Love Isn’t Always Support.
There were many times in my life where I believed I was helping people, or that is what I told myself, at least. This is a subject I have struggled with for decades and I still have a hard time
I believed loyalty meant staying. I believed love meant fixing. I believed strength meant carrying more. And if something fell apart, I could fix it, just at the cost of my credit or whatever it may have been.
It took me years to understand that helping and enabling can look almost identical — especially when fear, trauma, and attachment are involved.
Most people who enable don’t do it because they don’t care — in fact, it is the exact opposite. They do it because they care deeply. That’s what makes the difference between helping and enabling so confusing — but also so important.
On the surface, both can look like kindness. Both can look like loyalty. Both can look like love. We step in because we care. We intervene because we’re scared. We tell ourselves that if we just help one more time, things will be okay.
Throughout my own traumatic years, I’ve had more experience with enabling and codependency than I’d like to admit — something I’ll weave through as we move forward.
I can’t count the number of times I probably hurt more than I helped — and it’s a question I’ve wrestled with for a long time: where is that fine line?
Some of the hardest lessons I’ve learned came from realizing that love alone doesn’t fix any problem when accountability is not present.
What Support (Helping) Looks Like
Healthy support strengthens someone’s ability to function, grow, and take responsibility.
Support might look like:
- Encouraging treatment or outside help
- Having honest conversations
- Setting clear expectations, boundaries, and—when appropriate—helping set up a care or action plan
- Allowing natural consequences
- Offering emotional presence without solving the problem
- Standing beside someone — not carrying them
Support can feel uncomfortable in the moment. But it creates long-term strength. A good question to ask yourself is if you are standing by them in support or trying to fix the problem through the process.
What Enabling Looks Like
Enabling, by definition, is when you shield someone from the natural consequences of their actions, unintentionally allowing harmful behavior to continue. Enabling removes consequences in ways that allow harmful patterns to continue.
When there is no consequences, why would their actions change if they benefit from it?
Enabling might look like:
- Repeatedly fixing the same crisis
- Paying for the same mistake, repeatedly
- Lying or making excuses
- Protecting someone from the results of their behavior
- Avoiding or not setting boundaries to keep the peace
- Doing for someone what they are capable of doing themselves
Enabling often feels like relief in the moment but it quietly prolongs the cycle of getting better in a major way if they have someone that will continue to enable their negative behaviors.
Codependency
Codependency, by definition, is an unhealthy relational pattern where someone’s self-worth becomes tied to the role of rescuing or fixing others. It’s harmful not only to the person being enabled—preventing their growth—but also to the enabler, creating emotional exhaustion, anxiety, and burnout. It can look like feeling responsible for their emotions, over-functioning while they under-function, or fearing abandonment or tragedy if you stop helping.
I’m far too familiar with codependency. Through therapy, I have learned that the habit started forming as a young child through that trauma and wanting to fix everything, myself as a teen, and my toxic relationships as an adult. I used to joke about my “type”: no car, no job, no house, lives with his parents, just got out of jail—back the U-Haul up! I can’t tell you how many people heard that joke, and sadly, it was not far from the truth. I was the most codependent person I knew. Codependency isn’t just needing someone; it’s losing yourself in saving them. It’s needing someone to help someone who can’t help themselves and ignoring your own needs.
“Codependence implies that the loved ones of addicts, due to their underlying, often unconscious “childhood issues” tend to, as adults, give too much and love too much. Thus, they attract, enable, and enmesh with addicted partners.”— Robert Weiss
Often times, codependency seems to get confused with dependency. The difference between codependency and simple dependence is that dependence is needing help, while codependency is needing to be needed. In codependence, helping isn’t a role; it becomes a person’s identity.
“Codependency is when you’re overly invested in the feelings and outcomes of the people in your life to the detriment of your own internal peace.”
– Terri Cole
Setting Boundaries
In 2020, while I was in the treatment that saved my life, my counselor asked me to set a boundary with my father (among a couple others): he had to stay sober, including alcohol, for two years before we could reconnect, and there are reasons for that. During my time at Valley Hope is when I realized, no matter who it is, I don’t have to allow toxicity in my life. If I did, my life would stay toxic. While recovery teaches forgiveness, forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing harm or toxicity to stay in your life.
You can and should forgive…. but don’t forget. Forgiving doesn’t always mean letting people back into your life. Since I’ve cut out most toxic relationships, my life is more peaceful than it has ever been in a social aspect. I have no hard feelings, but I keep a very small tribe but it’s a tribe I fully trust. And I could never say that about everyone in my life.
Don’t get me wrong — holding those boundaries has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I’ve cut ties with every close friendship I once had, for different reasons. I haven’t had a civil conversation with my father since 2019. And that decision has changed the outcome of many relationships in my life, some I can never fix; but it is a boundary I HAVE to hold for my own sanity.
Someone once asked me, “Do you not have a heart? How is it so easy for you to just cut people out of your life like nothing?”, or at least very similar to that.
That question hit me hard in the gut — it did hurt — especially because it came from someone I loved dearly.
Believe me, it isn’t easy. But it just isn’t that simple; life isn’t that simple.
The irony is, I never cut people out before I learned my worth. I stayed. I folded. I bent until I broke more times than I can count. People don’t understand until they have stood in those broken shoes. As hard as it’s been to stick to my boundaries — and not fold the way I always did in the past — holding them has kept my self-worth intact. And that’s what it is really about.
“Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and wont accept.”
– Anna Taylor
Boundaries are vital—without them, people easily manipulate. Boundaries might be saying no, setting conversation limits, or requiring respect, etc. In the end, boundaries separate support from harm and protect both parties.
Holding boundaries feels so hard because deep down, when things go bad, we want to protect others or fix the problem, to avoid conflict and/or guilt when it doesn’t turn out okay. Sometimes whatever we try to fix gives us a temporary sense of relief or good feeling but the probability of it happening again is high. Or if we don’t fix it, we get the guilt trip or it becomes our fault, the scapegoat. At some point, we have to learn that we can’t save other people. They have to want to be okay too. The expectation that we will fix everything is not fair to us and it often looks like manipulation and gaslighting. It also often looks like insanity (doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome).
We may have learned that love equals self-sacrifice during our life. But boundaries aren’t rejection—they’re self-respect. Even when boundaries are uncomfortable, they create healthier relationships in the long run. With time, people normally find that boundaries don’t push people away—they help you care for yourself and others in a more genuine and healthy way.
“Boundaries are not walls, they are survival.”
– Melody Beattie
When You Stop Enabling and Something Bad Happens
When you hold to a boundary and something bad happens, it’s incredibly easy to blame yourself, especially when it’s tragic. But the truth is, even if you had continued enabling, the outcome likely would have been the same. If it didn’t happen at that time, it will most likely happen once you are not there. Eventually, it will most likely happen, because you can’t always be there. You can’t control or save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. It’s hard when you care deeply, but accepting that their choices are theirs is key, no matter how badly it may hurt.
Your boundaries protect you, and you are not to blame for another’s path. Please hear that. Because the devil on your shoulder will tell you it’s your fault when your worst nightmare happens…. You may tell yourself things such as, you didn’t do enough, you could have made a difference, if you would have woke up a little earlier than that would have had a different outcome…… don’t do that to yourself. And if you do not set boundaries, it can often take you down a dark path as well.
“The simple truth is that loved ones of active addicts are perpetually in crisis mode. Naturally, they try to control the crisis. In the process, they sometimes panic and make bad decisions. They may overdo. They may help too much. They may help ineffectively. They may enable and appear to be pathologically enmeshed. But that does not mean they are psychologically disordered.”—Robert Weiss
Final Closing
Love doesn’t mean it’s your responsibility to rescue someone who isn’t willing to rescue themselves.
Sometimes love looks like honesty.
Sometimes love looks like accountability.
Sometimes love looks like a boundary.
You cannot control someone else’s choices. You cannot save someone who doesn’t truly want to be saved.
What you can do is protect your peace.
What you can do is choose clarity over chaos.
What you can do is stop confusing self-sacrifice with love.
Helping builds resilience for your loved one.
Enabling continues the insanity of the cycle.
And sometimes the most loving thing you can do — for them and for yourself — is step back, as hard as it may be. Everyone is responsible for themselves first; you can only help if someone wants to be helped, and when that happens, they need to do the work.
Thanks for reading this week! Talk soon!
“When you say Yes to others make sure you are not saying No to yourself.”
– Paulo Cohelo
Sources Used To Write Blog: American Psychological Association (APA); SAMHSA; National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA); National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI); Mayo Clinic; Beattie (1986); Cloud & Townsend (1992).
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