9 Badass Questions About Emotional Incest
Emotional incest is a topic that troubles many adults. It comes up a lot during the Badass Counseling podcast as well as counseling sessions. In fact, Emotional Incest: Parent-as-Friend and the Very Real Problem of Parental Over-sharing is one of the top-read articles on BadassCounseling.com.
Emotional incest is real. It is the result of a life disconnected from your own very true self and soul, which has been waiting for decades, deep inside, to be rediscovered. Check out these 9 badass questions and then ask yourself if you’re ready to reconnect with your soul.
What is emotional incest?
Emotional incest - also known as covert incest - can be most simply defined as a parent using a child to get his/her own emotional or psychological needs or wants met. This using of the child can take the form of the parent:
dumping his or her problems, anxieties, fears, and situations onto the child, be they personal, relationship, financial, medical, sexual, family, parenting-related, or some other.
asking, and eventually expecting, the child to soothe the parent, whether physically or verbally, when the parent is doing the dumping or anytime the parent is experiencing emotional pain;
expecting the child to protect her/him emotionally, verbally, or even physically from any who might hurt the parent, including the other parent, extended family, friends, neighbors, or even the child’s own siblings;
insisting the child hold the family secrets or the family story/myths which often, if not always, run contrary to the very reality the child is experiencing – e,g. “There’s no abuse in our home” when in fact the child(-ren) is experiencing abuse;
begging or requiring the child to regularly, or constantly, tell the parent how good or great they are, often how terrific a parent they are, when because of the emotional abuse or other things the parent is definitely not that;
What kind of damage does it cause?
Since the child is conditioned to key exclusively into the feelings, wants and needs of the primary external power source, whom the child simultaneously most loves and also most longs to receive love from, the child then takes on this keying into others as his/her modus operandi for all relationships, as mentioned above. But what that means that the child ignores or cannot hear his/her own inner voice, feelings, and needs, and, in fact, distrusts his/her own inner voice. Thus, a dependency is created inside this person, not just for love but for orientation – ie decision-making. The longing to be loved is so great (to the degree of the long-term suppression of self) that this person will give his/her life away, dreams away, and love away just to receive the small amount of love in return that he/she has been conditioned to receive.
What are the results of emotional incest?
1. The child’s feelings become less important than those of the parent.
The adverse effects, or results, of these actions by the parent, often are that the child becomes acutely tuned into even the slightest shift in the emotions of the parent because he/she is expected to leap into actions to tend to the parent. This causes the child’s own feelings to become subjugated to the parent’s, diminished in value in the child’s own head, and often completely suppressed. The child becomes a living reaction and will, before long, start doing this with all people. This over-empathizing with the pain of others (to the exclusion of their own) becomes the very foundation of his/her personality. And that’s not a good thing, as that child and eventual adult will expend a lot of life disregarding self to tend others.
2. The child isn’t emotionally equipped to handle parental problems.
Another problem is that none of these problems that get dumped onto the child is the child equipped to handle. A four-year-old can’t process stubbing his toe, let alone the weight of adult relationships. A seven-year-old struggles with “My pencil is broken. Where do I get a new pencil,” not to mention a parent’s medical issues. A 12-year-old is just beginning to walk into the realm of trying to fathom his or her own sexuality and perception of peers and is in no way capable of taking in, let alone managing the sexual or financial wranglings and worries of an adult. Thus, the child loses his/her childhood, because she/he has now become overwhelmed with all the massive pain and fears that come with such large problems and the inability to solve those problems, not to mention the worst pain of all for a child: seeing or hearing his/her parent in distress, as well as feeling helpless to get them out of it.
It can cause the child to question reality if being expected to hold and sell a story that runs counter to the child’s very experience, such as in the abuse example above. The child learns to distrust and discounts his or her own memory and brain, not to mention his/her memories of childhood.
3. The child’s Love Cup Never Gets Fully Replenished
Further, the above-listed problems are nearly all functions that the parent is supposed to be providing for the child, not vice-versa. Hence, not only is the child shouldering and internalizing all of the parent’s problems and negative emotional energy, but the child is also giving out excessive emotional/life energy (to the parent), all while never getting his or her own love cup filled by the parent, never getting his or her own problems helped through by the parent, never getting help dealing with (let alone even being allowed to acknowledge) his or her own feelings.
Essentially, the gas tank, or love cup, is constantly being emptied and never replenished, or only getting small replenishment from outside sources (teachers, friends, boyfriend/girlfriend), rather than in large doses from where it’s supposed to primarily come from – parents! This can cause the child to latch onto such a person, often at a great price (be it sexual, health, safety, financial, future career), because it feels too good to even get a little bit of love from someone.
Is the parent aware that his/her actions are having these effects?
The parent is often unaware (strange as that may sound) that they’re even engaging in these actions with the child. Tragically.
At the same time, there are times when the parent IS aware, and does it anyway.
These expectations that the parent has of the child do not magically go away. In fact, far more often than not, they persist not only well into adulthood but into old age, to the parent’s death, and even after the parent is long passed.
Many adult children of deceased parents still protect the parent’s story, image, and secrets to the extreme detriment of their own healing and growth.
Why does emotional incest happen?
Emotional incest happens for a few reasons:
Lack of Awareness About Emotional Incest
Parents, and culture in general, are often unaware of the troublesome nature of, or negate the significance of, the dumping of adult problems onto children, or the highly problematic effects of the parent using the child to get his/her own needs met, in any way at all, but especially in the ways listed above;
Lack of Parental Self-Awareness
Parents, even people in general, are often unaware, crazy as it sounds, of what is literally coming out of their mouths and/or who is hearing it;
Parents Have Unhealed Pain in their past
Imagine a mug full to the absolute brim with piping hot coffee sitting on a coffee table. Try pouring more piping hot coffee into that mug or even just agitating that table, and what happens? Piping hot coffee spills out. But it doesn’t spill out on the person or dog on the chair on the other side of the room. No, it spills out on whatever is nearest to that cup. The parent has so much crud in his/her own love cup that adding even one more drop or agitating that parent’s life causes that crud from the parent’s past to come spilling out, often regularly, onto the child.
This is why healing one’s own childhood and past is so critical to deliberate parenting. Emotional incest happens because of unhealed pain in the parent’s past, as well as the core beliefs that parent was taught about him or herself. In my book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, I hold the reader’s hand while kicking the reader’s ass, through the process of de-charging and defanging the reader’s past, effectively emptying the reader’s own love cup.
Parents Believe that Children Exist For the Parent
Ultimately, whether conscious of it or not, emotional incest happens because the parent believes, deep down, that the child fundamentally exists for the parent, not vice-versa. The parent may put on airs of grand service to the children, protection of the children, and only working toward the best interests of the child, all with much pomp and fanfare.
But, with a bit of digging, it becomes painfully obvious that much of what the parent is doing, even the seemingly good or socially acceptable stuff, including going overboard for the child in certain ways or always being at events or always catering to the child’s financial needs, for example, is to create the appearance of being a good parent or as a means to justify using the child for his/her other needs.
Who is most vulnerable to emotional incest?
Any child (or adult-child long conditioned to believe his/her own needs and feelings do not matter) who loves his/her parent, which is all of them. Of course, everything shifts, and nothing shifts, when the child or adult-child stops loving the parent or starts hating the parent for all of this.
Everything changes insofar as the child, teen, or adult-child stops being a people-pleaser, at least to the parent, and becomes spiteful, a rebel, or self-destructive. Nothing changes, even if the child does become any of those three things because the child, teen, or adult-child is still a living reaction to the parent, not a sui generis, or self-generating person.
Spirited rebellion is often mistakenly viewed as originality, but, by definition, it isn’t. To ‘rebel’ means to act ‘in response to,’ ‘in reaction to’ some external power source. The parent is still, at the root, controlling the child, despite all outward appearances to the contrary.
Does it happen mostly with mothers who treat their sons like husbands?
No, because even in a healthy marriage, no spouse can dump all of their problems onto the other; no spouse can expect the other to meet all of her/his needs for attention, problem-solving, and assuaging of sadness, anxiety, and the like.
No, it happens with parents of any gender who, often unwittingly, see their child as existing to meet their own needs:
Fathers who need their daughters to see them as their hero or rock;
Mothers who see their daughters as their servants or guardians;
Fathers who see their sons as living extensions of themselves, therefore existing to bolster their ego or listen to all his gripes;
Mothers who see their sons as existing to meet their needs for (non-sexual) affection or to be mom’s best buddies.
What are the signs of emotional incest?
The signs of potential emotional incest include:
The inability to say ‘no’ when someone, particularly a loved one, expresses a need, want, or expectation
The belief that “I can take it,” “I can take it,” “It’s no big deal,” and “I got it,” are more important than “I need help” and “I can’t do this” and “This is killin’ me”
Feeling drained, burned out, unable to help others anymore, short-tempered, tired, sad, perhaps even suicidal
Putting family needs always above personal needs, feelings, and wants
Emotionally sensitive; cry at the drop of a hat
Emotionally insensitive or no longer caring
How do you protect yourself?
Well, this is what makes it so awful. The child is unable to protect him-/herself. The child is a defenseless victim in the truest sense of the word. There is no defense. The best the child can hope for is to heal later in life when he or she has the capacity to do so.
It is parental abuse. To say that one form of abuse is worse than another is the domain solely of the abused in each individual set of circumstances.
Dealing with emotional incest? Consider participating in the Badass Counseling Podcast.
Are you suffering from having been your parent’s emotional tampon? It’s time to get in touch with your authentic self. Here are a few next steps:
Thanks for reading.
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement, After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
