What Enabling Is and How to Stop Supporting People's Addiction and Dysfunction
Another guest post from Barb Nangle. If you like it, subscribe to her newsletter or check out her podcast. I listen every week.
Her website is here! She is available for individual coaching. I am including her posts because I believe that if we set good boundaries, we will improve the relationships we have with others.
What is “enabling” exactly?
Well, it’s when we make life easier fAnother guest post from Barb Nangle. If you like it, subscribe to her newsletter or check out her podcast. I listen every week.
Her website is here! She is available for individual coaching. I am including her posts because I believe that if we set good boundaries, we will improve the relationships we have with others.
or people who are highly dysfunctional. We do this by preventing them from reaping the consequences of their behavior. That is, we “buffer” them from the negative shit that would happen if we weren’t stepping in to block it. When we do this with addicts, we’re essentially supporting their addictive and dysfunctional behavior. But it’s not always addicts we enable.
My enabling story is that I often enabled my partners to engage in really serious drinking and drugging by making their lives a lot easier when they did so. I cleaned up messes (literally and figuratively), I drove them around, I lied and made excuses for them. I bought drugs and liquor for them.
But the most egregious enabling I ever did was what caused me to hit my codependent bottom. And that was with my friend Dan, the homeless man I befriended through church in the fall of 2014.
I invited him to stay at my home one night during a snowstorm and that eventually led to him practically living with me. I was enabling him to not reap the consequences of his homelessness.
He got:
· A warm and cozy place to stay, rent free
· a couch with clean linens on it
· a shower
· homemade meals
· a chauffer
· free cigarettes
· access to TV and music
I made his life a lot easier.
Perhaps you have an alcoholic in your life and you clean them up and get them into bed when they’ve vomited and passed out so they wake up clean in a warm bed. That’s enabling.
Or maybe you’re a parent of a teen who says at 8:30 on a school night, “I have a paper due tomorrow” and you get to work with them on researching and typing the paper, that’s enabling. If they’ve waited until the last minute to work on the paper, they’re the one who should be either getting a 0 and/or staying up all night working on the paper, not you.
If you rescue them, they don’t receive the natural consequences of their behavior. You’ve also exhausted yourself and taught them to be dependent on others. And that they don’t have to face negative consequences because mom or dad will do that for them. This doesn’t prepare them well for life.
So how do we stop enabling?
First, commit to no longer working harder on others’ life than they do. You’ll have to learn to keep the focus on yourself to accomplish this. This is extremely hard to do when you’ve been outwardly focused your entire life. Fortunately, I’ve been through this and have written an article on how to keep the focus on yourself so you can follow my path instead of forging your own.
If you’re putting more effort into something for them than they are, it’s a rescue mission and you’re enabling! The ability to stop enabling others rests on you allowing people to have the consequences of their own behavior.
The second thing is something that was a game-changer for me in many areas of my life. It’s to act your way into right thinking. In recovery we call this “acting as if.”
When we’re changing long-standing behaviors patterns, we can learn to act our way into new thinking. If you’re anything like I was before recovery, thinking isn’t working! We have to take action.
Even if you don't believe that you can stop enabling someone, if you just do the new, non-enabling behaviors anyway, eventually your thinking will come along. For example, stop cleaning up people’s messes, stop making excuses for them, stop giving them money.
When you “act your way into right thinking” regarding your enabling, you'll start to think about yourself and what you want and need, rather than what the other person wants or needs. You’ll stop supporting their dysfunction and start leading your own life.