How to Deal With the Guilt While Looking Into the Past

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 136 -139:

For some Chosen Children, guilt, not anxiety, keeps them from gaining a more accurate view of their childhood. This is often true of those who grew up worshiping a parent. How can they go from thinking a parent was the most wonderful mother or father on earth to seeing the parent as the source of their misery? How can they be angry at a parent who sacrificed so much for them? How can a relationship that usually felt so good be classified as bad? ...

...If you feel guilty for seeing the negative side of a parent, removing this barrier will hasten your recovery. But how do you do this? It's been my experience that learning more about the complicated psychology of guilt helps reduce its impact. In it's simplest form, guilt is a painful but short-lived phenomenon designed to jolt you into awareness that your behavior is not consistent with your beliefs. [Blog host note: This is much like the definition of cognitive dissonance, and guilt could well be an indicator of cognitive dissonance at work.] It's a voice from your conscience advising you to either (1) reexamine your beliefs or (2) alter your behavior so that the two of them line up...

[I]t's the adult who creates the parent-child alliance. A child can't be blamed for wanting preferential treatment from a parent; it's a survival mechanism built into all children: in times of scarcity, being first in line can mean the difference between life and death. A wise parent ignores the child's plea for a place of prominence and keeps all children on the same plane. No child is given preferential treatment or is asked to play the role of surrogate spouse. Ultimately, it's the parent's responsibility to create a balanced family system, not the child's responsibility to suppress a natural and understandable desire to be a Chosen Child.

Ironically, many Chosen Children discover that letting go of this misplaced sense of guilt for what went on in the family makes them feel anxious; it's a Catch-22. Once they place the responsibility where it really belongs – squarely in the lap of the parent – they may experience a surge of anxiety for having “bad thoughts” about the caretaker. Here's the internal logic: “If I was not responsible for being the Chosen Child, then my mother and father were to blame. It makes me feel anxious to see my parents in a negative light, however, because my unconscious mind assumes they are still responsible for my well-being. Even though I am 20 or 40 or even 70 years old and have outlived both my parents, I am still fearful of abandonment. It may be better to accept the guilt for what went wrong in my family than to blame my parents and stir up my anxiety.”

For many people, this complicated and erroneous belief system stands in the way of recovery. Understanding the way the unconscious mind operates is a first step to letting go of the unnecessary burden. Here, once again, is the faulty train of logic:

1. When children are young, they feel responsible for the tension in the family because of the false belief that they are in control of the situation.
2. In later years, if they try to change this belief and assign full responsibility to their parents, they feel anxious.
3. The underlying cause of this anxiety is the erroneous belief in their adult years.

If the thought of identifying the mistakes your parents made in raising you makes you feel guilty or anxious, you need to revise your belief system. You were not to blame for what went on in the family, and you have nothing to fear for placing the responsibility for where it really belongs. You are now capable of taking care of yourself. And remember that you don't have to confront your parents or disassociate from them to recover from emotional incest. You just need to remove some of the mythology that keeps you from seeing and experiencing the truth.

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

Romantic Relationships and Marriages of Adults Who Grew Up Enmeshed With Their Parents

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

From pages 82 – 84:

Ambivalence serves as a way to protect. By holding the ambivalence as a defense, covert incest victims stay guarded from the threat of being used and abused again. The original pain of being abused by the parent surfaces in relationships with spouses. As the need for further commitment in a relationship grows, the fear of being used again grows as well. Since the boundaries are often blurred between the incestuous wound of childhood and that of adulthood, being able to differentiate between one's spouse and the incestuous parent is difficult. Consequently the feelings of being violated become active. Ambivalence shields the covert incest victim from the threat of further abuse.

Although covert incest victims experience chronic ambivalence in relationships, the beginnings of the relationship are often quick and intense. Immediate and total commitment occurs, followed by the uncertainty of the ambivalence. The tremendous guilt the covert incest victims carry prohibits leaving if the relationship is not working. Instead, they try to make it right, only to be disillusioned after each attempt. Or if the relationship has potential, the guilt interferes with clearly identifying personal needs to make a legitimate attempt to make the relationship work. Commitment becomes an arena desperately longed for. However, it is an experience which generates fear and confusion.

These hasty and intense commitments are born out of the attachment to fantasy as well as the tremendous neediness experienced by the covert incest victim. Rather than bonding with the person, the bod is to the fantasy the person represents. Since the fantasy represents the ideal or perfect person, the commitment is immediate. The person may have some of the qualities of the fantasy spouse, but in reality is never seen as for who he or she really is. When the illusion dies, and they all do, the struggle regarding commitment surfaces. Now faced with who the person really is and realizing the vulnerable of committing so quickly, ambivalence sets in.

Healing the Chosen Child ~~ Love on Recovery

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

Up until this point in this series of posts concerning Patricia Love's book “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” concerning non-physical incest, I presented information from Chapters 1 – 5. There are an additional ten chapters that represent a very personal journey that those who want to find healing must take on their own. I cannot reproduce the entire book in this forum. I would, however, like to offer some glimmers of hope for those who read here. Toward that end of healing, let me write a summary of the journey that Dr. Love guides the reader through in order to find wholeness.

Dr. Love on Healing Self

Finding personal healing from the wounds of covert/emotional incest involves a major undertaking of revisiting one's own personal and family history. In earlier posts, I touched on some of this, but the remainder of the book delves into the specifics of the process. She does an expert job of explaining the process of healing and it's two components. The first involves an autobiography of personal history and the second component involves changing behaviors.

The first and essential step towards healing begins with the dispelling of the myths of one's childhood. (I recall Julie Andrews singing “Do, Re, Mi” from the “Sound of Music” with the “very fine place to start” – at the beginning.) She reviews those factors that we naturally employ and used as ways in which to cope and survive our childhoods which have worn out their usefulness for us. The first means of coping is that of denial. Telling ourselves that our childhoods were perfection or that our problems were never problems at all hinder our natural ability to heal. 

She also discusses the resistance that we experience through our natural inclinations to deny a true and realistic view of our own pasts in favor of the childhood perspective of fantasy. We tend to see the past through the rose-colored glasses that our memories and our child-like perspective gives us, yet this perspective inhibits realistic assessment necessary to change our current perspectives with the chief end of seeing things for what they really are. The other form of resistance is external, as our families and loved ones tend to resist a change in the status quo. 

Our loved ones built relationships around the ways that we always been, so there will be a natural resistance as you begin to stretch your borders as you grow in healthy new ways. This is often seen as “rocking the boat” which is generally something that is resisted in relationships characterized by the covert/emotional nature of the relationships with the “Chosen Child.” We can and often do find our loved ones working against this new area of growth in our lives which is already a challenge in and of itself.

Guilt also presents a major hurdle to overcome, as part of the process of covert incest and Botkin Syndrome requires that the child and the adult child absorb and bear the responsibilities for the adult's needs and for related hardships. In a related work, Pia Mellody defines this type of guilt as the “shame-existence bind.” Often, we were expected to deny our own needs, pretend that we did not have needs or forfeit the satisfaction of our own God-given needs for nurture in order to care for or avoid any “undue burdening” of our parents. For myself, I've found this to be my greatest hurdle in healing. Love states that a proper attributing of responsibilities of the parent-child relationship to the parent (as opposed to an unhealthy sharing of the responsibilities between both parent and child through denial and guilt) must be acknowledged and is key to healing. Addressing the faulty belief systems within the family also presents a critical element of healing. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the primary means of addressing this, and personally, I like Daniel Amen's concept of countering Automatic Negative Thoughts (killing the “ANT”s) as an example. Another Christian author on the subject that has been very helpful to me in the past is Chris Thurman who wrote “The Lies We Believe” and “The Truths We Must Believe.”

Love guides the reader through the process of writing one's autobiography as a first practical step means to healing one's own perception and wounds of the past. She also presents questions to present to family in the form of interviews that help to elucidate truths about other family members' perceptions of the past. The third step in the autobiography involves drawing a family “genogram” chart of one's ancestors, giving consideration to their own histories. (Did one's predecessors have coping or relationship problems, showing that one's parents may never have had opportunity to learn better relationship skills?) Finally, Love guides the reader through a summary of what was learned in the previous steps of the autobiography.

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Dr. Love on Healing Relationships

The book also presents detailed information about how to approach the various relationships that the Chosen Child or the parent of the the Chosen Child must undertake on the road to healing and wholeness. She addresses confronting and reconciliation with parents, siblings, spouses and one's own children in subsequent chapters of the book. 

Establishing healthy boundaries, both boundaries that protect self as well as decreasing the boundaries that Chosen Children erect in order to protect themselves from harm that serve to inhibit appropriate intimacy later in life, are an essential part of this process. (In addition to the helpful information that Love presents in the book, I also recommend “Boundaries” by Townsend and Cloud.) 

“The Emotional Incest Syndrome” offers exercises to help correct some of these emotional boundaries that inhibit intimacy in marital relationships of the Chosen Child. There are also several chapters that address general good communication skills as well as those specific to healing each type of relationship effected by covert/emotional incest. There are also good ideas about developing a healthy and supportive network of loved ones as well as promoting healthy, happy, well-adjusted families.

Before I conclude these blog posts, I will also highlight the last chapter which offers two case studies and examples of hope for those who have begun to realize that they are Chosen Children.

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