Helping vs Enabling: Whats the Difference?

Rather than enabling, it may be better to provide support or help for a person in need. This means assisting alongside them until they no longer need your help or support. If you’ve fallen into a cycle of enabling, consider reaching out to a counselor. You might consider online counseling if you’re worried about leaving home, are low on financial resources, or want another way to gain professional support.

Setting Boundaries

Chances are youve experienced judgment from others about your choices. It’s very easy for others to say, Why do you keep loaning him money? And on some level, you know that your enabling isnt helping (or maybe its even causing more problems). When you set boundaries, you release your need to control the outcomes that your loved one experiences. You allow your loved one the chance to connect his or her own choices to the positive and negative experiences that naturally follow.

More on Substance Abuse and Addiction

Defining the problem, creating boundaries, and making tough choices are a few tactics that can help you stop enabling. But these behaviors often encourage the other person to continue the same behavioral patterns and not seek professional help. Instead of focusing on what you feel you did wrong, identifying concrete behaviors that might have excused your loved one’s actions could help. 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. Your resentment may be directed more toward your loved one, toward the situation, both, or even yourself. You might feel hurt and angry about spending so much time trying to help someone who doesn’t seem to appreciate you.

Accept that you cant fix it.

You might want to justify your reason for helping or remind others of the person’s humanity. She recommended working with a therapist to change these patterns and explore how they developed in the first place. Additionally, she shared some helpful reminders to keep in mind as you shift away from enabling. Delawalla similarly advised considering whose narrative you’re supporting and whether showing “support” requires you to compromise your own morals, well-being and/or relationships.

1. Instead, you could be subconsciously showing the individual that your words hold no meaning.
2. Enabling may be part of a larger codependency issue taking place in the relationship.
3. A parent who allows a child to stay home from school because he hasn’t studied for a test is enabling irresponsibility.
4. Although how someone chooses to spend their money is not your responsibility, you can choose to give them your resources or not.

This might involve experiencing financial hardships in order to keep providing for the other person financially or neglecting your own health in order to care for the other person physically. Enabling behaviors include making excuses for someone else, giving them money, covering for them, or even ignoring the problem entirely to avoid conflict. When you empower someone, you’re giving them the tools they need to overcome or move beyond the challenges they face. For example, giving them information about mental health professionals in the area that might help. You may also feel hesitant or fearful of your loved one’s reaction if you confront them, or you could feel they may stop loving you if you stop covering up for them. In other words, enabling is directly or indirectly supporting someone else’s unhealthy tendencies.

In reality, enabling behavior can stem from any relationship dynamic, including friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. It affects and is affected by a wide social network, and enabling can inadvertently come from any corner of an addict’s life. Furthermore, the concept of enabling extends beyond the individual level. Societal structures and cultural norms can also play a role in sustaining addiction. Recognizing these broader implications is vital for creating an environment that supports recovery rather than unknowingly perpetuating harmful patterns. Basically, supporting is helpful and involves healthy boundaries, personal growth and the development of good coping mechanisms, while enabling is harmful and limiting and perpetuates problematic actions.

You might feel depleted and blame the other person for taking all your energy and time. At the same time, it may be difficult for you to stop enabling them, which in turn might increase your irritation. It’s difficult to work through addiction or alcohol misuse alone. And if the problem is never discussed, they may be less likely to reach out for help. Your partner has slowly started drinking more and more as stresses and responsibilities at their job have increased.

Because, for example, “enabling can also occur as an avoidance of self or a manifestation of fear rather than an act of love and caring,” she says. While enabling allows an individual to avoid the consequences of their behavior, supporting does not. Once you get a handle on your own anxiety and worry, you will be better able to reduce your enabling behaviors. Detaching means that you untangle yourself from your under-functioning loved one, see yourself as a completely separate person, and begin to focus more on your own needs. When you detach, you stop taking responsibility for other people and start taking responsibility for your own behavior and needs. Detaching helps you recognize that your loved one is not a reflection of you and you are not responsible for and did not cause the problems that they’re having.

Or you may call your child’s school with an excuse when they haven’t completed a term project or studied for an important exam. If you believe your loved one is looking for attention, you might hope ignoring the behavior will remove their incentive to continue. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness. Often, people are unaware they are enabling their loved ones and have good intentions. Enabling can be hard to spot for the people within the enabling relationship.

It is common for family members to believe they are helping their addicted loved ones when, in reality, they are acting as enablers. To truly help an addict or an alcoholic, you should be ready, willing, and prepared to address the consequences of mary jane drugs substance abuse. Your approach will require honesty and boundaries while being able to enforce consequences and accountability. An enabler is never the addict themselves, but typically someone very close to them – either a loved one or a friend.

These suggestions can help you learn how to empower your loved one instead. Minimizing the issue implies to your loved one that they can continue to treat weed and mdma you similarly with no consequences. People dealing with addiction or other patterns of problematic behavior often say or do hurtful or abusive things.

You may feel obligated to continue helping even when you don’t want to. It’s tempting to make excuses for your loved one to other family members or friends when you worry other people will drinking out of boredom judge them harshly or negatively. When worried about the consequences of a loved one’s actions, it’s only natural to want to help them out by protecting them from those consequences.

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. If all of the family is in a different role, casting all their attention on the substance user being the problem, chances are they will not see the need to change. Without this change it is most likely the family will worsen as will the substance use. Our experience and research show, families are never on the same page, not even close. They are all at various points emotionally and have taken on unhealthy roles that pits one against the other. As this occurs the substance is allowed to continue while the family is lost and at odds.