Emotional incest, also known as covert incest, is a dynamic that occurs in parenting where the parent seeks emotional support through their child that should be sought through an adult relationship. 

GoodTherapy.org

This explains so much of my childhood.

My mother divorced my father when we were young. I don’t know all the details around that (and I don’t have to), but my father bought into a toxic, conservative form of Christianity where men were in charge and women and children were the serfs. No wonder she left him.

When our father would interact with us (especially after the divorce), he would be so very, very sad, trying to reassure us how much he loved us and pressing for physical affection that never quite felt right. This wasn’t just a healthy hug or kiss between a parent and their children. These were attempts to make us console him for his lack of access to my mother.

It’s like he wanted us to be his goddamned wife.

That was never our job.

Before the divorce, he was one of “those” ticklers. Those of you that never experienced this, consider yourselves lucky. He’d keep going and going even when it was abundantly clear we weren’t enjoying it anymore.

He was also physically abusive.

In short: he was bad with boundaries, he expected us to continuously console him like a therapist or girlfriend, and he was physically abusive as well.

Only after his funeral did my sister confirm what I’d long suspected: he sexually molested her.

I once heard my sister react with anger and rage when my father kissed her against her will. When I entered the room, I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t okay for him to do that, even if she was one of his kids. “It was just a kiss” didn’t wash with me because I knew all too well the nauseating, stomach-dropping, clammy dread of silently enduring affection I couldn’t say no to.

She has forgiven him. I have not and probably never will. He never apologized for his behavior or sought to make amends.

My mother was alternately competent yet neglectful, if that makes any sense. I always got the feeling she would rather not have had us but was willing to soldier on regretfully. She seems loath to acknowledge this. It may be impossible for her to do so.

I am not one of those men that expects lifetime emotional support from a woman. Of course I recognize her right to be an independent, self-reliant woman. Of course she should not have had to shoulder the entire burden of raising children. But she was still the parent and we were still her children. It was not my sister’s job to step into the mother role when my mother emotionally shut down. It was not our job to take care of ourselves when my mother chose to distance herself from all but the most obligatory of parental tasks. But that is what happened anyway.

And don’t mention the other adults she chose to bring into our lives. One of her good friends when she was younger had nothing but seething, barely concealed contempt for me and my brother. That one interaction was enough for me to know without a doubt that she was bad news. She’s dead now. My brother in law (my sister’s husband) pretty much confirmed she hated men. I’m not saying I don’t understand women that can’t trust men due to a lifetime of misogyny and misogynoir. This was something different, however. We were boys, no more than seven years old. I’ll never understand that kind of hate directed at a child.

My ex-stepfather was an emotionally abusive and distant figure. When we lived with him, he insisted on absolute silence. Any attempt to get support, affection, or understanding from him resulted in absolutely volcanic, frightening rage. He never hit us like our father. I suspected that he could easily have killed us in our sleep without regret, though. The man was differently terrifying than my birth parents but equally abusive nonetheless.

For those of you that have survived emotional incest, emotional neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, please know that none of that was ever your fault. Your caregivers simply failed to raise you lovingly because of their own deficits. Give yourselves all the love and care you deserved and still do.