As we wrap up our exploration of enabling in psychology, it’s important to remember that change is possible. Recognizing and addressing enabling behaviors is a crucial step towards fostering healthier, more balanced relationships. Family dynamics are another breeding ground for enabling behaviors.
Instead of focusing on what you feel you did wrong, identifying concrete behaviors that might have excused your loved one’s actions could help. Managing enabling behavior may require that you first recognize the root cause of it. For this, it might be helpful to reach out to a mental health enabling behavior meaning professional.
Feeling resentment
Enabling behavior refers to actions taken by people that unintentionally support or perpetuate a loved one’s negative or harmful behaviors. People enable others out of guilt, fear, or pity, or because they want to avoid conflict. However, supporting someone’s negative behaviors unintentionally harms them by reinforcing unhealthy habits and hindering their ability to learn from their errors. In the journey to overcome addiction, understanding the role of enabling behaviors is crucial.
Giving a family member living with a substance use disorder the money to buy drugs. 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. Minimizing the issue implies to your loved one that they can continue to treat you similarly with no consequences.
- Enabling behavior might be preventing them from facing the consequences of their actions.
- Another widespread myth is that enabling only occurs within close family relationships.
- An enabler is a person whose supportive actions, driven by care, inadvertently perpetuate harmful or dysfunctional patterns in another individual.
- However, enablers can be victims of narcissistic abuse, or people can be enablers to individuals with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
It’s a bit like giving a fish to someone every day instead of teaching them how to fish – it might seem helpful in the short term, but it ultimately hinders their growth and independence. An enabler is typically a close individual who inadvertently supports another person’s harmful behaviors. By shielding them from the consequences of their actions, enablers contribute to the continuation of these self-destructive patterns.
A loan to pay off a portion of this debt could free them up to take supervisor training, so they can get a raise, and eventually climb out of their financial hole. If you put your foot down on not loaning money to your brother until three agreed upon monthly payments on previous loans, don’t waffle after two months. I don’t just mean literally cleaning up their messes (though I’m sure plenty of people do this as a means to “help”). But what my cousin–and those like her–was doing was not helping. People may engage in bad behavior for a number of different reasons. For example, this might look like constantly paying off the other person’s debts or irresponsible spending habits.
Fear-Based Enabling
When your loved one realizes their alcohol or drug use is considered problematic, they may ask or expect you to keep it secret so that their addiction can remain undisturbed. Or you might feel tempted to keep secrets in order to keep the peace. To stop codependency and enabling, you have to allow them to confront and manage the consequences of their addiction, even though it may feel unnatural, unloving or mean.
Enabling can also be a way of protecting those we love from others’ scrutiny — or protecting ourselves from acknowledging a loved one’s shortcomings. Enabling becomes less like making a choice to be helpful and more like helping in an attempt to keep the peace. It may be a decision you make consciously or not, but at the root of your behavior is an effort to avoid conflict.
- With codependency, a person relies on the other person for support in essentially all aspects of their life, especially emotionally.
- Breaking this pattern can be the first step toward breaking the cycle of harmful behavior.
- Understanding enabling is crucial, not just for those directly involved but for anyone looking to foster healthier relationships.
- Multiple discussions are needed, and working with a therapist for yourself provides strategies for approaching these conversations effectively.
- Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship.
But if these “rescues” happen repeatedly, all you’re doing is preventing your loved one from learning the cause-and-effect pattern of their behaviors. They don’t get the opportunity to grow from their mistakes, and gain confidence in their own ability to handle tough situations. By downplaying the seriousness of the situation, the enabler avoids facing uncomfortable truths, but this denial only allows the harmful behavior to continue unchecked. For example, giving money to a loved one who uses it for drugs or alcohol, or covering for someone’s bad behavior, are forms of enabling.
What is an enabler?
They may work with you in exploring why you’ve engaged in enabling behaviors and what coping skills you can develop to stop those. They can also help you learn ways to empower, rather than enable, your loved one. In this case, an enabler is a person who often takes responsibility for their loved one’s actions and emotions.
In the end, understanding and addressing enabling is about more than just changing behaviors – it’s about fostering growth, independence, and genuine connection. By moving away from enabling and towards empowerment, we create space for authentic relationships to flourish, free from the tangled web of codependency and misplaced help. It can also end up in worsened outcomes in relationships and the overall situation, as destructive behaviors continue they come with higher risk. Often, enabling behaviors come from the desire to help a loved one. An overprotective parent may become an enabler when they allow their child, even an adult child, to neglect responsibilities or continue doing things that are harmful to them. It can be very difficult to see a loved one face challenges with substance abuse.
It might be covering for a loved one’s absence at work due to substance use, lending money that’s used to support their addiction, or even denying that there’s a problem at all. While these actions might seem supportive, they allow the person struggling with addiction to continue their destructive patterns without facing the natural consequences of their actions. Helping involves actions that encourage an addicted individual to take responsibility for their behavior and its consequences. This might involve researching drug rehab options, discussing different therapy techniques, or providing resources to help them remain sober.
Enabler definition
If your loved one is dealing with alcohol misuse, removing alcohol from your home can help keep it out of easy reach. You may not have trouble limiting your drinks, but consider having them with a friend instead. 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.
Helping vs enabling
For example, tell them that they cannot come to your home or be around you when they are drinking. Having boundaries minimizes enabling behaviors and protects your mental health and well-being. For example, provide transportation to appointments but refuse to cover expenses like rent or legal fees.
Not to be confused, enabling doesn’t mean that a person thinks the behaviors of the other person are okay, but they might tolerate them because they don’t know how to better handle the situation. Enabling can look like being a cover up for others, helping them avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, or feeling too nervous to set boundaries. We may think we’re helping someone by enabling them, but we need to understand that we’re only making the problem worse. Even though we might have the best of intentions, we need to recognize the harm we’re causing and take steps to break the cycle—for the person’s own good as well as our own. Offering a parent living with diabetes a piece of cake they’re not supposed to eat.
Here are five of the most common patterns found in codependent relationships where partners enable their loved one—and a few suggestions to change the dynamic. On the flip side, the person being enabled often experiences a gradual erosion of self-efficacy and personal responsibility. Why learn to solve problems when someone else always swoops in to fix them? This can lead to a sense of learned helplessness, where individuals believe they’re incapable of managing their own lives. It’s not always easy, as the line can be blurry and context-dependent. Psychological insight into human behavior suggests that the key difference lies in the outcome.
What are the common traits of enablers?
When you’re navigating the landscape of addiction recovery, understanding the multi-faceted nature of enabling is critical. Enabling isn’t just about the obvious acts that prevent your loved one from feeling the full weight of their actions. It’s about the subtle dynamics that occur within relationships, often rooted in a genuine desire to help. Dependency on substances on the part of the addict or alcoholic is fairly straightforward.