Family members may feel responsible for their loved one’s struggles, leading them to intervene in ways that prevent long-term recovery. Whether in relationships, parenting, or addiction recovery, enabling can have severe long-term effects on both the enabler and the person being enabled. Understanding this behavior is the first step in breaking the cycle and fostering true, meaningful change. Enablers, even if well-intentioned, allow a person to continue destructive behaviors. Sandstone Care is here to help you learn how to set the right boundaries with your loved ones to help them recover from substance use and mental health issues.

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• 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.
• Instead of talking about the issue, you start suggesting places that don’t serve alcohol.
• You may try to help with the best of intentions and enable someone without realizing it.
• They may also feel that you’ll easily give in on other boundaries, too.

For example, an adult sibling who grew up with a parent struggling with addiction might have learned to avoid conflict and “fix” problems to hold the family together. Without setting healthy boundaries, these patterns can prevent both people from growing and lead to frustration, resentment, and burnout. Enabling behaviors include making excuses for someone else, giving them money, covering for them, or even ignoring the problem entirely to avoid conflict. “Enabler” is a highly stigmatized term that often comes with a lot of judgment. However, most people who engage in enabling behaviors do so unknowingly. A sign of enabling behavior is to put someone else’s needs before yours, particularly if the other person isn’t actively contributing to the relationship.

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The difference is that enabling takes helping to an extreme.

They may focus their time and energy on covering those areas where their loved one may be underperforming. More than a role, enabling is a dynamic that often arises in specific scenarios. People who engage in enabling behaviors aren’t the “bad guy,” but their actions have the potential to promote and support unhealthy behaviors and patterns in others. Yes, enablers feel guilt, as their actions, though stemming from love or concern, often lead them to recognize the negative impact on the person they’re trying to help. This realization leads to feelings of guilt, regret, and even self-blame. It’s important to remember that enablers are often caught in a complex dynamic and need support to break free from the cycle.

Supporting Without Enabling

When you empower someone, you’re giving them the tools they need to overcome or move beyond the challenges they face. For example, giving them information about mental health professionals in the area that might help. In other words, enabling is directly or indirectly supporting someone else’s unhealthy tendencies. As with other behaviors, you can manage and change enabling tendencies.

• It’s important to remember that enablers are often caught in a complex dynamic and need support to break free from the cycle.
• For this, it might be helpful to reach out to a mental health professional.
• Being an enabler doesn’t mean that someone is a bad person, but it isn’t a healthy thing for either them or the person that they are trying to take care of.
• “Enabler” is a highly stigmatized term that often comes with a lot of judgment.

What Are the Characteristics of an Enabler?

If you think your actions might enable your loved one, consider talking to a therapist. In therapy, you can start enabling behavior meaning identifying enabling behaviors and get support as you learn to help your loved one in healthier ways. For example, an enabler might protect a person from facing the consequences of their actions and addiction because they think that that is the only way to keep them safe. However, this ends up in the other person continuing their destructive and addictive behaviors, and the situation worsening over time. Establishing boundaries can help prevent you from enabling your loved one’s problematic behaviors.

But sometimes, our efforts to support a loved one can do more harm than good. Enabling behavior occurs when well-intentioned actions shield someone from the natural consequences of their choices, allowing destructive habits to continue unchecked. There’s a difference between supporting someone and enabling them. 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. There’s often no harm in helping out a loved one financially from time to time if your personal finances allow for it.

You may also feel hesitant or fearful of your loved one’s reaction if you confront them, or you could feel they may stop loving you if you stop covering up for them. This may allow the unhealthy behavior to continue, even if you believe a conflict-free environment will help the other person. When someone you care about engages in unhealthy behavior, it can be natural to make excuses for them or cover up their actions as a way to protect them. “When you’re on the inside of an enabling dynamic, most people will think they’re just doing what’s best, that they’re being selfless or virtuous. In a lot of cases, it’s other people around you who are more likely to recognize that you’re helping someone who isn’t helping themselves,” Dr. Borland explains. When helping becomes a way of avoiding a seemingly inevitable discomfort, it’s a sign that you’ve crossed over into enabling behavior.

Help them celebrate their wins and promote healthy behaviors by doing things that are beneficial for both of you. One of the biggest risks of being an enabler is that it can end up becoming extremely draining and distressing for both the enabler and the person being enabled. According to studies, overprotective parenting is defined as a parent being overly restrictive in an attempt to protect their child from potential harm or risk. With codependency, a person relies on the other person for support in essentially all aspects of their life, especially emotionally. Over time, this type of helicopter parenting can prevent the child from building confidence in their abilities. In the control stage, the enabler tries to take control of the situation.

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. While these actions may seem compassionate, they ultimately reinforce negative behaviors by removing the need for change.

There are no particular personality traits that make someone an enabler. Instead, it’s determined by your emotional connection to a person. Loved ones enable addiction out of fear or love, but genuine support means guiding them toward recovery, not shielding them from consequences. 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, or other family members. Sometimes we want to make sacrifices for the people we care about.

What Is a Passive Enabler?

This may be hard at first, especially if your loved one gets angry with you. Tell your loved one you want to keep helping them, but not in ways that enable their behavior. For example, you might offer rides to appointments but say no to giving money for gas or anything else.

Keeping alcohol or other drugs accessible can make it difficult for someone with an addiction. However, real support involves encouraging treatment, setting boundaries, and refusing to participate in destructive patterns. Your resentment may be directed more toward your loved one, toward the situation, both, or even yourself. You might feel hurt and angry about spending so much time trying to help someone who doesn’t seem to appreciate you.

Even though it’s starting to affect your emotional well-being, you even tell yourself it’s not abuse because they’re not really themselves when they’ve been drinking. You might tell yourself this behavior isn’t so bad or convince yourself they wouldn’t do those things if not for addiction. Your loved one tends to drink way too much when you go out to a restaurant.

A person may want to help but at the same time not know when they need to set a boundary. By downplaying the seriousness of the situation, the enabler avoids facing uncomfortable truths, but this denial only allows the harmful behavior to continue unchecked. In the denial stage of enabling, the enabler tries to downplay or deny that there is a problem or that their actions are potentially harmful and unhealthy.