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What is emotional incest?

Emotional, or covert, incest is an overclose bond between a parent and a child without normal boundaries, but without sexual contact. (Overt incest involves sexual contact.)

Best described to date by Dr. Patricia Love, Dr. Love defines emotional incest as "a style of parenting in which parents turn to their children, not to their partners, for emotional support. To the casual observer, the parents may appear loving and devoted. They may spend a great deal of time with their children and lavish them with praise and material gifts. But in the final analysis, their love is not a nurturing, giving love--it's an unconscious ploy to satisfy their own unmet needs."

The BPD factor: Parents with BPD tend to be emotionally immature, have poor boundaries, and think in black and white terms (child = good; spouse = bad). Non parents, faced with a spouse who through his or her disorder may not be functioning as an equal and satisfying partner, may also turn to a child for support. The resulting family situation is one that is at risk for emotional incest.


What are the characteristics of an emotionally incestuous parent-child bond?

1. The parent is using the child extensively to satisfy needs that are beyond the child's ability and role and that should be satisfied by other adults--intimacy, companionship, romantic stimulation, advice, problem solving, ego fulfillment, and/or emotional release.

2. The parent is ignoring many of the child's needs, e.g., for protection, nurturing, guidance, structure, affection, affirmation, or discipline. Instead of the parent meeting the needs of the child, the child is meeting the needs of the parent.

Many parents and children are close; closeness is often healthy and desirable. The key determinant of whether the parenting role has become invasive is that a healthy parent "takes care of a child's needs [in an age-appropriate way] without making the child feel responsible for his/her needs." Parents often slip into the "invasive" role without any intention to harm their children, but the impact is nonetheless harmful.


What are the effects of a parent's reliance on a child?

According to Dr. Love, "Being a parent's primary source of support is a heavy burden for young children. Forced to suppress their own needs, they struggle to satisfy the needs of the adults. Because of this role reversal, they are rarely given adequate protection, guidance, or discipline, and they are exposed to experiences well beyond their years. In adolescence and adulthood, they are likely to be plagued by one or more of the following difficulties: depression, chronic low-level anxiety, problems with self-esteem and love relationships, overly loose or rigid personal boundaries, some form of sexual dysfunction, eating disorders and drug or alcohol addiction."


What about other family members?

Emotional incest affects all members of a family. Dr. Love provides a "role call":

*The Invasive Parent--is enmeshed with a child in order to meet his/her needs that are not being met in an adult relationship

*The Chosen Child--is enmeshed with the invasive parent; often treated as "all good" and favored, but own needs to develop as an individual, to make mistakes and learn, to receive structure and discipline, etc. are actually neglected. Chosen children can also be treated as scapegoats, used "not just for emotional support but for the release of anger and tension."

*The Left-Out Spouse--spouse of invasive parent, is often shut out of exclusive parent-child bond; may turn to workaholism, alcohol, affairs, or other unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with an unhappy life at home

*The Left-Out Child(ren)--a non-favored child, may be neglected or receive less of the family's resources; may bond with the left out spouse

*Spouse of the Chosen Child--when the chosen child grows up and marries, his/her spouse may find him/herself engaged in a rather disturbing triangle with the chosen child and invasive parent


Where can I find out more?

Book Review for The Emotional Incest Syndrome (https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=123770.0), by Dr. Patricia Love

Share your experiences by adding a comment. If you answered yes to the poll, how has emotional incest affected you and your family? Have you found ways to cope with and improve the situation?

I haven't absorbed it yet that physical incest really happened... .accepting the emotional incest was hard enough.

I'm the only child of uBPDm.  The divorce between she and my dad (dBPD), when I was 4, was the second for them both.  He then faded away, he wasn't there to protect me.  I became ubpm's entire world.  Whenever an unrealistic couple in a movie depended on each other or saved each other (Prince Eric and Ariel, for example), upbm said that she and I had each other like those characters had themselves.

She alternately painted me as the golden child and the black sheep, depending on how much of her needs I was considering/fulfilling at the time.  Golden child periods consisted of me carrying 100% of the relationship in addition to her dreams and relationships with other peopld.  When I was the black sheep, she claimed both that I was abandoning her and that she would abandon me.

I have never heard of this before but this is exactly what my exhn/BPD(also schitzophrenic) did to my kids. Such inappropriate behaviours! Just a few examples:

"walk up and down so i can look a your sexy bum"

telling my d15 (then 10) that he "wanted her to be the mother of his children" !

Telling the kids to bark at me "Ur a dog mummy, woof woof"

Has a rage at them if they dont call him

Tries to make them responsible for his life and choices

There are so many other things but you get the drift. He is emotionally incestuous toward all 3 of my kids and my oldest is udBPD and my son is showing signs of schitzophrenia :'( My middle child d15 is incredibly amazing in her response to him. When he face books her with the title, "live or die" and then tries to make her feel responsible for his predicament, she replies, "This would be really touching dad IF YOU WERENT THE ADULT HERE!"

My kids are d18, d15 and s14 and all live with me 2,000 km away from him!  

Emotional incest is the perfect description of what he has done to my kids

  neverenz

WOW... .YES!


I grew up being my mother's "best friend"/parent/therapist, and had

to listen to her talk about her sex life with my dad (... .including the

"inadequate" size/duration of his erections, etc... .)

               


Ironically, she used to try and guilt ME into keeping my distance from

my dad... .   (by saying things like "your father would make you his WIFE

if he could!"

 


People on the outside just don't understand how incredibly damaging

this all is on a child... .

... .and because it's so subtle, nobody else can see what is going on.

I've never heard this term, but YES, it describes the relationship between my mom and I. My mom jokes about how she used to cry on my shoulder when I watched Sesame Street.

I did think about this type of relationship between my mom and her brother.  She is obsessed with him, constantly calling and wanting his attention.  He has been supporting her financially for 20 years.  A few family members were talking and wondering if they ever had a sexual relationship.  I don't think they have, but emotional incest describes it perfectly.  My mom acts like her brother is her boyfriend!  My mom asked her sister one day, ":)oes Jon say "I love you, I love you, I love you" when you say goodbye?"  The way she said I love you was so passionate.  My aunt (my mom's sister) did tell me that my mom went on a campaign to break up her brother and wife when they first got engaged.

"I think the most difficult aspect of this legacy was feeling I had to jump back and forth between two desperate worlds: The world of a child and the world of a grown up. Just as pdm had no enduring sense of identity I also struggled to find my own voice. I became overly responsible, anxious and burdened. In effect, I don't feel I ever really HAD a childhood, you know, pretty much care-free like my friends appeared to be. And I lived in terror knowing my "white" status could be changed to "black-beyond-recognition" in a heartbeat or less and I had NO control over either."

Yes! What said!

I was always visual-minded when I was little, and, as a result of the emotional incest, got the idea that I was not actually a real child but some kind of obscene little adult in a child's body, and also that my voice was not a child's but a grotesque little adult's, and that that was my fault and that nobody generally noticed this, but that I should be GLAD that no one noticed, because if they did, they would no longer love me, if they loved me, and their noticing would also be my fault.  It was also my "job" to somehow bridge the gap or disparity between the child's world and the grownup's world, and I'd always feel despair at not knowing how to do it. I never put it into words, but felt and saw it this way very strongly.

On the surface, I was the left-out child, and my uBPD/NPD? ensis was the chosen child, but we each experienced emotional incest in different ways. Ensis was mother’s favorite and caretaker/therapist, chosen to manage her “good” moods, and was rewarded for it. They sort of enveloped each other (or rather mother did because she was the one with the power) in this nurturing-looking environment and would coo over each other and soothe each other in ways that I was jealous of (because I wanted love) and disgusted by (because it seemed creepy to me).   Mother also used ensis to abuse me by proxy.

On the other hand, ensis was the “innocent” one in the household, and I was the one who didn’t deserve innocence and never had. I was left out of the “happy” emotional incest (as if there really were such a thing), and was chosen to manage mother’s bad moods, and was punished for provoking them.   All three of us (mother, uNPD endad, and I) were supposed to band together and worship ensis’s innocence. I was the one chosen from a very early age to hear details of mother’s and endad’s sex life and opinions of each other as sexual and romantic partners, and very punishing opinions of men and women  and the way they ought to act in general.  Endad gave me Lolita to read when I was ten, because I was “supposed to be the smart one,” even though he told me males were smarter than females, and I was “old enough to appreciate it.”  Over the years, I would get in serious trouble if I mentioned  to ensis that any of this was happening, even to complain in a general way when we were both teenagers, which was all I did, because at two years younger than I am (even when we were both adults) she “wasn’t ready” for things like this and it was “abusive” and “creepy” of me.

I think endad and mother were attracted to each other for the usual n and bp reasons, and endad was a total enabler but very self-absorbed and also got tired of soothing mother constantly  and affirming her delicate waifiness or meeting anybody’s needs but his own, so mother used ensis for that when we were both very little and I wouldn’t do it.  Endad was jealous and felt himself superior to mother, and  used me sometimes as a surrogate spouse intellectually and with inappropriate sharing of sexual and emotional information.  But mother also forced sexual and emotional information on me, so I don’t know. I guess we were set up in opposition to each other in their minds: Ensis was an innocent androgynous sprite when I was a mean and precocious brainy woman-child brat, and ensis was a delicate, feminine angel when I was a surrogate (male) intellectual partner for endad or a surrogate (hated) endadish stand-in (or conversely hated Other Woman) in mother’s eyes. It makes no sense. 

I now cope with the situation by never interacting with them, because there is no chance at all that they’ll change. Mother’s dead, Endad is drinking himself to death in a filthy house, telling himself fictitious anecdotes about his wonderful life with mother, and ensis only wants me in her life if I’m unhappy, overweight (that’s another issue), self-limited, and yearning for greater closeness, none of which is happening.

YES!  My gcbro has become my mother's new husband (in every way other than sexual)  It is creepy & other people notice it.  Several of her sisters have done the same thing (with sons) I don't understand how their real husbands let this happen.

Before I knew much about the BPD in my mil, I discovered this concept of emotional incest. I knew that DH was not physically or sexually abused by his Mom. I doubted she ever touched him. BUT, I had this nagging sick feeling in my gut, that something very disturbing on a similar level existed. Somehow in my research, I came across this concept.

DH absolutely experienced emotional incest. He tells me stories from a very young age, he would sit on her bed, while she cried and made him tell her how much he loved her. She would often tell him how much his Dad was never there for her in the way she needed. She was very invasive about girlfriends that DH had while growing up that went on into college and adulthood.

The descriptions and roles that have been described in this post, fit our situation exactly. It still sickens me

 

sick!  I heard the word emotional incest.  Sadly I experienced emotional incest up until I terminated my relationship with my Mother.  She stole my childhood.  I am feeling anger inside me.

Sad. :'( :'(

Japanese Doll

Oh yes, very much so.  With dad gone 6 months out of the year and my being an only child for 5.5 years.  I was her golden child and her black sheep too.  When brother came along she would switch back and forth between us.  If he was doing what she wanted him to do for her he was good.  If I wasn't doing what she wanted I was bad and blackened and made to feel incompetent.  That would be when she would tell dad lies just so he would get upset at me and yell at me.  I can't tell you how many "listen to your mother and behave yourself's" I heard while he was a way and to me I WAS behaving, I was listening.  It was MOM that wasn't listening.  I was her therapist, her friend, her victim.  I was the second mother and her little helper.  She would tell me that she didn't know what she would do without me growing up and then later that day tell me I lacked common sense and was just like my father.  Who would circle the gammut a few times between being the love of her life and a piece of hit_.  She stole my childhood too.

I experienced this in my family. My uBPD mom told me inappropriate things about her relationship with my en-dad, and her problems with everyone (including ALL of our relatives, her co-workers, our neighbors and friends). When she was angry at someone else, she took it out on me. When she gave my dad the silent treatment, she gave me the silent treatment. Often for days. In the meantime, she and my golden brother were like little lovebirds. I got it from both of my parents. My en-dad used to tell me about all his problems with my mom. When I was 8, he showed me a letter she'd written to him about how she hated him and wanted a divorce. He wanted my opinion. I told him to leave her. He didn't. He did, however, start sleeping in my bed at night.

My wife insisted our daughters sleep in our bed , every night since birth. I was the odd man out, and slept in the basement. If/when I objected, I was  a swlfish, bad parent.

I never did in my life, but I witnessed it in my udBPDex's.  I watched her dad flirt with her.  It was disgusting, but it explains a lot.

 

I can see now that this was what happened between xbph and his mom. Now he's doing it with D8.   

It sickens me, I lose sleep over it, yet I feel like there is nothing that I can do to protect D8 from this. But at least I have a label for what he's doing now.

The courts/judge don't see this as an issues, the GAL thinks it's "cute" and that xbph is a "doting" dad, the 2 counselors D8 has seen refused to take a stand in court over the issue. So in the end, xbph will end up with 50/50 placement of D8.

What can I do? Those of you who were/are the chosen child, what do you wish the other parent would of done to help or protect you? Xbph and I have been separated for 3 years, divorced for 2, and it's only getting worse     :'(

Good Question life2live,

i was in exactly the same situation. My d15 (chosen child ) said to my sister the other day "I wish i could go back in time and be mum, I would kick dad in the nuts"

Pretty obvious she wanted me to protect them! Eventually i saw what was happening and left but a lot of damage has been done. My advice would be to say straight out to him that what he is doing is inappropriate. Put it out there so he knows you are watching and then if it continues, kick him in the ... .! :)

  neverenz

I had never heard this term until reading it today, but it so perfectly describes everything I've felt. My mom was an invasive parent... .she would tell people (and still does) that we are best friends. She calls and lays the guilt trips on thick with "I'm lonely... .I'm by myself ALL the time" (imagine a weepy, creepy voice). As a child she would take me with her everywhere, including when she was being unfaithful to my dad and then make me lie to him afterward about where we had been and who we were with. I spent the majority of my childhood life having nightmares that dad was chasing me with a gun because he found out that I was lying to him. She also inserted herself into every aspect of my life... .even for the time I lived eight hours away. I had nothing that was my own. I don't even tell her things anymore for fear that she'll coincidentally show up. It got to the point (and stayed there) that my friends wouldn't even be around her for holiday or birthday gatherings... .she would spend the whole time monopolizing them and then tell them to call her or come see her when I wasn't around... .as if my friends even remotely had any interest in her. She hit on a couple boyfriends and even cheated on my dad with the father of my brother's girlfriend and the dad of my boyfriend (2 diff guys).

I never knew the terminology for these things... .I just knew they were very abnormal and inappropriate. It makes so much sense now!

Great post!

My uBPD mom used to leave me notes under my pillow after she'd just given me long bouts (days, weeks) of the silent treatment for who-knows-what (she had a bad day at work, Christmas was coming, I closed the door too loudly, or left a dirty plate in the sink) and finally I'd get up the nerve to apologize to her, which would end the silent treatment, and she'd write to me: You're my best friend.   ? And I'd feel tremendous relief. Then I'd write her a note back, and say, You're my best friend, too. Ugh.

I never made the link that a chosen child could also be the scapegoat,  but now I can see that to be true. That would explain the feeling I always had growing up. I was to be my father's confidante, understander, listener beyond anyone else, the one who understood fully , the one he could go to... .and at same time, the one he could blame, yell at, torment and destroy. i never understood the chosen child scapegoat blend, because that is who I was to my father. My mother, maybe always the scapegoat. But to my dad, he had a need with me, he had a reason to pull me aside and talk with me, share with me, things that were not my responsiblity, to contain or hold... .and then, a day later, i was the vessel of his wrath , his hate.And yet, I was always somehow told, without words, I was the chosen child by him. The chosen child to be his vessel of need, someone trained well to hear him, listen to him, and be exploited and hurt by him. YAY!  

The Invasive Parent-my uBPD/NPDmo was so invasive when I was growing up and into my adult years until I shut her out that she used to brag about me being her shadow. Everything was always about her; even when she was doing something for me that appeared on the surface to be for me – it was always about her. Just recently when she was saying something that she believed she was entitled to say to me that was so invasive I told her I am a separate person from her and she said with all seriousness that I am extension of her. That is why I live 800 km away from her and try to keep as LC as possible with her. 

The Chosen Child—I was the ‘chosen child’ for a long time and it pitted me against my siblings. I fought against it for years and my uBPD/NPDmpo. I think I might have been CC because I was being groomed for her future carer.

The Left-Out Child –after years of fighting against being the CC I am now on the border of the non-favoured child. uBPD/NPDmo still talks it up to anyone she can about how much she loves me and is so close to me, I am her best friend and rah rah rah. But she now uses ignoring me and giving other FOO members things that she doesn’t give me as her way to let me know I am on the edge.

For years I have felt like she plays cat and mouse games with me – I’m the mouse and she cruelly tries to lull me into a sense of safety and enjoys the game until eventually I am giving back to her. When I realise what has happened again and step out of the FOG she pounces with the intention to hurt or stands back and gives room for one of her PDchildren to pounce with the intention to hurt.

Ouch – No wonder it hurts so much. It’s all so creepy and so so sad.

I was the chosen child, the oldest of 5 children. This meant that my mother talked a lot at me. She talked mainly about whatever was passing through her mind but also made a lot of personal comments about me. But I felt she was not really there. It was as if there was no real person there, behind all that talk.

At the same time, I saw her neediness & tried to help her. And I became the parentified child, caring for myself & the other children because there was so much she did not do. Our father came home late, only to sleep.

But sometimes she did help me to get my wishes met, particularly via money or dealing with my father so I could do something like study a particular course at school. I appreciated that very much. I was not particularly demanding though, but some things were important to me & I asked. She did not assist with the most important thing I wanted, a stable, loving, sane & happy home & a mother I could turn to.

I coped with her by setting limits/boundary setting. She was not usually cooperative. Some things I had to learn to accept & to do what I could to remedy any resulting problem, such as going elsewhere to study & preparing meals for my brother & sisters.

I have had less & less to do with her as I and my children have become older. I have come to understand her quite well & I don't want to experience her behaviour. I wonder if I have become uncaring of her. Up to 18 years ago, I was too considerate of her, basically letting her get away with too much behaviour I did not want, but never anything like completely.

Definitely.  I vaguely remember being a small child & upbd Mom  making me sit down facing her to listen to her go on & on but I don't think I had any idea of what she was talking about.  The emotional incest was so intense & enduring that I have had dreams of her sexually exploiting me.  I don't think that happened, but is a reflection of the emotional incest. 

She also used me to do her dirty work, such as face bill collectors, call in sick for her at her workplace,  deliver messages to people, etc.  I hated it!  I had to face the hostility & shame that should've been hers to face & I was a little kid!

When I became an adult it got worse.  She would say "my sister" when referring to my Aunt as if she was speaking to a stranger or friend who wouldn't know her sister.  She didn't seem to be aware she's referring to MY Aunt.   I always felt as if all relatives were HER relatives, but not mine.  I guess that made it easier to go NC with her & all relatives, which, for me was the only solution.  I have never felt like I had an FOO or extended family.  They are just "relatives", I never use the word "family".

W W! So that's what that was, is.

As a child I was the chosen child. My mother came to me for alot of her validation as a parent, or her validation if there was something negative going on between her and my father which there usually was. There was only one way to answer and that was to tell her exactly what she wanted to hear. I learned to repeat back what she had asked me about herself because God help you if you made the childish mistake of answering her as a child would or if the answer wasn't correct then I could be transported to "left-out-childom" in an instant. 

When she and my father divorced I was chosen/left out. Very disorienting really. No wonder I second guess myself so much!

When she and my stepfather divorced, which happened to coincide with my adolesence, all hell broke loose and I became the left out child. She took every bit of rage out on me at that point! That witch totally robbed me of my childhood and teen years.

When I became an adult and no longer was vunerable to her bullying I became her emotional dumping ground. I can leave phone conversations with her and be absolutely exhausted.

Wow, that really touched a nerve with me. Thank you for introducing this topic. I need to do some more exploring regarding this.

She allways yells that I'm her daughter and hers only.

She blames me for not being thankfull enough for all the sacrifies she has made for me.

When she is suicidal she uses me as an excuses because I don't support her unconditionaly.

Pff it's like I'm just a hugh amount of Salt in the open wound that is her life.

And she thinks I'm not feeling guilty about it. :'( she should know.

I distinctly remember once yelling back at mother "I'm not your husband! I'm a child!" I can't remember what led up to the argument, but now this vivid memory has a lot more meaning.

She wanted a buddy, and as a relatively normal kid with school, sports, friends, etc I wanted a normal life. She had clearly put the expectations of an adult relationship onto a kid, and thankfully I had pushed back. I saw how my friends related with their parents, and all I knew was that what I had at home wasn't normal.

Yes, she would tell me all sorts of inappropriate things, and her demands on my time and accusations when it was inevitably never enough were abusive. She would talk to me about something where she needed support, but, being a kid still with a still-developing emotional intelligence and grasp on the world, the best I could do was try to listen or grunt a response. This led to accusations that I didn't care about her etc, and bam, rage.

Or I saw my friends have a nice dinner with their families, maybe watch some TV together etc and everyone was happy, but me... .no, I was expected to do overtime and sit there with mom all night because she had no friends and was lonely. If I wanted to head out I got the whole "using the place like a hotel" rage or "you don't care about me."

So there you go, it has a name: emotional incest.

New here, but I definitely was a chosen child (and only child) of my mother. Glad to see I'm not alone!

I'm not sure if this counts but my BPDm would have me do her pedicures at a young age, take off her make-up, and rub her hair at night.  The funny thing is, we never received manis/pedis from her. 

It took me a long time to convince myself to get manis/pedis and I still feel guilty, like I only deserve them if I did something good. 

I do hate being touched/handled by my mom now but can not pin point exactly why.  I used to feel horrible for feeling this way, I often flinch when my mom reaches to touch me, but I don't feel so bad anymore from reading some of the posts on this board :)

I guess all three of us were at some point Mom's spouse because to her, my father was and would always be bad (and I easily accepted this since he was the overt abuser (physical and verbal)).

I can remember times when my mom and I would hang our all day.  I would drive her here and there, we'd go shopping, have lunch, she would talk to me and I would listen.  Mostly I thought it was mother-daughter bonding (which it might have been), but it became more of a dependence.  Even when I moved away she would say things like "no one is here to take me here and there."  or "when you come, you can take me here and there and check things out.  Your brother doesn't want to/can't take me".

My younger brother is clearly the surrogate spouse now and has even admitted to being mom's confidant and replacement husband.  I think he doesn't know a)how to get out of it or b) that he can and SHOULD get out of it.  He texted me once "Mom says we never talk and I told her we talk all the time, we're in the same house".  She clearly NEEDS him to be her listener, confidant, etc.  And what does she talk about usually... .everyone else (and how they are making her miserable)!

I think my older brother was her surrogate spouse until HS when he rebelled and started confiding more in my father (betrayal!)

This is one of the hardest issues I am now coming to understand in our family. My mother was very sexually inappropriate with my sister and I growing up, stemming from her own sexual abuse. There was never any physical component, but just a feeling of "ickiness" that stuck in my throat as a child--that feeling like you want to cry, but can't--when she would engage in her behaviors.  Some examples:

When my sister was four, my mother showed her a Playgirl magazine in a bookstore to show her what a naked man looked like (in a sexual manner), which terrified my small sister;

My mother would often tell my sister and I how much she wanted to be our friends, and would then tell us all the very intimate and functional details about her sex life with our father usually in her bedroom (message: This is MY special connection with your father you do not have).

My mother would rely on us as her little therapists, so she could tell us about how she was date raped at 23, how her grandfather molested her at age 5 (revealed in a BPD rage)--we were told of both these events when we were far too young to be told this information (around 7-9)

Beyond the sexual inappropriateness, there were numerous suicidal remarks and threats made to us which to this day I would say amount to emotional incest. No child should know of suicide so intimately at such a young age. One particularly terrible one was when my sis and I were 5 and 3 respectively. She was in full rage, and screamed that she wanted to kill herself, locked herself in their bedroom (where we knew our father kept a gun), and sat in there quietly while we were both screaming and crying outside the door for her to stop. The next thing we knew, the door flew open and she told us how "stupid" we were to think she would ever actually do it. This was followed up later by telling me all about my grandparents' neighbor's grandson whom I knew, who had "shot himself right in the head" and "tried to drink mercury from a thermometer." I still have profound abandonment issues as an adult.

How does emotional incest affect you as an adult? My sister and I have both had major issues with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, just to name a few. How does one go about "de-programming" the feelings associated with emotional incest?

Your post sounds like something I have written. I completely empathize with you about being the "parent" to your parent and other children. I feel like I have been a mother myself since I was very young, to the extent that my BPD mother would yell at me for "mothering" my sister proclaiming "YOU are not her mother! I AM!" The fact it was a point of argument (bear in mind she was arguing with a small child) interests me to this day. I was actually providing my younger sister the emotional support and nurturing a mother should be providing even as young as five years old. My mother was a functional alcoholic most of our lives, so she would become a drooling, babbling baby (which I resented terribly) and need to be put to bed. To this day, I cannot stand to see her drunk for that reason. My mom does, however, always have a penny to spend. It is as if buying things makes it all OK on some level... .

Wow never identified this behavior but always thought it one of the more creepy aspects of mom.

My sister was the chosen and would have to sleep with her most nights especially when she was depressed. Poor sis having to put up with mom crying and lonely. When they lived together without me (a couple of times) she also didn't have her own bed. I don't know the effect on my sister but she is okay now.

Mom would tell us things about her sex life, have us do her hair and show us her lingerie for when going out "for the night" with her obsession. We were her sounding boards for that unhealthy "relationship" She also told us inappropriate sexual information about our dad when he was younger (when they divorced). TMI to the nth degree.

She sleeps with my 9 year old sister, often kicking her new husband out. Also when I come over the couple times a year she tells my little sister that I'm sleeping with her (I'm 30 years old) and I put my foot down and remind her everytime that I am an adult and I sleep on the couch. I resent that she is setting me up to disappoint my sister who thinks of it as a sleepover.

Now she acts like a prude about sex like an innocent child. Whereas before she was the opposite. Now if there is kissing even in a movie, its all embarrassing and oh my goodness.

Weird weird weird.

I haven't really talked about this before... .One time my family and I were travelling and we stopped at a gas station for a bathroom break. For whatever reason, probably at my mothers request, I went into the washroom with her. She did her business and then it was my turn, for whatever reason I couldn't. I told her that I didn't feel comfortable peeing in-front of someone else. She exploded at me and said that the only reason I wanted her to leave the washroom was so that I could masturbate. This has always disturbed me. She always would go the bathroom with the door open at home and it always bothered me, I never did the same. How hard is it to close the door?

Now I'm thinking this may be part of why I feel obligated to spend at least some time with my mom (versus going NC).  For a long time (don't know when it started, but I'm sure she did when I was a teen, maybe earlier) she's told me just about everything she thinks, including complaints about my father and wanting to die.  And I've had to reassure her that she was a good mother and comfort her when she was feeling down.

Funny how my dad is the one I actually want to spend time with, but don't (I always somehow knew I wasn't supposed to because my mom would be jealous), but there's no obligation or guilt there -- he has his own life and friends and never burdened me with his problems, aside from telling me that my mom was upset and I should do something about it.

I felt that way, anyway, when my mom "changed" back into the little girl/waif. I remember going underwear shopping when I was about 20 and she used to be alllllll about the lacy sexy stuff and then she was MORTIFIED and REALLY UPSET when I picked them up for consideration. Only white plain granny panties now. That actually was the point that I consciously recognized that I was dealing with an entirely different person! Though I actually honestly didn't mind... .This one is much more tolerable.

When my mother retired from the military she had a very hard time finding work and was very depressed.  I remember I was probably 10 years old, one time she drove us to the copy shop and sent me in with a dollar to get her resume copied, not telling me anything about what she required.  I went in and waited in line, the clerk looked at me while he was helping someone else and sent me over to a self copier.  WTH did I know about this?

I came back to the car and gave them to her and of course self copiers have all kinds of little marks and smudges on the copies and she freaked out on me and then gave me a sobbing, silent treatment for more than a day.

She said to me, mostly in her behavior and not in so many words:

Didn't I know that resumes had to be extremely clean copies?

How could you do this to me?

You're so stupid!

I don't have the money to copy them over again, it's your fault that we're poor!

I was so scared and angry with her for sending me to do this task I wasn't prepared for, that she didn't prepare me for, and that she then punished me for.

Later in life, when I was in college, she wanted me to call around to companies in her industry to get the names of the hiring managers because I lived in the same state as the city she wanted to work in.  Somehow since she was out of state, it was better for me to call.  I made 2 calls and decided I was done with that task.  If she wanted a new job, she could call herself!

At least as a semi-adult, I could finally see that it was wrong of her to make me responsible for her finding employment.

I never knew about this until I read it about on this site not long ago. I would say I definitely experienced this as both a child and an adult. However, it was just such a "normal" part of my mother-daughter relationship, I didn't recognize it was wrong. Even as an adult I just assumed my mom was more "needy" than she ought to be.

My experiences:

--I have ALWAYS felt responsible for my mother's emotional, mental, and somtimes physical well-being.

--My mother had no sex life so that, thankfully, wasn't a problem. However, her and my dad were so distant (had separate bedrooms on opposite sides of the house) and disliked each other so much that my mom had no one to recieve any level of physical comfort and/or love from. So, she took it from her kids.

--She often slept with me in my bed until I was old enough to feel very uncomfortable about it and told her to stop (repeatedly before she got the message). Then she made me feel guilty about it, as if I was denying her something important.

Note, I'm not agaisnt co-sleeping with infants and young children. I actually think it is very natural and can be quite healthy and beneficial to the family as a whole. My DH and I co-slept with our DS until he was 10 months old and sleeping through. We still co-sleep with our DD who is 13 months old and will until she is sleeping through. But there is a big difference between sleeping with baby that wakes during the night to nurse and sleeping with a tween who doesn't want to share a bed, imho.

--She has never had many friends, so I was always required to take on that role for her. She always wanted me to participate in her hobbies, like the things she liked, and "hang" with her all the time. When she moved in with me as an adult, it was my fault she was bored all the time. I didn't have time to take her places and do things with her like she had with her exSO. Somehow I was a bad daughter for that.

Some mother-daughter bonding of this type is good, I think. But when mom becomes completely reliant on me for all aspects of her social life, entertainment, hobbies, etc. then it becomes a real problem, I think.

Emotional incest is the perfect way to describe it. My mother told me I was her "best friend." She used me as her therapist and told me all about her childhood abuse, her sex life, how much she hated my dad and his family, and how great and elite "her" family was. She never referred to cousins as our cousins, or our aunt, it was always her cousins and her aunt. My parents were violent towards each other but no one protected me, I had to protect my younger siblings from being scared and calm my mother down after the fight. I've always felt responsible for her moods and happiness. As long as I agreed to everything she said it was fine. The minute I disagreed she went off in a rage telling me how she's given up her life for her children and this is how I repay her? By making her so angry? She said she gave up getting married a second time so we wouldn't have a step dad. She wouldn't work so she could stay home with us. Blame and guilt constantly. And then when I graduated from college she said it proved she was a great mom and I was smart because she did homework with me and got me on the right track. Nothing was mine, everything felt like hers. She hated my friends and put them down any chance she got, then would tell me how she didn't know how anyone could stand to be around me. As an adult I'm expected to hang out with her and listen to her nonstop complaints about everything and make her feel better. She's mad she can't see her grandchild everyday, "her only joy." How's that for pressure? The boundaries I put in place caused a huge rage on her part. No contact it is. Now that I have my own family I just can't take it anymore.

When I started reading this thread I didn't think it could apply to me... .and then I read some of your comments, guys, and it made me shiver.   

Recently my mom has been abusing me so badly (to my face and behind my back) that I've decided to go NC with her. She's even tried to bully my grandma into not calling me anymore. Yet when my grand mother said no, that would be there for me because she loved me, my mom literally *screamed* at her: "NO ONE LOVES MY DAUGHTER MORE THAN ME!"

In hindsight, I find this quite disturbing.

Also, yeah... .it's been years since I've been comfortable with my mom touching me or hugging me. It always made me feel very uncomfortable, as it there was some sexual undertone she wasn't aware of. I don't have issues hugging or kissing my dad or grandma on the cheek. Just my mom.  ?

When we all lived together, we'd go wake up my younger brother by... .massaging his butt, just like when he was a baby. It wasn't overtly sexual, but I've always found it strange, considering he was 18 then... .but I now I find it downright creepy.   

Eww.

I don't think my enSis is/was BPD, but this really resonated with me.  I can remember my uBPDM and enSis sitting on one side of the living room whispering to each other while I sat on the other side of the room, alone.  There would be furtive glances at me, and then more whispering.  (Geez, can you get any more "mean girl"?)


Yup. 

I'm not sure about this... .

I know my mom liked to talk to me as her BFF, from a very young age, about everything, including her sexual relationship with my dad, but I don't know if that behavior has any 'label'.

After they divorced and I lived with Dad, and even before, he liked to make jokes to me to, "Walk like you've got a pair," and he'd jerk my shoulders back (I slouched a lot) to shove my chest forward, much to my embarrassment.  This was often in public places, like shopping malls.  He'd also made comments about my rather wide hips at times, "I made you that way on purpose," ? in front of my step-mother of just a short time.  At the same time, though, he told me my legs were too big for shorts and knee-or-higher skirts, like he thought people were starting up them. 

He and Mom both were very bad about inappropriate, sexually tinged humor around me.  But I was not molested - no on touched me, except the doctors Mom liked to drag me to for pelvic exams. 

Even before the divorce, and deferential after,  I guess he felt he should be able to talk to me about anything and everything, and I felt so lost, lonely and unwanted that any attention was welcomed.  I felt that I was the lady of the house (apartment) and I should do all 'grown-up' things, like iron his clothes and cook/clean and listen, grocery shop - all the stuff I'd felt guilty Mom didn't do, and I was trying to be a better person than her.  I was very mixed up, and afraid he'd want to get rid of me at anytime, too.  He was preoccupied with his worries, trying to get a job, life-disappointments and all, and being stuck with a teen daughter didn't help.  He wasn't home a lot after a while, and I was left to fend for myself when he was out late working or courting my step-mom.   

So I think I played substitute wife for a few years, between the ages of 14 and 19.  Is this what this post is talking about? 

I was the chosen child/scapegoat of invasive uNPD father who complained bitterly in secret to me about  HIS uBPD wife, MY mother. I always knew I was one nano second away from being the focus of the same poisonous rage he felt toward her.  Between this and their raging battles, I was a very nervous child.  To this day mother is baffled as to why I was nervous.

 

Ever since I was young, I always felt that my Mom was waaaaaaaaaaaaay too close for comfort.

I was her crying towel, her unpaid therapist, and the unwilling (and disgusted) recipient of dozens of sexual overtures - she wanted a young boyfriend, not a son. Just writing that makes me want to puke and then jump off a bridge.  

!

I voted yes on this, as "another or mixed roles" because I don't know yet where I fit. Need to read this again. My first thought was "what is emotional incest?" Then read what it is and my stomach hurts now.

My uBPDmom and my who knows what father (he actually acted kind of like a waif) were divorced when I was an infant. He fought for custody of me, so she turned him to the draft board and he was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, he never dodged his visitations with me, even though it must have really sucked dealing with my mom. I was his only child, but have 3 half brothers (1 older, 2 younger) through my mom.

My father always took me to the big amusement park, out to lobster dinners, bought me whatever i asked for (only if i asked and i rarely asked). but it didn't occur to him to buy me school clothes, shoes, or take me to the doctor or dentist, which i really needed. I was so starved for affection (my mom was a horribly severe witch BPD and i honestly can't remember her EVER saying "I love you" to me even once while i was growing up) that my fathers attention looked fabulous to me. yes, it devolved into a few instances of actual physical molestation as well.

Oh, man--I feel sick. just when ya think ya got this BPD mess all figured out---OMG. there's always MORE!

Having a parent like this is a real great way to not ever learn boundaries.  One because you are not allowed to have them. And two bc they make it very hard to keep them once you've found some.

It's a process.  Like the survivors guide. Discover a little.  Make changes.  Get accustomed to changes.  And then right when you think you get a handle on it.  Another discovery.  Maybe its a good one like reengaging a healthier relationship, sometimes its more dysfunctional parenting stuff.

One foot in front if the other.  Looking at ways to help ourselves.

I'm constantly working on boundaries.  How are you handling it?

GM

I have a HORRIBLE time with boundaries! And you're right--they weren't allowed. My mom just screamed and raged her way through life and it wasn't possible to "ignore" because she would become physically violent.

My father on the other hand, was more insidious. He was unfailingly polite and "reasonable" and made it so I felt really bad to ever disappoint him. After I was an adult, he basically turned me into his personal slave. When he was married to my (3rd) stepmom, he tried to get me to have a threesome with them. I didn't do it. It was horribly disappointing, because I was 21 years old and pregnant, had just been dumped by "the love of my life" and father of the baby, and I really, really needed my dads help. And here he was, coked up and obsessed with sex.

Later, after stepmom #3 finally divorced him, he became "ill" and wouldn't get out of bed unless he had to, and began to gradually turn me into his slave. He'd call in the middle of the night and say how sick he was, that I needed to rush to help him, and when I'd get there (300 miles away!) he'd send me to the grocery store with a detailed list of very specific items (sizes and styles and brands of products that weren't easy to find) and if I messed any of it up, he'd pout and throw it away and sigh loudly (acting like--but not actually saying--that I was incompetent). Then the next list--take his poodles to the groomers, clean the house, etc, etc, etc.

He died 12 years ago, and I felt guilty because I was so relieved. For so long, I was torn, because on the one hand, he fondled me a few times growing up (first time at 7) and acted very sexually inappropriate sometimes, but on the other hand, he was so polite, and smart, and reasonable, and NICE (compared to my mom). It seemed, in some ways, like his death ended the whole mess. which of course, it did not.

I'm seeing a therapist once a week. ":)ad" is our next topic. I also ordered a copy of this book that the poll comes from. This is good advice, GreenMango--discover. Change. Adapt to changes. Then discover more.

But CRAP---I only learned about BPD 2 months ago! Now this! Sometimes life doesn't give the luxury of small bites when we can handle them. It's OK, though. I can assemble the picture of what I'm up against and just start taking bites of it.

Boy, this really hits home about boundaries. I have a big problem there. I have learned a lot about getting past the verbal and physical abuse, but apparently have a ways to go dealing with the sexual and emotional abuse.

Sigh... .well, it is what it is... .

Wow! This term is exactly what I experienced. I never had a way of expressing it fully. I still am the golden child, and my mother although she is in T, still needs me to support her all the time.

She invited me to a church picnic yesterday. I was at my dad's house and I have a TON of things to do before I start my new job 1,000 miles away in June. She was so hurt and mad at me for not attending, but why would I want to go? I don't know anyone in her church, there is no one there my age and all she does is cart me around and tell everyone about me.

I hate it. And she was so mad at me. I felt like a mom who didn't go to her daughter's basketball game... .

I am missing all of the nurturing, discipline, and love from my mom and I hate it. She doesn't get it at all though... .

When I was about 5 years old I remember have a fight with my uBPD mother. I remember shouting "You're a BAD MOMMY!"

After raging, my mother hid in the bathroom and cried. I felt terrible so I apologized to her and told her how much I loved her to console her. And then she said:

"Remember, you can always hurt me more than I can ever hurt you."

And because I was 5 years old, I believed her. From that point on, I felt responsible for her happiness. I felt responsible if she was sad, mad, I felt responsible for the marital problems my mom and dad were having. Whenever they fought, I was the problem solver. I remember once writing notes begging her to unlock the bedroom door during one of their fights.


Totally relate. She would send me to mail an international letter or address invitations and yell at me when I didn't know how to do it or did it incorrectly. When she never taught me how to do it in the first place.

Silver lining: I am a great problem-solver as an adult!

Doublearies-   you didn't deserve any if that treatment.  And learning about mental illnesses can be totally overwhelming.  Taking it slow, being really kind to yourself, and doing those things like T are positive steps.

I think you are stronger than you realize.  Looking at the whole thing in one fell swoop can be so.overwhelming.  But in small bits its more doable.

There's a pretty great workshop on boundaries here on Ftf.  You are not alone in working on these and they can be really difficult because it goes against the grain on everything we've been taught.

Joyfulgirl-

Once there's a name to what's going on it can be that ah ha moment.  A parent with BPD can be like an overgrown child.  Their immediate needs seem to trump ours... .even when your in the process of moving for a new job.  I mean seriously the guilt trip over this is pretty thoughtless.

BPD manifests in some distinct ways... .lack of identity (relying in kids to fulfill this and no clear boundary between themselves and us) and lack of empathy (putting themselves first) are a few.  It doesn't make it any less painful or inappropriate.  But if you know what your dealing with it may help to refine your approach to protect yourself.

Do you have support through this?

Tygress-

It's awesome you found a silver lining.   |iiii

GM

As you can probably tell by my username, YES, I was the chosen child (and only child) enmeshed with my uBPDmom   

MBF

That must have been a diffcult situation to navigate out of.  Sounds like you've come out of the FOG.  

GM

Getting there  |iiii   with help from this board!     

This is a very tough subject for me. I might post more later but for now I'll just say that my relationship with my mother when I was a kid was disturbingly close to this description. She has been extremely invasive/overbearing in my life. I was treated like an adult when I was a child and am now treated like a child when I'm an adult. She told me what classes to take in HS, singed me up for things and basically made decisions for me about anything important, even into adulthood. I wasn't given much opportunity to make mistakes and grow.

My sister and I used to be extremely close. But things started to get weird. If you look at some of my past posts you'll see what I mean. She would tell me intimate details about her sex life, would drunk dial me multiple times a week, and has actually asked me "anatomical" questions . It's like she feels like I'm the only "safe" male in her life but it's very very creepy at times.

The first time I heard the term "emotional incest" (incidentally, before I knew what BPD was), I knew exactly what it meant and that it was what I'd been looking for a term for since I was quite young.

Compared to many of you, what I had to put up with was mild.

-used as an emotional soundingboard anytime she felt my father didn't love her enough

-treated the times my father and I spent together with suspicion, like I was stealing him from her - "You don't love ME like you love him. Why don't you want to sit next to ME at dinner? Why did you get so excited about a trip with him and not with me?" This didn't apply constantly, as one of her complaints about him was that he wasn't involved enough in his children's lives (I have no clue why she thought that... .he was really a good dad, except for not seeing how much we needed to be rescued from her), so she liked it when he chose to spend time specifically with us... .you could see her fighting herself on what her response was going to be

-she loved to make my sister and I uncomfortable by allusions to sex. For example, on a road trip, we're all comparing notes on our favorite things - favorite smells, tastes, sounds, and so on - and I asked what everyone's favorite sensory feeling was, expecting things like "a rabbit's fur" or "strong wind on my face." Mom just got that smirk on her face and smugly said "I can't tell you my favorite feeling. It's something only for married people." I was probably nine years old at the time and knew enough to have a vague idea what she meant. But it was that kind of thing constantly.

-she also wanted me to be her personal little facial groomer, helping pluck her eyebrows and stray hairs on her chin/throat/etc. This absolutely disgusted me, especially since she wanted to lie with her head in my lap so I could 'see them easier.'

-the emotional crap got much worse as I got older. While she refused to let me date all the way through my first four years of college - until I finally stood up for myself and told her that since they were no longer supporting me, I was going to make my own choices on the matter - she cried to me from my late teens on about things like ":)addy doesn't kiss me like he used to", "I tried saying something flirty to Daddy and he made a mean face at me," all the way to "You have no idea how much I miss him having sex with me. Now he won't even look at me. It's been so long since I've been touched... ." dissolving into sobs - all while getting progressively more suicidal, putting all the pressure on me to cheer her up as I used up calling card after calling card in our hall commons phone.

Nowadays I don't put up with it, but she still tries. Usually she'll try to back into it - "Oh, I wanted to let you know a praise report about my life. I asked God to help me be nice to Daddy on our anniversary and not expect anything from him, and when I hugged him he didn't jerk away from me, even though he didn't hug me back, and the Lord helped me to be happy about that instead of being sad... ." I finally had to tell her that I can't listen to any topic that involves my dad. He finally left her a few months ago, and that kind of thing eased up, but just this week she was wanting to know if I ever talked to him and if it was him who called me or if I was the one who called him... .

Sigh. I wish I had a robot to send to her to help ease her misery. She IS miserable. I certainly can't fix it, and much of it is her own doing, but her lifelong feelings of abandonment finally have some basis in reality now.

Green Mango, I'm not locating the workshop about boundaries you spoke of in your reply... .where can I find it?

This is so creepy! But all these things I have learned in the past 2 months are also a relief. There are actually names for this garbage!

I never thought i'd ever be able to explain my mom to anyone--ever. Come to find out, she's a text book witch BPD! And my dad--that always seemed even more complicated. An example: when I was 14, my mother shipped me off thousands of miles away to "the brother Roloff's home for girls"--a fundamentalist Baptist "attitude adjustment" private juvinile hall of sorts. My dad sprang me from there after a few months of hellish abuse and torture (seriously--google this place up!) and had me come live with him. I was pretty shell shocked for quite a while. I'd been living at my dads for only a few weeks when he had this party at his house and all his friends were drinking hard and using cocaine. The later it got, the more grotesque it got, with my dad making all kinds of sexually explicit jokes and innuendos. After everyone finally left, he and my stepmom got into a big argument and he came into my room and crawled into my bed and started fondling me, breathing booze breath on me and sniveling how (stepmom) was being mean to him and he needed some affection and couldn't get it from her so basically it was my job, and I owed him the "love" he "needed". These weren't his words of course--his words were more self pitying and manipulative. I finally got him to go away after a lengthy argument about whether I was a virgin or not, and the next day he acted like it didn't happen. When I brought it up, he acted like I was rude and unreasonable and being controlling. Wasn't too much longer before i ran away from "home".

I don't know if this counts as emotional incest, but there were many times that I felt like my mother treated me more like a significant other than her child.

In my 20's is when my parents really started having marriage problems. Whenever my parents were fighting, my mother would act like my new BFF. Confiding in me all of her problems with my father.  But as soon as my parents made up (for the time being),  she would get sort of distant with me. Sometimes even cold towards me.  And then when they were fighting again, she would get into BFF mode again.

Or when my father would go away on business during the week.  At that time,  I was the BFF.  But when he'd come home on weekends,  my mother would treat my like a dumped significant other.  Just a totally different behavior towards me.  And this pattern would continue.

Several months ago before I went NC,  she told me that I was her "best friend".  For some reason that made me uncomfortable.  I told her that my husband was my best friend, and that shouldn't her husband be hers?   And she told me "Up until 10 years ago,  he WAS my best friend."

10 years ago is when they started having marital problems and have chosen not to seek counseling for it.

But there have been other things too.  Like when she'd get annoyed with me if I didn't want to go to church with her, or if I didn't want to go shopping with her, or if I didn't want to pursue a specific career that she thought I should.

There was absolutely no mutual respect in the relationship.  She would sometimes ridicule me or make fun of me or criticize me.  But if I were to do the same to her?  She'd go running to my father in tears and he'd start yelling at me like a bully.

Meanwhile I'd watch my GC brother get treated like an adult.  And he would often be rude to my mother, like a brooding teenager (even though he's in his early 30's). But my mother would never get offended by his rudeness.  

I'm not saying I should be allowed to be rude towards my mother,  just showing how unbalanced her behavior is depending on who she's dealing with.

Sunnyskies,

Yeah parents over sharing or having one lean on us in inappropriate ways during times when the other parent is absent falls into this too.

When parents don't have the emotional maturity to self soothe or problem solve their stuff in appropriate ways can get put on the kids.  Gripeing to the kids about dad when he's fallen short of moms expectations is also a form of triangulation and a lack of boundaries.

Doublearies,

Here's the link to the boundaries workshop  https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=132527.msg1298413#msg1298413  (https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=132527.msg1298413#msg1298413).  I bumped it so it should be on the front page.of coping.

GM

Oh, yes.  Up until a few years she truly believed it was her God given right to talk crap about dad when he wasn't around.  She did this all my life.  One of my sisters has a story that once upon a time dad came to her with tears in his eyes and said "Your mother has turned all you kids against me."  I felt awfully sorry for him before I saw his significant, SIGNIFICANT, role in our upbringing.  Spineless jellyfish!  I shut her down a few years ago and long before I knew about this condition/evilness by saying "You shouldn't talk to me about your relationship with dad.  That is between the two of you and it is WRONG to include me."  I watched her come apart like a cassette tape in an old Pontiac.  She gathered herself together mighty quickly though.  What made her come apart was not the knowledge that it was wrong.  She knew that.  What made her momentarily, and you had to be watching closely, was that I KNEW IT AND SAID NO.  She never tried it again with me.  Ain't that a surprise? 

One summer day I was out riding a bike that was probably too large for me and hit some gravel and went sliding on a hip.  I didn't break anything but I was hurt and there was huge amount of skin scraped off of me.  I had long learned not to come home expecting sympathy from her.  Instead you were likely to get raged at.  However, I really was having a bit of trouble walking and I was bleeding everywhere and I knew I had to have help.  Can you imagine being that age and injured and knowing you have to go to the only person for care and that the person will likely injure you more?  I had to though.  Sure enough... .rage, rage, rage.  No doctor though and we were rich with great insurance.  She had me sleep for quite some time in a little slip that maybe wouldn't cling to the open wound so much.  One day she came into my room and gave me this incredible disapproving look up and down my body and said to me "You shouldn't dress that way in front of your father.".  I was NINE.  I got the message.

Emotional incest?  YES

When I was a kid, she_

I dont even remember a time when I really got to be a child, it was always me that had to look after my mother and sisters as well as all the other day to day things, cooking,cleaning and of course I had to be ready with a shoulder to cry on for my mother depending on her mood at the time. Usually I was either "the only one that understands her" or "completely useless and trying to ruin our family" its amazing how many others out there have been through this as well! I just dont understand how this happens in so many households all over the world and yet people still seem to turn the other cheek.

I think I'm starting to understand the whole emotional incest thing.  My uBPD mom pulled this behavior quite often.

When I was a child she exuded this behavior in the following ways:

1. Forcing her kids to like the same things she liked (crafts, clothes, etc.).  If you expressed that you liked something else she would make snide comments or tell you she was hurt depending upon the situation.

2. When any of her kids (there were 3 of us) was not sitting with her in the family room in the evening after dinner, she would constantly call you to come downstairs and sit with her and watch TV.  She did not like us actually sitting alone in our rooms.  We did not have any privacy.   But when we did sit with her in the family room, she'd then be on the phone with a friend of hers for the entire time we were there. 

3. Random Sunday afternoons she would get us into the car to 'take a drive' because SHE would feel cooped up at home.  She was (and still is) a very high-energy, constantly on-the-go type of person.  She cannot just sit and relax.  To this day, I still feel guilty sitting inside and watching a movie on a 'nice' day.  I always feel like I should be outside enjoying the day.  Working on that one.

Today:

1. She tries to get me to look at pictures of my cousins' kids and talk about how she's found out the latest info about our relatives who won't interact with us anymore (not her fault, they're just as screwed up,etc.).  She tries to pull the emotional heartstrings on me when she wants me to join in her lamenting over our non-communicative relatives. 

When I push back and decline her constant requests, she flips her perspective to ' well I don't care about what they do anyway'.  The next time I see her she's back to getting all emotional about them and the latest news she's heard about them.  It really is 'crazy-making' behavior.

Totes, that was M_

You know, that really jumped out at me. uBPDM ALWAYS says _

I couln't agree more.  One of the things that had always bugged me as an adult is that my mother never treats me like an adult.  She would try to make major decisions for me.  If I didn't want to do what she thought I should, she would either pull the "No, you don't really want to do that, do you?  Come on, why not do this instead  :)" nonsense.  If I stood up to that, she would find some way to either berate my decision or focus on one aspect she didn't like and harass me about it until I changed my mind (or forever if I stuck with my decision).

As a child, my mother would use me as her counselor.  She would ask my advise on everything from how to find a job (seriously, I wasn't even 15, what could I possibly know about getting a job?  ) to how to deal with work politics.  Even though she never dated after her divorce (probably a very good thing), she still asked for advice on interpersonal matters... .when she wasn't trying to sway me to think people A, B, and C were absolutely evil because *gasp* they said "Hi" to her in a "funny" way.  She would reward me for helping her by telling me how "wise" I was.  

My mother would constantly bait me into telling her she was a good cook (in hindsight, she wasn't, but hey, what did I know), and a good mother by saying that she was an awful cook/mother and would stand there waiting for my response, and then argue with me why she thought she was a bad parent.  I was a kid, why would I tell her she was a horrible mother? How she was treating me as a result of being a pwBPD was never mentioned.   She would also cry at the drop of a hat.  I remember asking her why she would cry so often and she told me that "Women are emotional, men are logical" (yeah, like that didn't screw me up any ).  I think it was then that I started to feel responsible for comforting my mother whenever she would cry.  Oh, and when she was happy over something, she would be hurt if I did not immediately become equally as happy as she was... .even if it was over the dumbest things.

When I was young, I fell n a garden and hurt myself... .not too many scratches, but it hurt a lot... .and I could see my mother was nearby but she refused to come when I called out for help. I remember asking years later why she didn't help me and she said that she wanted me to learn that she won't alwas be around to help and I need to be able to take care of myself (at less than 6 years old?  Really?).  She also provided no real structure for boundaries/what I should do.  If I ever got caught doing something I shouldn't, the punishment was normally very light... .unless it wasn't at which point it was very severe.  In either case, the punishment never really seemed to fit the crime.

I also never had a solid door on my bedroom.  Instead, it was more like a plastic curtain that could close.  I also remember my mother would often sleep in the same bed as me - even past puberty  .  Her excuse was that the air conditioner was in my room, but I never understood why we couldn't change rooms the A/C was in or get a second window unit.  I even remember inadvertently pushing her out of bed several times because I barely had enough room to lie down.  That's when she slept on the floor.  That finally stopped when I insisted... .many times over many weeks, that it needed to stop.

Growing up, I always looked a lot older than my age, and my mother tended to look young for her age.  Once I was in/past my junior year of high school, waitstaff would often think we were a couple on a date, and my mother always laughed it off.  I thought it was humerus.  Now I just see it as one more way we were enmeshed and she was carrying out the emotional incest.

If you look at pictures of my college graduation, my mother is grinning from ear to ear, hugging me in a ridiculously hard hug.  I am there looking like "Get. This. Person. Off. Of. Me. Now!"  I think one of the worst things is that I bought the lies and manipulations whole-sale.  I thought this was normal  (I didn't have a father-figure around and I didn't see any other mother-son relationships indepth enough to know otherwise).  Every time I think about this stuff, I feel dirty... .like I need a brillo pad, a ton of degreaser, and a  shop vac to clear out all of the crud this left in me. 

Yes, the sad thing is my mother is being very emotionally incestuous with my little sister and in turn she doesn't have any boundaries. When I'm at home it feels a bit like being in a concentration camp, you have no privacy, your valuables are taken off you, nothing is your property, you're always working and there are daily rituals of humiliation. My sister always wants to sleep in my bed and winds herself up into a fit even if I don't. I can't have a shower without her insisting on being in the bathroom where she spends the duration of the time trying to touch my breasts/ genitals or pooping loudly on the toilet.

It's like my mum has deliberately trained her to be unpleasant so people won't want to spend time with her, kind of sad because she really does like being around other people, she just exhibits the behaviors of a person who hasn't been raised with any kind of logic or consistency. I wish there was something I could do to get her out but she's too young to go anywhere without mum.

Another weird thing my mum does, which is an extension of her narcissistic/ competitive personality is talking about her sex life. She always talks about her sex life, how hers is the most healthy, most fulling sexual relationship anyone has ever had in the history of the world. She is always judging other women as part of her 'splitting.' If she doesn't like a woman she talks about how she imagines she is in a bad/ abusive sexual relationship with her partner, she goes in to quite graphic detail about what the woman's husband must say to her while he's raping her. Not very normal right?

I can always tell when she is making me the bad child because she will imply I'm also having bad sex, she honestly thinks that I lay there detatched while my partner jackrabbits away on top. So wierd! A few years ago I remember my sister who was nine was sitting on my mothers bed miming a sex act my mum grinned and coo'ed 'ooh she's going to be a wild girl just like her mummy!' 

Yep, I can relate to a lot of these posts. I have a hard time with boundaries, I didn't know you were allowed to have them! My mother views me as an extension of herself and we were very enmeshed.

My mom slept with me in bed until I was in fifth grade. She would wash my hair and give me a bath while I was in the shower until that time, too. This only stopped because I had a bout of lice that went on for a year in fifth grade. I remember this because it was a classmate of mine who had the lice and she made me call the girl on the phone myself and tell her that I couldn't "be her friend because she was a dirty girl". I had to stop the situation myself by hurting my friend or be stuck with the lice because she refused to get me transferred to a different class.

My real dad left when I was three/four. I became her therapist, her best friend, and something like a comfort doll or a teddy bear. She always told me that I was such an adult, and that she believed in talking to me like I was an adult, not a child. When she was having fights with my step-dad, she would confide in me a lot. She would confide in me about her anger towards our relatives, people she didn't like, work drama etc. and she worked hard to build a paradigm of me and her versus the horrible world. Except when she'd split and it was her and my step-dad against the horrible world.

My step-dad is emotionally and verbally abusive so as a child it felt good when she confided in me because I felt validated, I think. My step-dad and I would be white or black and we were never the same color. It was really dysfunctional.

I didn't even realize anything was strange about this until I was an adult. When I moved out she began to cling even harder, working at the same place as me, calling me almost everyday, and (creepily enough) trying to compete with my husband for my attention and paint him black. She started to confide in me about harder stuff, like her days snorting cocaine, growing marijuana as a profession, and lots of sexual stuff.

I didn't have to listen to her talk about her sex life as a child, thankfully. She would have a lot of loud sex while I was in the house, though, and I'd have to listen to that when I was in middle school almost every night. I can't watch a sex scene in a movie without becoming triggered and getting upset. I'm trying to get over that one right now.

Boundaries are important.  It's pretty crazy the things we can assume are normal then find out there not.

Fransisca you mentioned working on the sex scene trigger.  What are you finding helpful?

To what extent is this like incest?

When I was little the social workers wanted to take me away at one point because I was exhibiting behaviors of having been sexually abused but I don't remember any overt abuse.

I enjoyed being her chosen child (or at least I think I did) and until my late teens I always thought of all the sexual stuff as a form of "bonding".

I've tried talking about this in other places to some extent in the past but I'm kind of disgusted with myself because at the time I wanted it.

In my early teens we watched porn together and shared a vibrator at one point and wore the same underwear and since I was a child I would wear the sexy lingerie that she'd gotten way back when for her ex… at the time I enjoyed all that attention I got from my mom and I thought it was just being "liberal" and modern… and she was just "educating" me by telling me all about her sex life including with my dad and so on… It was only in my mid teens that I suddenly didn't want her to touch me anymore or see me naked.

When she tried asking why I wouldn't even hug her anymore I admitted a couple of times that it felt sexual and she called me a "pervert" for thinking that "everything's sexual" and for thinking of my own mother that way…

(One time when I ~sort of~ confronted her though she actually said "oh my, I really messed you up in your teens… I'm sorry" but I didn't want to hear her say that because I knew that no matter how sincere she was with that "I'm sorry" that she'd soon forget all about it and then go back to her previous attitude and I didn't want to forgive her either at the time…)

When she was brain dead I finally felt safe enough to touch her again and I hugged and hugged her the way I hadn't hugged her in years… at one point I went home and realized that all these years that the feeling of disgust whenever she touched me – it was fear of finding out that I had been attracted to her all along… which apparently I was.

I can deal with sex but last time I tried lying next to a guy (one of my exes) I kept getting flashbacks to when I was little and snuggling in bed with my mother and it was like such a weird cross between a sweet dream and a horrible nightmare… idk how to describe it.

This may be a stupid/rhetorical question and I'm sorry if someone else already mentioned it earlier in the thread 'cause I didn't read through the whole thing but: Is there any way of dealing with this?

This may seem inappropriate to mention but I literally just threw up after sending the above post. I can't believe I actually wrote that.

Sorry for double posting btw, I don't have an edit option these days… which is probably just as well…

Right now I just want to say "I'm sorry" repeatedly forever and idk why…

I just finished reading The Emotional Incest Syndrome, and it was an amazing book. Very thorough talking about how all this affects a person and their whole family. I highly recommend it!

My mom was the victim of ACTUAL incest, by her father, so I completely understand why she's as messed up as she is, and how she could easily justify something like, "Well, it's not like I've having sex with my children, so I'm actually treating them great!"

The book also covers how the emotionally incestuous parent can actually believe this counts as GOOD parenting (my mom thinks she's a Super Mom), and how the Chosen Child also thinks this is great at the time (my mom was my best friend when I was in middle and high school, and I was grateful we had such a "good" relationship, and she trusted me to tell me all her most intimate thoughts and feelings).

Makes me feel a lot less guilty about thinking this kind of behavior was actually good at the time, to find out that's actually a normal thing for a Chosen Child to think.

Justnothing, don't be so hard on yourself. There's a reason why it's called emotional INCEST, because it can get dangerously close to actual incest. I just had a talk with my younger sister last night, and apparently after I grew up and moved out, Mom turned her attentions on her, and in some ways worse, or at least more sexual. I was always mom's best friend/unpaid therapist, but then again that was when mom was a bit more emotionally stable. My sister didn't want to get into detail, but I got the impression things got worse when I left, to the point where my sister now acts like a survivor of sexual abuse.

I only have a couple of problems with Love's book. She doesn't even consider the possibility of homosexual emotional incest. She mentions same-sex incest as a "best friend" thing like I had with my mom, and acts like only opposite-sex parents are the ones that cross the line into romantic/sexual territory, but I seriously doubt that's actually the case.

The other criticism I have is that she has these stories in here of Adult Children reconciling with their Invasive Parents which I think are way too optimistic for most of our situations here at BPD family. BPD is not the only reason a parent can be invasive, so maybe the ones that do it for other reasons are more willing to work things out. I'm sure that if I did like some of the people in the book did and confronted my mom about what went on, it would not go NEARLY as well as it does for some of the people in the book.

So for that I'm reading some things about BPD specifically, but Love's book is at least really helpful in understanding what emotional incest can do to a person, and how to avoid letting it ruin your marriage, social life, or your own kids.

I try to treat it like an anxiety attack or an emotional flashback. Deep breathing, recognizing it for what it is, and keeping myself in the present.

I didn't understand what was happening until recently. I have no problems with intimacy and am relatively open-minded about sexual things so having an irrational child-like response because of a scene in a movie was humiliating. My poor husband had to come find me one time, because I just got up and walked out of a theater during a movie on one of our first dates. I have had to leave the room during movies and try not to watch anything that might be explicit. I just go somewhere and curl up and want to cry like a little girl.

I have always thought I had problems with explicit scenes due to self esteem with my previous weight issues, perceptions about misogyny in raunchy movies, objectification, I'm just broken etc... .It's a relief to finally understand what's causing the intense response. Just understanding has helped.

It doesn't always work perfectly, particularly if the trigger is unexpected/loud. It's getting a lot better, though, and I was even able to watch a movie with my husband last night with no problems.  Baby steps.  lol

Thank you… (I needed to hear that)…

And yeah, unfortunately it's not surprising that Dr. Love doesn't consider the possibility of same-sex incest…  Society itself doesn't seem ready yet to even consider that mothers, in general, can be anything other than the Virgin Mary… much less abusers and much less sexual abusers and much less sexual abusers of their daughters…

I know a woman who was sexually abused by her mother since she was small and when she once tried to confront her mother and aunt about it the two actually laughed at her and said that "that's not sexual abuse"…

Not that I think boys have it any better. I used to wish I were male when I was little because I wanted to be my mothers' knight in shining armor (which I think she may have wanted)… and between that and my mothers' belief, back then, that men were the ones responsible for all the woes of the world and that women were there helpless victims… I absolutely shudder to think what it might have been like if I had been male.

Just nothing, you have nothing to be ashamed of, you were a child and did not know the difference between right and wrong. You completely trust your parents and everything they say because when you are a child everything seems a bit bizarre, you're still learning and your parents job is to tell you whats normal.

I really worry about my sister sometimes, the stuff she and my mum talk about to do with her sexual feelings and she thinks it's normal... .

Since you've all been so honest I have to confess my mother has made some areas of my sex life quite difficult, because I'm not the golden child she makes remarks about how she thinks I'm very passive in my sex life and her and my sister are wild and empowered.

Even though I have a wonderful boyfriend and we have a very fulfilling sex life because he's so loving and understanding and I'm really embracing my confident side it still bothers me that she thinks that way.

I've had dreams where I've been engaged in sex and somehow through video or a spy hole my mother is observing it and commenting on how everything I do is a sign that I'm a passive victim. I think this is maybe because my mother has no respect for my boundaries and maybe would do this if I ever had sex within a five mile radius of her.

I realize that this thread is old, but I need to release this into the world... .

I am always in the position of "unwilling/unpaid therapist" as well, including wildly inappropriate statements about my parents failed marriage, her exes, etc. I finally flipped out in late high school with "Oh my god, stop telling these things about my dad!"

I also experienced what I consider sexualized bullying, not specifically sexual abuse, mainly relating to developmental things (telling me I was "swinging my hips like a slut" when I was 9), wildly inappropriate demands for information about my period, micromanaging that (demanding I pack I whole extra bag of clothes to middle school everyday, which other girls bullied me about), screaming at me in public for needing a quarter when I forgot to bring a supply of pads with me. She refused to let me use tampons in middle school, and I missed a going away swim party my little friends planned when she chaotically decided to move on a whim, and all of my little friends thought I stood them up. She made me call them to cancel, then told the family I was "throwing a tantrum about what to wear," not that she was so worried about toxic shock syndrome she was willing to let me move away without saying goodbye to any of my friends. She threw the worst, most abusive tantrum ever and refused to give me my insurance card to get birth control when I was 17.

The worst was when she showed up unannounced for a "driving lesson" at my (repeat:my) house when I was 18 (in my car which I bought and insured myself), saw me in bed with my boyfriend, KIDNAPPED ME IN MY OWN CAR, drove me to planned parenthood and demanded I go inside at that very moment for an immediate gyno exam. She was literally trying to drag me into the appointment lobby by the arm, screaming and crying. That was the point I threatened to call the cops to get a restraining order and possession of my car. I told her if she succeeded in shoving me in to that office to be examined under duress, that I would be to using their phone to call the police. I missed the first day of college classes over that BS, and had to finish teaching myself how to drive. The next week I crashed into some dude's Jaguar in a parking lot because, surprise, my insane parent was more worried about me dying of AIDS than learning how to drive. I had to change the locks on my rental house too. I should have cut her out of my life completely then.

Wow. I'm going to bookmark this. I didn't know this was a thing. So, my uBPDm wanting me to sleep in the same bed with her and snuggle when I was 16yo wasn't just run of the mill enmeshment? She used to confide everything in me at a very young age. She would ask me to lie to her boyfriends about which boyfriend she'd seen the night before. I started helping with the household finances and paying my own way as a teen.

Even now, when I think about it, she still wants me to take on the role of her missing partner. She wants me to take her to appointments, take her grocery shopping, help her pay bills, do the maintenance on her house, etc.

Even creepier, she says my husband is the son she never had. She says she doesn't like his parents and wants to adopt him. Literally, she wants to legally adopt my husband. She seems oblivious to the creepiness level of how that would make him my brother. 

Can't talk about this anymore right now. I have to go breathe into a bag.

Wow, sounds like this struck a chord in a lot of people... me included. Nearly everyone has talked about their mom being the one, in my case it was my malignant NPD dad. My mom was cold/distant to everyone, him included. And he treated me like I was his age... to the point of being ridiculous. He rode motorcycles ... and when I was 7 he got me one, and I rode with him and his friends... no other kids did, but I did (he was a doctor in a small town and was given more leeway than he should have been.)  We rode cycles each weekend... and they would bring beer to drink... and at 7... I was having beer because it would be summer, over 100 degrees and there was nothing else to drink.

He would talk to me about arguments he had with my mom, how she was unreasonable, didn't care, etc. He favored me so much over my sister that it was sad... he would plan trips to do things like go skiing or riding motorcycles out of state... and it would end up being him and I, but my sister either wouldn't be asked or invited... or worse, would be included ... . then at the last minute told she couldn't go. After a while she refused to discuss any of it with him, as she knew he wouldn't take her.

My folks eventually separated, and my sister and I lived with my mom, which was very unpleasant, as we didn't get along well... and she was passive aggressive in dealing with me, she would wait till I wanted to go somewhere with friends and say I didn't have some minor chore done ... and delay or stop me from going (despite me having asked and reasked many times whether everything was done... we lived on a farm... her thing not mine.)... So when my parents announced they were divorcing I chose to go with my dad (which wasn't expected)... and didn't see/talk with my mom for about 4 yrs... (she called to have me come out... I did and found out she wanted help burying our family dog that she was having put down that day... I was so hurt/pissed I didn't talk to her for a few more years.)

Anyway, I was always the responsible one, the one that looked out for everyone, I was barely out of high school and rescuing my dad's paperwork and taxes and everything else... we took a trip that was supposed to be 5 days, and it ran 14... he took me all over the place in an RV, then we went to Vegas and he wanted to get hookers... it was so twisted... I didn't and he acted like I was afraid of women.

He got more and more malignant over time, always had to have things better than me. I bought a 280Z when he had a VW Rabbit... a neighbor commented that I had a nicer car than my dad, next day he had a very expensive Vette roadster, and no VW. As I started making good money, he did what he could to get me to ruin my income... . when my wife got pregnant he tried to cause a miscarriage, and I ceased having anything to do with him... 2 yrs later he had medical power of attorney and orchestrated the death of my grandmother... at which point my whole family quit having anything to do with him.

Amazing what comes back to you when someone reminds you of something like being the adult to your parent growing up... no wonder I am attractive to a person with a PD... I had a childhood... it was about 3 yrs long... from about 4-7.

Even though this is an older thread, I'll speak here, for those who might be in the same situation - I am the left-out spouse. My BPD husband had a creepily enmeshing mother when he was growing up, and now he's repeating the pattern with my four year old stepson. It's heartbreaking to witness. My attempts at loving, civil interventions are - of course - met with lashing out and emotionally-violent deflection behavior by my husband.

I can well understand why the left-out spouse "turns to workaholism, alcohol, affairs, or other unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with an unhappy life at home"; it's a very off-putting dynamic to watch unfold. Seeing a grown man try to merge with a 4 year old, watching an adult use a small child for intimacy, companionship, ego fulfillment, etc is rather repulsive.    Among other things, it certainly decreases my desire for physical intimacy with my husband.

My BPDh craves symbiosis, he desperately seeks out engagement with others that replicates the Symbiotic Phase (see Margaret Mahler et al); Separation-Individuation isn't a state he handles well - when he's not actively enmeshed with either our child or myself (whom he turns to as the substitute when the child's not around), he instantly feels 'empty' and turns to drugs to get away from the feeling. My analogy is that of the 'windsock' figures one sees outside car washes, etc - those tall pipes of fabric with faces and hands at the top, connected to an air blower that makes the pipe of fabric remain upright and wave around. The moment that air source is removed, the windsock figure falls flat on the ground. When my husband isn't merging and snuggling and 'petting' (non sexual) with one of us - when he isn't wrapped in a cloud of infantic symbiosis - he immediately becomes empty and falls flat.

He's promised for over a year to go back into therapy; I wonder if he ever will. I know I can't live out the rest of my life with a spouse who is the way he is.