#28 Emotional Incest: When Parents Cross the Line

Have you ever felt responsible for a parent's emotional wellbeing? Been called "the only one they can talk to" or "their rock"? That special closeness you felt might actually have been something therapists call emotional incest—a hidden form of boundary violation that shapes how we connect with others well into adulthood.

Emotional incest occurs when a parent turns to their child to fulfill emotional needs typically reserved for adult relationships. Unlike physical or sexual abuse, it's often disguised as love, creating confusion for survivors who struggle to recognize its harmful effects. This dynamic frequently emerges in families with an absent, addicted, or emotionally immature parent, leading to a triangulation that pulls children across boundaries into adult roles they're developmentally unprepared to handle.

The impact on adult relationships is profound. Survivors typically struggle with setting boundaries, confuse unhealthy enmeshment with intimacy, and often become chronic people-pleasers or over-functioners in relationships. Many battle persistent guilt when prioritizing their own needs or fear they're "too much" for others. Recovery begins with the powerful realization that it was never your job to emotionally caretake your parent. From there, practicing firm boundaries becomes essential, along with grieving the parent you deserved versus the one you had.

If any of this resonates with your experience, know that healing is possible. Consider working with a therapist trained in modalities like Internal Family Systems or EMDR to process this relational trauma. With awareness and support, you can break these generational patterns and create the healthy, authentic connections you deserve. Join me for an empowering discussion about recognizing, understanding, and healing from the subtle but significant wounds of emotional incest.

This podcast is meant to be a conversation — not a lecture. 🖤

Have thoughts, questions, or a topic you want covered? Or want to share how this episode supported you?

Email me at kayla@evolutionwellnessnc.com
or find me on social at @itskaylareilly. I genuinely love hearing what you’re navigating. ✨

Transcript

Catching Up & Topic Introduction

Speaker 1 0:00

I have been a naughty, naughty podcaster. I've started getting inconsistent. I skipped like two weeks. I am sorry, party people.

Speaker 1 0:10

Let me tell you a little bit about what I've been up to, because it's pretty exciting, and then we'll jump right into today's topic, which is emotional incest. I know y'all want to hear about it because it's so fascinating and it's a gross term, but I think that it happens a lot, like especially millennials. I'm seeing that when I'm doing therapy with clients and also what I'm hearing in the grapevine and what I'm seeing on social media. Like I think a lot of emotional incest has happened and is happening with our parents and nobody's talking about emotional incest and kind of clarifying. Everybody's talking about boundaries, but boundaries is the solution and the strategy to fix it, but maybe not everyone understands the problem. Anyways, okay, why I've been naughty? So I started seeing clients again. You guys, it's so exciting. Very, very small caseload. I went and started doing EMDR training. So that's pretty rad because I think EMDR is the bomb. It's really intense learning, like getting trained in it. It's expensive and intense, but I think it's for good reason, like I think that they only want serious people. Anyways, I'll do a whole episode about EMDR how about that? But in the meantime I am seeing a small caseload and I'm pretty confident that most of them, if not all of them, have experienced emotional incest. So I thought this would be helpful. I also started shopping around for my own therapist because I've done therapy a bazillion times but I was thinking that it would be cool to do another course of EMDR therapy to work through my own childhood trauma. So I've been shopping around. I've seen maybe four different consultations with EMDR certified therapists. We'll get more into that in an EMDR episode.

Speaker 1 2:12

But I finally met with one. That just got me very quickly and I was comfortable and it was professional. It was one-sided, honestly. One girl I had a consult with. After one hour with her I knew that she was divorced. She had two kids. I knew their ages. I knew way too much about her. The personal disclosure felt incredibly intrusive, like I don't need to know that stuff.

Speaker 1 2:37

This is about me. I feel another episode of terrible therapy experiences coming on because they're fun, they're funny, they're depressing a little bit for those of us who are in the field. But okay, I digress, let's hop into this. This episode is about emotional incest. So this is a different form of abuse. It's not sexual, it's not physical, it's emotional. So let's talk about what it is, how it impacts you and how you can recover.

Speaker 1 3:12

Hey there, and welcome to Not your Therapist the no BS podcast, where I ditch the therapy couch and get real about life, love, work and all the messy in-betweens. I'm Kayla Riley, a licensed therapist and founder of a group practice that now runs without me, giving me freedom to spend more time with my littles and to share the secrets of wellness I've learned with people like you. This isn't therapy. It's your go-to for real talk, practical tips and the occasional truth bomb to help you thrive. And the best part no diagnosis, no insurance company constraints. I get to take off the white gloves and tell it like it is, because I'm not your therapist. If you're ready to break free from unhealthy patterns, navigate the messiness of life with more ease and uncover the magic in your everyday moments, you're in the right place. Welcome to your healing era. Friends, let's do this.

What Is Emotional Incest?

Speaker 1 4:17

If you've ever felt like your parent treats you or has treated you like their therapist, their partner, their emotional crutch, that is not closeness. That might be emotional incest, and you are not alone. So emotional incest is just a form of covert boundary violation where a parent turns to a child to meet an emotional need typically reserved for adult relationships. And it's interesting because this actually ends up happening way into adulthood. Like parents who violate your boundaries in that subtle, covert way like this probably do it your entire life. So if you were the therapist slash husband to your mother when you were growing up, I guarantee that your mother still tries to invite you into that role today and it is not serving you. You are still their child. You are not the parent. You are not the parent and you know I think a lot of people don't recognize they're doing it Like I don't think any parent wakes up and says I'm going to of people don't recognize they're doing it Like I don't think any parent wakes up and says I'm going to emotionally burden my children and put them into a role that they are not mature enough or you know, nobody recognizes that.

Speaker 1 5:35

So emotional incest is a terrible term because automatically when you think incest, you think you know a family member sexually doing something with another family member, but this is not sexual. So this is when a child is made to feel responsible for a parent's emotional regulation. You feel responsible to be their companion, you feel responsible to give them self-worth. So it all. It really often looks like a parentified child dynamic, right? So especially when in families where one parent is either absent, addicted, emotionally immature or struggling with some kind of mental health issue or addiction, whatever, usually those are the kinds of families that I see this in the most often.

Speaker 1 6:31

If you were raised that way, your parent might have been kind of triangulating you into the parent subsystem, so in you know, structural family therapy it's just a theory, y'all. There's a theory called structural family therapy. It is done by Mnuchin, who is this old white man I actually thought he was fantastic, but anyways, he does a lot of boundaries understanding, and so if you understand the family as a system, it's a unit, right? First you have the spousal subsystem Mom, dad, dad, dad, mom, mom, whatever Two people who love each other, maybe, or were attracted to each other because of their trauma, who knows. So you have the parental subsystem and around that imagine a boundary like a line. And then you have children, or they have children maybe, and so when they have children, they should be in the sibling subsystem, right? Even if you're an only child.

Examples of Emotional Incest

Speaker 1 7:39

There should be certain things that you do not talk to your children about period, your sex life, your emotional well-being, like, yes, it's okay to express that you have feelings as a parent. No, it is not okay to talk about your conflict with your husband, with your child. Does that make sense? I think you're probably picking up what I'm putting down. Think you're probably picking up what I'm putting down.

Speaker 1 8:07

Here are some other examples. Maybe a parent over shares details about their sex life or their romantic problems, right, and say things like you're the only one I can talk to, you're the only one mature one in the family, her. When in the family, comments like that are incest comments, they just are. So a child maybe becomes the man of the house or mom's best friend at a very young age. That is unhealthy, it's sick, right, and the parent is. We call it covert abuse because the parent doesn't know and it's very subtle. So it might be framed as like daddy's gone, so you're the man of the house now and it's like there are good intentions behind that. But what that does to a young man is devastating. Or a child like hearing oh well, you know, daddy's not around, so you're mommy's best friend. That's sick. You're not supposed to be mom's best friend. You're supposed to be mom's kid, okay.

Speaker 1 9:08

So another example would be a parent gets jealous of the child's partner and tries to sabotage their independence. So this is like a possessiveness right, where the parent wants to have a close relationship and anything they see that threatens that closeness, they start getting possessive, like a dog being possessive of a human. It's the same kind of thing. So here's another example You're my rock. I don't know what I would do without you. Sounds really loving, but it actually creates psychological pressure and entanglement or enmeshment. It's not good for you. All right.

How It Impacts Adult Relationships

Speaker 1 9:51

So how it impacts you as an adult. If you were raised like this as a child, you may struggle with setting boundaries in relationships, especially saying no when another person is expressing their needs. You might feel like you confuse guilt, like you feel guilty when you pull away from toxic dynamics, right, like if you set a boundary or you cut somebody off or you take some distance and you're not speaking to somebody. You might feel guilt doing that. You may also have a tendency to people please or rescue or over-function in your relationships. I had a client once that felt so much resentment because she was always giving really good, thoughtful gifts to her family members and she never got anything in return. That is an example of over-functioning.

Why It's Hard to Recognize

Speaker 1 10:44

Another way that this might impact you as an adult is a deep fear of abandonment or feeling like you're too much for other people. Another way is shame or feeling guilty or bad about needing space or prioritizing your own self-care. And the other one is like seeing emotional enmeshment as closeness, because it's not. Emotional enmeshment and intimacy and closeness are very different things. So this is so incredibly hard to recognize, though, because it feels like love is so incredibly hard to recognize though, because it feels like love.

Speaker 1 11:24

Often the parent is super affectionate and supportive and seemingly like nicer or closer to the child than others, right. So if you're a child and you're receiving this kind of quote, unquote, love, right, and you're seeing this parent as like affectionate and they love you, then it's really hard to see this as abuse. Also, culturally we really normalize that like mama's boy or daddy's little girl tropes or my mom's, my best friend, like, I think. As a culture we really normalize that when it really is psychologically unhealthy. Also, a lack of physical abuse can make survivors question their right to feel hurt or to feel abused. So the most common thing I see, when I'm assessing people is when people I'm like how was your childhood? And people are like I had a great childhood. My parents were loving, my dad worked a lot but my mom was so loving, and it's like, okay, and you scratch a little deeper. And you scratch a little deeper and you really help people understand these dynamics and all of a sudden their eyes open and they're like whoa, you're right. I mean, obviously sometimes it's a little bit more blatant, a little bit more obvious and people have already done some self-reflective work, but a lot of times this is a really covert, subtle kind of abuse.

Breaking the Pattern and Healing

Speaker 1 12:45

Now let's talk about how to break this pattern. So first and foremost, you need to recognize that it is not your job to emotionally caretake your parent. Easier said than done. But first comes that awareness right, it is not your job to emotionally caretake your parent. Then you can kind of move into practicing boundaries. So emotionally, physically, logistically, I mean, we need to have just a whole boundary setting episode, don't we? Maybe that'll be next week, who knows. Stay tuned, all right, the third thing you need to do and I think this is the step that most people skip is allowing yourself to grieve the loss of the parent that you deserved versus the one that you got or the one that you have. Right, you have to grieve that loss. It is okay and healthy for you to grieve that.

Speaker 1 13:49

I had a therapist once a personal therapist that told me I was talking about grieving the family that I wish I had when I had a baby and the way the hospital experience looked and who showed up for me. And she I know what she was trying to do. She was trying to, like, confront a thought distortion, but it wasn't a thought distortion, it was a feeling. So she was trying to tell me that that was unhealthy expectations that a family would be loving and show up when a baby was born, that families looked all different ways, which is legitimate. However, the grief is still real. So you got to find that balance right Of knowing like, hey, this is the family that I have. I know I wanted a family to look like this or I deserved a family that looks like this, but also this is the family I have.

Speaker 1 14:41

There's a lot of grief there and you have to allow that and give yourself space to feel that and honor it, validate it right. So a therapist or coach and exploring these relational dynamics and the relational trauma that you've experienced really will also help you build safe adult connections. So, lastly, create a space to redefine what love, closeness and respect looks like in a healthy adult relationship. Clarify that, maybe with a therapist or a best friend, kind of redefine for yourself what does closeness look like, what does respect look like, what is love right According to your adult lens? So those are my steps for breaking that pattern Recognizing like being aware, practicing boundaries, grieving the loss because there is a significant loss, maybe getting into some therapy for yourself or some coaching whichever kind of floats your boat. I would recommend therapy with particularly like an internal family systems, ifs or EMDR trained therapist truly Okay, I'll talk about what those things are in a different episode and then creating a space for yourself to redefine what love, closeness and respect look like to you.

Speaker 1 16:08

Just remember that you're not alone, you're not broken. You can absolutely heal from the effects of this kind of abuse and any kind of abuse. Healing is possible and we live in this beautiful time and age where therapy is more normalized. Therapists are being trained in these awesome evidence-based treatments that are super effective. You can you can heal from this. You can create a different life and you can break this cycle. I believe in you. I'm so glad to be here with you again, and I'll catch you on the next one. Okay, bye.