How Professional Interventions Can Help Families Recognize and Address Enabling Behaviors

Our entire S.A.F.E.® Family Recovery Coaching program and intervention process helps families recognize and understand their enabling behaviors when we enable people to disable their ability to do something different. When we enable people, we validate their negative behavior. When somebody engages in a behavior, they do more of the same behavior if they get a positive outcome. So when you enable and create a system where enabling behaviors produce a positive outcome for negative behaviors in your loved one, you’re preventing them from accepting help or seeing the need to do something different. In the second stage of change, the patient must acquire something called ambivalence. What ambivalence is is seeing the need to do something different. If you’re enabling, you’re comforting them and allowing them to stay where they are. You are not helping them move out and on through the stages of change.

Many say we talked to all these people, and they must want it and hit bottom. If you enable them, you prevent them from wanting help and hitting bottom. The question is, recognizing the enabling behavior is excellent. Most of you know what you’re doing, but understand what it’s doing for your loved one and what it’s giving you. People enable for the same reason people use substances, because it feels good.

So the real question and what we try to accomplish in our curriculum is to help a family understand that their enabling is hurting, but why do you feel the need to do it?

What are you getting from it?

An enabler feels needed in a relationship. An enabler has a purpose, but what an enabler is doing is they’re affecting the entire family, because when an enabler has got all their eggs in one basket, i.e., they’re giving all of their resources and love and attention to the one person who needs help, they forget about everybody else. They forget about their husbands, wives, children, and coworkers. There’s a ripple effect of what ends up happening. So when you recognize you’re enabling, that’s great. Now we have to address it, but the real question is, why are you enabling? And that’s something you’ll learn in our S.A.F.E.® Family Recovery Coaching program, and you’ll know that we can still help you and your loved one by changing why you’re enabling and stripping away your enabling and learning something called detachment. Because until you hold them accountable and until they see a negative consequence to their negative behaviors, they’re not gonna stop. Enabling prevents that.