PPTFH Addresses ‘What is an Enabler?’

By SARAH SHMERLING | Managing Editor

“Enabling is a big word, a triggering word,” guest speaker Aaron Fisher said at the start of the Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness community meeting on March 19.

Fisher, of La Vie Counseling Center of Santa Monica and Pasadena, has worked with homeless men at Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row, Lazarus Homeless Shelter, and children and adolescents with trauma histories in foster care.

Instead of speaking at the audience, he opened up a discussion. The first question was asking attendees why they were at the meeting.

“To learn,” “I see the homeless as human beings,” because there’s a “fine line between helping and enabling” were some of the responses that rolled in.

Fisher repeated this process, asking audience members to think about a time they or someone they know dealt with a child who wanted something that wasn’t necessarily healthy for them, like to eat Cheetos for three meals a day, then asking them to think about how they would want people to respond to them if they themselves were doing something that was considered detrimental.

“It’s not just kids who want things that aren’t good for them,” Fisher explained, pointing out that these patterns are in all of us, like when we stay up too late to watch another episode of a show.

Fisher’s analogy related to how the public deals with people experiencing homelessness—that sometimes people give into requests because it’s easier, like putting a Band-Aid on the situation to avoid confrontation.

At about 85 minutes into the 90-minute meeting, an audience member asked: “Are you going to give us your definition of enabling?”

“When a person … basically hurts someone by veiled attempts at caring for them, when you are perpetuating the difficulty that you are espousing to be solving,” Fisher replied.

Fisher explained that homelessness is not a one-size-fits all story, each person has their own unique set of circumstances that has led them to where they are—usually a combination of mental illness, job loss, divorce, financial struggles.

“If we don’t know whether we’re going to help or hurt, perhaps you should not do anything and leave it to the people who are on the streets, all the time, who do know these people,” an audience member suggested. “Let them take care of it and our job should be to help them.”