10 Ways You Could Be Enabling an Addict

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When your actions make it easier for an individual with an addiction to obtain and use drugs, this is called enabling. This also includes providing others with a sense of comfort and ease during the course of their drug abuse. 

Enabling an addiction simply prolongs your loved one’s ability to recover and get the help they need. Learning about the disease of addiction can help you understand what they’re going through and why enabling behaviors have to stop. The following are 10 ways you could be enabling an addict.

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1. Letting the Individual Have Control

An individual with addiction may become very selfish, and their main concerns might involve continued use of the drugs, despite their seemingly sincere desire to do otherwise. Concern for others is displayed only when the individual has finished using or is looking for resources to use again. 

In the meantime, there are frequent upheavals from physical and psychological distress that have other family members walking on eggshells as the individual gains full control over the atmosphere of the home.

2. Making Excuses for Their Behaviors

Making excuses for the individual’s wrongful behaviors enables them to keep doing the same things that destroy the family dynamics. They may fail to participate in activities, withhold commitment and support, and fail to serve as a role model for other, more vulnerable family members, including children. 

Children and spouses of individuals with addiction are at a higher risk of developing mental health disorders from having to deal with these issues daily. They are also more likely to abuse substances as a result of drug exposure. 

3. Providing a Safe Environment to Use

Most people don’t want individuals using drugs in their home, but they might fear making them leave. They might think that doing so means sending them off to the streets, where they could be in danger or where contact will be lost. People with addiction often threaten the people they care about with overdose, suicide, reprisals, and discontinued relationships because they know the impact that these threats can have on their loved ones. Playing into these threats is enabling them to continue exerting their will over yours.

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4. Providing Money to Obtain Drugs

Giving money to someone struggling with addiction is one form of enabling.

Addiction progresses from the occasional use of the drugs for their positive effects to compulsive and uncontrollable use to avoid withdrawal. This disease becomes very expensive as tolerance to the drugs continues to increase, requiring higher and more frequent doses to elicit the desired effects. Lending or providing money to obtain the drugs when someone is suffering from addiction is contradictory to helping them get better.

5. Providing Support or Money for Other Expenses

Individuals who have been self-supportive before tend to lose their self-sufficiency as addiction progresses over time. Providing money for food, gas, utilities, rent, or even the drugs to stay well may seem like the right thing to do when the person you care about is down and out, but chances are they are using these needs to gain more of your enabling support, playing on your sense of generosity to maintain their habits.

6. Disregarding Your Own Well-Being

The stress, anxiety, and pain that you feel while coping with someone in addiction will eventually begin to wear you down physically, emotionally, and psychologically. More often than not, a person who is enabling will give up some of their own values, beliefs, assets, and time to make sure the individual is taken care of long before they take care of themselves or the others they may be obligated to protect.

7. Trying to Maintain the Peace and Avoid Confrontation

Between the frustration, confusion, and fear, trying to keep peace in a relationship where stability fluctuates between intoxication and withdrawal is an exhausting task. Many times, the people who have a relationship with the addicted person will undergo tense, fearful, and confusing situations trying to avoid conflict at the expense of their own well-being. Sometimes, they believe it’s their own fault that the individual is suffering the way they are.

Addiction changes the way someone perceives their wrongful behaviors. By avoiding confrontations in an effort to keep peace, you are enabling them to have a greater sense of comfort in what they are doing.

8. Picking Up the Broken Pieces

As the course of your relationship with the addicted person continues to deteriorate, you will probably be the one picking up all the broken pieces.

Bailing them out of jail, relieving their debts to creditors or drug dealers, and taking care of other obligations they have neglected is enabling them. It prevents them from recognizing the harm they are causing and the dangers they are in.

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How to Stop Enabling an Addict

As the loved one of someone struggling with addiction, the way you act toward them has an effect on their recovery. Enabling allows them to continue their behavior, which is not helpful to you or to them.

9. Joining Them in Their Activities

Whether an individual is addicted to drugs or alcohol, joining them in their activities is a serious mistake. This way of enabling removes any effect of the positive examples you may use to let them know you do not support their choices and behaviors in the future. They gain a distinct leverage over you by using your own circumstances to justify their continued use.

10. Supporting the Use of Other Abusive Substances

It may seem less harmful to support the addict’s use of other substances, such as alcohol or antidepressants, when the substance they prefer has wreaked significant consequences, but this can keep them from seeking the help they need to recover. Abuse of other psychoactive substances doesn’t take away the cravings for other drugs, but rather decreases the inhibitions to use them and often leads to overdose when they are combined.

Do you think someone you know or love might be struggling with addiction? Reach out today or browse our website to discover recovery resources. You can also check out our online directory of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings to find a local peer support group near you!

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