COVERT INCEST

When you place all your emotional needs on your child, what happens?

- VIVIAN MAINA AND ANDANJE WOBANDA

Do you take your child out on dates? Do you ask them to hold you when you are sad? Does your kid lack privacy because you are constantly in their space asking if everything is ok or what you can do to make things better? Do you comment A LOT on how perfect their bodies are? If this is you, you may be committing covert incest.

According to experts covert incest or emotional incest, is a dynamic that occurs when a parent seeks emotional support from their child. That is, the kind of emotional support that they should get from their partner. The kid ends up being used for emotional fulfillment and serves as the confidante to a parent or an ‘emotional spouse.’

In most cases, a parent will commit emotional incest when the relationship with their partner or marriage is fragile, they are single and lonely or the family has broken up for various reasons including drug abuse, infidelity, divorce, death of a spouse, childhood trauma or through a generational pattern of covert incest.

This is a passive form of emotional abuse that always goes unnoticed even though it is emotionally damaging to children and has lifelong consequences.

Covert incest survivors typically display the same adult-life symptoms and consequences as victims of covert sex abuse including:

• Codependency.
• Fear of commitment and difficulty in developing and maintaining healthy. long-term relationships.
• Feelings of inadequacy and deep shame.
• Detachment.
• Difficulties with physical and emotional self-care.
• Love/hate relationships with the parent.
• Inappropriate bonding with their own child (intergenerational abuse).
• Sexual addiction.

HERE ARE SIGNS THAT YOU ARE GETTING TOO CLOSE TO YOUR CHILD