“Enabling” has become a word people use to criticise each other. It started as a useful idea and has been worn down into an accusation, usually aimed at whichever family member is doing the most.
There is a real distinction underneath, and it can be stated clearly.
The line
Support is anything that makes the person’s life better without making the substance easier.
Enabling is anything that removes a consequence of the substance before it reaches them.
That is it. The test is not how generous the act is, or how it feels. It is whether it stands between the person and the natural result of their own behaviour.
Cooking dinner is support. Phoning their employer with a story about food poisoning is enabling. Both are done out of love; only one blocks information.
Where the folk wisdom goes wrong
“Enabling means being kind.” No. Kindness is not the variable. You can be warm, affectionate and generous while declining to make a single excuse.
“Enabling means giving them money.” Sometimes. Money for food while they are working is not the same act as money that will be spent tonight. The question is always what the specific act intercepts.
“You have to withdraw completely.” This is where the folk version does real damage, because withdrawal is not the opposite of enabling. It is a different mistake.
Miller, Meyers and Tonigan (1999) tested the detachment approach directly: the Al-Anon-based arm of their trial emphasised detachment and powerlessness, and engaged 13% of unwilling drinkers in treatment. CRAFT — which asks family members to stay engaged while changing what they do — engaged 64%.
Detachment is not the answer to enabling. Staying close while stopping the interception is.
What to actually do instead
CRAFT gives four moves, and they work together.
Stop absorbing consequences, without adding punishment. The consequence arrives on its own; your job is simply to stop catching it first. No lecture attached — the lecture is what turns it into punishment and produces defiance.
Make sober life genuinely more rewarding. This is the piece people skip, and it does much of the work. Be warm, available, good company and engaged when they are sober. Be busy, brief and elsewhere when they are not. Not as a punishment — as an honest reflection of what is possible. Right now the substance is the most reliable good thing in their day, and that balance has to change.
Change how you raise it. Short, specific, first-person. I saw this. It frightened me. Here is what I want. Never the accumulated case.
Watch for the windows and have something ready. Openness is brief. A concrete option offered in that hour is worth more than fifty general appeals.
The awkward question about honesty
Families ask whether stopping the lies counts as enabling.
It does — and it is often the hardest one, because the lies are usually protecting other people. Telling the children a softer version. Telling your mother he has flu. Telling the employer he is unwell.
Some of that is legitimate: children need age-appropriate truth, not the whole of it, and privacy is not the same as deceit.
But there is a difference between not volunteering something and constructing a cover story. The cover story is enabling, and it is exhausting, and the person maintaining it is usually the one being told they enable.
For couples in particular
O’Farrell and Fals-Stewart’s work on behavioural couples therapy found that working on the relationship and the drinking together outperformed treating the drinking as one person’s separate problem.
Which is a reframe worth having if you are the spouse: this is not you managing their illness. The relationship itself is part of what is being treated, and your share of it is legitimate work rather than interference.
The part that will surprise you
The trials measured what happened to the family members.
Those who learned this approach were less depressed, less angry, and reported more cohesive and less conflicted households at three and six months — and those gains held whether or not their loved one ever entered treatment.
Copello and colleagues (2005) make the same point from the other direction: a family member is affected in their own right, not just as a route to the person using.
So the honest summary is not “stop enabling and they will get better.” It is: change what you do, and your own life improves measurably — and the odds of them accepting help roughly double or better.
That is a much better offer than the one usually made to families, and it is what a conversation about intervention actually starts with.
References
- Miller WR, Meyers RJ, Tonigan JS (1999). Engaging the unmotivated in treatment for alcohol problems. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 688-697. 10.1037/0022-006x.67.5.688
- Copello AG, Velleman RD, Templeton LJ (2005). Family interventions in the treatment of alcohol and drug problems. Drug and Alcohol Review. 10.1080/09595230500302356
- O’Farrell TJ, Fals-Stewart W (2000). Behavioral couples therapy for alcoholism and drug abuse. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 18, 51-54. 10.1016/S0740-5472(99)00026-4
- Meyers RJ, Wolfe BL (2004). Get Your Loved One Sober. Hazelden. ISBN 978-1-59285-081-5.
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