The *Subtle Beast* of Emotional Incest

Thank you!!

This was so helpful. Thank u.

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart! I never knew what felt wrong in my life because I could never explain it in a way that made sense to anyone else. I found your videos in 2019 and felt 'seen' for the first time in my life. That began my long journey of healing... I appreciate you for being brave enough to make these videos and getting your message out into the world. You changed my life and I will always be grateful 🙏

I'm 23 and my therapist hinted at the issue with my dad not being narcissistic abuse necessarily but moreso emotional incest. I was aware but I didn't come across any material on it until seeing your channel - I'm shocked. My father convinced me to leave my former partner and move in with him. It's been extremely difficult getting back on my feet and looking back this has always been the case with him. He's slashed my tires before. The incest isn't always sexually driven, he doesn't look at me that way. It's like whatever he didn't get from his mother he projects onto all women in his life and unfortunately that's his oldest daughter. Thank you for your wisdom🙏

Can you, please, make a video about emotional incest from a severely abusive parent? My father was emotionally, mentally, and physically abusive to the extreme, and, yet, still wanted to control my sexuality and was jealous of any boys my age. Not all victims of emotional incest are treated "especially". Some are treated "especially bad". 😢

You do deserve Million subs! Thanks for your words!❤

There were shades of this in my mother and stepfather.
It wasn’t emotional smothering.
It was what I called “ pulling rank”
Stepdad would be a big kid with me and talk to me about his problems or personal history with his childhood and my mother would tell me her problems or insecurities. Then when they felt like it they would pull rank and suddenly be the authority in charge.
Very chaotic childhood with two underdeveloped emotionally arrested people.
I do know they were good people but each had a ton of abandonment issues in their own childhood

Wow, I feel called out here. My father subjected me to emotional incest, and he was quite abusive towards my mother to the point where her health was severely compromised and she ended up passing away due to complications resulting from that. I was brought up with the notion that I HAD to take care of my parents first before anything else. This meant I missed out on jobs, schooling, relationships, what have you. This lead to my father moving in with me and my husband last year, and that subtle abuse I dealt with growing up became outright verbal and psychological abuse. We ended up kicking him out of our house late April of this year, and after dealing with the consequences of that to the point where we had to call the police, I've been in no contact with my father since May. I have his number blocked, my husband doesn't answer the phone if he tries to call him, and if he sends mail, we return it.

What happened this past year has caused me to really take a look at myself and examine why I am the way I am, including why I exhibit certain behaviors. Because of this, I've recently found myself backing away from certain engagements and friendships because of the unhealthy amount of energy I've been putting forth towards each, and learning more on how to create firmer boundaries with others and with myself. I'm still figuring things out, but I feel like this is another step in the right direction, and at one some point, I would like to consider therapy.

Spot on. My husband treats me like I’m his Mom. He projects what he can’t say and acts immature when he gets upset. 🤦🏻‍♀️

You deserve million subs, you actually KNOW what you talking about!

My mother always subjected me to emotional incest. She hated my father and treated me like her partner. But she never left him. I would say do you remember you have a husband? When she would force me to listen to all of these disgusting things about herself. She never liked me having friends and i never felt comfortable talking about my dating life. Now my father has died and she is trying to force me to live with her. No one in the family believes what i have gone through. I am her only child and already know if i distance to much she wont leave me anything, i dont care all money is not worth dealing with these sickos. I hate to admit I will feel free when she is gone.

Yep

I have had the experience of a friend insisting that “your parents loved you” whenever I mentioned the issues I had. I think because my friend only saw the charismatic side of my mother, he can’t imagine the manipulative side. Your friends may accuse you of being an ungrateful child if you criticize your parents, but you have to remind yourself they have no concept of what you went through; a bit like a blind person trying to imagine a particular color.

I didn’t discover the concept of emotional incest until a few years before my parents died. It was too late to set boundaries with my mother because to do so would be to hurt her in a way that would haunt me more after her death than simply doing the work on myself alone. When she died my only reaction was “I’m free”.

It’s important to remember that emotionally incestuous parents can still be good people in certain ways. But the fact that they may provide for you and be supportive doesn’t mean that they also didn’t do things that were deeply damaging. Recognizing both the good and the bad of a person is a lot like untangling a ball of string. Making sense of of what behaviors lead to what reactions can be a life long task.

To anyone dealing with emotional incest, if you can set good boundaries with your parent, do so as soon as possible. Start the work of finding out who you are and who are the right people to surround yourself with. I was not able to until my parents died and I find myself in my late 50s having never formed any intimate relationships and having trouble trusting friendships.

And even if you are my age and are struggling with these conflicts, recognize that you can still grow and learn. You may not be able to go back and make your life perfect, but you can make it better than it is right now.

I love your topics 👆💫 The way you explain your stories and Gain clarity for the healing journey ❤️‍🩹
For me the saddest part is to accept the pain and the suffer of both sides,mother-daughter.

Wow - nailed it!!! You make so much SENSE of the nonsense. Thanks to all the clarity I now have because of your videos and my helpful partner, I've been able to completely cut my mother and brother out of my life. I was so gaslit. I believed the problem was me. I punished myself for not being what they wanted me to be. I thought I was irresponsible, selfish, manipulative, jealous for pursuing my needs and wants. That's how they made me feel. After my mom started the process of re-doing her will, my mom's and brother's dark sides started to become apparent to me. There was no more denying it. I started to see how my mom and my brother were pretending to care about me. My mom, as usual, went out of her way to ensure me that she was going to be equitable and fair, that she loved us both equally, and everything would be split between the two of us. My mom and my brother have been using his current divorce to justify using up my inheritance to protect him. I'm the scapegoat. I'm supposed to pay for their mistakes. They're so unbelievably deceptive. An honest person tries to figure out how to work with other people to achieve a win - win situation. Not them. My mom never protected me. My mom never set boundaries. They both protect each other and justify each other's abuse of me as "love" and "protection" - just like you said. He's using up the inheritance. I don't expect to see a dime of it. I've done enough. I've put up with enough. I'm done with their lies, their deception. That's all there is to them - nothing else. I've finally cut them out of my life entirely. Their behavior is so unbelievable. It's hard for me to believe they're human.