How Do You Know If You’re an Enabler? Signs and How to Stop
Rather than helping them understand the consequences of their actions, you’re letting them get away 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. The closer you are to a person needing help, the more likely you will enable them. This is because it’s harder to draw the line between acceptance and unacceptable behavior. Enabling can lead to codependency when the person enabling leans into the unbalance of the relationship in other ways, eventually becoming codependent.
It requires a balance of compassion and firmness, encouraging loved ones to take responsibility for their actions and seek the help they need. Whether it’s exploring different therapy techniques or finding resources to maintain sobriety, recognizing the thin line between help and hindrance can make all the difference. When a loved one engages in impulsive or self-destructive behavior, it’s normal to want to help and make things better. An enabler is someone who cleans up after someone else’s dangerous mistakes, preventing the other person from consequences and accountability. While you may not be able to change their ways, it is important to understand your own actions, and begin to set healthy boundaries. Enabling is a complex and often unconscious behavior where a person supports or facilitates another individual’s harmful actions.
Online Therapy Can Help
This can take many forms, including paying a person’s rent or debt, lying to people about a loved one’s substance use, fixing their tickets or bailing them out of jail. It’s difficult to work through addiction or alcohol misuse alone. And if the problem is never discussed, they may be less likely to reach out for help. This may be hard at first, especially if your loved one gets angry with you. But you don’t follow through, so your loved one continues doing what they’re doing and learns these are empty threats. Missing out on things you want or need for yourself because you’re so involved with taking care of a loved one can also be a sign you’re enabling that person.
Your loved one’s choices are (and have always been) his or hers. Your loved one’s outcomes and consequences, as well, belong to him or her alone. Recognizing and adjusting your enabling behaviors can be a pivotal part of your loved one’s recovery process.
My Loved One Needs Help
Instead of asking them about the receipts, you decide not to press the issue. When you empower someone, you’re giving them the tools they need to overcome or move beyond the challenges they face. For example, sun rock cannabis giving them information about mental health professionals in the area that might help.
MORE IN LIFE
- She offered some questions that can be helpful to ask yourself if you think your support might’ve crossed over into enabling territory.
- This will only set you up as opponents, with you trying to keep goals while they try to get around you.
- This is particularly the case if the funds you’re providing are supporting potentially harmful behaviors like substance use or gambling.
- Enabling can also be a way of protecting those we love from others’ scrutiny — or protecting ourselves from acknowledging a loved one’s shortcomings.
Your partner has slowly started drinking more and more as stresses and responsibilities at their job have increased. You remember when they drank very little, so you tell yourself they don’t have a problem. They could say they’ve only tried drugs once or twice but don’t use them regularly. You reassure them you aren’t concerned, that they don’t drink that much, or otherwise deny there’s an issue. Minimizing the issue implies to your loved one that they can continue to treat you similarly with no consequences. You might let your teen avoid chores so they can “have time to be a kid.” But a young adult who doesn’t know how to do laundry or wash dishes will have a hard time on their own.
In this scenario, the person with a mental health condition or substance use disorder loses their independence and isn’t empowered to recover or make necessary changes. Al-Anon, a mutual-help group for people with alcoholic friends or family members, pioneered the idea of detachment with love—and recovery for the loved ones of alcoholics. When your loved one realizes their alcohol or drug use is considered problematic, they may ask or expect you to keep it secret so that their addiction can remain undisturbed. Or you might feel tempted to keep secrets in order to keep the peace.
Recognizing the difference between supporting someone in recovery and enabling their addiction is pivotal. After all, enablers want to help their loved one, too, and codependency might feel like healthy support. But enabling allows the status quo—drinking or using drugs—to continue, whereas healthy support encourages a person to address their addiction and all of its consequences.
