When a loved one is going off the rails, how do you love them without enabling their self-destructive behavior?
That’s the question Kim brought to Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak on a recent episode of their More2Life radio show.
When her 25-year-old daughter moved back home after a suicide crisis, Kim and her husband took her in, paid off her debts, covered residential treatment and three months of intensive outpatient therapy, and handed over the keys to one of their cars.
“We’ve been very supportive,” Kim told the Popcaks. “But now she seems to be going off the rails…we’re just kind of not sure where to go from here.”
Where’s the line between supporting a loved one and enabling their harmful behavior? It’s one of the hardest questions in family life. Fortunately, the Popcaks have spent decades helping families work through this dilemma.
When ‘Helping’ Isn’t Authentically Loving
Human beings are hardwired to want to relieve others’ suffering, especially the people closest to us. Usually that works out, but sometimes the way we offer support backfires.
“Love isn’t just about doing what makes people feel better in the moment,” Lisa Popcak said. “It’s a commitment to doing whatever we reasonably can to help someone be their best. And that sounds simple, but it can get so complicated when someone we care about is really hurting, because we tend to focus more on what we need to do to reduce the tension in the moment rather than working for their ultimate good.”
We shift into fix-it mode, taking the responsibility for their decisions off their shoulders and saying yes when we probably should say no.
“We don’t do it because we’re selfish or weak, but because we can’t stand watching someone we love suffer,” Dr. Popcak said. “The clinical word for that is enabling, but what it really means is that we confuse making someone comfortable with actually loving them.”
What inevitably happens next? Our loved one stays stuck and we burn out, which makes the situation worse.
Authentic love means working for the other person’s ultimate good, not just relief in the moment. This is where things get complicated. How do we figure out what authentic love looks like in a particular situation?
An Examination of Conscience for Helpers
Jacob Popcak, a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com, offers a simple starting point: a three-question “helper’s examination of conscience” that cuts through the confusion by getting honest about our motivations and our goals.
1. Am I doing this for them, or to feel better about myself?
Sometimes we convince ourselves that we are doing something for the good of the other person, but in reality, we are more motivated by our own self-interest. That’s why it’s important to explicitly examine our motivations.
Let’s say, for instance, that you really don’t want to stand up to your loved one about their irresponsible or self-destructive behavior. As a Christian, you might tell yourself that you are being loving — carrying your cross, so to speak. But if your real motivation is to avoid the person getting angry at you, then your actions aren’t really oriented towards the other person’s well-being.
“You might be doing it to feel better about you,” Jacob said, “because you don’t want to feel the feelings you associate with someone being angry at you.”
Self-interest takes other forms too — protecting your reputation, advancing your own agenda, or simply nursing the quiet satisfaction of being the person who swoops in and saves the day. None of that is the same as working for someone’s good.
If you really want to help your loved one, stay focused on the question: What do I need to do to help this person to heal and become their best self?
2. What does success look like?
This question helps us reframe our expectations. The truth is, when we stop supporting someone’s harmful behavior and start helping them get to a better place — well, most people on the receiving end of that kind of help aren’t thrilled about it.
“That question helps me to adjust my expectations so that my goal becomes my own virtue, not just getting a positive reaction from the person,” Popcak said.
Depending on the situation, success might look like remaining calm in the face of the other person’s angry reaction. Or if I know I tend to come off as condescending and preachy, success might look like delivering a tough message in a more neutral way.
Reframing your definition of success is all about recognizing what you can control and what you can’t. You can control your own behavior; you can’t control what the other person does.
It also means the intervention doesn’t fail just because the other person gets angry, refuses to cooperate, or walks away from the conversation. If you showed up with integrity — calm, honest, respectful — you did your job. Their reaction is theirs to own.
3. Am I speaking with the love due to a child of God?
Examining your motives and freeing yourself from the need for a positive reaction doesn’t give you permission to be cold, blunt, or self-righteous. The person you’re confronting is a child of God, and they deserve to be treated as one, regardless of what they’ve done or how they’ve responded to your efforts.
As Jacob Popcak puts it: “The first two questions are not a carte blanche license to speak however I want to and say, ‘Well, if they’re mad at me, it’s just because they can’t handle the truth.’ I am, as a Christian, still obliged to ask myself this third question.”
Help That Actually Helps
Kim and her husband had already done so much. The question wasn’t whether they loved their daughter, but whether their love was being directed well. Asking yourself these three questions not just once, but as you continue to accompany your loved one, will make the journey easier for both of you in the long run.
“The best way to make sure that we’re loving responsibly is to keep asking God, how do you want me to work for their good, given everything that I’m seeing?” Dr. Gregory Popcak said. “Let the answer to that prayer, not our guilt or sentiment or panic or fear, guide what to do next.”
For more on loving the difficult people in your life well, see Dr. Popcak’s book God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts!. For personalized, faith-filled support, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.