Preoccupied Attachment as Predictor of Enabling Behavior: Clinical Implications and Treatment for Partners of Substance Abusers

Abstract

Substance use can affect partners in innumerable ways. The emotional pain, turmoil, stress, and strain alone leave family members searching for ways to help, or simply to cope. Enabling is one such method. A common coping mechanism in families struggling with substance use, enabling involves actions and behaviors employed by loved ones to incite change, regain control, and increase stability. Enabling is unique however. Rather than minimizing use, enabling has an adverse effect of contributing to, and reinforcing the partner’s substance use and addictive behaviors. For Clinical Social Workers, Licensed Addiction Specialists, and other Mental Health Practitioners, working with family members who enable their partners can be challenging, complex, and still, even with one’s best efforts, fail to reduce or eliminate the behavior. Looking at a single case through the lens of Classical and Modern Attachment Theory, a close examination of enabling and its correlation with preoccupied attachment style is provided, contributing to the current research on affect regulation through the marital dyad, attunement, attachment repair through therapeutic relationship, and enabling behavior, concluding that the characteristics of an insecure/preoccupied attachment generate a very specific vulnerability to, and motivation towards, enabling behavior.