How Do You Know If You’re an Enabler? Signs and How to Stop

This may be hard at first, especially if your loved one gets angry with you. 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. But by not acknowledging the problem, you can encourage it, even if you really want it to stop.

What Is the Psychology Behind Enablers?

However, if you find yourself constantly covering their deficit, you might be engaging in enabling behaviors. This may allow the unhealthy behavior to continue, even if you believe a conflict-free environment will help the other person. But it’s important to recognize this pattern of behavior and begin addressing it. Enabling can have serious consequences for your relationship and your loved one’s chances for recovery.

Sacrificing or struggling to recognize your own needs

Denying the issue can create challenges for you and your loved one. 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. You might tell yourself this behavior isn’t so bad or convince yourself they wouldn’t do those things if not for addiction.

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. In this case, an enabler is a person who often takes responsibility for their loved one’s actions and emotions. what does an enabler mean They may focus their time and energy on covering those areas where their loved one may be underperforming. If you think your actions might enable your loved one, consider talking to a therapist.

Avoiding conflict

In other words, enabling is directly or indirectly supporting someone else’s unhealthy tendencies. In many cases, enabling begins as an effort to support a loved one who may be having a hard time. 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.

Taking on someone else’s responsibilities is another form of enabling behavior. If your loved one is dealing with alcohol misuse, removing alcohol from your home can help keep it out of easy reach. You may not have trouble limiting your drinks, but consider having them with a friend instead.

Share

• An enabler does things that the person should be able to do for themselves.
• While the intention is to support the child, this behavior keeps them from learning responsibility, problem-solving skills, and the ability to manage their own challenges.
• Over time, this type of helicopter parenting can prevent the child from building confidence in their abilities.
• Someone with an enabler personality has a desire to help others, so much so that they would help them even when their behaviors can harm them.
• Enabling is very commonly seen in the context of substance abuse, substance use disorders, and addiction.

This resentment slowly creeps into your interactions with her kids. If you or your loved one crosses a boundary you’ve expressed and there are no consequences, they might keep crossing that boundary. But you also work full time and need the evenings to care for yourself. Your teen spends hours each night playing video games instead of taking care of their responsibilities.

• This often stems from a desire to keep the peace, diffuse tension, or avoid conflict, even though it continues unhealthy situations.
• For example, you might offer rides to appointments but say no to giving money for gas or anything else.
• While the intention is to help, this behavior allows the harmful cycle to continue and can lead to burnout for the caretaker.
• Breaking this pattern requires setting firm boundaries and encouraging the child to take responsibility for their own recovery.

Over time, this behavior can lead to toxic relationships, where one person becomes dependent and less accountable, and the enabler feels trapped or taken advantage of. When the term enabler is used, it is usually referring to drug addiction or alcohol misuse. Indeed, the lion’s share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again.

In the desperate stage of enabling, the enabler is primarily motivated by fear. In the innocent enabling stage, a person starts with love and concern for the other person, but they don’t know how to guide or help them. In the control stage, the enabler tries to take control of the situation.

In the compliance stage, the enabler tries to comply or accommodate the other person’s destructive behaviors. In the denial stage of enabling, the enabler tries to downplay or deny that there is a problem or that their actions are potentially harmful and unhealthy. For example, an adult sibling who grew up with a parent struggling with addiction might have learned to avoid conflict and “fix” problems to hold the family together.

Learning how to identify the main signs can help you prevent and stop enabling behaviors in your relationships. You may try to help with the best of intentions and enable someone without realizing it. 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. Enabling doesn’t mean you support your loved one’s addiction or other behavior. You might believe if you don’t help, the outcome for everyone involved will be far worse. Maybe you excuse troubling behavior, lend money, or assist in other ways.

Confronting your loved one can help them realize you don’t support the behavior while also letting them know you’re willing to help them work toward change. Minimizing the issue implies to your loved one that they can continue to treat you similarly with no consequences. It’s often frightening to think about bringing up serious issues like addiction once you’ve realized there’s a problem. This can be particularly challenging if you already tend to find arguments or conflict difficult. Being an enabler can take a toll on a person’s mental health, physical health, and overall well-being.