Summary: To know if you’re enabling addiction, you can assess your relationship with the person with the addiction problem, analyze your behavior in the relationship, and decide if your behavior allows them to continue their behavior without addressing the addiction problem.
Key Points:
- Enabling is a natural reaction when you’re in a relationship with a person with an addiction disorder such as alcohol use disorder (AUD) or substance use disorder (SUD).
- It’s most often derived from the urge to help and protect someone you care about: child, sibling, spouse, peer, parent.
- Although enabling is typically based in love and wanting to help, it’s counterproductive, and in the long run, exacerbates problems both for you and the person with the addiction.
- During addiction treatment, engaging in family therapy with the person in treatment can help you know if you’re enabling addiction, and help you replace enabling behavior with helpful, productive behavior.
Enabling Behavior and Addiction: A Family Matter
When an important person in your life has an addiction problem, you want to help them. That’s natural. However, when you’re very close to that person, the situation can get complicated. For various reasons, your efforts to help may have the opposite effect than you intend. Rather than help, they may end up causing harm. That is, of course, the last thing you want to do.
It’s also exactly what we mean when we say enabling.
Let’s take a step back and refer to the American Psychological Association (APA) dictionary of psychology, where we’ll find enabling means different things in different situations. One type of enabling is helpful, while the other is not. Here’s what the APA dictionary says:
Enabling, noun.
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A process whereby someone (i.e., the enabler) contributes to continued maladaptive or pathological behavior in another person. The enabler is typically an intimate partner or good friend who passively permits or unwittingly encourages this behavior in the other person.
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The process of encouraging or allowing individuals to meet their own needs and achieve desired ends. A therapist attempts to enable clients to believe in themselves, have the confidence to act on their desires, and affirm their ability to achieve. See also empowerment.
That’s a good way to understand enabling. In one way it helps, in another it harms. The difficulty is learning which is which. Let’s say the pathological behavior in the definition above is the disordered use of alcohol or drugs, a.k.a. addiction, and the person that matters to you is your adult child.
When the person with addiction is your adult child, the situation can get very complicated, and separating what helps from what harms is not as obvious as it may seem.
If you’re the parent of a person in active addiction, you want to help, but you may not know how. In your efforts to help, you may do the following.
- Support them financially, and pay for:
- Food
- Car
- Insurance
- Rent
- Allowances
- Let them live at home (de facto financial support)
- Get them out of tight spots and problems, which may involve lying/making excuses for them in the following situations:
- Legal: bailing them out of jail, paying for lawyers
- Vocational: calling/lying to employers for them
- Relational: shielding them from consequences of negative behaviors with other family members and/or spouses, peers, partners/romantic interests
- Avoid talking about:
- Addiction: given up talking about it/have never talked about it
- Rehab: given up talking about it/have never talked about it
- Accept negative behavior/not call out obviously negative behavior, including:
- Lying
- Manipulation/emotional blackmail/guilt trips
- Verbal abuse/intimidation
- Physical abuse/intimidation
These are all enabling behaviors.
Enabling behaviors keep a person in active addiction from feeling the negative consequences of addiction firsthand. This reduces the likelihood they’ll quit using alcohol or drugs and reduces the likelihood they’ll change their behavior, seek treatment, and start the road to recovery. Parents and family members may sincerely believe they’re doing the right thing by offering them support, paying their bills, and letting them live at home. However, if the person in active addiction does not take steps to make positive change, the ongoing support contributes to the substance use disorder (SUD), the alcohol use disorder (AUD), and rather than prevent escalating negative outcomes, promotes the likelihood of escalating negative outcomes.
How Can I Tell the Difference Between Enabling and Actually Helping?
In the online resource “Understanding Enabling Behavior and How to Address It,” experts in family psychology and addiction treatment clarify the difference between enabling and helping. Here’s what they observe.
Helping or Enabling? Which One Am I Doing?
- Helping behavior promotes positive outcomes:
- In the context of addiction, real helping means behavior that guides your loved one towards treatment and support.
- Enabling promotes ongoing addiction/addictive behavior, and negative outcomes:
- In the context of addiction, enabling may feel and look like help, but ultimately helps your loved one keep drinking and/or doing drugs.
- Enabling most often begins with positive intentions but is, in fact, negative behavior.
The primary drawback of enabling behavior is that if the person with an addiction problem never experiences any real world consequences for their behavior, they may see no problem with it. Therefore, they have no compelling reason to change their behavior, i.e. stop drinking or doing drugs.
If you see yourself in the behaviors we describe above, it’s important to remember:
- Enabling is a common, natural reaction to a loved one with an addiction disorder.
- It’s typically a result of you trying to do your best in a situation you don’t know how to handle.
- Enabling is natural because it’s derived from the drive to love and protect a family member in trouble or experiencing hardship.
- Since enabling is an adaptive response, it’s possible to identify the negative aspects of enabling and encourage positive adaptations that don’t enable addiction.
It’s also important to remember that enabling can have negative consequences for you, too. If you engage in enabling behavior, you may experience:
- Depression
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Shame/guilt
- Internal conflict
In the publication “Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Family Therapy,” experts in addiction treatment and family therapy indicate that one of the most important outcomes of family therapy in addiction treatment is the ability of family members to:
“…recognize behavioral, cognitive, and emotional responses that unintentionally support the substance use disorder.”
Therefore, the best way to know if you’re enabling addiction is to either get your loved one into treatment and participate in the process, or seek a therapist yourself and work with them to identify whether your behavior promotes or discourages addiction.
What is Real Helping and What is Enabling?
The authors of the article “Enabling or Engaging? The Role of Recovery Support Services in Addiction Recovery” reviewed existing literature on how best to support people in recovery to identify which types of services provide the most benefit to people in addiction treatment. The study authors open with a quote that gets right at the heart of the matter:
“You need a little love in your life and some food in your stomach before you can hold still for some d@mn fool’s lecture about how to behave.”
–Billie Holiday
Here’s something to know: you can love your child and put food in their belly without paying their rent, giving them your car, bailing them out of every jam they get into, and creating a situation where they can keep on drinking or using drugs.
With that in mind, here’s our interpretation of that quote:
You can help them with the love and the food but you can’t make them listen to good advice.
In addition to offering unconditional love and dinner when needed – dinner being a metaphor for comfort – you can also learn the difference between enabling and non-enabling behaviors. Here’s a helpful list to give you a general idea.
What Non-Enabling Behaviors Look Like
Non-enabling behaviors:
- Create an atmosphere that supports treatment engagement and recovery-friendly activities
- Help identify and resolve obstacles to treatment engagement and recovery-friendly activities
- Help people connect to community support for addiction
- Motivate loved ones to engage in the work of recovery
- Instill hope in loved ones that they can recover
- Inspire loved ones to stay on the recovery path
- Help loved ones develop the skills they need for successful, long-term recovery
In other words, anything you can do that helps them find their way to recovery – no matter how difficult it is, in the moment – qualifies as non-enabling behavior. And in fact, that’s going one step beyond simply not enabling, and moving toward actually helping. Strictly speaking, not enabling could mean allowing them to experience real world consequences of addiction. Letting them feel real consequences and helping them find treatment is best thing you can do: you deter unhealthy behavior and actively promote healthy behavior.
That’s the best path forward for you and your loved one with addiction. You help them find the support they need while taking care of yourself, putting their adult responsibilities back on them, and allowing them to do the work they need to become whole, and move past the destructive cycles of addiction.
We’ll close this article with an enabling checklist we collated and adapted from the various sources we mention above.
Am I Enabling Addiction?
15 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Behavior Toward Your Loved One With Addiction
- Does worrying about them take up significant time and energy?
- Do you try to solve their problems rather than allowing them to?
- Do you fear for their overall wellbeing all the time?
- Are you convinced they can’t manage difficulty and hardship without your help?
- Do you do things for them they should do for themselves?
- Do you make excuses for behavior that causes you emotional distress or harm because they’re under stress or misunderstood?
- Have you given them money?
- Have you loaned them your car?
- Do you give them a free place to live?
- Do you feel you need to protect them despite the fact they’re a grown adult?
- Do you think it’s your job to make them happy?
- Have you ever felt manipulated by them, but ignored it?
- Do you think you’re the only person who gets them/understands them?
- Do you act like you believe them when you know they’re lying?
- Have you canceled other plans and commitments to rush to help them out of a jam they created by drinking or doing drugs?
If you answer yes to two or more of those questions, we encourage you and your loved one to find professional support.
