Setting Boundaries With Your Parents

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From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome

” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.. Exploring the dynamics of covert (emotional or non-sexual but gender-related) incest.

From pages 166 -167:

An essential aspect of making peace with your parents is to establish clear boundaries between you. As I explained in chapter 7, a healthy family system has a firm but flexible barrier between parenst and children. When the children mature, this barrier is reinforced. The adult child no longer needs to turn to the parents for protection, guidance, day-to-day affection, nurturing, or financial support, because those needs are now taken care of by a partner or adult friends. The two generations stay in touch because of the love between them and because they are genuinely interested in each other, not because they meet each other's fundamental needs or feel a sense of obligation.

The exceptions are worth mentioning. I believe a parent and adult child are obligated to keep each other apprised of their status and whereabouts. A significant illness, a death in the family, a job change, a divorce or a marriage, and a change of address are examples of information that needs to be shared. In addition, I believe that adult children have a responsibility to care for their aging parents in some fashion. Whether that entails home care or institutional care is for each family to decide.

Beyond these minimal obligations, a healthy relationship between a parent and adult child is one characterized by choice. For example, one reason to stay in touch is to give everyone a sense of history. When family members play the game “remember when,” everyone has a sense of belonging and a connection to earlier times. Though repetition of these anectotes, a family identity is passed down from generation to generation...

The need for guidance may also connect adult children and their parents. The older generation may have expertise in a special area or have an overall wisdom that comes from having lived a few more decades. The tables turn as the parents become limited by poor health or age, and the older generation may turn to the younger generation for advice. In this exchange of insight and information, two ideas are kept in mind: (1) asking for advice is not the same thing as taking it, and (2) unsolicited advice can lead to resentment – especially if the advice is coupled with expectation.

A desire to express affection, history sharing, celebration, and guidance are key components of a healthy parent/adult child relationship. Ideally, these interactions and any beyond this -- mutual interests, cooperative ventures, and joint activities, for example – should be a matter of personal choice.

Excerpt from
Dr. Patricia Love's The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent's Love Rule's Your Life Bantam Books, 1990

When Children are Made Responsible for Parents

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From “Silently Seduced” by Kenneth Adams. Exploring the dynamics of covert (emotional or non-sexual but gender-related) incest.

From pages 13 -14:

The covertly incestuous relationship system continues to affect one's choice of partners, decisions about separation and divorce, sexuality and all attempted at emotional fulfillment until the truth is faceted and resolved. This is not about blaming or accusing parents. It is about assigning responsibility where it belongs: the parents' relationship with the child. Children do not choose this relationship; it is created for them. Even as adults we do not gain freedom of choice until we see the past clearly and experience our feelings about it. Relationships continue to be dictated by the sense of entrapment, experienced as a surrogate partner to one's parent. Assigning responsibility where it rightfully belongs is the first crucial step in gaining access to one's true feelings, needs and wants.

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I think it's important to understand that parents recreate their own family systems. Most parents are not malicious and are not aware of the effect they have on their children because a part of their own childhood is buried within. Sadly, if one's own childhood is not seen for what it really was, the pain of these incestuous relationships gets passed on from one generation to the next. If parents never recover their own lost childhoods, their grief deepens. They continue to expect their children to be there for them in ways they hoped their parents would have been. When this expectation goes unmet, parents see their children as ungrateful, unloving and ungiving. The result is heightened struggles between adult children and aging parents. Willpower or the right set of moral standards aren't enough to produce lasting, healthy changes. Only by facing one's past can one take responsibility for oneself and reclaim the vitality surrendered by being a parent's surrogate partner.

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From page 19 – 20:

Many men and women have grown up in families where there is no alcoholic or chemically dependent parent, yet the struggles for love and intimacy are similar. In fact, many of these families appear well put together, almost the ideal or perfect family on the outside. This makes it much more difficult to confront the past in the effort to find the roots of one's current struggles to grow and become healthy. These dysfunctional families have been described as co-dependent.

In “Co-Dependency And Family Rules: A Paradoxical Dependency,” Robert Subby and John Friel offer this definition:

Co-dependency is a dysfunctional pattern of living and problem-solving which is kept in place by a set of the rules within the family system. These rules make healthy growth and change very difficult.

These rules are described by Subby and Friel as follows:

1. It's not okay to talk about problems.
2. Feelings should not be expressed openly.
3. Communications is best if indirect, with one person acting as messenger between the other two (triangulation).
4. Be strong, good, right, perfect. Make us proud. (Unrealistic expectations.)
5. Don't be “selfish.”
6. Do as I say, not as I do.
7. It is not good to play or be playful.
8. Don't rock the boat.

Excerpts from

Kenneth Adams

"Silently Seduced:

When Parents Make Their Children Partners

~Understanding Covert Incest"

Health Communications, 1991

Sex and Relationships Problems ~~The Effects of Enmeshment

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From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.

NOTE: SENSITIVE SUBJECT MATTER concerning sexual problems that stem from enmeshment with a parent. Please make note of it. For mature readers only.

The Relationship Problems of the Chosen Child

(The child within a relationship of enmeshment with a parent.)

From pages 51 – 55:

(BUY THE BOOK if you find this relevant to you!

This is a gross condensing of the main points of the text!)

Fear of Commitment

“I do just fine with women right up to the point where the word 'commitment' is mentioned. Then I feel like turning and running away. The thought of living with just one woman for the rest of my life sends me into a cold sweat.”

Problems with love relationships are the rule rather than the exception for the adult Chosen Child, and one of the most common problems is a fear of intimacy and commitment. To a person who was bound up with an engulfing parent, any close relationship can feel like an invasion. I see this trait quite frequently in men who were the favorite sons of aggressive, domineering mothers.

Lack of Romantic Attraction

Woman: “I am married to a wonderful man. He goes out of his way to please me. I couldn't ask for anything more. Yet, I'm always dissatisfied. I keep wondering, 'Where's the magic? Isn't there more to love than this?'”

Man: “I've been married three times, and I'm about to sign up for number four. I've never found what I'm looking for in a woman. All my wives have disappointed me.

The normal parent-child bond is powerful in and of itself; when it is amplified by enmeshment, it becomes all-encompassing. Unwittingly, some Chosen Children go through life trying to recapture this intensity...

Creating a Diagram of Your Own Relationships

Get a clean piece of paper and chart your own relationships, and possibly those of previous generations in your family. Get creative! Use different colors or special lines and express yourself.

Excerpts from "Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves" by Drs. Stoop and Masteller.



From pages 148 – 151:

Charting the triangles is often tricky because, as we have seen, the dynamics of relationships are not always clear and simple, and not always what they seem to be at first glance...

[D]o they help you see more clearly how the dynamics of your family life affected you? Do they point out particular relationships that did not work well, particular individuals whose impact on you was harmful in some way?

If so, your tendency may be to get angry or bitter at such individuals. That would be an understandable reaction. But our goal has not been simply to nail down “who did what to whom” so that our blame and bitterness can be more accurately targeted. Rather, our goal has been to get a clearer picture of where the damage lies so that we can respond to it constructively.

NOW WHAT?

...But the important thing is not just discovering where the problems and who the “villains” are. The important thing is what we do with this information now that we have it. Whatever may have been done to us while we were children, we are now grown-ups who must take responsibility for our attitudes and actions. Whatever others may have done in the past, what matters is what we do today.

It is not enough for us to label others as “villains” and blame them for all our troubles. We need to understand what has been done to us so that we can take responsibility for our lives as adults and find the freedom from our past hurts. We cannot change what has happened to us. But we can learn to respond to what has happened to us in a way that helps us to rise above the negative influence of the past.

How can we learn to respond in such a way that we can begin to experience the freedom of forgiveness? What about those who have hurt us? Can they be released from their pain as well? In Part Two [of Stoop's “Forgiving Our Parents...” the source quoted here –YOU should BUY the book if this resonates with you!], we shall discover that there can be release for ourselves and others if we and they learn the lessons of forgiveness.

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop & Dr. James Masteller's
"Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:
Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families"
Regal/Gospel Light, 1996 (Servant, 1991)