How To Support Someone Without Enabling Them, From A Therapist

Have you ever had the urge to help someone you love, followed by a nagging feeling of doubt? Maybe you wondered, "Wait. Am I being supportive here—or am I enabling them?"

If you've ever been in this situation and paused to think about it, that's a great sign. You're examining your motives in context, and you're reflecting on whether an impulse that appears to be "good" is genuinely the right thing to do in a particular situation.

Most of us are conditioned to behave in pro-social ways, to be helpful and "good." At a young age, we learn our behaviors affect those around us for better or worse. And yet it's common to go overboard with what we learn about what it means to be kind, good, helpful, or supportive. We may get into a habit of being too helpful, too focused on others' well-being, too compulsively problem-solving or "good."

There's a big difference between supporting someone and enabling them.

As an example, let's consider a couple named Shania and Louis. Shania works as a TV producer. Louis is a computer programmer frustrated with his stalled career. Shania hires a full-time nanny to look after their 4-year-old twins so Louis can focus on finding a job, but he spends his afternoons playing video games and buying Star Wars paraphernalia online. Shania finds him a therapist and arranges networking dinners for him, but he misses his therapy sessions and doesn't follow up with his professional network.

Shania's attempts to support Louis end up being more enabling than helpful. They reinforce his overreliance on her and underreliance on himself. They also contribute to his low self-esteem. He starts thinking he's not capable of solving his own problems.

Supporting means you offer assistance. You help someone bear the weight or burden of an issue or problem. When you support, you acknowledge the person you're supporting is the master of their own destiny. You have faith in another person's capacity to make their own choices, and also—maybe most importantly—their own mistakes. When someone makes their own mistakes, they have an opportunity to learn from them and to grow.

When Shania realized she was enabling Louis rather than supporting him, she took a different tack. She let him know her boundaries, saying, "Louis, I love you, and I am committed to our relationship. But I can't help you find a job. I also need you to contribute to our family. Either you find temporary work, or we let the nanny go, and you take care of our daughters."

In truth, Shania was afraid Louis would leave her and their daughters. Being supportive rather than enabling raised her anxiety level and left her feeling vulnerable. But she consciously chose to expect more from Louis rather than feeling sorry for him.

Louis got angry, at first. He accused Shania of controlling him. At the same time, he began looking more seriously for a job. After three weeks, he found a part-time job as a software developer. It wasn't ideal, but he took it. Going to work again and interacting with colleagues helped him feel engaged and useful.

Enabling reflects our own discomfort with boundaries, uncertainty, and letting go of an outdated identity. It may appear helpful on the surface, but at a deeper level, it's disempowering—both to those we enable and to ourselves.

Support is an offering we give from a place of strength and generosity, not out of fear or obligation. Supporting someone often has the potential to propel them further than they might have gone without our support.

As the popular saying goes, "Give a person a fish, and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, and they eat for a lifetime."