They can also help you learn ways to empower, rather than enable, your loved one. For this, it might be helpful to reach out to a mental health professional. Enabling behavior is often unintentional and stems from a desire to help. Sometimes it may mean lending a financial hand to those you love. You may find yourself running the other person’s errands, doing their chores, or even completing their work.
Understanding Enabler Behavior: Motivations, Signs, and Strategies for Change
Instead, it’s determined by your emotional connection to a person. If you think your actions might enable your loved one, consider talking to a therapist. It’s difficult to work through addiction or alcohol misuse alone. Enabling can have serious consequences for your relationship and your loved one’s chances for recovery.
What Happens When an Enabler Stops Enabling
If this is sounding familiar, it may be time to reassess your role in allowing problematic behaviors to continue. “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. Making excuses can be one way you help cover up problematic behavior and keep your loved one from being held accountable for their actions.
Recognizing and Addressing Enabling Behavior
For example, you might have seen some parents helping their children with homework or examinations knowing that such behaviors are not promoting learning at all. An enabler personality avoids conflict. An enabler personality ignores their own needs.
- There’s a difference between supporting someone and enabling them.
- In fact, many people who enable others don’t even realize what they’re doing.
- An example of an enabler can be someone who supports another person’s alcohol addiction.
- But enabling happens in many other contexts as well.
- With financial dependency, a person might provide excessive support for another person, causing them to not face the full consequences of their actions.
By allowing the other person to constantly rely on you to get their tasks done, they may be less likely to find reasons to do them the next time. Taking on someone else’s responsibilities is another form of enabling behavior. You may also justify their behavior to others or yourself by acknowledging they’ve gone through a difficult time or live with specific challenges. It doesn’t mean someone else’s harmful behaviors are on you, either. For example, enabling behavior may include providing the school with an excuse so someone can skip class, even if they did because they spent the night drinking. They may focus their time and energy on covering those areas where their loved one may be underperforming.
Anxious Personality: Understanding, Coping, and Thriving
Keeping alcohol or other drugs accessible can make it difficult for someone with an addiction. Unfortunately, many enablers struggle to understand the recovery process. This is because it’s harder to draw the line between acceptance and unacceptable behavior.
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. In this case, an enabler is a person who often takes responsibility for their loved one’s actions and emotions. The term “enabler” refers to someone who persistently behaves in enabling ways, justifying or indirectly supporting someone else’s potentially harmful behavior. In many cases, enabling begins as an effort to support a loved one who may be having a hard time. Learning how to identify the main signs can help you prevent and stop enabling behaviors in your relationships. Rather than helping them understand the consequences of their actions, you’re letting them get away with it.
- According to the American Psychological Association, an enabler is someone who permits, encourages, or contributes to someone else’s maladaptive behaviors.
- These suggestions can help you learn how to empower your loved one instead.
- Although rooted in a desire to help, these behaviors often worsen the situation by removing accountability and allowing negative actions to continue.
- Enablers often find themselves inadvertently supporting destructive behaviors in others.
Overcompensation Enabling
Enabling behaviors can be common in codependent relationships. Additionally, other treatment options help address a loved one’s addiction. You have to make them understand the gravity of their actions and behavior. When they overstep their boundaries, make sure to give them proper consequences.
How to stop enabling a loved one
It can quickly turn into a draining and unhealthy relationship when loved ones try to provide support they aren’t qualified for. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the skillset to navigate things like addiction appropriately. Without setting healthy boundaries, these patterns can prevent both people from growing and lead to frustration, resentment, and burnout. This often happens out of a desire to help or protect close relationships, but it actually ends up preventing the person from facing the consequences of their actions or taking responsibility. Enabling behavior is when someone unintentionally supports or encourages another person’s harmful habits or choices.
Other people tell you you’re enabling
With financial dependency, a person might provide excessive support for another person, causing them to not face the full consequences of their actions. However, this ends up in the other person continuing their destructive and addictive behaviors, and the situation worsening over time. In the compliance stage, the enabler tries to comply or accommodate the other person’s destructive behaviors. 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. Protecting enabling involves shielding the other person from the consequences of their actions. No, usually enablers have a heightened sense of empathy, which is why it can be difficult for them to hold the other person accountable or allow them to face consequences.
Do you struggle financially after giving your loved one money? You remember when they drank very little, so you tell yourself they don’t have a problem. It also makes it harder for your loved one to ask for help, even if they know they need help to change. Denying the issue can create challenges for you and your loved one. You reassure them you aren’t concerned, that they don’t drink that much, or otherwise deny there’s an issue.
However, enablers usually have good intentions that are misplaced, while abusers are typically trying to gain something over their victims. It can also end up in worsened outcomes in relationships and the overall situation, as destructive behaviors continue they come with higher risk. 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. With codependency, a person relies on the other person for support in essentially all aspects of their life, especially emotionally. A characteristics of an enabler person may want to help but at the same time not know when they need to set a boundary. An enabler might do things because they fear that things will be worse if they don’t help them in the way that they do.
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. Tell your loved one you want to keep helping them, but not in ways that enable their behavior. Make it clear you’re aware of substance misuse or other behavior instead of ignoring or brushing these actions off. You may feel obligated to continue helping even when you don’t want to.
It’s time for some honest self-reflection, folks. The fear of losing someone can drive us to enable their behavior, creating a vicious cycle of dependency and insecurity. And let’s not forget the stunted personal growth for both parties. It’s a bit like being the puppet master, only to realize you’re actually the marionette. By constantly bailing people out of their problems, we rob them of the opportunity to learn and grow from their mistakes. It’s like trying to run a three-legged race, but instead of crossing a finish line, you’re just going in circles.
First is recognizing that you’re contributing to a cycle of enabling. Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship. But in an enabling relationship, a person who’s used to being enabled will come to expect your help. The specifics can change, but at its core, enabling behavior tends to have some common themes. “Enabling happens when you see a loved one making unhealthy life choices, so you assume the role of problem solver.