric Association. (2017). APA Ethics Code Section 7.3 (the "Goldwater Rule"). NASW Code of Ethics analogous discipline. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/ethics ↩
Briere, J., & Scott, C. (2015). Principles of Trauma Therapy (2nd ed.). Sage. (See chapter on present-day contact decisions for adult survivors.) https://www.sagepub.com/books/Book238389 ↩
Walker, P. (2017). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote. (See sections on contact decisions and role refusal.) https://www.pete-walker.com/complex_ptsd_book.html ↩
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice. North Atlantic Books. (See sections on the second wave of grief work in adult survivors of personality-disordered families.) https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/in-an-unspoken-voice/ ↩

Frequently asked questions.

Is the enabler as bad as the abuser?: No, and the answer matters because the question is usually asked from a place of trying to absolve one parent or to flatten both parents into a single villain. The abusive parent generated the harm. The enabling parent held the responsibility of stopping it and did not. Those are two different responsibilities and they are not equivalent. The abusive parent operated with intact reality testing and chose to harm. The enabling parent operated with intact reality testing and chose to accommodate the person harming. Both were responsible for what happened. The enabling parent's responsibility is not absolved by being smaller in scope, and the abusive parent's responsibility is not absolved by the enabling parent's complicity. In clinical work, survivors often spend years trying to settle this question by ranking the parents against each other. The work is not to rank them. The work is to hold each parent's responsibility separately and let the grief about each one have its own room.
My enabling parent is the only one who showed me any warmth. How do I make sense of that?: The split-loyalty experience you are describing is an accurate response to a contradictory parent. The enabling parent often was warm and the warmth was real. The enabling parent also held the line that protected the abusive parent and that line cost you protection. Both are true. The brain does not metabolize this contradiction easily because attachment systems are built for clear signals. When the only available source of warmth is also the source of structural betrayal, the experience inside the child is a kind of permanent dissonance. The clinical work is not to resolve the contradiction by picking a side. The work is to hold both. The warmth was real. The accommodation was also real. You can grieve both and you can be in relationship with the parts of the parent that were warm without erasing the parts that were complicit.
Can the enabler change in old age?: Sometimes, and the conditions matter. The enabling parent can change when the abusive partner is removed from the system through divorce, separation, or death; when a puncturing event makes the cost of accommodation visible in a way the parent cannot defend against; when outside relationships model that something different is possible; and when the parent is willing to feel the historical weight of what the accommodation cost the children. Without those conditions, the pattern usually persists because the accommodation was the survival strategy that organized the parent's adult life. Asking the enabling parent to change without those conditions is asking them to disassemble the structure that has held them together for decades. Some parents can do that work. Many cannot. Hoping for it is reasonable. Building your life around it is usually not.
Is codependent still the right word for this?: Codependent is the term that came out of Al-Anon and the addiction literature in the 1980s and it has limits. It originated in the context of families organized around an alcoholic and was extended to families organized around a personality-disordered member. The term carries useful clinical recognition and also some baggage about pathologizing the partner of the person with the primary disorder. Modern clinical and trauma literature has moved toward a more layered set of frames including accommodation, betrayal-trauma compliance, frozen bystander response, learned helplessness, trauma-bonded compliance, and the sequelae of growing up in a family where one parent's regulation was the central organizing demand. Different frames fit different presentations. In this article I have used several. The point is not which word is right. The point is to see the structure clearly enough that the survivor can name what happened to them without flattening it.
My enabling parent is now the abusive parent's caregiver. Am I obligated to help?: Clinically, your enabling parent's choice to remain in the role of caregiver to the person who harmed you does not transfer that protective responsibility to you. There are multiple legitimate positions an adult survivor can take when this question arises. Some adult children stay engaged at a logistical distance because they have processed enough of the original family system that contact does not destabilize them. Some adult children stay engaged with the enabling parent and decline contact with the abusive parent. Some adult children disengage from both because the system keeps reorganizing around the abuser regardless of who is technically in the caregiver role. None of these positions is the wrong answer. This is not legal advice. Filial responsibility statutes exist in some states and have specific applications that an elder-law attorney in your state can assess if that becomes a practical question. Clinically, the work is to make the choice from a place of present-day capacity and not from a place of inherited family obligation that was assigned to you when you had no power to refuse it.

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