What is enabling behavior?

Enabling behavior is when our actions end up supporting or reinforcing someone’s unhealthy habits or destructive choices. When someone you care about is struggling, our first instinct often is to help in any way that we can. Whether a family member is battling addiction, a friend making poor decisions, or a partner going through difficult times, we naturally want to protect them from harm and make things better. While well-intentioned, this type of help can actually prolong the problem rather than support the healing process.

What is enabling behavior?

Enabling someone is when our actions end up supporting or reinforcing someone’s unhealthy habits or destructive choices, rather than allowing them to face the consequences of their actions. We may (successfully or unsuccessfully) try to cushion them from the natural outcomes, which prevents them from recognizing the need for change. Enabling behavior essentially pretends that there is no problem, help a person cover up their mistake, encouraging someone to do things they should not be doing, or allowing them to keep doing it rather than calling them out on it.

It is noble for us to not want people we love to suffer, and enabling often comes from a place of love. However, when we enable, we are inadvertently keeping them stuck in harmful patterns.

Common Signs of Enabling Behavior

1. Shielding them from consequences: You might cover up mistakes, pay bills they were supposed to handle, or make excuses for their behavior to others.
2. Excusing harmful behavior / Justifying Actions: “They’ve had a rough week,” “They didn’t mean it,” or “It’s just a phase”—even when deep down, you know the behavior is problematic.
3. Taking over responsibilities: When someone you care about isn’t pulling their weight, you might step in and handle their duties, whether at home or work. Over time, this creates a dynamic where they don’t have to be accountable for their actions.
4. Ignoring the problem: Sometimes, it’s easier to turn a blind eye than to confront a difficult issue head-on. You might avoid having hard conversations because you’re afraid of causing conflict or losing the relationship. However, to avoid hard conversations is to acknowledge that relationship is lost already.
5. Providing a safe space to engage in said destructive behaviors.
6. Sacrificing your own well-being: Many enablers put the needs of the other person first, often to the detriment of their own emotional, physical, or financial health.

Examples of Enabling Behavior

These are just some of the different types of enablers:

• Addiction enablers: You might give a loved one money, even though you know they’ll use it to fuel their shopping addiction. You rationalize it by thinking, “At least this way they won’t do something worse to get the money.” If you are in an abusive relationship, you may give someone money to pay for their child support, thinking that it is one less burden for the other person to carry, and you can have a “nice dinner” instead of the silent treatment.
• Responsibility enablers: You may constantly cover for another person (work friend, etc.) at work, or for your partner at home when you think that this person may be going through “a rough patch.” If you have children, you do their chores, such as laundry, for them.
• Relationship enablers/emotional dependency: You may be in a relationship with an emotionally immature person, who is dishonest, unfaithful or abusive.
• Health enablers: people who support unhealthy lifestyle choices and/or avoid addressing health concerns.
• Social enablers, people who like to gossip or bully.

Saving Your Partner, Toxic Relationships & Enabling Behavior

In a toxic relationship, enabling behaviors are often motivated by the enabler’s fear of abandonment, guilt, or desire to maintain control. For example, in a relationship where one partner is abusive or manipulative, the enabler may:

• Excuse the behavior by blaming stress, past trauma, external factors
• Sacrifice their own needs in order to “keep the peace” or to avoid conflict
• Take responsibility for the partner’s actions through apologizing on their behalf or covering up harmful behaviors to friends and family

In a study by Wright and Wright (2015), the authors’ examined codependent relationships, focusing on how one partner may enable the destructive behaviors of the other. The study found that codependent individuals feel responsible for the well-being of their partner, even when the partner engages in harmful behaviors such as neglect, emotional manipulation, and addiction. Why? Because the enabler’s self-worth was tied to the perceived success of helping their abusive partner. Codependent partners feel that their role is to “fix” or “save” their partner, forcing them to take on excessive emotional and financial burdens.

Why do we enable bad behavior?

Enabling is, at its’ core, rooted in love, fear, or guilt.

• We may be afraid that if we do not step in/intervene, that the situation will get worse, that we feel responsible for the person’s well-being and that it is our duty to fix (every) thing for them.
• We may have fear of conflict or confrontation, enabling behavior to maintain a “sense of peace” (though, our body remembers and keeps the score).
• We may have misplaced loyalty, love, duty and empathy.
• We may have unrealistic optimism, thinking the harmful behaviors will change on their own (they don’t).
• We may need to have the person’s approval or validation, wanting to maintain a positive relationship with the person.
• We want to validate our existence and self-worth, because if we save the other person, they will in turn save us. They don’t.

While our feelings are valid, enabling creates a cycle where the person doesn’t take responsibility for their own actions, and the enabler takes on that burden instead.

References

Wright, C. A., & Wright, B. E. (2015). Codependency: Enabling and self-sacrificing in relationships involving substance abuse and emotional abuse. Journal of Addiction and Interpersonal Relationships, 10(4), 25-42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-015-9306-4