When I was a teenager, I heard through the family grapevine that my favorite cousin, a bright and beautiful woman in her early 20’s, got married to a man with an alcohol and gambling problem. He stole her hard-earned money and gambled it away. He often stumbled home—if he came home at all, blind drunk. My cousin sacrificed her own future for years—paying off his debts, nursing his health problems, shielding him from his own family, trying every which way to help him overcome his addictions.
Many people find themselves in similar situations: They're trying to help a loved one make major life changes, and they're failing. I’ve met people who've done things like trying to help a spouse quit smoking by hiding their cigarettes; trying to get their roommate out of an abusive relationship by secretly sabotaging their dates; trying to smooth over family relationships by doing whatever a manipulative parent wants.
Many people find themselves trying to help a loved one make major life changes, and failing. The people caught in these binds tend to be kind and giving. Their sympathy overflows.
The people caught in these binds tend to be kind and giving like my cousin. Their sympathy overflows, and they want so much to help their loved one. They say, “If I don’t try to help, what will become of them?”
But what my cousin was doing was not helping her husband. She was enabling him.
And she’s not alone. A study on people with alcohol dependence and their partners found that the majority of partners engaged in enabling behaviors, such as taking over basic life activities for the alcoholic, lying and covering for them, borrowing money to pay their debts, or threatening to leave but not following through.
My cousin’s husband never did quit drinking or gambling. At some point, she left him and is now doing well. (Our family has lost the thread of where his story went.) But I wonder how things would have gone if they both knew the difference between enabling and helping when they first met.
Today’s episode is about this difference—how to tell if you’re enabling, and how to stop so you can start helping.
What is enabling, and why is it unhelpful?
There are many ways you can enable someone’s bad behavior, but it all boils down to things you do that contribute to keeping them in the status quo. Usually, enabling happens accidentally. You were trying hard to help, but after months or years of trying, one day you look up and realize that your college-aged son is still being...
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