With emotional incest, the child is used by the adult for emotional fulfillment. In other words, the child is forced to support the abusive adult by serving as a trusted confidante or an “emotional spouse.” Although there is no direct sexual touch, these emotional enmeshment relationships have a sexualized undertone, with the parent expressing overly graphic interest in the child’s physical development and sexual characteristics or betraying the child’s boundaries through invasions of privacy, sexualized conversations, and the like. Typically, covert incest occurs when a child’s parents have distanced themselves from one another physically and emotionally. (Often, this is caused by an addiction in one or both of the adults.) This distancing causes one of the parents to focus on the child, seeking solace and emotional fulfillment by turning the child into a surrogate spouse. Meanwhile, the child’s developmental needs are ignored and, as a result, emotional growth, especially in the area of healthy sexual and romantic attachment, is stunted. RELATED: 9 Signs You Have Emotionally Abusive Parents + What To Do Nevertheless, these relationships are without a doubt sexualized, and the victims learn over time that their value is based not on who they are but on whether they can successfully please/amuse/soothe the abuser. And yes, this is the exact same life lesson that victims of overt incest learn—my needs don’t matter; what you want matters. I am nothing more than an emotional/sexual object for other people to use in whatever way they want. Unsurprisingly, cover incest survivors typically display the same adult-life symptoms and consequences as victims of overt sex abuse: It is only when we dig beneath the surface that we see the connections between covertly incestuous behaviors and later-life problems. RELATED: What Is Trauma Bonding? 5 Signs + How To Break It
