Enabling

Quality 0.50 · 0 views · Updated 2 months ago

Psychological intervention

title: "Enabling" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["motivation", "counseling", "behavior-modification", "behavioural-syndromes-associated-with-physiological-disturbances-and-physical-factors", "interpersonal-relationships", "narcissism", "abuse"] description: "Psychological intervention" topic_path: "philosophy" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Psychological intervention ::

In psychotherapy and mental health, enabling is an action or deliberate lack of action that directly or indirectly encourages behaviors in others, especially if said behavior is dysfunctional.

Positive

As a positive term, "enabling" describes patterns of interaction which allow individuals to develop and grow in a healthy direction. These patterns may be on any scale, for example within the family.

Negative

In a negative sense, "enabling" can describe dysfunctional behavior approaches that are intended to help resolve a specific problem but, in fact, may perpetuate or exacerbate the problem. A common theme of enabling in this latter sense is that third parties take responsibility or blame, or make accommodations for a person's ineffective or harmful conduct (often with the best of intentions, or from fear or insecurity which inhibits action). The practical effect is that the person themselves does not have to do so, and is shielded from awareness of the harm it may do, and the need or pressure to change. |author=Robert L. DuPont|page=15|date=2000-02-17|publisher=Hazelden |isbn=978-1-56838-363-7}}

Codependency

Codependency is a theory that attempts to explain imbalanced relationships in which one person enables another person's self-destructive behavior such as addiction, substance abuse, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement.

Enabling may be observed in the relationship between a person with a substance use disorder and their partner, spouse or a parent. Enabling behaviors may include making excuses that prevent others from holding the person accountable, or cleaning up messes that occur in the wake of their impaired judgment. Enabling may prevent psychological growth in the person being enabled, and may contribute to negative symptoms in the enabler. Enabling may be driven by concern for retaliation, or fear of consequence to the person with the substance use disorder, such as job loss, injury or suicide. A parent may allow an addicted adult child to live at home without contributing to the household such as by helping with chores, and be manipulated by the child's excuses, emotional attacks, and threats of self-harm.

Abuse

In the context of abuse, enablers are distinct from flying monkeys (proxy abuse). Enablers simply allow (not specifically support) the abuser's own bad behavior while flying monkeys always support and perpetrate bad behavior to a third party on their behalf. Padilla et al. (2007), in analyzing destructive leadership, distinguished between conformers and colluders, in which the latter are those who actively participate in the destructive behavior.

Emotional abuse is a brainwashing method that over time can turn someone into an enabler. While the abuser often plays the victim, it is quite common for the true victim to believe that he or she is responsible for the abuse and thus must adapt and adjust to it.

References

References

  1. [http://www.elinewberger.com/enabling.html elinewberger.com] {{webarchive. link. (2008-02-09 From the page on 'enabling', by Eli H. Newberger, M.D., referenced by that web page to ''The Men They Will Become'' ch.18 "Enabling".)
  2. "The Role of Enabler: Are You Enabling Addiction In The One You Love?".
  3. (2012). "Codependency and Pathological Altruism". Oxford University Press.
  4. Johnson, R. Skip. (13 July 2014). "Codependency and Codependent Relationships". [[BPDFamily.com]].
  5. (17 May 2016). "Are You an Enabler? - Psych Central".
  6. (29 March 2015). "Loved Ones of Addicts May Also Need Help Saying No".
  7. Ziehl N [https://qz.com/852187/coping-with-chaos-in-the-white-house Coping with narcissistic personality disorder in the White House] ''[[Quartz (publication). Quartz]]'' 06 Dec 2016
  8. Padilla, A, Hogan, R & Kaiser, RB 2007, ''[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984307000367?via%3Dihub#bib71 The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments]'', in ''The Leadership Quarterly'', vol. 18, pp. 176–194
  9. Joan Lachkar, How to Talk to a Narcissist (2008). {{isbn. 978-0415958554

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

motivationcounselingbehavior-modificationbehavioural-syndromes-associated-with-physiological-disturbances-and-physical-factorsinterpersonal-relationshipsnarcissismabuse