The Emotional Incest Syndrome

What to Do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life

De: Patricia Love EdD, Jo Robinson

Narrado por: Laural Merlington

Do these "endearments" sound familiar to you?

"Of all my children, I expect the most of you." Translation: I've selected you to be the one to make my life worth living.

"You've never caused me a minute of trouble." Translation: Ignore your own needs, I can't handle them.

"You're the only one who truly understands me." Translation: I would be totally alone if it weren't for you.

If so, you may have been a "chosen child", seemingly the focus of loving and devoted parents, but in reality a child walking a psychological tightrope - learning early on to deny your own needs in order to meet the emotional needs of a parent. Today, there is a name for this devastating form of child abuse: emotional incest. Here, Dr. Patricia Love offers adults real hope - and help - in overcoming the hurtful legacy of being a chosen child. Based on proven therapeutic techniques and using real-life case histories, her total program of recovery will help you identify the signs of emotional incest, confront your parents - and your past - with love and understanding, disentangle your life from theirs, and create a positive relationship with your parents - and your own children.

©1990 Patricia Love and Jo Robinson (P)2017 Tantor

If you relate to anything in this book, you need therapy.

But you are so worth it. This book is very eye opening and helpful in navigating relationships.

Amazing

I have just begun my journey for self healing and I could never explain why I was so miserable...this book gave me an answer. There was so much that I had gone through that I didn’t know wasn’t normal. I can finally begin my road to recovery thanks to this book. I will listen many times over!!!

Stimulates healing

Even if the chosen child isn’t your dominant childhood wound, you’ll find it’s dimensionality in your own life or those near and near. This is a must read for anyone seeking self-healing and better relationships.

an eye opener!

highly recommend for every adult who is unsure where their relationship difficulties originated from. Helped to put pieces together and explain things were not understood before

Highly Recommended

A very common yet misunderstood phenomenon, it’s good for all adults to learn this, whether you’re a parent or want to become one, or don’t.

Eye Opening and Illuminating

A well-thought out and surprisingly personable work about the affects of our conditioned life experiences. Self-awareness leading to understanding of boundaries in life is pressed home through the authors voice. Excellent self-help book.

Life Changer!!!

I have already recommending and gifted out this book to friends and family. I gave a copy to my therapist. I cant recommend enough. This book providing a lot more language and clarity into unhealthy parent child boundaries and how it effects everyone involved. She gives really good examples and exercises. I'm going to reread and go back to many times as a reference. Thank you Dr. Love!!!

Helpful with multiple areas

While not perfect, this book helped me understand multiple areas in family systems type stuff. Also, as an adult man I'm a bit biased and the narrator was difficult listening to. But I got through it by just imagining what it would sound like if a man read it.

Outdated and sympathetic to abusive parents

I think it’s a red flag when books designed to help you learn about the abuse you endured are sympathetic to parents. This book regularly says some variation of “they did their best”. Having personally been the victim of a sexually emotional incestuous relationship, I don’t need more sympathy for my abuser. I needed sympathy for myself then and I need sympathy for myself now. And the abusive person should be held accountable.

part one yes, part two absolutely not

overall this book was disappointing. part one is informative and helps provide some understanding as to how toxic parents affected your early developmental and childhood years.

HOWEVER part two took away from so much of part one. from my pov, this was written by a woman insistent on not being cut off. no contact was not an option given, instead the book primarily focused on how the reader could change to make the relationship tolerable or potentially better IF the parent decided to change.

the author suggested some “objective dialogue” for the reader to “take ownership” of their “role in the difficulty”. this is good advice for the behavior perpetuated as an adult, however, some of the dialogue she provided put the child at blame. a few of the suggestions were:

1. “I wasn’t the easiest child to raise.”
2. “I must’ve been really hard to live with.”
3. “You must’ve had a hard time knowing how to handle me.”

those absolutely ruined the entire book, not only do they place the blame on the child, they gaslight and perpetuate the feelings of shame that come with emotional incest. it reverses the roles of the victim and the offender.

it is not the job of the child to apologize for being coerced into the role of a surrogate parent and/or spouse, being the chosen child, being completely enmeshed by one or more parents. as the parents and as adults, they were completely responsible and their children were dependent on them to survive.

the author is so set on suggestions for repairing the relationship, she completely ignores the basics of the validation needed to truly heal. she states after boundaries are set, is important to act as normal as possible outside of those.

that just further emphasized for me, the lack of empathy for the inner child as the reader is now an adult. the message I got from this book was, “yea what they did sucked, but be an adult and deal with it.”

what I’d actually recommend:
- What Happened to You, Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D Perry
- Facing Love Addiction, Pia Melody
- Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members, Sherrie Campbell