October

And most of the time, when someone shares their struggles with you, they actually just need nothing more than a listening ear. Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship. You may justify doing her assignment by saying you’re helping her get a good grade.

• It’s most often an intimate partner or close friend who passively and unknowingly encourages negative behaviors to continue.
• It sounds harsh, but think of what will happen if you let people live off of you indefinitely.
• Mental health experts recommend you begin by having a clear conversation about your concerns around their substance use and go over the boundaries you are setting from that point forward.
• This therapy can also enhance family members’ skills in managing their own emotions and reactions during challenging moments.

What is the Difference Between Helping and Enabling?

It’s not his fault that he put his fist through the wall after a drinking binge. There are effective and ineffective ways to deliver consequences. Enablers often make vague, feeble hints that they hope will get the message across. These won’t even register on the radar of a precontemplator, who by definition is determined not to change, and is resistant to any feedback that they need to change. Helpers address specific disruptive and distressing behaviors.

Help the person reflect on their behaviors, choices, and the impact they have on their life and others around them. Encourage self-awareness and reflection to foster personal growth and the motivation to make positive changes. Defining enabling can help you recognize it in your own life. Enabling is when a person partakes in actions that frequently solve others’ problems or minimize the consequences of a person’s actions.

Comprehending the instinctual responses and responsibilities that precipitate enabling behaviors is key to transitioning from enabling to helping. The helping process requires a comprehensive understanding of engagement and planning. For effective support, it’s essential to ensure that boundaries enabling vs helping between enabling and supporting are maintained while developing a tailored action plan for the individual. Setting firm boundaries is essential in breaking the cycle of enabling. Boundaries allow individuals to define acceptable behavior and clarify the consequences of crossing those limits. Such measures help both parties understand their respective roles and responsibilities.

These actions contribute to enabling drug addiction by preventing the addicted individual from facing routine life duties and experiencing the negative consequences. One needs to understand the difference between support vs. enabling to be able to set proper and healthy boundaries. Inconsistent boundaries or unpredictable responses can create confusion and undermine recovery efforts. For example, if a supporter fluctuates between providing help and withdrawing support, it can leave the person in recovery feeling unstable and uncertain about their path forward. Supportive approaches focus on building skills, encouraging self-sufficiency, and creating opportunities for independent decision-making.

The Role of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in Treating Addiction

The trait shows up as always wanting to intervene and help remedy your loved one’s problems or doing things they can do for themselves. Help the person by calling them out and addressing their actions head-on. Be frank and explain what consequences will follow for offensive conduct. In your case, you may silently hope the situation resolves itself. Poor behaviors are ingrained from an early age and don’t magically change.

• Healthy support means acknowledging the challenges while maintaining clear expectations.
• I had to draw the line and stop giving what seemed like infinite chances.
• The enabler may experience feelings of guilt, stress, and burnout from constantly being in a caretaker role.
• The more you rescue them from life’s problems, the weaker they grow in resilience.
• The journey may be challenging, but the outcomes can lead to healthier relationships and improved mental health for everyone involved.

How Addiction Influences Risky Decision-Making

You have to pay close attention to understand if your well-intentioned behavior supports or harms your loved one’s chances of recovery. These professionals can help individuals and their families navigate the complexities of addiction, address enabling behaviors, and develop effective coping strategies. To break the cycle of enabling, it is crucial for families and loved ones to establish clear boundaries. Setting boundaries helps protect the well-being of both the individual with the substance use disorder and their loved ones.

It may be a decision you make consciously or not, but at the root of your behavior is an effort to avoid conflict. You’ll eventually move from enabling to empowering the individual to improve their life. Your friend or family member may thank you later for assisting them in creating a productive life on their own.

It’s very easy to move from being a supportive, empowering person in your loved one’s life to being an enabler of their addiction. Enabling behaviors in the context of substance use disorders can vary widely. Put simply, enabling behaviors can remove the desire to seek treatment. Enabling behavior can range from pretending there isn’t a problem to providing money to your loved one for drugs or alcohol to taking on their responsibilities.

It can be challenging to admit you are in the wrong when your actions come from a place of worry and care. It is important to remember that even with the best intentions, you can still engage in negative behaviors. Often, soliciting professional help is instrumental in addressing codependent relationship and enabling behaviors. Therapists can help individuals identify enabling behaviors and learn methods to support loved ones constructively. Cognitive behavioral therapy and engagement in support groups such as Co-Dependents Anonymous or Al-Anon provide specialized approaches to tackle and surmount codependent and enabling behaviors.

Making Excuses

She noted that support often means showing up and sitting with the mess of someone’s emotions as they navigate challenges in life. As the popular saying goes, “Give a person a fish, and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, and they eat for a lifetime.” Enabling is when you give someone the power or means to do something. It presupposes that the person you’re enabling isn’t able to find or give themselves what you give them or to obtain this power on their own.

I hope this has provided some insight into the ways you interact with the people you love, and that it will help you be more effective in the way that you love and care for them. Many of us (myself included) think we are helping when we’re actually enabling. Enabling, though it might sound good, means that the things we are doing or saying to someone are backfiring. We are unwittingly “enabling” our loved one to stay stuck, to dig in their heels even more. Boundaries play a crucial role in our lives and are essential in maintaining personal space, safety, and well-being while addressing our own needs.

On that note, I know you’ll enjoy reading 11 Steps to Stop Caring So Much. It’s a great piece about distancing yourself from things you can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, control. Giving someone an easy pass whenever they do something wrong might be your way of showing love.

Of course, God does use others as a means to answer their prayers for help, but to be a “911” call for every problem they have is sending them the wrong message. It’s not always easy to discern whether someone is sincere in their efforts to find work. They might refuse lower paying work and wait for a better job, but if that job never comes, they have to do what we all must do, and that is work and support ourselves. God says 6 days we shall work and on the Lord’s Day, we rest, so that means we are to be working and not waiting. Our comprehensive programs offer medical detoxification, residential treatment, and intensive outpatient services designed to support both individuals and their families.

While both involve assisting, there is a significant difference between the two. Phrases like “he’s going through a phase” or “She doesn’t mean to act that way” are common. If you are fighting someone else’s battles or making excuses so they don’t have to face the consequences of their behavior, you are enabling.

It’s difficult for someone to start helping themselves if they’re being kept unaware of the consequences of their actions. Traditionally, families have been advised to wait for the individual to hit “rock bottom” before seeking treatment for substance use disorders. Waiting for addiction to worsen before seeking help can be detrimental, analogous to waiting until stage 4 to treat cancer. Early treatment initiation is key to improving outcomes and preventing further deterioration of the disease. Early intervention plays a significant role in improving outcomes for individuals with substance use disorders.