Supporting someone means helping them in a way that empowers them to make positive changes and achieve their goals. Enabling, on the other hand, involves helping someone continue negative behaviors or patterns, often in an attempt to protect them from the consequences of their actions. Understanding the difference between support and enabling is crucial for maintaining healthy relationships and promoting growth and responsibility.
What is supportive behavior?
Supportive behavior involves encouraging, assisting, and advocating for someone in ways that truly help them. Here are some examples of supportive actions:
- Listening without judgment and providing emotional support
- Giving advice when asked
- Assisting with practical needs like childcare or transportation
- Encouraging positive growth and pursuing counseling or treatment if needed
- Providing honest feedback in a compassionate way
- Holding someone accountable for their actions
- Letting natural consequences occur when appropriate
The key distinction is that support is given with the ultimate goal of helping the person gain more independence, responsibility, and self-efficacy. Even when support involves assistance, the aim is to empower the other person to eventually handle things on their own.
What is enabling behavior?
Enabling involves helping someone in ways that reinforce or sustain their harmful behaviors. It removes natural incentives to change and prevents the person from experiencing the consequences of their actions. Here are some examples of enabling actions:
- Ignoring or making excuses for irresponsible, unethical, or dangerous behavior
- Shielding someone from the negative results of their actions
- Taking over responsibilities for someone else
- Providing money, housing, substances, etc. that perpetuate addiction or irresponsibility
- Covering up or lying about problems to protect someone’s reputation
- Completing tasks for someone who is capable of doing it themselves
While enabling is often done out of care, guilt, or a desire to reduce short-term pain, it prevents the natural incentives and motivations that could prompt someone to make needed changes in their life. It fosters dependence and gives the message that there are no consequences for harmful behaviors.
Differences between support and enabling
There are a few key differences that distinguish true support from enabling:
| Support | Enabling |
|---|---|
| Empowers change and growth | Perpetuates status quo |
| Promotes independence | Fosters dependence |
| Holds person accountable | Removes accountability |
| Allows natural consequences | Shields from consequences |
Support is focused on empowerment and positive change, while enabling is focused on keeping things stable and avoiding discomfort in the short-term. Support centers accountability and growth, enabling centers protection and dependence.
Examples comparing support and enabling
Here are some examples that illustrate the key differences between supportive and enabling behaviors:
Substance abuse
- Supportive: Expressing concern about drinking, encouraging counseling, providing rides to treatment, holding them accountable if they drive drunk.
- Enabling: Making excuses for drinking, lying to protect their job, giving money that is used for alcohol, preventing drunk driving consequences.
Financial irresponsibility
- Supportive: Encouraging financial counseling, teaching budgeting skills, co-signing a loan to build credit only if payments are made.
- Enabling: Bailing someone out when bills go unpaid, paying debts without repayment, failing to address spending habits.
Abusive relationships
- Supportive: Expressing concern about abuse, helping make a safety plan, supporting decisions, driving them to get a restraining order.
- Enabling: Making excuses for abusive behavior, financially supporting the abuser, telling them “you can’t leave.”
Why do people enable?
Though enabling is unhealthy, it often springs from good intentions. Here are some common reasons people enable others:
- Desire to reduce short-term pain or conflict – It can feel easier to protect someone now instead of holding them accountable.
- Fear the person can’t handle consequences – People worry about trauma, self-harm, or the person “hitting rock bottom.”
- Guilt and a sense of duty – Feeling responsible for protecting someone or “being there for them.”
- Hope the problem will resolve itself – Thinking enabling might allow things to improve without intervention.
- Dependency or control – Some enablers like feeling needed or essential to the other person.
While these motivations are understandable, enabling ultimately does more harm than good in the long run. Positive change requires accountability and facing consequences.
Effects of enabling
Though enabling is intended to help someone, it can deeply damage relationships and the enabled individual. Effects of enabling include:
- Increased dependence, helplessness, and entitlement
- No motivation to change harmful patterns
- Loss of responsibilities and self-efficacy
- Resentment building up in the enabler
- Erosion of boundaries and trust in the relationship
- The enabled person doesn’t learn essential life skills
Rather than sparing someone pain, enabling often prolongs suffering by removing incentives that could prompt positive change. Setting boundaries and allowing natural consequences is ultimately more compassionate and leads to health and growth.
Setting boundaries
It can be challenging to avoid enabling behaviors, especially with loved ones. Here are some tips for setting healthy boundaries and limits:
- Be clear about what you will and won’t do – State specifics about enabling you won’t engage in.
- Hold others accountable for their actions.
- Allow natural consequences instead of rushing to solve problems.
- Don’t make threats or ultimatums you can’t follow through with.
- Consider involving a third party like counseling or support groups.
- Be prepared to let go with love if behavior continues – Maintain your own health.
Approach limits compassionately but firmly for the long-term health of both people. Make self-care a priority so resentment doesn’t build up. You cannot force someone to change – consequences combined with support often impact behavior more than empty threats or lectures.
Healthy support strategies
When navigating the line between support and enabling, here are some healthy strategies to employ:
- Offer specific help that encourages responsibility – Don’t take over all duties.
- Provide resources like counseling contact info – Don’t try to fix it yourself.
- Speak the truth with love about concerns – Don’t deny problems.
- Suggest incremental changes instead of demanding massive change immediately.
- Shift focus to self-care if you feel enabling pull – Maintain your own health.
- Consult others for perspective if you feel confused – Get an outside view.
The healthiest form of support empowers someone to regain independence and make changes. It balances compassion with accountability. Offer help that encourages growth rather than fostering ongoing dependence.
Conclusion
The difference between enabling and supportive behavior is subtle but vitally important. Enabling is well-intentioned but removes accountability and natural motivations to change. True support provides help that empowers positive growth and responsibility. Understanding the distinction can improve all of your relationships and promote health. Focus on empowerment while also allowing natural incentives and consequences to encourage development. With commitment and clear boundaries, you can transition from enabling to genuine support.