Amber Hollingsworth (Put the Shovel Down) explains the difference between helping and enabling when a family member struggles with addiction. She promises six scenarios and then describes common enabling behaviors—outing secrets, making excuses, damage-controlling the addicted person's relationships, micromanaging solutions, fighting with other family members about how to respond, and tolerating abuse—contrasting each with more helpful alternatives (don’t cover for them; allow natural consequences; educate yourself; listen empathetically; guide rather than force solutions; set healthy boundaries). She also references an "invisible intervention" process as a resource.
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Alright, in this video, we're going to explore the difference between helping and enabling. Because I know that this is such a hard thing to figure out. Sometimes as a family member who has someone struggling with addiction, you want to help, but you don't want to cross that line into enabling. And in this video, I'm going to help you understand exactly where that line is. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth and you're watching Put the Shovel Down. This channel is all about helping you to understand the science and psychology of addiction. It's my goal to make sure you're always five steps ahead of it so you can get back to living the life that you want to live. Alright, let's get back to our topic of helping versus enabling. I'm going to go through six scenarios. I'm going to tell you what's enabling and what's helping in each of these scenarios. One thing that family members do that's actually quite enabling, that you may not have thought of, is that they sort of out all the addictive person's secrets. So they tell all of the addictive person's business to other people, like family members, church members, friends, and that sort of thing. Now, you may think, well, that's not enabling, but it really is. Because if you're outing someone else's private business, well, they're not going to like it. They're not going to get really, really angry at you. And they're going to use that anger and resentment to fuel their own emotional justification for why to keep using what might be more on the helping end of that spectrum of that issue. What I would tell you is not necessarily to out all their secrets, but if their secrets get out on their own and other people start to know, then don't cover for them. You want to allow this to happen naturally, otherwise the whole situation is going to backfire on you. And the only thing that's going to happen is the person's going to get really angry at you. Here's a super common enabling thing that family members do is they make excuses for their loved ones addiction. Well, it's a stage they're going through, or well, I did that when I was younger, or well, they went through really hard things when they were young, or well, they just have really bad anxiety. You're making excuses for why someone is making a bad decision. Even if any of those things are true, it doesn't justify the addiction. So then what's a better thing to do instead of making the excuses is to Educate yourself about what addiction is and how it works. And guess what, you're doing that right now, so you're already off to a good start. You can check that one and give yourself a plus. Another thing that families do to enable addiction is that they try to damage control for the addictive person's other relationships. So they make up excuses for them, they cover for them at work. You know, if the addicted person is damaging their relationships with the children, maybe they're trying to all the time go behind and patch it up or make it better. Or maybe they're trying to make sure that the addicted person doesn't, you know, totally burn the bridge with a parent or with a probation officer or with a boss. That is an unproductive thing to do because you're not allowing the natural consequences to be happen. Now, like we said earlier, it's not your job to go out there and destroy those relationships or tell the person's business, but it's not your job to fix the problems that they create either. Those are called natural consequences. If they're burning bridges with other people, those are natural consequences. And it's up to that person to fix those problems, not the family member. Now, what you can do that's more in the helping category and not an enabling category, is that when they do damage those relationships or burn bridges and they're talking about it with you, just maybe try to be a little empathetic or understanding and be a good listener when they're talking to you about it. Now, that doesn't mean you have to like totally bind and endorse a false narrative that they're telling themselves, but you can have a little empathy for their side of the situation. It's going to help them figure it out even faster. Now, this next one may seem a little bit obvious. You probably thought about this one. But family members try to tell the other person what to do and how to do it right? It's like you've got this problem, they try to force that on you, that you accept that you have this problem and this is the way to fix it. And this is how I want you to go about fixing it. This sort of micromanaging thing. Now, families do this out of fear. There's some good reasons why they do this. It just doesn't work very effectively. Even if the solutions you have as the family member, even if they're the right solutions, it's more helpful if you can figure out how to guide or influence your loved one into coming up with those solutions for themselves. That's way more effective because chances are they're probably going to resist the idea just because it came from you. Now, if you're really struggling with this and you've got a loved one who's addicted and you're trying to motivate them to make some big changes, then consider looking at our invisible intervention process, because that teaches you the step by step on how to get someone to recognize that they have a problem and come up with their own solutions. I'll put a link in the description in case you want to know more about that. Another thing that families do that's super enabling is that they fight with the other family members and friends and other people that are part of this situation about how to handle the other person's addiction. So it's like the whole family's over here hashing it out, getting all mad at each other, disagreeing on what the problem is, how bad the problem is, and what should be done about it. Now, listen, I get that it is completely maddening when you know your husband or your child or your wife or your sister or whoever it is, they have this terrible addiction and this other person, the family or friend, they're just in complete denial and they're enabling it. I know it's tempting that you just want to get them to see the problem really fast. You want them to be out of denial. But the harder you push on them, the harder you try to make them see it, the longer it's going to take for them to see it. The same way it works with denial. If you have an addiction, it works the same way with the family. The more helpful thing you can do is back up and let them see it for themselves. If they get a front row seat to it, they're going to see it. They're not gonna be able to minimize it or deny it because it's gonna be pretty obvious. Now, of all the enabling things that families do, I really hope that you're not doing this one, because this enabling thing means allowing the addictive person to be abusive towards you. Not all people, but some people with addictions can be really, really nasty and mean. They can be ugly physically, emotionally, financially, in every kind of way. You should not tolerate those kinds of behaviors. It is not okay even if you know they didn't mean it, Even if you know they did it when they were intoxicated. It's still not okay to let someone be abusive to you. It's not good for you and it's not good for them because they're just going to end up hating themselves and being mad at themselves, being full of shame, too. So it's not helping anyone. It's totally okay to be empathetic, but you shouldn't let them be abusive. The helpful thing to do is draw healthy boundaries for yourself. Okay, so up next, I got a couple of videos for you about how to create healthy boundaries.
