Helping vs Enabling: Whats the Difference? Leave a comment

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. If your loved one is dealing with alcohol misuse, removing alcohol from your home can help keep it out of easy reach.

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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. A sign of enabling behavior is to put someone else’s needs before yours, particularly if the other person isn’t actively contributing to the relationship. You might put yourself under duress by doing some of these things you feel are helping your loved one. In this case, an enabler is a person who often takes responsibility for their loved one’s actions and emotions. They may focus their time and energy on covering those areas where their loved one may be underperforming.

Boundaries begin by recognizing the difference between enabling and supporting someone. Maintaining boundaries between enabling and supporting may be key to helping friends, family members, and loved ones. But it’s important to recognize this pattern of behavior and begin addressing it.

Your partner has slowly started drinking more and more as stresses and responsibilities at their job have increased. You remember when they drank very little, so you tell yourself they don’t have a problem. Even though it’s starting to affect your emotional well-being, you even tell yourself it’s not abuse because they’re not really themselves when they’ve been drinking. But if your help allows your loved one to have an easier time continuing a problematic pattern of behavior, you may be enabling them. 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.

Learning how to identify the main signs can help you prevent and stop enabling behaviors in your relationships. 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. Oftentimes, when a loved one is ill or in recovery, it’s difficult to find a balance between providing support and giving space. You may even find yourself struggling with the desire to control their behaviors.

We realistically cannot stop people from drinking alcohol or using drugs. The topic of addiction will understandably create some conflict. Your loved one may show signs of denial, where they refuse they have a problem with alcohol or other drugs. Or they may have decided that their drinking or drug use “is what it is” and are unwilling to change. 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.

Providing financial assistance

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. 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. It may be helpful to express honest concerns in a direct manner or to answer questions honestly when safe to do so. “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.

But enabling allows the status quo—drinking or using drugs—to continue, whereas healthy support encourages a person to address their addiction and all of its consequences. 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. There’s a difference between supporting someone and enabling them. Someone struggling with depression may have a hard time getting out of bed each day. Temporary support can help them make it through a difficult time and empower them to seek help. More than a role, enabling is a dynamic that often arises in specific scenarios.

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. Even if you personally disagree with a loved one’s behavior, you might ignore it for any number of reasons. It can be difficult to say no when someone we care about asks for our help, even if that “help” could cause more harm than good.

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Enabling usually refers to patterns that appear in the context of drug or alcohol misuse and addiction. Enabling happens when you justify or support problematic behaviors in a loved one under the guise that you’re helping them. That can be things like giving money to an adult child who hasn’t spent theirs wisely.

You may not have trouble limiting your drinks, but consider having them with a friend instead. This may be hard at first, especially if your loved one gets angry with you. Tell your loved one you want to keep helping them, but not in ways that enable their behavior. For example, you might offer rides to appointments but say no to giving money for gas or anything else. When a pattern of enabling characterizes a relationship, it’s fairly common for resentment, or feelings of anger and disappointment, to develop. But you don’t follow through, so your loved one continues doing what they’re doing and learns these are empty threats.

They may not agree to enter treatment right away, so you might have to mention it several times. Working with your own therapist can help you explore positive ways to bring up treatments that are right for your situation. Say your sister continues to leave her kids with you when she goes out. You agree to babysit because you want the kids to be safe, but your babysitting enables her to keep going out. If you or your loved one crosses a boundary you’ve expressed and there are no consequences, they might keep crossing that boundary.

Avoiding conflict

• Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship.
• For example, giving them information about mental health professionals in the area that might help.
• 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.
• Trying to manage your own life along with others’ starts to wear down your reserves.
• Enabling can have serious consequences for your relationship and your loved one’s chances for recovery.

Addiction is addiction, regardless of external circumstance. A 2021 study found the risk of becoming codependent is 14.3 times more likely if the family or loved one lacks coping resources. 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. Support groups like Al-Anon may be useful for people whose loved ones are living with addiction.

• He starts thinking he’s not capable of solving his own problems.
• It’s most often an intimate partner or close friend who passively and unknowingly encourages negative behaviors to continue.
• It presupposes that the person you’re enabling isn’t able to find or give themselves what you give them or to obtain this power on their own.
• At the same time, he began looking more seriously for a job.
• 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.

Enabling can describe any situation where you “help” by attempting to hide problems or make them go away. Sometimes, when all your time and energy is focused on your loved one, you might feel like your efforts aren’t appreciated or reciprocated. Taking on someone else’s responsibilities is another form of enabling behavior. As the popular saying goes, “Give a person a fish, and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, and they eat for a lifetime.”

Signs of enabling behavior

The following signs can help you recognize when a pattern of enabling behavior may have developed. The term “enabler” generally describes someone whose behavior allows a loved one to continue self-destructive patterns of behavior. Enabling behavior is often unintentional and stems from a desire to help.

Enabling reflects our own discomfort with boundaries, uncertainty, and letting go of an outdated identity. It may appear helpful on the surface, but at a deeper level, it’s disempowering—both to those we enable and to ourselves. In truth, Shania was afraid Louis would leave her and their daughters. Being supportive rather than enabling raised her anxiety level and left her feeling vulnerable. But she consciously chose to expect more from Louis rather than feeling sorry for him. One sign of codependency or enabling is the failure to follow through on boundaries and expectations.

Your adult child struggles to manage their money and never has enough to pay their rent. Helping define enabling someone them out each month won’t teach them how to manage their money. Enabling often describes situations involving addiction or substance misuse.