The Role of Enabler: Are You Enabling Addiction In The One You Love?
Unfortunately, many times, a loved one actually is enabling addiction through their well intentioned desire to help the addict or alcoholic. How does this occur?
Consider the role of the addict; their intention is to continue the using behavior at all costs. What better way to continue that use than to enlist someone to ‘help’ him. Without the enabler, the addict would have to start facing consequences of his actions, and that might interfere with use continued use. The well intentioned enabler, out of love for the addict will ‘protect’ him from consequences and himself.
I watched an episode of the TV show “Intervention” where a mother gave her son, living at home, in his mid twenties money for Heroin, drove him downtown to buy the drugs and back home so he could use ’safely’.
She was afraid he might have uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms or get hurt in a dangerous part of town. That was one of the more dramatic examples of addiction enabling I have seen. Are you lying, making excuses, and creating alibis for your loved one? These are signs that you may have crossed the line from helping into enabling addiction.
Enabling behavior usually starts out very slowly and gradually with trying to smooth things out with others outside the relationship or family. There is a desire to keep family secrets or not rock the boat. Part of enabling, just like active addiction, is denial. In the beginning the enabler will make all sorts of rationalizations and try to minimize the problem; ignore it and hope it goes away. This does not happen.
The vicious cycle of enabling and addiction works something like this. The chemically dependent person is being shielded from the negative consequences of their use. Since these consequences are not hitting home, they can continue to use, or increase their use even more. This means the enabler gets drawn even deeper into the web by having to deal with ever increasing chaos. The increasing chaos in the home can be just the excuse the dependent person needs to keep on using.
Where and how does the madness end? For the enabler, though there may be fear and shame about the situation, it usually ends in anger. The enabler typically tries to hold things together and keeps the mounting frustration and anger bottled up…until one day the explosion occurs. They opt out of continuing the excuses.
Paradoxically at this point, with the rug pulled out from him the user may encounter the crisis that will be motivation to seek treatment. Pain is not pleasant, but it is a wonderful motivator. People who seek addiction treatment usually come from one of two camps. 1. They simply get sick and tired of being sick and tired. They get worn out. More commonly is the second option: 2. A crisis occurs that hits them with the force of a 2 x 4 in the side of the head.
Being protected from crisis may simply be doing nothing more than preventing engagement in addiction treatment and delaying the entry into addiction recovery
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Graet article on enabling. Right now I am dealing with a situation that is dealing with enabling minus the addiction factor. In my opinion whether you are dealing with addiction or just a person with behavioral issues it is all the same. There is a fine line however. When is it enabling and when is it saving someone’s life. The person with the issues care, yet they have no clue what to do in the life. Whether it is get clean and sober or learn new life skills. Thankfully for those of us in recovery we are always a work in process of learning how to deal with life. Now all we have to do is learn how to pass this on to others without the person being on the defensive. Having a person with an open mind is a perfect world yet that is hard to find.
We as the people that the the person with the problem(s) are dealing with need to step back, evaluate the situation, hopefully run it by another unbiased person then make a reasonable and rational decison on how best to help the person(s) involved.
Mys sis and I are both ACOA. She is also addicted to alcohol. We live in different states, but my daughter lives near her. Sis is talking about depression, “not being around much longer”, – she does this, send out an alarm then won’t answer phone calls and hides when someone comes to her house, so you have to threaten to call police, or call them. So my daughter now feels like she has to spend more time with her, try to get her out of her depression, keep her from committing suicide. I’ve sent my daughter info, asked her to be careful. I feel cold because I feel nothing. It’s gone on for too ong and sis shuts me out anyway, there’s nothing I can do, but I don’t feel right about that. Don’t know what to do….
Sometimes it’s better to leave the situation to the hands of the professional because if you are with your love one, tendency is there will be enabling addition. Sometimes it’s easier to trick our family that we need such substance and because of their love for us, thus enabling addition happens.
Oftentimes the enabler continues to promote the addiction for fear that the addict might not love them if they don’t. Enablers need to get themselves in order to help the addict stop the addiction.
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Yes, most often than not enablers make the situation worse by thinking that they are helping. This is the common misconception that enablers have.
We should always be careful not to enable an addiction of someone we love. We might think it’s helping them, but in reality it’s not. Get them the proper treatment they need.
I guess I’m lucky that my partner is not a bad influence to me. He’s not into any form of addiction especially drugs. If he ever has this kind of addiction, I will do my best to help him get out of it.
Usually people who go for treatment either get tired of the addiction or they end up experiencing a dramatic crisis that leads them to seek out treatment for the problem. It is important that you never protect a loved one from this type of crisis because you may be keeping them from finding the treatment that they need for their addiction problem.