Signs of Enabling Behavior and How To Stop

Then you can move on to sharing with people who have earned your trust and really get it. Addressing these behaviors begins with acknowledgment and moves towards action. Talking to a therapist yourself can help you develop new coping skills and protect your own mental health and well-being. Even if your loved one won’t accept help, you might also consider going to therapy yourself. When the other person can’t fulfill their daily duties, you might take over to cover for them. This might involve doing household tasks such as cleaning, laundry, or child care.

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But avoiding discussion prevents you from bringing attention to the problem and helping your loved one address it in a healthy, positive way. Financially enabling a loved one can have particularly damaging consequences if they struggle with addiction or alcohol misuse. The following signs can help you recognize when a pattern of enabling behavior may have developed. This term can be stigmatizing since there’s often negative judgment attached to it. However, many people who enable others don’t do so intentionally. 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.

Detachment with love means caring enough about others to allow them to learn from their mistakes. It also means being responsible for our own recovery and making decisions without ulterior motives or the desire to control others. You may want to try to control their behaviors or help by giving money and bailing them out of trouble. Enabling may be part of a larger codependency issue taking place in the relationship. This may look like a loved one over-functioning to compensate. While this may seem supportive from afar, it actually creates and increases dependency.

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. “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. 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. But in an enabling relationship, a person who’s used to being enabled will come to expect your help. So, you step in and fulfill those needs in order to avoid an argument or other consequence. One thing that members of Al-Anon learn is that they no longer have to allow a loved one’s unacceptable behavior.

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In its original context, enabling refers to a pattern within the families of people addicted to alcohol and drugs, wherein the family members excuse, justify, ignore, deny, and smooth over the addiction. This notoriously allows the addicted person to avoid facing the full consequences of his or her addiction, and the addiction is able to continue. Recognizing enabling behaviors in oneself or in others is the first step towards creating a healthier environment for someone struggling with addiction.

1. You might try to ignore the signs of your loved one’s behaviors.
2. 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.
3. When we point out enabling, it can feel like we’re blaming a loved one for the presence of addiction.
4. They may not have had the benefit of true self-reflection and self-evaluation of their behaviors.
5. When helping becomes a way of avoiding a seemingly inevitable discomfort, it’s a sign that you’ve crossed over into enabling behavior.

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“While your counterpart may be engaging in harmful or destructive behaviors, if you are the enabler in the relationship, you also have a problem to address,” says Grazer. “Once you can recognize how your actions are enabling the person, you can begin to make alcohol and violence statistics changes to them.” For the loved ones of people with an alcohol or substance use disorder, sometimes this isn’t easy.

Instead, it will only encourage the habit as the person becomes accustomed to getting away with drug use consequences. If you help a loved one set realistic, incremental milestones right from the start, there will hopefully be many opportunities to celebrate. It’s your job to remind them how hard change is, and how proud they should be of every win. Before you start to help someone, it’s important to acknowledge that you can’t control another person’s behavior, and it’s not your job to do so. Cleaning up includes any form of shielding the person from the natural negative consequences of their own behavior.

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. If your loved one starts shouting during a discussion and you continue the discussion instead of walking away, they may get the message that the problematic behavior isn’t that big of a deal to you. They may also feel that you’ll easily give in on other boundaries, too.

Over time you become angrier and more frustrated with her and with yourself for not being able to say no. This resentment slowly creeps into your interactions with her kids. Your teen spends hours each night playing video games instead of taking care of their responsibilities.

Learning how to identify the main signs can help you prevent and stop enabling behaviors in your relationships. Support groups like Al-Anon may be useful for people whose loved ones are living with addiction. And talk therapy, Dr. Borland suggests, can be helpful for anyone who finds themselves in an enabling situation or who could benefit from developing assertiveness. Setting boundaries is something you do for yourself—it’s not about controlling your loved one or trying to change their behavior.