6 Signs of Enabling An Addict

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If someone you love is struggling with substance abuse, you need to be mindful of the signs of enabling an addict. As parents, spouses, children, siblings or even friends of a drug addict, it’s only natural to want to help your loved one. But when it comes to alcohol use disorders and substance use disorders, recovery at a treatment facility is the best type of help the addict can receive.

The real question that family members must ask is whether the assistance provided to an addict is helping them or helping them harm themselves even more. A primer on signs you’re enabling addiction can help you recognize your role in the situation and put the help you give your loved one in better perspective.

What are the Signs of Enabling an Addict?

Are you empowering and enabling addiction? Understanding what being an enabler entails makes it easier to recognize the many forms and signs of enabling an addict in your own life. From a purely psychological perspective, enabling is “a process whereby someone contributes to continued maladaptive or pathological behavior in another person.”

The American Psychological Association notes that the enabler is usually a good friend or intimate partner who “unwittingly encourages” or “passively permits” the addict’s behavior. This could come in the form of the following signs that you’re facilitating the behavior of an addict:

Do You Give Them Money?

Providing the addict with the money they need to support their drug use instead of helping them get treatment helps facilitate addiction. This might manifest as giving your addicted loved one money after a job loss or posting bail after an arrest, even though you know in your heart they’re just going to use the funds you provide to buy drugs or alcohol.

Do You Make Sure They Have Shelter?

Continuing to allow the addict to live with you or paying the addict’s rent so they can have a roof over their head enables them to continue life as usual despite the addiction that’s harming them. They don’t have to see to their own needs, seek out mental health help or treatment options or even think about recovery if they’re comfortable with their surroundings.

Do You Make Light of the Seriousness of Their Addiction or Deny It Altogether?

Even when a loved one’s addiction is blatantly obvious, families continue to enable the addiction by pretending nothing’s wrong or simply failing to do anything at all to help the addict with recovery. This gives the addicted loved one the false sense that their behavior is okay, or it may even normalize the addiction in the eyes of the addict.

Do You Find Yourself Lying for Them or Making Excuses on Their Behalf?

Lying for the addict in order to protect them from consequences or judgment enables the addiction and, in a sense, promotes it. As an enabler, you may find yourself lying to police, doctors, employers or other members of the family to shield the addicted person from facing the outcome of their behavior.

Do You Fall for Their Lies and Manipulation?

It’s only natural to want to trust your loved one and believe them when they say they want to stop or they’ll get better. In the end, they promise the moon and deliver nothing, time and time again because they’ve come to see that you’re unable to say “no.”

Do You Put Your Needs or the Needs of Other Loved Ones on Hold to Enable the Addict?

It’s common that other family members are pushed to the back burner and their needs overlooked because the addict demands so much time and attention. It’s not unusual for an entire family to spend all its time and energy worrying about or helping the addicted person and the bulk of their money supporting the addict’s habit.

The family dynamic focuses on the addict’s dangerous behavior and the person’s needs, wants, health, well-being and mortality, with constant worry over the person’s health, whether the person has overdosed or if they’re in jail. The mental health of the whole family suffers as a result.

Recognizing Enabling Patterns

Facilitating and unknowingly supporting addiction usually comes in four patterns: fear-based, guilt-based, hope-based and victim-based. It’s possible for more than one pattern to emerge at a time in your relationship with an addicted loved one.

Control Through Fear

Fear-based enabling occurs when the addict puts fear in the enabler when their addiction is called out. They may threaten to hurt themselves or leave and never come back.

Instilling Guilt

Guilt-based facilitation involves casting blame for drug abuse on someone else, such as accusing a parent that they weren’t there for them during a tough situation in the past. The addicted individual deflects responsibility for the addiction to drugs onto the enabler or another family member, never answering for their own actions.

Creating False Hope

Hope-based enabling happens when the addict manipulates the enabler into believing they want to overcome addiction, seek addiction treatment or make other positive changes. Many addicts provide false hope that they’re on the verge of a breakthrough and ready to throw down the drugs or other substances “tomorrow,” or they’ll get high “just once more.” The individual’s behavior is almost always disingenuous.

Playing the Victim

Victim-based addiction facilitation occurs when addicts portray themselves as victims, shifting the blame for their addiction elsewhere. Believing this narrative is one of the ways a substance use disorder flourishes.

Family Members Enabling a Loved One’s Substance Abuse

Owning up to your enabling tendencies is crucial to helping your loved one recover. If you’re not sure whether you’re an enabler, ask yourself if your actions toward your addicted loved one result in the addict delaying confronting the reality of addiction. If so, you’re not helping — you’re making things worse. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means you’re an enabler.

Many enablers are codependent on the addicts in their lives, an unhealthy pattern in which the enabler fulfills their need to satisfy the addict by providing for the addict’s wants and needs. Family therapy and support groups like Al-Anon can help you recognize this sort of unhelpful behavior and learn to set boundaries and stop enabling your loved one.

Alcohol and Drug Addiction Help

The codependent relationship between an enabler and an addict must change and enabling behaviors stop if the addict is going to break free from the cycle of substance abuse. Left unchecked, an addict will never be forced to realize the negative effects and consequences of their actions and behaviors if they continue to get the emotional support and financial help of the enabler.

If you recognize enabling behavior in your relationship with your addicted loved one, reach out to Camelback Recovery today for substance abuse treatment that helps them begin the recovery process.

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