10 Signs You’re Enabling an Addict & How to Stop

What Does it Mean to Enable an Addict?

Enabling an addiction means engaging in behaviors that foster a loved one’s alcohol or drug use.² For example, enabling an alcoholic means purchasing alcohol for your household, even though your loved one is dependent on alcohol. Enabling behaviors are sometimes done unconsciously or with potentially good intentions but ultimately continue an already destructive path.

As previously mentioned, enabling an addict differs vastly from helping. In discussing enabling an addict, it is essential to note that the term “addict” has transitioned over recent years to “alcohol or substance use disorder,” encompassing any person whose drinking causes distress and harm while destigmatizing such disorders. Enabling is passively or actively influencing addiction based on one’s actions or inactions.² Conversely, helping or empowering a loved one through addiction is a process where natural consequences of substance or alcohol-using behaviors can unfold without interference. A helper may say, “How can I support you?” while an enabler may say, “What can I do for you?” It is the process of doing for the person struggling rather than allowing them to do for themselves, where enabling is born.

Codependent Relationship & Enabling

Codependency has been linked to addictive behaviors for decades. This term is often used interchangeably with enabling insofar as a codependent person will seek to please their substance-dependent partner by any means necessary. Codependency occurs due to the enabler’s own lack of a secure sense of self. Codependency has also been correlated with intergenerational family systems dysfunctions. It has been found that a codependent person may have developed these insecure patterns in childhood with parents who struggled to provide a safe foundation.³

That being said, it is important to be mindful of our language when discussing substance use and a loved one’s experiences. Codependency has a strong negative connotation and can often pathologize a loved one trying to survive difficult circumstances.¹ As mentioned before, we encourage using appropriate terms. Therefore, enabling behaviors is a more accurate way to talk about loved ones who are struggling. Adding “behaviors” in this and other phrases again moves away from the problem with the person.

Types of Enabling Behaviors

Enabling behaviors often fall into one of four categories. These categories shed light on the “why” behind enabling. Falling into unhelpful behavioral patterns are reactive means of managing chaos. These patterns may feel functional in the short term. However, they are detrimental in the long run.

The four types of enabling behaviors are:¹

1. Fear-based: Talking to your loved one about their substance or alcohol-using behaviors often leads to conflict or even explosive behavior on their part. Therefore, the perception of safety is found through not confronting them, which becomes the adopted and safe reaction.
2. Guilt-based: The loved one experiencing addiction will make statements that lead you to believe you are the cause of their addiction and their problems in life overall. Therefore, you operate from a place of blaming yourself. With enough guilt and self-blame, shame often comes into the picture as well.
3. Hope-based: Your loved one may have briefly succeeded with recovery or show strides in their process. Yet they continuously fall back into their same addictive patterns, and the progress is short-lived. Regardless, you hold onto hope that your ongoing presence will “get them back to themselves” without substances or alcohol’s influence one day.
4. Victim-based: While people contribute to how we feel, we ultimately are responsible for ourselves. Yet, a loved one struggling with addiction may play victim to their life circumstances. Playing the victim role often leaves the loved one on the receiving end feeling obligated to them.

Identifying The Signs of Enabling An Addict

Addiction and managing a loved one experiencing addiction comes with a significant set of challenges. Therefore, enabling behaviors can also be viewed from a place of “self-preservation.” This theory is supported by what we discussed above with the four types of enabling behaviors.¹ The complexities of managing a loved one’s addiction may give a person the sense that they are helping themselves when in reality, they are enabling.

For example, a loved one struggling with addiction may not follow through on their responsibilities. Therefore, the non-addicted partner may pick up these responsibilities because they have to get done, irrespective of who does them. Unfortunately, this behavior of taking on the addicted person’s responsibilities sends an unhelpful message. The unhelpful message is, “I’ll continue to do what you end up not doing, even at my own expense.”

10 Signs You’re Enabling an Addict

If you know or suspect a loved one is misusing substances, your help may support their addiction. You may find yourself in the place of their caretaker or as their problem solver, worrying more about their well-being than they do. Enabling has some adaptive short-term functions, such as avoiding conflict, as discussed above. However, the longer we avoid, the more difficult circumstances become.

Here are ten signs of enabling an addict:

1. Making Excuses

Making excuses for a loved one’s addiction is often the most common sign of enabling.¹ For example, making up an excuse for their lack of presence at a family function when in reality, they are too hungover to attend. Additionally, your loved one struggling with addiction called to say they had a hard day at work and would be out with friends. You excuse their arrival at home drunk or high because of the tough day they had told you about. These excuses ultimately translate to the addicted loved one that their substance use is “justified.”

2. Triggering Addictive Behaviors

A person struggling with a substance or alcohol use disorder may seek financial support. Money is often the most triggering entity across addictions. Addictive behaviors can often lead to job loss. Thus, a loved one seeking financial support may mean that you are funding their addiction.

3. Engaging in the Use of Drugs or Alcohol

It can be difficult to identify, at times, when substance use turns from recreational to problematic. You may have engaged in the use of substances with your loved one and continue to do so from time to time. It is important to know the signs of use turning into addiction and what that means for your own relationship with substances or alcohol.

4. Avoiding Natural Consequences

When we love a person, it can be hard to allow for the natural consequences of their decision(s) to run their course. We may intervene to “soften the blow” of their mistakes. However, when it comes to addiction, it has been shown that allowing natural consequences to unfold is actually what supports change in substance-using behaviors.⁴

5.  Not Setting Boundaries or Lack of Follow-Through With Boundaries

Setting boundaries in a relationship is incredibly important to its success. However, boundaries often become blurred with a partner experiencing a substance or alcohol use disorder. The blurring of these boundaries lends itself to why one may ultimately stop trying to set boundaries or give up on them.⁵ The increased effort required to set and enforce boundaries with a chemically addicted partner is tenfold. However, this is ever more the reason to have boundaries because without them, enabling is at play.

6. Ignoring your own Personal Needs

Even in the most stable of relationships, love comes with sacrifice and compromise. In a relationship with a substance or alcohol-misusing partner, it can be very easy to forget ourselves while helping them. The time and energy it takes to keep them from self-destruction leaves an individual with little time to focus on themselves.

7. Ignoring the Addiction

Sometimes, all we can do is ignore something distressing to us. Yet, there does come a time where ignoring can turn into avoiding and, in the case of a substance-misusing loved one, turns into enabling.¹ While ignoring, again, is an act of self-preservation, it also feeds into many of the earlier signs of enabling discussed, such as not setting boundaries with a substance-dependent partner.

8. Hiding the Addiction

Hiding a partner’s substance use disorder is another act of self-preservation. If your own family knew how much you were struggling, they may try to intervene.This can trigger a fear-based response because of the added layer of conflict that could ensue.¹ Therefore, actively keeping the addiction a secret may feel like the best option. This is an enabling sign that feeds into making excuses and lying on behalf of an addicted partner.

9. Pacifying the Addiction

Pacifying, similarly to making excuses, is a process where you may downplay your partner’s drinking and/or drug use. Furthermore, you may say it is okay for them to use in certain circumstances, like at a social gathering or event, even though they have continuously shown difficulties limiting their use.² This extends from how you minimize your partner’s addictive behaviors to making light of their behaviors to family and/or friends.

10. Lying on behalf of the Addicted Partner

Our last act of self-preservation on behalf of a partner managing a loved one’s substance use disorder is lying. Lying is a behavior across addictions that acts as an agent of the old adage, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Being in the throes of addiction often makes people less honest with themselves and those around them. This can easily extend to their partner, who may stop at nothing to protect them.

How to Stop Enabling an Addict

Addiction is an especially difficult disease to manage and overcome. It is riddled with roadblocks and creates more distress the longer it continues. Being in love with someone fighting addiction, especially where self-blame is involved, leads to enabling behaviors. These enabling behaviors are understandable as short-term reactions. However, ideally, one will move away from these behaviors to establish long-term helpful solutions.

Here are steps to stop enabling an addict:

• Empower your loved one: Rather than enable their behavior, support them by offering tools and viable solutions, such as rehabilitation.
• Stop making excuses for them: Stop providing an excuse for their behavior and instead acknowledge it as a consequence of their addiction. Empower your loved one to face the reality of their situation.
• Stop taking over their responsibilities: As hard as it can be to allow for chaos, it can also be a visual cue to your loved one that their lack of responsibility affects you and your family or relationship.
• Set and stick to your boundaries: Setting and enacting clear and concise boundaries is the most effective way to begin allowing for natural consequences
• Put your needs first: There’s an analogy where we all have a cup, and the more we fill others cups, the more ours runs dry. We ultimately need to fill and refill our own cups to support the people in our lives adequately.
• Ask for help: Managing a loved one’s substance use disorder is distressing. Professional help is available, and you may even find solace in a support group or trusted friend/family member who can approach you from a non-judgmental place.
• Allow for natural consequences: If your loved one drinks, drives, and gets a DUI (driving under the influence), this is a natural consequence of their behavior. As much as you may not want such a charge on their record, allow for the process to run its course so that they can feel the true impact of their behaviors.
• Be honest with yourself and your loved one who is struggling: Honesty can feel like a vulnerable act, especially when it entails revealing our own hurt to someone we love. This is especially true when they are the cause of that hurt. However, honesty is the best policy.
• Hold yourself accountable: Reflect and take account of your own substance and/or alcohol-using behaviors to make the above steps possible. Reflect and consider how you may have contributed to the addictive cycle to move forward.

Setting Boundaries to Stop Enabling

Boundaries serve as a critical component of ensuring you stop enabling an addicted partner. When your partner is not under the influence and in a good enough place to hear you on your concerns, use an “I” statement to start the conversation. Something like, “I want to discuss my personal boundaries with you.” “I” statements are very helpful in lessening the receiving party’s defenses. Think of boundaries around substance-using behaviors as “non-negotiables” in that once you see your partner is engaging in addictive behavior, you will follow through on how to preserve your peace.

Clear boundaries to define with an addict include:

• Drinking or drug use in your presence or on your property is prohibited
• Abusive behavior, from hitting to name calling, etc., will not be tolerated
• Access to finances will be strictly limited and monitored or, depending on the circumstances, not provided at all
• If arrested, you will not bail them out or pay for their lawyer
• Being under the influence at home is prohibited, and you will leave the home to go to a safe space until they are no longer under the influence
• No longer “covering” for a loved one because of their addictive behaviors so that they may answer for their own actions

Get Help for You and Your Loved One

The cycle of addiction can leave a person experiencing addiction and their loved ones feeling helpless. This is often how the cycle continues. Persons experiencing a substance use disorder and their loved ones would benefit greatly from therapeutic interventions or support groups. There are many different avenues to receive this support.

Support Groups & Group Therapy

There are many support groups for addicted persons and their concerned significant others (or CSOs for short). From alcoholics and narcotics anonymous, Al-Anon and Nar-Anon were born as additional support options for loved ones. Online group therapy and support groups also benefit those who cannot attend in-person meetings. Support groups, while not run by a licensed clinician, aid patients and their loved ones. Support groups help to lessen isolation and bridge a sense of community concerning mutual struggles.

Furthermore, attending group therapy orchestrated by licensed clinicians can be very beneficial. The sense of going through recovery “alone” is lessened in a group setting. Having the added benefit of a therapist and specific group-related interventions brings mutual awareness and understanding across members’ experiences and is key in the recovery process. Fellow members being able to hear other members’ successes in their use of therapeutic interventions can add an additional layer of confidence to their own treatment.

Individual & Family Therapy

Individual psychotherapy is a key component of the recovery process and the healing process for loved ones. On both ends, a therapist must be specialized in substance use disorders, given the added layer of complexity. Additionally, finding a therapist or clinic offering individual and family therapy is recommended. Evidence has shown that both therapeutic models, when done concurrently, afford more support to an addicted person’s recovery overall.⁶

Detox, Inpatient, and/or Outpatient Rehabilitation

Depending on the type of substance use, attending a licensed detox program may be the safest option for early recovery. Withdrawal from alcohol, for example, can lead to fatality. This is due to withdrawal effects, including seizures and delirium tremens.⁷ Additionally, inpatient and outpatient rehab programs are standard programs for substance use treatment depending on the person’s need and severity of use. In more severe cases, detox and inpatient rehab may be most beneficial. Outpatient rehab is most effective for those experiencing mild to moderate substance use disorders that can be managed due to enhanced protective factors. Many of these programs also counsel family members and loved ones on the effects of substance use disorders within the family unit and provide psychoeducation on how to reduce enabling and enhance the empowerment of their loved one.

In My Experience

In my experience, enabling behaviors occur in response to highly complicated disorders and distress. Enabling behaviors happen across families and friendships for various reasons, not just in the case of substance use disorders. However, enabling an addiction, as I have seen in my own work, is extremely detrimental to the person enabling and the person misusing substances. It not only perpetuates the addictive cycle but also brings on feelings of resentment and shame over time.

Moreover, I firmly believe that asking for help is the bravest step one can take toward their favorite version of themself. Receiving your own support as a person who may be enabling a loved one, especially when a loved one is resistant to their own treatment, may be the first step in the recovery of the family and/or friendship. Willingness to take the first step may plant the seed that help is available for a loved one struggling with a substance or alcohol use disorder.

Additionally, not all is lost if you have enabled your loved one. Humans are amazing creatures, and our ability to unlearn specific disruptive patterns when we put our mind and energy into it is incredible. I have worked with many loved ones over the years whose adolescents or young adults are struggling. I have been inspired by their willingness to express themselves and reveal the parts of themselves that they may view as most shameful. Being able to bring resilience into a person’s life and away from feelings of shame is one of the greatest gifts of being a therapist. As I always say, if you come in with an open heart and open mind, you will be welcomed with open arms.