Are You Enabling Addictive Behavior?

Hello and welcome to our video all about enabling behaviors. In fact, we're going to cover 3, plus I added 2 more for you, a couple of bonuses, behaviors that sometimes family members do that absolutely sabotage the recovery process. And this topic recommendation actually came from one of our viewers named Paige, and Paige asked me to talk about What happens when one family member continues to allow the addictive person to manipulate them and how that not only just affects the person with the addiction, but also how that affects everyone else in the family. So we're going to talk about these sort of enabling behaviors, but also the ramifications of that. If you're new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth. And this channel, this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you can get 5 steps ahead of it and get back to living the life that you want to live. All right, back to our topic. Now make sure as we go through, if you're watching live, make sure to put your comments and questions over to the side. And once I cover the information, I'll come back and answer those just because I'm not good at going back and forth. I get all distracted. All right, here we go. So the enabling things I'm going to give you in this video are actually different than the enabling things that I usually give you. I try to talk normally about enabling ways that people enable that most people maybe like the uncommon, not really uncommon ones, but the ones that people don't recognize as much. And today we're going to talk a little bit more on the On the, what I call the good guy role. So the first enabling thing that sometimes one family member will do that counteracts everything everyone else is trying to do is that they'll get into this good guy role. And I see this very commonly with maybe if it's a person who has an addiction and there's 2 parents, one of the parents will be the bad guy, which is an enabling thing to do. I talk about that on other videos about enabling, but also overly playing the good guy role is enabling in more of that really traditional sense of the word. And so you frequently have this good cop, bad cop dynamic that develops in addicted families. If you're the extreme bad cop, you're enabling, but if you are the extreme good cop, you are enabling as well. Another time when I see this situation really frequently is if the person struggling with an addiction is a spouse. And what will happen is the spouse will get really upset with them because of the addiction, but then that spouse will go and talk to their parents, their own biological parents, and pit them against the spouse. And so of course you always want to believe your child and you always want to think, oh, their husband or their wife, they're just ridiculous and their expectations are too high. And you want to blame it on the spouse because that's what the addicted person is doing. And I hear this a lot, like, what do I do if my husband's parents keep enabling him? What do I do if my wife's parents just Keep enabling and the spouse feels really stuck and powerless. That one brings me to my second example, which is allowing the addicted person to split you against the other members of the family. Let me tell you what, I've done this myself before in counseling sessions, especially early on when you listen to the person that has an addiction and they're all They're complaining about this person in their life and how mean they are. And you can fall into that and you can start to overly align with them around that piece of information, not really recognizing that their viewpoint on the situation is probably a little bit distorted. And the reason it's so easy to fall into this one is because they believe it. So they have a lot of emotional charge that comes along with what they're telling you, which makes it that much more believable. That's why in our We want to see the whole family system because otherwise I would probably fall into this more often than not. If I don't have that other, those other pieces of information to keep me balanced, it's easy to fall into their narrative. I call it the story that they're telling themselves that allows them to keep using. And so we see this again with parents a lot. Like if it's a child who's using, they'll get the parents split into this good cop, bad cop scenario, and then they'll constantly go over to this parent and complain about the bad cop one. And they know, you can see with married people what one gets aggravated with the other one about stuff, and they'll use that information to split the parents against each other. So they'll go to the good cop and complain about how mean and unfair the bad cop parent is. And if this one that the person's going to isn't very careful, they're going to fall into that. And so they're going to start working against this person over here. And the more they do that, the more this person over here becomes more of the bad cop, and then you get this seesaw effect, right? As long as you are allowing the addiction to keep the family split, the addiction will live. The most important thing is for the family to get in alignment about how to deal with the situation. It's really the first thing that we address in our office. Campbell or Kim or Scott, one of our family recovery people, they will immediately start to work to get the whole family system on board with how to go forward. Because like I said, as long as they're split, as long as you got a good cop and a bad cop and somebody that's rescuing over here, you're going to keep enabling this behavior. You're basically almost like interfering with the natural consequences, right? Even if you don't want to play the bad cop, which you guys know, I feel like that's too. You still don't have to feed into their story. You don't have to fall for it hook, line, and sinker. You can listen to them. You can say, man, that sounds hard. You can say some empathetic statements, but be really careful that you're not allowing this person to split you against the other family members. I mean, you could be thinking, well, their wife is just so mean and naggy. I think I'd drink too. If you start listening to their narrative, that's what you're going to think. So you got to be very, very careful. Which leads me to the number 3 way that some family members will enable, which is making excuses for the person. A lot of times there probably are reasons why someone fell into an addiction, and it's not necessarily their fault that they got addicted. However, if you continue to make excuses for the addiction, They're not likely to take responsibility for it and address it. For example, excuses that I hear a lot is I'll hear, oh, when I was that age, I did that too. Boys will be boys. That's a super common one, right? Or there's a college student, every college student does that, right? It's not that big a deal. It's just developmental, an excuse. Or you know what? They went through something really terrible in their childhood and they just can't cope with it. And I know that this Substance use is the way that they're coping with it. There may be some truth in that, but continuing to allow that excuse to work is going to keep the person stuck in the addiction role or in the addiction problem. And not only that, but as long as you're doing that, as long as you're over here on this good guy train, you're making everyone the bad guy. And that's not fair. It's not easy to be the bad guy. It's not easy to hold the hard limits. And you need to ask yourself, what's really going on here? Is it that I don't want to have the courage to hold the boundary? Thereby I'm enabling this person, which then is making everyone else's life that much harder. I've seen spouses do this for the other spouse, right? Like sometimes the kids are really angry about what's going on. Maybe the kids are really angry because mom is Drinking and she's really mean to dad and really mean to the kids, but dad keeps making an excuse for mom. And the more that dad does that, the more angry that the kids get. And then you have this split divide situation in the family. So this good cop role over here is undermining basically any kind of natural consequence that could occur. Another way that families do this is that they just sort of always bail the person out. That could mean they always give them the money to fix the problem. That could mean that they literally bail them out of jail every time. It can mean any number of situations. You know what one of the worst ones is? Is like the person goes to treatment and they're calling their loved one and they're like, come get me. I'm not doing this. I want to come home. And one loved one's trying to be really tough, but then they call up grandma, right? And then grandma goes and picks them up. Oh my gosh, that is so frustrating, right? I talked to a person earlier this week who was calling about a sibling issue, and I do get this from time to time. It's like a brother or a sister calls me and they want to know what to do about their brother or sister's substance use. It's always interesting to me because I'm like, why are you the one calling? Why isn't their spouse calling or their parent calling? Well, sometimes there's not a spouse or a parent, and then it would make sense that The brother or sister will be calling. But a lot of times I have found that when this is happening, it's like the parent doesn't want to step up to the plate and hold the boundary. The parent is being the enabler, and that leaves the brother or the sister having to do all the hard work and play the bad cop role. Completely unfair. I really feel bad when I see this because it's bad enough if it's your spouse or if it's your kid, but having to step in and try to help a sibling When there's a parent that's enabling, that's almost nearly impossible, right? It's like as long as there's this other way, other way out other than recovery or taking, at least taking steps in the direction of recovery, right? Even if it's not, I'm getting all the way sober, but something, as long as there's an escape route, they're going to take that escape route. So you've got to be really careful about that. Now, Another way that, and this is probably, this one really probably is at the crux of all the other ones that I just named, but another way families enable is that they just flat out refuse to admit that it is addiction that they're dealing with, right? They want to call it something else. They want to call it age. They want to call it work stress. They want to call it problems with the family. They want to call it childhood trauma. Like I said, it's not that any of those things aren't relevant, but again, it's making an excuse for it. The reason why it's really important to accept that you're dealing with addiction, because there's certain ways that you fix addiction problems, right? It's a certain set of steps that you need to take. And if you won't acknowledge that it's addiction, you're probably not taking those steps. You're probably taking other steps to solve these other problems that you're calling the problem, which aren't the right steps, right? If you're calling it, well, the person's just drinking too much because they're really stressed at work, then you're going to spend all of your time dealing with the stress, which could be helpful to some degree, but is not ultimately solving the problem. In fact, sometimes you're making it worse because like I said, you're feeding into their own rationalizations and justification. So you have to be So careful about that. Now, one way that we teach people how to intervene with addicted loved one is our Invisible Intervention. Some of you guys are probably in our Invisible Intervention, and that is our way of intervening with someone who has an addiction. We call it invisible because it's sort of behind the scenes. It's not the whole like get the whole family in the room, get in a circle and read the letters kind. It's a process that happens. And one of the great things about this is it's a systematic process that if you're in the Invisible Intervention, you get the whole family on board for us. Like you can all do it together. And that way there's like a roadmap, a clear and precise, this is what we're doing. And let me tell you what, Invisible Intervention is really effective as it is because it uses the 2 most effective research-proven effective methods out there. But if you get several members of the family doing this at once, the addiction is done for because you got it trapped up. There is no, This person's going to get better if everybody gets on the same page. The faster that happens, the faster the person is going to get better. Even if everybody gets in the good guy role, I'm good with that. What doesn't work is the good cop, bad cop scenario. Everybody either has to get on the bad cop line, or everybody either has to get on the good cop line or find something in the middle. But as long as you have that split dynamic in families, You're in trouble and that will allow addiction to continue to grow and thrive. And it splits the whole family apart and it's unfair for the rest of the family to have to deal with the consequences of it or clean up the messes of it or always have to make the hard decisions. So you got to think not only is the choice to enable not the best thing to do for the person, but it's not the best thing to do for anyone involved in the situation. All right, let's take a look at some of our comments, questions, and concerns. I know that this is a slightly different take on enabling than I usually take. Let's see, Tara was our first one in here. Hey Tara. Tara says, patiently waiting, has a daughter 11 days clean today, but walked out of Isaiah's house last Sunday. She's still in Kentucky, but I'm afraid to go and get her. She's with fam. Okay, so that's kind of one of these situations where you're trying to draw the lines like, I'm not going to come get you, but the other family member is letting them in. That could definitely count exactly in what we're talking about today. Now, before I move forward, I need to tell you this warning. When I decided I was going to do this discussion for today, one of the things that came to my mind was I was like, you know what? I'm going to be talking about this and some of my viewers are going to be like, oh yeah, I'd tell you who does that. This person, I'm going to send them this video. Listen to me, people. I love that you share my videos. Share my videos. It is super helpful. It's helping us spread recovery, but never share my videos as a weapon. If you're trying to get someone to get on board with you, then pick one of the videos that I have that you feel like is going to make the other person feel understood. Not a video that I have That you feel like it's going to make the other person feel defensive or under attack. So I know a lot of you're listening to this and you're like, oh yeah, she always plays the good guy and that's not fair. And that's why this addiction's going on. You're going to want to send this video. Don't send this one first, right? Send one that they're going to connect to and then work up to this one. Once a person is kind of coming along and they're thinking, that was just a fair warning I had before you do it. Hey, Vicki and Suffering Succotash. And we have a Vicki from South Dakota and a Vicki from London. Hey, that's really cool. Let's see what Kimberly says. Thank you for the topic. Seems so difficult to navigate through. It really is. The key to it is the family getting lined up on the same page. I say this all the time. I'd rather you make the wrong decision united than a split decision. That will not work when one's trying to go this way and one's trying to go that way. Get lined up if at all possible. Now I do have a video, another video that's about what do you do when the other person won't get lined up? And sometimes what you have to do in the worst case situation is you have to just let them deal with it until they get burned enough times that they get on board, right? The longer you try to argue with the good cop, the longer that supports the narrative that the addicted person's telling them that you're crazy and you're mean and you're almost validating what they're hearing. So sometimes you just got to hands off of it. it, right? If they want to buy them 5 cars and let them total it, maybe on the 6th one they'll be like, you know what? I'm tired of doing this. And then they'll get on board. Hey Connie. Let's see. I kept making excuses for his addiction because he was depressed and didn't really want to see how bad his addiction was as time went on. That is a really common one, Anna, and I'm glad that you said that. I have a whole video about how people hide behind Other mental health problems to keep their addiction going. And I know that's controversial. The video's not saying that they don't have the mental health problems. The video's talking about they'll hide behind that as a reason to not address the addiction. And whatever mental health problem that you have will only ever be made worse by addiction. No addiction has ever made a mental health problem better. It just doesn't. It may give a person a temporary relief feeling from some of the symptoms, but in the long run, it's making whatever that problem is worse and worse and worse. So it's just a really ineffective strategy. So don't fall into that line of thinking. Doesn't mean you have to say you're not really anxious or you're not really depressed, but the situation is, is just this is not the most effective way to address that. So you have to let your— stop letting yourself get manipulated by that. Sherry says, do you treat people out of town? Sherry, we do offer some coaching and consultation sessions, mostly to family members for advice. We try to listen to your situation and find out all the details about what's going on and give you some guidance on maybe what your next step is. And if you're watching on YouTube, there's a link in the description for that. It's called a strategy session, and you can check that out if you want more information. It's exhausting trying to convince my husband's family of the reality of what's happening and how to stop enabling. I recognized the futility and had to leave feeling like the bad guy and all the blame was on me. It really sucked. It's sometimes you have this other family member enabling like that, Elise, and it really is almost an impossible situation because as long as they have this escape route over here, It's just never, you're just never going to, you're never going to get there. And it is frustrating. And sometimes the best thing to do is just let that person live with the addicted loved one. They'll eventually see it. Oh, you know, another one I forgot to mention that I see a lot is when a young person, like a teenager or like a young adult, is struggling with an addiction and they are complaining constantly about their family. This one makes me crazy mad. I really hate this one worse than any of them. And somebody else's mom, like their best friend's mom, wants to intervene and is like, well, come over here. You can stay over here with me and your mom's so mean. This makes me really mad because it's like, oh, this mom over here thinks they know better about how to help your child than you know. I don't know why that just gets under my skin. I just don't like that. Now that, if you're the parent, is Infuriating, right? Not only are you worried about your kid who has an addiction, but you have this other grown person over here intervening, keeping the whole problem going. Oh my goodness. It's just maddening. Don't even, don't, I can't even talk about it without saying bad words. So I'm just going to move on. Oftentimes I find myself acting like a good cop to avoid the confrontation. Avoiding confrontation feels like I'm enabling and honestly about keeping their behavior keeps peace, but feels I'm glad you said that, Vero. Sometimes you want to avoid confrontation because that's your strategic plan. Like a lot of the invisible intervention will show you how to avoid confrontation. And so if you're doing that with a plan for a reason, you're just saying, you know what? I know they're intoxicated right now, but I'm not going to start arguing about it because that's going to hinder the recovery process. Then that's a strategic plan. But if you're just not doing it because you're walking on eggshells and you're scared and you just don't want to deal with it, then it probably falls more in the enabling. So it's kind of interesting, right? You can have like 2 people doing the same thing, but for 2 different reasons and ultimately get 2 different results from it. Sometimes it is the wise choice to avoid some of the confrontation. If you are going to confront, there's a better, more effective way to do it than this like really direct head-on challenging way. So it's not necessarily bad do that, but it's kind of like, what's your motive there? Sensible Crime says, oh, I think she's, you must be talking to somebody on up the list there. I'm sorry, interrupt your conversation. Connie says, how often have you seen the adult child deep in addiction and the parent, the addicted adult child's dad or mom joins in and starts using too? I've seen it. My own mom did that with my sister. They used to use together. And sometimes in that situation, it's unclear of who started it. Sometimes the parent has been using and is in an addicted state, and then eventually their child starts using and then they start using together. I rarely see it that the parent never was using anything and then the child was using it and taught the parent to come along. That can happen, but I haven't seen that as much as I've seen the other scenario happen. Let's see here. I lost— oh, here we go. Is continuing to give chances when they say they'll stop enabling? That's a really good question. Most of the time it is going to take multiple Times and efforts to stop. For most people, it takes several tries at getting it. So it depends on what you mean by giving them chances. I'm never going to give up on somebody if it's try number 10,002. I'm like, all right, we're on 10,002. But it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to continue to fix everything for them. It's more of an emotional, like, I can still stand behind you. I can still have your back. I can still encourage you in the right way. But when you're doing things that you ultimately end up regretting and feeling resentful about. For example, if you're paying somebody's electric bill, but then your bills are getting behind, then you're going to end up with a bad feeling. You're going to end up being resentful and it's not going to help the person anyway. So if that's what you mean by stand behind, then yes, but emotionally stand behind and walk with somebody and have empathy and compassion. I feel like that's okay. And you'll be able to better do that if you don't overhelp And overextend yourself. Because when you overextend yourself, then you get really mad and then it's time 5 and you're done and you're out and you can't even emotionally be there for them anymore because you're so mad because they've taken advantage of you. So if you want to be able to make it through all that trial and error, the best thing to do is be super careful about your boundaries. Don't let them overcross your boundaries. Rebecca said he was doing very well and he was called to preach and then had to have surgery in 2016. It's escalated since then because of all the pain pills. That's a tough one, Rebecca. When someone's in recovery, but then they have to have a medical process, especially if they're in recovery from opiates, that's so scary for families and it can definitely reignite an addiction. So that is a tough one. Is the strategy sessions covered by insurance out of town? I live in Las Vegas. No, unfortunately the strategy sessions are Covered by insurance? We actually don't do insurance in our office, but that's a good question. I'm glad you asked it because a lot of people ask that one. Sometimes you gotta hands off. Well said, Amber. Yes, yes. Easier said than done. Ooh, I like that. Thank you. I appreciate that, Joelle. Let's see. My husband wants, my husband wants him out and I keep saying, seeing hope. And plus I feel like it's just smoke being blown up my tail. Is it your husband wants himself out, like out of treatment, or your husband wants like your kid to get out of treatment? I need a little bit more clarity on that. I've covered up for my son and I'm tired of doing that. Yeah, you'll eventually get tired of it if you're the good guy and you cover up. And that's what I say sometimes. If you have this other person out there being a good guy, you're just going to have to let it run its course because probably If you're not in that role anymore, you might have been in the past, right? Until you got burned enough, until you got out of it. So if that's going on, it's not you, but it's someone else. The best thing to do is back up out of it and let, if you have their back long enough and they make you look bad, you're going to quit having their back. Just like Rebecca said, avoiding confrontation can be a very strategic plan. I highly recommend Invisible Inner Origin. Oh, hey, thanks, Joelle. Thanks for the recommendation. She completed it and it was helpful. Sometimes my husband will drink and be in a good mood and we'll have what I call normal conversations. I don't know how to act when he's been drinking, but he's not acting crazy. I feel wrong being nice and engaging because I don't want him to think that I condone drinking, but I also don't want him to be negative because it isn't right either. What's the healthiest way? In the Invisible Intervention, what we teach you to do, Jennifer, is sort of in those situations, we teach you how to be sort of neutral. You want to be positive reinforcement and neutral. And it's really hard for the person with the addiction that sometimes when they drink or use, they're fine, no problems happen. And sometimes when they drink or use, terrible, awful things happen, right? It's unpredictable. But it's also hard for the family too, because sometimes they're just pleasant to be around. Sometimes they're more sociable or talkative and you kind of enjoy them more. And so that can be hard for you to know what to do family member. And I think that's what you're saying, Jennifer. But if you can sort of be neutral, you don't have to argue about it or fight about it or confront it, but just kind of back away from it. Because even though if it's working this time, it can work this time, but it might not work next time. When does it become enough? What if someone says all the right things and acts as if they're motivated about getting clean, but you never actually see The action or effort, or if so, it's minimal. My best answer to that, Sarah, is you're going to be able to tolerate their trial and error for a long time if you're not allowing yourself to be used and abused. So you're going to have a lot more rope when it comes to, you know, like the end of your rope. If you're not using abuse. So eventually you may have to sort of back up if they're sucking you into it. If every time they keep using, it's causing all these terrible things on your life, you may have to figure out how to physically distance yourself or emotionally distance yourself. And there are sometimes when you just really need to walk away from the situation, at least temporary. And that's what our Tuesday video is about. So if you haven't seen that one, go back and check it out because I talk about 4 situations that you really just need to, to get out of, because sometimes there is kind of a line in the sand. She also loves the Invisible Intervention. Well, thank you, Kelly. He isn't holding down a job. He's 37. He does good for a while and then he goes on a binge. Does he, does he get jobs and then he lose them? loses them or he just isn't getting stable long enough to get a job and hold it at all. Many of the things you recommend are like Love and Logic makes me really want to focus on parenting and retrain myself not to control my kids. Let them face their own consequences. Actually, Elise, you're exactly right. The base of my knowledge and experience about how to deal with this comes from the Love and Logic books. That's really where the place that I started when I figured out the techniques that work best. I've read all those. I love those. I'm like a cult fan, right? And that's just good parenting boundaries in general. They're not even about addiction. But if you can understand that philosophy that they teach, that is exactly— Elise is exactly right— what we're teaching you here, right? It's continued empathy, continued concern. Do not play the bad guy, but don't fix it. That's it. That's the plan. So I love the Love and Logic one. So if you haven't seen those, they're really old books. Like I read them forever ago. You can check them out. Thank you everyone who joined us. I will be here next Thursday live, always at 1:00 PM Eastern. And next up, I'm going to give you the link to the Helping Versus Enabling playlist. Let's see if I can actually put it here in chat. Look at me. I feel like a tech guru. There it is for you in the chat, and I will also put it here at the end of the video for those of you watching on replay. See you next time.