When I make up for others' lack of willingness with excess enthusiasm, encouragement, or chivvying, I'm delaying them from getting to the rock-bottom necessary for them to pull their finger out and do the work.
Every time someone trots out woe in an online Al-Anon meeting, and others come in with little red hearts and expressions of how much they love the individual, the symptom is being treated, but not the cause. The individual goes away comforted, where chastening might be more useful.
What's the cause of my suffering as an Al-Anon? Not others. My fixation on others, and all of the attendant behaviours of self-neglect, control, fixing, and unreasonable demands.
I started to deal with this only once the suffering became unbearable.
The comfort and jolliness of Al-Anon meetings is all well and good, but there's a terrible danger of the camaraderie and constant, lavish, sentimental expressions of praise, thanks, gratitude, belonging, and so forth being fragrant poultices applied to gunshot wounds. They temporarily take away the stink of the festering flesh but don't actually treat the underlying problem.
What is needed? As with a wound, debridement, disinfection, and suturing.
This is Steps Four through Nine. Not gentle. Brutal. Because they systematically dismantle the castles in the air one has been living in. Every single false belief, the whole false identity of the put-upon little man, with his brave, bitter smile, as he struggles on, only wanting the best for everyone, and the thousand other real causes of the unhappiness.