The Enabler Effect: Understanding and Breaking the Cycle
This denial can prevent the family from confronting the issue head-on, delaying necessary intervention and support. By recognizing the fine line between helping and enabling, you contribute significantly to the environment that fosters genuine recovery. It’s about striking the right balance between empathy and accountability, ensuring your loved one has the resources and motivation to pursue sobriety.
Someone struggling with depression may have a hard time getting out of bed each day. Temporary support can help them make it through a difficult time and empower them to seek help. Recognizing the pattern of enabler behavior is important because it can help us understand the role the enabler is playing in the person’s harmful habits.
How to stop enabling a loved one
In its original context, enabling refers to a pattern within the families of people addicted to alcohol and drugs, wherein the family members excuse, justify, ignore, deny, and smooth over the addiction. This notoriously allows the addicted person to avoid facing the full consequences of his or her addiction, and the addiction is able to continue. Transitioning from enabling to truly helping involves setting and maintaining clear, firm boundaries.
Helping vs enabling
When we transition away from codependency and enabling, we can help our loved one realize the severity of their addiction, and guide them toward treatment and hopefully into recovery. Enabling someone doesn’t mean you agree with their behavior. You might simply try to help your loved one out because you’re worried about them or afraid their actions might hurt them, you, 12 Steps of AA What Are the Principles of AA or other family members. But if your help allows your loved one to have an easier time continuing a problematic pattern of behavior, you may be enabling them. It’s tempting to make excuses for your loved one to other family members or friends when you worry other people will judge them harshly or negatively.
Because the enabler(s) will always solve problems for them, the enabled person does not learn how to solve their problems themselves. Firstly, many believe that all forms of help are inherently beneficial. It’s a natural instinct to want to protect and aid those we care about, especially when they’re in distress. For instance, bailing a loved one out of financial or legal issues resulting from substance use doesn’t encourage them to confront the consequences of their actions. Recognizing the difference between supporting someone in recovery and enabling their addiction is pivotal.
- It might be covering for a loved one’s absence at work due to substance use, lending money that’s used to support their addiction, or even denying that there’s a problem at all.
- To the contrary, enablers are often the ones most affected by, and most disturbed by, the negative behaviors of the enabled person.
- The difference is that enabling takes helping to an extreme.
- Be compassionate and make it clear that while you don’t support the behavior, you are willing to support and help them in getting help and making a change.
- Talk to family members or loved ones about your concerns, and consider attending Al-Anon or another support group where everyone shares similar experiences and everything is kept confidential.
Breaking the Cycle of Enabling
Addiction Resource does not favor or support any specific recovery center, nor do we claim to ensure the quality, validity, or effectiveness of any particular treatment center. No one should assume the information provided on Addiction Resource as authoritative and should always defer to the advice and care provided by a medical doctor. Making hard choices involves avoiding enabling while still being supportive of your loved one.
As with other behaviors, you can manage and change enabling tendencies. Support groups like Al-Anon may be useful for people whose loved ones are living with addiction. And talk therapy, Dr. Borland suggests, can be helpful for anyone who finds themselves in an enabling situation or who could benefit from developing assertiveness. When helping becomes a way of avoiding a seemingly inevitable discomfort, it’s a sign that you’ve crossed over into enabling behavior. There’s nothing wrong with helping others from time to time. No one is saying you should never give a friend a ride to the store when their car breaks down.
Enabler behavior can have negative consequences for the enabler and the person they’re enabling. It’s basically a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. Establishing boundaries can help prevent you from enabling your loved one’s problematic behaviors.
The study further demonstrates how having strong bonds with others encourages and supports a person’s quality of life. But you also work full time and need the evenings to care for yourself. You may choose to believe them or agree without really believing them. You might even insist to other family or friends that everything’s fine while struggling to accept this version of truth for yourself.
What’s the difference?
Enablers generally are aware that they are being taken advantage of in some way; they often report feeling frustrated, unappreciated, and resentful. Addiction Resource does not offer medical diagnosis, treatment, or advice. Only trained and licensed medical professionals can provide such services. If you or anyone you know is undergoing a severe health crisis, call a doctor or 911 immediately. As long as someone with an alcohol use disorder or other issue has their enabling devices in place, it is easy for them to continue to deny the problem. For example, instead of confronting the person about their behavior, you might simply look for ways to avoid dealing with it.
This makes them feel it’s okay if they get in trouble because you’ll be there to bail them out. Because you’re close to the person in need, you don’t want to believe they’re doing what they’re doing. She recommended working with a therapist to change these patterns and explore how they developed in the first place.
