This may allow the unhealthy behavior to continue, even if you believe a conflict-free environment will help the other person. You might put yourself under duress by doing some of these things you feel are helping your loved one. But even if all you want is to support your loved one, enabling may not contribute to the situation the way you might think it does. It doesn’t mean someone else’s harmful behaviors are on you, either.
Engage in empowering behaviors
It may be a decision you make consciously or not, but at the root of your behavior is an effort to avoid conflict. Enabling becomes less like making a choice to be helpful and more like helping in an attempt to keep the peace. Often, we think we’re helping others because we want to. In the dynamics between parents and their grown children. Or that it’s necessarily problematic to help an adult child pay an overdue bill here or there. “We don’t want to see our friends or family struggling.
This not only allows the harmful behavior to continue but also creates stress, guilt, and resentment for the parent, trapping both in an unhealthy cycle. Often, enabling starts when a person tries to offer support to someone they care about because they know they are going through a difficult time. Someone with an enabler personality has a desire to help others, so much so that they would help them even when their behaviors can harm them. Enabling behavior is when someone unintentionally supports or encourages another person’s harmful habits or choices. An enabler, however, might repeatedly call in sick for that loved one at work or make excuses for their behavior, preventing them from facing consequences or taking accountability for their own life.
Seek Professional Addiction Treatment
Jade Wu, Ph.D., is a clinical health psychologist and host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast. Your compassion plus your boundaries will make the perfect balance for delivering your help, and you just might be planting that first seed towards their recovery. Asking these questions and encouraging thoughtfulness around them is not being stingy with your support.
Lending financial support
With financial dependency, a person might provide excessive support for another person, causing them to not face the full consequences of their actions. 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. In the innocent enabling stage, a person starts with love and concern for the other person, but they don’t know how to guide or help them. By downplaying the seriousness of the situation, the enabler avoids facing uncomfortable truths, but this denial only allows the harmful behavior to continue unchecked. Protecting enabling involves shielding the other person from the consequences of their actions. Recognizing where this behavior comes from and setting healthy boundaries is the first step toward breaking the cycle and building healthier, stronger relationships.
Enabling Emotional and Psychological Dependencies
- For example, this might look like constantly paying off the other person’s debts or irresponsible spending habits.
- In many cases, enabling begins as an effort to support a loved one who may be having a hard time.
- An enabler is a person who allows someone close to them to continue unhealthy or self-destructive patterns of behavior.
- However, most people who engage in enabling behaviors do so unknowingly.
- If your help makes it easy for a loved one to continue with their problematic behavior, you may be enabling them.
They don’t get the opportunity to grow from their mistakes, and gain confidence in their own ability to handle tough situations. Usually, enabling happens accidentally. You can enable someone’s bad behavior in many ways, but it all boils down to the things you do to keep them in the status quo. What is enabling, and why is it unhelpful? But what my cousin–and those like her–was doing was not helping.
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. Without setting healthy boundaries, these patterns can prevent both people from growing and lead to frustration, resentment, and burnout. Enabling can look like enabling behavior definition being a cover up for others, helping them avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, or feeling too nervous to set boundaries. But these behaviors often encourage the other person to continue the same behavioral patterns and not seek professional help.
What Is a Passive Enabler?
- Enabling behavior is typically driven by hope, guilt, fear, and love.
- Our loved ones often come to us in a moment of crisis.
- Breaking this pattern requires setting firm boundaries and encouraging the child to take responsibility for their own recovery.
- However, enablers usually have good intentions that are misplaced, while abusers are typically trying to gain something over their victims.
- For example, a parent might insist, “They’re just going through a rough patch; it’s not that bad,” even as their child’s substance use becomes more obvious.
Worse, consuming drugs or alcohol around that person makes it harder for them to break their 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.
With codependency, a person relies on the other person for support in essentially all aspects of their life, especially emotionally. A 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. In the desperate stage of enabling, the enabler is primarily motivated by fear. This stage is often filled with guilt, frustration, and overwhelming stress, but it can also be the first step toward acknowledging the need for change and setting healthier boundaries. The parent might think, “I’ve been trying so hard to help, but now I see it’s only made things worse.”
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So, when you start taking on tasks to help others, it’s only natural that eventually something has to give. You may need to take care of children or aging parents. Enabling can also be a way of protecting those we love from others’ scrutiny — or protecting ourselves from acknowledging a loved one’s shortcomings.
How Do You Deal With an Enabler?
The first step in trying to support someone without enabling them is to acknowledge the things you have done that might have allowed the other person to continue their destructive behaviors. This can also lead to a type of trauma bonding, where the enabler feels that they cannot stop enabling the person that they love without feeling that they abandoned them in their time of need. Over time, this behavior can lead to toxic relationships, where one person becomes dependent and less accountable, and the enabler feels trapped or taken advantage of. While it might feel like you’re helping in the moment, this behavior often makes it harder for the addicted person to change or grow.
Not all experts agree on the amount of stages when it comes to enabling, but some include denial, compliance, control, and crisis. While this may keep things running smoothly in the short term, it allows the other person to avoid their responsibilities and creates an imbalance in the relationship. For example, a partner might take on all the household chores and bills because their spouse refuses to contribute, thinking, “If I don’t do it, nothing will get done.”
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. 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 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. Recognizing the pattern of enabler behavior is important because it can help us understand the role the enabler is playing in the person’s harmful habits.
When you engage in enabling behaviors, you may find that the bulk of your time and energy is focused on the other person. If a loved one brings to your attention that your behavior may not be beneficial to you or the person you’re enabling, take some time to consider it. Enabling happens when you justify or support problematic behaviors in a loved one under the guise that you’re helping them. Enabler behavior can have negative consequences for the enabler and the person they’re enabling. A lot of times, people don’t realize that they are enabling someone because they think they are helping.
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. However, enablers can be victims of narcissistic abuse, or people can be enablers to individuals with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). 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.
The difference is that enabling takes helping to an extreme. That kind of thing happens sometimes, and it’s probably OK. There’s nothing wrong with helping others from time to time. We asked Dr. Borland about the signs of enabling, and how to put an end to the cycle of nonproductive “helping.”
Enabler: 9+ Signs of Enabling Behavior
When I was younger, a story about my favorite cousin, a beautiful young woman who had married a man with an alcohol and gambling problem, worked its way through the family grapevine. Receive weekly insights to help you and your loved ones on your road to recovery. It is difficult to compare an enabler and an abuser because they are two different things.