You’d never want to say that behind every addict, there’s someone to blame. But the truth is that behind the lives of many addicts are people who love them, but unintentionally contribute to their addiction in various ways. Whether supporting the addict financially, allowing them to live in their home, whether giving them money for food and essentials (which may very well be spent on drugs), whether allowing addicts to associate with the kind of people who contribute to their addiction. A lot of different behavior can keep addicts doing what they love best, using.

It can be even a parent or grandparent; it can be a sibling or spouse. It doesn’t matter who, many people can be enabled by the behavior of others, meaning that their addiction is maintained by the actions of someone else.

It happens when people want to keep the addict alive. It happens when they want to support and help with their drug problem. That’s why enabling is so complicated—it means that the enabler must admit that they’re harming rather than helping, even when helping is their intent. Of course, every situation is different, and sometimes, the enabler can be an addict, too. Enabling is such a little-known element of addiction that an enabler will unconsciously display enabling behavior, usually without knowing what is happening.

Recently, a show by the makers of Intervention called Codependence was created to display the enabling behavior of addicts. It seems like a pretty good thing—to attempt to make more well-known the kind of problematic behavior that keeps addicts addicted.

Codependence refers to the type of behavior often seen among couples who are both addicts. At one extreme, this can mean that two addicts maintain one another’s behavior. It’s a very dangerous cycle, one that at its core is complicated by interpersonal relationships and addiction alike.