"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."

(All quotes in this color are from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls)

I witnessed a scene a few years back that was graphic proof that the best thing any of us can for our loved ones is to focus on our own healing.  At a CoDA meeting one day a little four-year old boy, who had been going to twelve step meetings with his mother for two years, 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.

There are several facets of that scene that are remarkable because of their rarity in our society.  One was that the adult had a safe place to share and express her feelings.  The second was much rarer, a child with some semblance of healthy boundaries between self and parent.

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.  Some people in the field refer 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.  The child feels responsible for it because they suffer the consequences - rather it is through outbursts from the parents or being shut out emotionally by the parents.

Often a parent who has a passive, traditionally codependent defense system will be married to a parent that has an aggressive, counterdependent defense system.  (As I say in my book, traditionally in this society men were taught be John Wayne and women to be self sacrificing - but that is a generality, it is entirely possible that your mother was the John Wayne aggressive type while your father was the passive one.)

What happens in this dynamic - a very common one - is that the passive parent allows the aggressive one to abuse him/her and the children in some way (verbal, emotional, mental, and/or physical.)  And then that parent turns around and makes excuses to the children for allowing that behavior.  A child that grows up hearing abuse being excused with rationalization and justification, is going to become an adult that will swing between the extremes of tolerating an abusive relationship or avoiding relationships altogether.

I came from a traditionally dysfunctional family, in that my father was the emotionally unavailable angry person while my mother was the martyr with no boundaries.  I so hated how my father behaved that I became a martyr like my mother.  I was a martyr because I did not speak my Truth or set boundaries, avoided confrontations, tried to please the other person to keep her liking me.

In my first relationship in my codependence recovery, I realized that for me, setting boundaries in a romantic relationship felt to my inner child like I was being abusive.  The very thing I had sworn to myself I would never be - like my father.  I had to constantly be alert to that child’s feelings and let that wounded part of me know that it was not only OK to set boundaries and say no - but that it was not Loving to do otherwise.

I discovered that there was a 4 or 5 year old age of my inner child who felt overwhelming shame that I could not protect my mother from my father.  I thought that was my job.  To make my mother happy.

I thought that I was not worthy of Love because I had been unable to do my job.  So, in my adult life I was attracted to emotionally unavailable women who were verbally abusive.  To my disease, it was better to be in relationship with someone like my father, than to fail to do my job in a relationship with someone who was available emotionally.

I had a relationship phobia that for the most part kept me from getting into relationships because I felt I was defective in my ability to be responsible for another person happiness.

Until we do some healing of our childhood wounds, it is impossible to really understand our adult patterns.  If we have never experienced ourselves as independent emotional beings separate from our parents, we can not truly be present for a relationship in our adult lives.

Emotional incest is a violation and invasion of our emotional boundaries.  It is not sexual abuse, nor is it sexual in nature - although sexual incest is often accompanied by emotional incest.  It can however cause great damage to our relationship with our own gender and sexuality.  Emotional incest, along with religions that teach that sexuality is shameful and societal beliefs that one gender is superior to the other, fall into a category that I call sexuality abuse - because they directly impact our relationship with our own sexuality and gender.

Our parents were our role models.  We learned how to be emotional beings from their behavior and attitudes.  We learned what a man is, what a woman is, from their example.  We cannot undo that programming without being willing to heal those emotional wounds.  We cannot know who we truly are without separating ourselves on the emotional energetic level from our parents.

I also have an article I wrote some years ago on this site: Emotional Incest - emotionally devastating child abuse

Another article I published on Suite 101 in November of 2003 (and since have moved to this site):  Emotional Incest = Sexuality Abuse