How Do You Know If You’re an Enabler? Signs and How to Stop

At the same time, he began looking more seriously for a job. After three weeks, he found a part-time job as a software developer. Going to work again and interacting with colleagues helped him feel engaged and useful. Enabling is when you give someone the power or means to do something.

• The difference is that enabling takes helping to an extreme.
• There’s often no harm in helping out a loved one financially from time to time if your personal finances allow for it.
• That is, accept that you’ve played a part in perpetuating unacceptable behaviors in your loved one and make a commitment to breaking the cycle.

You may want to try to control their behaviors or help by giving money and bailing them out of trouble. The study further demonstrates how having strong bonds with others encourages and supports a person’s quality of life. So, when you start taking on tasks to help others, it’s only natural that eventually something has to give. Trying to manage your own life along with others’ starts to wear down your reserves. You may need to take care of children or aging parents.

Helping vs enabling

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. Instead of talking about the issue, you start suggesting places that don’t serve alcohol. Whether your loved one continues to drink to the point of blacking out or regularly takes money out of your wallet, your first instinct might be to confront them. You might call your partner’s work to say they’re sick when they’re hungover or blackout drunk. Or you may call your child’s school with an excuse when they haven’t completed a term project or studied for an important exam.

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. If you’re concerned you might be enabling someone’s behavior, read on to learn more about enabling, including signs, how to stop, and how to provide support to your loved one.

Helping friends, family members, or other loved ones who are experiencing mental health conditions or substance misuse can be challenging and confusing. 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. If you love someone with a mental health condition or substance use disorder, you may feel as though you’re doing everything in your power to help them, but it’s just not working. define enabling someone Enabling behaviors can encourage unhelpful habits and behaviors, even if it’s unknowingly. But supporting behaviors can empower a loved one to recover. Therapists often work with people who find themselves enabling loved ones to help them address these patterns and offer support in more helpful and positive ways.

It’s most often an intimate partner or close friend who passively and unknowingly encourages negative behaviors to continue. “Ending an enabling relationship requires assertiveness — the ability to say no,” Dr. Borland says. “For a lot of people, learning to be assertive is a new and potentially uncomfortable skill set. It’s not that you need to cut the person out of your life necessarily, but they need to know that they are no longer welcome to come to you for support. Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship. Enabling can also be a way of protecting those we love from others’ scrutiny — or protecting ourselves from acknowledging a loved one’s shortcomings.

What Is the Difference Between Supporting and Enabling?

In fact, many people who enable others don’t even realize what they’re doing. 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. 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. 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. Although life circumstances can indeed cause undue stress, some things—like excessive alcohol or drug use—can’t be explained away by stress.

Our hope is merely to capture the spirit of the fellowships, and to approach people with the language they commonly use to describe the disease of addiction. Victims of emotional or physical abuse should contact authorities whenever possible, and reach out for help from support groups or meetings. 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. The difference is that enabling takes helping to an extreme.

If you state a consequence, it’s important to follow through. Not following through lets your loved one know nothing will happen when they keep doing the same thing. This can make it more likely they’ll continue to behave in the same way and keep taking advantage of your help.

Or making excuses for a spouse’s anger management issues. And it’s counterproductive to the person you’re trying to help. After all, enablers want to help their loved one, too, and codependency might feel like healthy support.

• Establishing boundaries can help prevent you from enabling your loved one’s problematic behaviors.
• 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.
• Often, we think we’re helping others because we want to.
• If you think your actions might enable your loved one, consider talking to a therapist.

Other Signs of Codependency and Enabling

You might decide it’s better just to ignore the behavior or hide your money. If you believe your loved one is looking for attention, you might hope ignoring the behavior will remove their incentive to continue. It’s not always easy to distinguish between empowering someone and enabling them.

How to say enabling in sign language?

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. From afar, these types of behaviors may appear supportive, but enabling behaviors serve to contribute to and reinforce problematic behaviors. Establishing boundaries can help prevent you from enabling your loved one’s problematic behaviors. When you engage in enabling behaviors, you may find that the bulk of your time and energy is focused on the other person. This may make you feel like your own needs have fallen to the wayside.

As with other behaviors, you can manage and change enabling tendencies. In many cases, enabling begins as an effort to support a loved one who may be having a hard time. There’s a big difference between supporting someone and enabling them. A core principle of Al-Anon is that alcoholics cannot learn from their mistakes if they are overprotected. Detachment with love means caring enough about others to allow them to learn from their mistakes.

You help someone bear the weight or burden of an issue or problem. When you support, you acknowledge the person you’re supporting is the master of their own destiny. You have faith in another person’s capacity to make their own choices, and also—maybe most importantly—their own mistakes. When someone makes their own mistakes, they have an opportunity to learn from them and to grow. Most of us are conditioned to behave in pro-social ways, to be helpful and “good.” At a young age, we learn our behaviors affect those around us for better or worse.

If you think your actions might enable your loved one, consider talking to a therapist. In therapy, you can start identifying enabling behaviors and get support as you learn to help your loved one in healthier ways. “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.

But you also work full time and need the evenings to care for yourself. But by not acknowledging the problem, you can encourage it, even if you really want it to stop. Denying the issue can create challenges for you and your loved one.

And yet it’s common to go overboard with what we learn about what it means to be kind, good, helpful, or supportive. We may get into a habit of being too helpful, too focused on others’ well-being, too compulsively problem-solving or “good.” When we point out enabling, it can feel like we’re blaming a loved one for the presence of addiction.