Can enabling your partner lead to an unhealthy codependent relationship?

Many experts say that this happens very often.

Enabling begins with good intentions. Though you desire to help your significant other with a challenge, addiction, or mental health condition, things often go awry. Over time, offering help repeatedly only encourages the problem behavior.

Why Does Codependency Happen?

Codependency results when the enabled person never experiences consequences. Enabling rescues them so often that they lean into your unbalanced connection. They do this with respect to their primary problem and soon they allow you to manage their life in other ways, as well.

If you find that your current relationship isn’t your first experience with codependency, you should know that this pattern occurs as some people consistently seek partners to “fix”.  Thus, you may find that enabling is part of your relationship pattern when codependency happens again and again.

Signs of Codependency

If you are in a codependent relationship, you likely find you are compulsively trying to meet your partner’s needs. Moreover, you may continue to give up on meeting your own needs at all. 

Do these common signs of codependency ring true?

• You stop everything to help your partner
• You only have  joint friends and pastimes
• Your loved one’s unhealthy or destructive actions are reasoned away
• You protect your partner from  the consequences of their problematic behavior
• You lack the ability to set boundaries and communicate openly
• Your anger rises when your offers of help are rejected
• You remain loyal regardless of your own emotional or physical safety

Interested in learning more about dealing with enabling and codependency in your relationship? Please read more here: What’s the Link Between Codependency and Enabling?