8 Signs You May Be Enabling Someone Enabling Behaviors

If you find yourself instinctually siding with the addicted person at all times, you may be an enabler. Enabling may feel like kindness in the moment, but real love means supporting positive change, not reinforcing harmful habits. By setting boundaries, encouraging independence, and letting others face the consequences of their actions, we can foster genuine growth and healthier relationships. Many people believe they are helping when, in reality, they are preventing personal responsibility.

• If you state a consequence, it’s important to follow through.
• Close relationships, such as those with family members or partners, lead individuals to engage in enabling behavior.
• Quit making excuses for them, covering up for them, and blaming others for their problems.
• The focus is on supporting the loved one’s recovery without reinforcing harmful behaviors.
• Importantly, enabling tends to develop gradually and unconsciously, underscoring the need to recognize these underlying factors to break the cycle and promote healthier 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. Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship.

Enablers usually act with good intentions, aiming to help rather than cause harm. However, what appears as supportive behavior actually reinforces the problem. Enabling usually refers to patterns that appear in the context of drug or alcohol misuse and addiction. It’s important to directly address an enabler’s harmful behavior and how they contribute to addiction. Providing specific examples of the negative impact on the addict helps highlight the harmful consequences. Clear communication that avoids blaming often encourages a shift towards more supportive behavior.

How to Recognize Enabling Behaviors

• At its core, enabling behavior refers to actions that, instead of helping someone overcome challenges, actually reinforce their harmful patterns.
• 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.
• Say your sister continues to leave her kids with you when she goes out.

You might even insist to other family or friends that everything’s fine while struggling to accept this version of truth for yourself. By pretending what they do doesn’t affect you, you give the message they aren’t doing anything problematic. They say they haven’t been drinking, but you find a receipt in the bathroom trash for a liquor store one night.

Who is most likely to be an enabler?

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. Instead of focusing on what you feel you did wrong, identifying concrete behaviors that might have excused your loved one’s actions could help. This is particularly the case if the funds you’re providing are supporting potentially harmful behaviors like substance use or gambling.

You might put yourself under duress by doing some of these things you feel are helping your loved one. There is a fine line between providing support and enabling. If your help makes it easy for a loved one to continue with their problematic behavior, you may be enabling them. It’s not easy for someone with substance abuse problems to avoid drugs or alcohol.

You may also consider talking with your friends and family, so you don’t have to do it alone. Quit making excuses for them, covering up for them, and blaming others for their problems. 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. But after thinking about it, you may begin to worry about their reaction. You might decide it’s better just to ignore the behavior or hide your money.

They might insult you, belittle you, break or steal your belongings, or physically harm you. But if your help allows your loved one to have an easier time continuing a problematic pattern of behavior, you may be enabling them. It’s tempting to make excuses for your loved one to other family members or friends when you worry other people will judge them harshly or negatively.

You’re looking to avoid conflict

By allowing the other person to constantly rely on you to get their tasks done, they may be less likely to find reasons to do them the next time. Taking on someone else’s responsibilities is another form of enabling behavior. An intervention can be a good way to help them understand their problems.

How to stop enabling a loved one

“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. 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.

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.

Seek Professional Addiction Treatment

Desperate enabling causes stress and difficult challenges for everyone involved. 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. For example, a parent who has been covering for their adult child’s substance use may suddenly face the reality when the child gets arrested or loses their job. While the intention is to enabling behavior meaning support the child, this behavior keeps them from learning responsibility, problem-solving skills, and the ability to manage their own challenges. This can mean that they might keep the person from facing the consequences of their actions or resolve the other person’s problems themselves. Instead of learning to budget or manage their finances, the person becomes reliant on the rescuer, continuing the problem and creating an unhealthy dynamic.

You Set Aside Your Own Needs

The definition of enabling behavior is any action that allows someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions, making it easier for them to continue destructive habits. They may also feel that you’ll easily give in on other boundaries, too. 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. 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.

But your actions can give your loved one the message that there’s nothing wrong with their behavior — that you’ll keep covering for them. You might avoid talking about it because you’re afraid of acknowledging the problem. You or your loved one may not have accepted there’s a problem. You might even be afraid of what your loved one will say or do if you challenge the behavior.

What Is the Problem With Being an Enabler?

There’s nothing wrong with helping others from time to time. No one is saying you should never give a friend a ride to the store when their car breaks down. Or that it’s necessarily problematic to help an adult child pay an overdue bill here or there. There’s nothing wrong with extending financial help to a loved one from time to time.