In some cases, enabling can be beneficial, such as providing a safe environment for an individual with an addiction. Enabling behavior can have significant clinical implications for both the person being enabled and the enabler. For the person being enabled, enabling behavior can reinforce the addiction or other problematic behavior by shielding them from the consequences. This can lead to increased substance use, increased risk-taking behaviors, and difficulties in developing healthy coping skills and problem-solving strategies.
Covering for them or making excuses
- Maybe you excuse troubling behavior, lend money, or assist in other ways.
- Enabling becomes less like making a choice to be helpful and more like helping in an attempt to keep the peace.
- 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.
- He or she may refuse, or appear unable, to fulfill normative roles of adulthood.
- If you’re not sure if what you’re doing is enabling or supporting, you may want to consider whether or not you’re helping your loved one help themselves.
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. Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today. Jade Wu, Ph.D., is a clinical health psychologist and host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast. She specializes in helping those with sleep problems and anxiety disorders. Just imagine that someone has a huge amount of credit card debt due to poor decisions made years ago. They work minimum wage to pay the interest, but can’t get a better job without further training, and they get further in debt without better job prospects.
Making excuses
People who engage in enabling behaviors are aware of the destructiveness of the other person’s behaviors and try to do what they can to prevent further issues. Establishing boundaries can help prevent you from enabling your loved one’s problematic behaviors. 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.
Signs or characteristics of an enabler
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. It doesn’t mean someone else’s harmful behaviors are on you, either. 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. When you set boundaries, you release your need to control the outcomes that your loved one experiences.
Receiving counseling for further insight and support in this area is highly recommended. 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. You can’t help someone if they’re afraid or ashamed to be honest with you. That doesn’t mean you condone their unhealthy behaviors; it simply means you acknowledge their intrinsic validity as a person.
Abuse
In these moments, it can be hard not to feel compelled to do something. We sometimes reflexively feel like we have to give money or some other non-specific form of “bail.” But after a time or two, you simply become the ATM (or the dog house, or life raft). The root of their problem doesn’t change; they simply gain a false sense of security that there’s always more bail if they screw up again. 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. Enabling behaviors ultimately perpetuate the problem by protecting or safeguarding a person against experiencing the full consequences of their actions. Supporting someone empowers the person to take active steps in their recovery.
This may allow the unhealthy behavior to continue, even if you believe a conflict-free environment will help the other person. 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. It may also take the form of excusing outbursts or violence, since they relate it to intoxication or mental health diagnoses.
- Enabling can describe any situation where you “help” by attempting to hide problems or make them go away.
- Support groups like Al-Anon may be useful for people whose loved ones are living with addiction.
- It’s a bit like learning a new language – at first it feels awkward and uncomfortable, but with practice, it becomes more natural.
Although life circumstances can indeed cause undue stress, some things—like excessive alcohol or drug use—can’t be explained away by stress. Addiction is addiction, regardless of external circumstance. When you’re unable or refuse to maintain boundaries, it says to your loved one, “There are no consequences to your behavior, and addiction is welcome here.”
Enabling usually refers to patterns that appear in the context of drug or alcohol misuse and addiction. The key to breaking the pattern of enabling is to return responsibility to the person it belongs to. This involves setting boundaries between yourself and your loved one. You can no longer attempt to take on responsibility for anyone else’s actions but your own. Your loved one’s choices are (and have always been) his or hers. Your loved one’s outcomes and consequences, as well, belong to him or her alone.
They feel extremely anxious about the destructive consequences that the enabled person could face. Those who habitually enable dysfunctional behavior are often referred to as co-dependent. It’s a telling word, because an enabler’s self-esteem is often dependent on his or her ability and willingness to “help” in inappropriate ways. This “help” allows the enabler to feel in control of an unmanageable situation.
With a solid understanding of what enabling is, and what it is not, there is hope for families who are acting out this pattern. An experienced individual and/or family counselor can be a valuable source of support for anyone who is looking to break enabling patterns. The enabled person lives in the same world, with the same rules, as everybody else. Managing their world for them means that they don’t learn to manage themselves within the world. He or she is very likely to have untapped internal and external resources which have not been utilized because the enabling pattern has short-circuited their growth.
You may choose to believe them or agree without really believing them. You might even insist to other family or friends that everything’s fine while struggling to enabling definition psychology accept this version of truth for yourself. 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.
There’s often no harm in helping out a loved one financially from time to time if your personal finances allow for it. But if they tend to use money recklessly, impulsively, or on things that could cause harm, regularly giving them money can enable this 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. 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.