Emotional Incest
By Robert Burney M.A.

"Consider a scenario where mother is crying in her bedroom and her three year
old toddles into the room. To the child it looks as if mom is dying. The
child is terrified and says, "I love you mommy!" Mom looks at her child. Her
eyes
fill with love, and her face breaks into a smile. She says, 'Oh honey, I love
you so much. You are my wonderful little boy/girl. Come here and give mommy a
hug. You make mommy feel so good.'

A touching scene? No. Emotional abuse! The child has just received the
message that he/she has the power to save mommy's life. That the child has power
over, and therefore responsibility for, mommy's feelings. This is emotional
abuse, and sets up an emotionally incestuous relationship in which the child
feels
responsible for the parent's emotional
needs.


A healthy parent would explain to the child that it is all right for mommy to
cry, that it is healthy and good for people to cry when they feel sad or
hurt. An emotionally healthy parent would "role model" for the child that it is
okay to have the full range of emotions, all the feelings - sadness and hurt,
anger and fear, Joy and happiness, etc."


Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney


One of the most pervasive, traumatic, and damaging dynamics that occurs in
families in this dysfunctional, emotionally dishonest society is emotional
incest. It is rampant in our society but there is still very little written or
discussed about it.

Emotional incest occurs when a child feels responsible for a parents
emotional well-being. This happens because the parents do not know how to have
healthy
boundaries. It can occur with one or both parents, same sex or opposite sex.
It occurs because the parents are emotionally dishonest with themselves and
cannot get their emotional needs met by their spouse or other adults. John
Bradshaw refers to this dynamic as a parent making the child their "surrogate
spouse."

This type of abuse can happen in a variety of ways. On one end of the
spectrum the parent emotionally "dumps" on the child. This occurs when a parent
talks
about adult issues and feelings to a child as if they were a peer. Sometimes
both parents will dump on a child in a way that puts the child in the middle
of disagreements between the parents - with each complaining about the other.

On the other end of the spectrum is the family where no one talks about their
feelings. In this case, though no one is talking about feelings, there are
still emotional undercurrents present in the family which the child senses and
feels some responsibility for - even if they haven't got a clue as to what the
tension, anger, fear, or hurt are all about.

Emotional incest from either parent is devastating to the child's ability to
be able to set boundaries and take care of getting their own needs met when
they become an adult. This type of abuse, when inflicted by the opposite sex
parent, can have a devastating effect on the adult/child's relationship with
his/her own sexuality and gender, and their ability to have successful intimate
relationships as an adult.

What often happens is that 'Daddy's little princess' or 'Mommy's big boy'
becomes an adult who has good friends of the opposite sex that they can be
emotionally intimate with but would never think of being sexually involved with
(and
feel dreadfully betrayed by, when those friends express sexual interest) and
are sexually excited by members of the opposite sex whom they don't like and
can't trust (they may feel they are desperately 'in love' with such a person
but in reality don't really like their personality). This is an unconscious way
of not betraying mommy or daddy by having sex with someone that they are
emotionally intimate with and truly care about as a person.

Over the last ten years I have seen many different examples of how
emotionally dishonest family dynamics impact children. Ranging from the
twelve-year old
girl who was much too big to be crawling into mom's lap but would do so every
time mom started to cry because that interrupted her mother's emotional
process and stopped her crying, to the nine-year old boy who looked me in the
eye
and said "How am I supposed to start talking about feelings when I haven't my
whole life."

Then there is the little boy who by four-years old had been going to
twelve-step meetings with his mother for two years. At a CoDA meeting one day he
was
sitting on a man's lap only six feet away from where his mother was sharing and
crying. He didn't even bother to look up when his mother started crying. The
man, who was more concerned than the little boy, said to him, "Your mommy's
crying because she feels sad." The little boy looked up, glanced over at his
mother and said, "Yea, she's getting better," and went back to playing. He knew
that it was okay for mom to cry and that it was not his job to fix her.

That little boy, at four years old, already had healthier boundaries than
most adults - because his mother was in recovery working on getting healthier
herself. The best thing that we can do for any of our loved ones is to focus on
our own healing. And one of the cornerstones of healing is to forgive ourselves
for the wounds we suffered and for the wounds we inflicted. We were powerless
to behave any differently because of our programing and training, because of
our wounds. Just as our parents were powerless, and their parents before them,
etc. etc.

One of the traps of Codependence Recovery is that as we gain awareness of our
behavioral patterns and emotional dishonesty we judge and shame ourselves for
what we are learning. That is the disease talking. That "critical parent"
voice in our head is the disease talking to us. We need to stop buying into that
negative, shaming energy and start Loving ourselves so that we can change our
patterns and become emotionally honest.

There is hope. We are breaking the cycles of generations of emotional
dishonesty and abuse. We now have the tools and knowledge we need to heal our
wounds
and change the human condition. We are Spiritual Beings having a human
experience. We are perfect in our Spiritual essence. We are perfectly where we
are
supposed to be on our Spiritual path, and we will never be able to do human
perfectly. We are Unconditionally Loved and we are going to get to go Home.


Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
by Robert Burney, therapist


HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
~Scottish Saying


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