If you love someone who's struggling with addiction, someone has probably already told you you're enabling them. Maybe it was a friend, a counselor, or your own voice after you sent just one more payment you swore would be the last.
You want to help without making things worse, but no one seems able to tell you where that line is. Let me start with a story that has nothing to do with addiction.
When one of my kids was a preschooler, he developed a significant speech impediment. My mama-heart broke when I realized that my bubbly, silly, sweet boy was actually beginning to avoid speaking altogether because it was stressful and hard.
Not only did I hate watching his current struggle, but like most loving moms, I created fear fantasies of where this may lead:
What if he gets made fun of as he gets older? What if this has long-term consequences on his confidence? What if he never outgrows it?
I wanted to remove every obstacle from his path. To intervene early with the best help possible.
Spoiler alert: I signed him up for speech therapy. It's what most involved, motivated parents would do. Not shocking.
I brought him to his weekly appointments, worked with him on the homework the speech therapist gave us, and gradually, over about a year's time, the therapy began to work.
Enabling isn't a dirty word
So let's start here: Enabling is not a dirty word. It just means "creating opportunity."
A wheelchair enables improved mobility; a tutor enables a better understanding of algebra. And the desire to create opportunities for the people you love is the most natural of instincts.
No one told me, "Hey Karen, you shouldn't enable your preschooler by signing him up for speech therapy. You should really go with a tough love approach." That would be crazy!
It is with this same fundamental logic that most families are approaching their loved one's addiction: We want to remove obstacles for them. We want to help them in the best way possible.
"But our situation is unique!"
When families come to me, there is often already a degree of shame (or they have been shamed by others) that they are enablers to their addicted loved one. And therefore, they often arrive already playing defense: "You have to understand, our circumstances are unique!"
Truth be told, many families have a number of pretty darn understandable (and sometimes pretty unique) reasons why they have been enabling their loved one in addiction. Let's look at four families and the different, perhaps unique, reasons they enable:
Family 1: Our son was adopted and has abandonment issues. We never want him to feel abandoned again.
Family 2: My daughter has a felony drug charge, so no one will hire her. What choice do we have but to pay her bills?
Family 3: We put our adult son up in his own apartment so our other, younger children aren't exposed to his chaos.
Family 4: Our marriage is set up where my husband is the breadwinner and I am a stay-at-home mom. I don't even know what leaving would look like.
So, let's acknowledge the dilemma before we look at any solutions:
One side of the dilemma: These reasons (and many others) are valid reasons to feel paralyzed from setting boundaries, making demands for change, or frankly feeling empowered to do much at all other than to let your loved one's addiction run the show!
The other side of the dilemma: Unlike a preschooler's speech impediment, addiction happens to be a disease that fuels itself off of the enabling of others.
Why addiction turns help into fuel
Let me break that down a bit more. There are many struggles we could watch a loved one face: a cancer diagnosis, a job layoff, or a difficult divorce.
In these and many other situations, it would make all the sense in the world to step in and help that person for a bit while they get back on their feet. And when the worst is over, they would likely say, "Thank you for supporting me through that tough time. I can now pick back up from here!"
A healthy adult brain is designed to restore balance again as soon as possible because a healthy brain prioritizes values like integrity, honesty, work ethic, and personal responsibility.
However, as addiction progresses, the addicted person's brain gradually pivots away from value-based behavior (driven by the prefrontal cortex) and becomes more determined by short-term gratification and primal instincts (driven by the limbic system).
Fascinatingly, you can even see this difference on the brain scan of a healthy vs. addicted person's brain. We are talking hard science! The more primal behaviors of the addicted brain lead to impulsivity, dishonesty, high-risk behavior, and often chaos.
As we discussed above, when the family steps in, the instinct is to create opportunity for the loved one to get back on track. This could look like anything from bailing them out of legal, financial, or personal consequences, protecting the loved one's image, or stepping in to "adult" on their loved one's behalf while the loved one continues to use/drink.
But unlike the healthy brain, the addicted brain will respond by saying, "Oh, that's awesome! Thanks for taking care of that for me! Now I have more time/resources to get high or drunk!"
This is not a personality flaw of the person—it's a predictable feature of what the disease does to a person's brain in addiction.
So ironically and often unintentionally, the family (the #1 cheerleaders for their loved one's success) can become the very fuel that escalates the disease's power.
This would be like if I (as the family member) had unknowingly brought my preschooler to a terrible speech therapist every week who secretly gave my son exercises to make his speech problems worse! I would be doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing to create opportunity for him, and I wouldn't understand why he was getting worse, not better.
Addiction is like a sadistic speech therapist—convincing the family, "Keep coming every week! I swear he'll get better soon!"
How to help without enabling: detach from the disease, not the person
So what options do families have?!
You may have heard of the term Detaching with Love. In talking with many families, I find this to be a deeply misunderstood concept. Families often pick this term up along the way with only a partial or distorted view of what it truly means.
Here are some misperceptions I've heard:
It sounds too much like abandonment.
It's the same as "tough love."
It feels controlling—like I'm trying to blackmail him until he does what I want.
It's like an empty ultimatum.
Fortunately, it's none of these things.
I like to think of Detaching with Love as having two distinct parts: Detaching from my behaviors that fuel the disease (driving them to that nasty speech therapist) WHILE loving the authentic person (the preschooler) that is likely suffering underneath that addiction.
The hardest part of this work for families can be understanding which of their behaviors fuel the disease versus which behaviors demonstrate love to the person. This disease has a way of running circles around the family and leaving them feeling like they can't tell upside-down from sideways.
For this reason, objective support systems (like Al-Anon and therapy with an addiction specialist) are key to unraveling our own decision making and behavior in response to our addicted loved one. It's also the heart of what we work through together in Empowering Families That Face Addiction, my private online course for families.
What helping the person can look like
Asking "What's your plan?" and really listening, instead of handing them yours
Offering a ride to an appointment they made, rather than making it for them
Sharing a meal or a walk together, even in a week when you've said no to paying the rent
Keeping the number for a treatment program close at hand for the moment they ask
Saying "I love you, and I believe you can handle this," and meaning both halves
None of these is a rule. What fits depends on your family, your values, and what you can actually stand by. There's no single right answer for every family, or even for every week.
Questions to ask before you step in
If you are early in your journey of understanding enabling and detachment with love, here are a few questions to reflect on:
Whose problem is this, really?
In what ways am I working harder than my addicted loved one at getting their life back on track?
When I'm responding to my addicted loved one's behavior, in what ways do I jump in to keep them comfortable in the short term? In what ways do I allow them to face their own natural consequence so they grow in the long term?
What value do I want to guide this decision?
What would I have to change in myself to hold compassion for them when they are struggling but not step in to fix it for them?
"But how will they ever get better if I stop helping?"
Let's circle back one last time to my speech therapy analogy. You may be thinking: I don't understand! How will my loved one ever have an opportunity to get better if their disease is trying to make them worse, and I'm not allowed to step in and help?
If so, what a fair question. One "bad apple" speech therapist wouldn't have kept me from getting help for my kid either!
Here's the answer. For this particular problem that your loved one is facing (not cancer, not being laid off, not going through a tough divorce), but addiction—Detachment with Love IS the best opportunity a family can create for their loved one to eventually find recovery, accept help, and heal.
While scientists and researchers continue to explore ways to address addiction biologically, we don't have a medical cure at this time. What we do know, though, is that the limbic system (the driver of addiction) responds to consequences.
That means that when a substance abuser hates the consequences of their addiction enough (legal problems piling up, health beginning to decline, relationships suffering, and so on), the limbic system is far more likely to change strategy and seek reward from something different—recovery.
An addicted person truly has to be ready to get help him/herself, but the family's loving detachment can be a major player in allowing this new course to unfold. It's not creating the change for your loved one…it's lovingly getting out of the way so he/she can find the change themselves.
We shift from "No problem, I'll solve that for you!" to "My heart hurts seeing you struggle in this way—but your consequences are yours."
If the loved one begins to show genuine interest in getting help (not just lip service), at that point, the family can decide if they are willing to play a role in this process—whether that means emotionally, financially, and/or logistically. But the truth is, many recovering substance abusers believe that even recovery has to fully be the responsibility of the recovering person for it to truly work.
One important note: letting consequences land is never the same as ignoring danger. If someone's life is at risk, call 911, or call or text 988.
What becomes possible
As families begin to learn the art of detaching with love, the stakes can feel high and the rules of engagement can feel confusing. If "loving someone" and "always keeping them comfortable" have always felt like one and the same, then loving detachment can, at first, feel a lot like you're abandoning them.
We grow to understand, though, that it's just a different way of loving them, one that is far healthier and more sustainable for both you and them.
As families progress through this transformation, I find that they shift from "You don't understand, our circumstances are unique! We have no choice" to "We don't understand how we lived that way for so long—held hostage by their addiction. We never want to go back!"
They have come to understand that while their circumstances may indeed be unique, this disease responds to enabling the same way for everyone—and therefore change is necessary.
Not sure which of your ways of helping are feeding the disease? My free 15-minute mini-session walks you through the "co-addiction stew," the four predictable ingredients that pull loving families off course, so you can start to see the pattern in your own home before deciding what to do about it.
This post is educational and isn't a substitute for therapy. For guidance specific to your situation, please talk with a licensed professional in your area.