Silently Seduced

Being obsessed with sex was the way Tom distracted himself from the pain of the covert incest.

To this day, I still don’t understand why he left.

It is easy to see how a parent can channel his or her passion and energy into the child and how that child can feel like the parent’s surrogate partner.

Talking about feelings or problems helps to resolve tension.

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 to be the ideal or perfect family on the outside. Such an illusion makes it much more difficult to confront the past, find the roots of one’s current struggles, and become healthy.

Other potential situations include a chronically ill parent or a parent who rigidly holds onto rules dictated by a religious or ethnic tradition. The emotional absence in the second case occurs because the parent is more interested in upholding the moral principles of the religion or the rituals and rights of the ethnic background than in considering the needs of individuals.

When this expectation goes unmet, parents see their children as ungrateful, unloving, and selfish.

There is an important difference between overt and covert incest: while the overt victim feels abused, the covert victim feels idealized and privileged

To the child, the parent’s love feels more confining than freeing, more demanding than giving, and more intrusive than nurturing.

The boundary between caring love and incestuous love is crossed when the relationship with the child exists to meet the needs of the parent rather than those of the child.