You remember being close to your parent. Maybe closer than felt comfortable. You were the one they confided in, leaned on, or looked to for emotional support that perhaps should have come from another adult.
Now, as an adult, you find yourself questioning those dynamics. You love your parent, yet something about the relationship has always felt off. You might feel guilty for even having these thoughts, or confused about where healthy closeness ends and something else begins.
If any of this resonates, you are not alone. What you experienced might have a name: covert incest, also known as emotional incest.
This article will help you understand what covert incest is, how to recognise the signs, why it happens, how it may still be affecting you, and most importantly, how to begin healing safely and effectively.
What Is Covert or Emotional Incest?
Covert incest, also known as emotional incest or psychological incest, is a form of childhood emotional abuse in which a parent uses their child to meet emotional needs that should be fulfilled by another adult. The term was first introduced by psychologist Dr. Kenneth Adams in his 1991 book Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners.
Unlike overt incest, covert incest does not involve physical sexual contact. Instead, the violation is emotional. The parent treats the child as a surrogate spouse or partner, relying on them for companionship, validation, or emotional intimacy in ways that cross appropriate boundaries.
According to Dr. Adams, the boundary between caring and incestuous love is crossed when the child exists to meet the needs of the parent rather than the other way around. The parent may be motivated by loneliness, an unhappy marriage, or the absence of an adult partner.
Healthy parental closeness involves the parent supporting the child’s emotional development. In covert incest, this dynamic is reversed. The child becomes responsible for the parent’s emotional wellbeing, often at the expense of their own childhood.
This pattern is sometimes referred to as emotional incest syndrome when the effects persist into adulthood, shaping how survivors relate to themselves and others.
7 Tell-Tale Signs You Experienced Emotional Incest
Recognising covert incest can be difficult because it often looks like closeness or being the “special” child. However, healthy closeness does not require a child to sacrifice their own needs or take on adult responsibilities.
The following signs may indicate you experienced emotional incest:
- You were your parent’s main source of emotional comfort or support. Rather than turning to a spouse, friend, or therapist, your parent relied on you to listen, comfort, and validate them.
- Your parent confided in you about adult problems. This might include their loneliness, financial struggles, marital issues, or intimate details about their relationships. You knew more than a child should know.
- You took on more responsibility or maturity than was appropriate for your age. You may have been called the “little adult” or praised for being mature beyond your years. This is sometimes called parentification or spousification.
- You were made to feel guilty or disloyal for prioritising your own needs. Spending time with friends, pursuing your own interests, or setting boundaries may have been met with disappointment, anger, or emotional withdrawal from your parent.
- Your privacy and personal space were not respected. Your parent may have felt entitled to know everything about you, read your private communications, or be present during moments that should have been private.
- You were expected to take sides or protect your parent during family conflicts. Rather than shielding you from adult disagreements, you were drawn into them as an ally or confidant.
- You may have experienced what is known as covert sexual abuse. Emotional incest is about emotional boundaries, not sexual contact. However, in some families, these blurred boundaries overlap with covert sexual abuse, where a parent involves the child in sexualised behaviour or conversations without physical touch. Examples of covert sexual abuse include exposure to age-inappropriate sexual talk, sexualised comments about the child’s body, or lack of privacy around nudity and sexual behaviour.
In a candid post published on The Mighty, contributor Monika Sudakov described her experience with covert incest:
“In my personal case, my parents were divorced by the time I was 3. My father was completely out of the picture and what emerged was a very unhealthy enmeshed relationship between my mother and I… Aside from feeling afraid to have any needs because I didn’t want to overwhelm my mother who was prone to fits of self-harming behavior and panic attacks, I squelched all of my negative emotions because I was always told, ‘don’t be mad at me’ or ‘don’t be sad because it makes me sad’…
“However, the worst aspect of this unhealthy relationship exhibited was that I was exposed to sex talk from a very young age. I knew all about sex by the age of 5 and was aware of every man my mom slept with, how the sex was and details thereof. As I got older, this boundary became even more blurred when it came to privacy. I was often told that she was entitled to look at me naked because I came out of her body, as if that ascribed some kind of ownership of my body to her…”
The Root Causes of Emotional Incest Syndrome: Why Your Parent Crossed Emotional Boundaries
Understanding why covert incest happens can bring relief and clarity. However, understanding does not mean excusing. Regardless of the reason, the impact on the child is real and harmful. The behaviour was wrong, and it was never your fault.
Absence of a Partner or Lack of Emotional Support
Divorce, separation, or the emotional absence of a spouse can leave a parent without adult companionship. Rather than building a support system with other adults, the parent may inappropriately turn to their child for emotional connection, affirmation, and intimacy.
Many survivors of covert incest describe a parent who was lonely, unhappy in their marriage, or lacking meaningful adult relationships. The child becomes the default confidant, absorbing emotions that were never theirs to carry.
Unresolved Childhood Trauma or Family Patterns
Adults who engage in covert incest may have experienced similar boundary violations in their own childhood. This is sometimes called generational enmeshment.
If a parent grew up without clear emotional boundaries, they may view such entanglement as “normal” and recreate it with their own child.
Conversely, a parent who had a distant or neglectful relationship with their own family may overcorrect, becoming excessively involved with their child to fill gaps in their own emotional life. Either pattern can lead to covert incest.
Personality Issues and Emotional Dependence
Certain personality traits and disorders can predispose an adult to engaging in covert incest. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is particularly associated with this pattern.
The strong sense of entitlement that accompanies NPD can make the adult feel it is acceptable to demand complete emotional attention from their child.
Parents who are highly emotionally dependent or struggle with codependency may also be prone to covert incest. They lack the emotional regulation to meet their own needs and instead project those needs onto the child.
Lack of Awareness and Family Normalisation
In some families, enmeshment and blurred boundaries have existed for generations. When unhealthy closeness is the norm, no one questions it.
The parent may genuinely believe they are being loving and attentive, unaware that their behaviour is harmful.
This lack of awareness does not make the impact any less real. Children raised in these environments often sense something is wrong but lack the framework to name it.
They may not recognise their experience as covert incest until adulthood, when relationship patterns or emotional struggles bring the past into sharper focus.
How Does Emotional Incest Affect You as an Adult? The Aftermath of Covert Incest Explained
As children grow into adults, the “icky” or “weird” feeling described by Dr. Adams often shifts into something more diffuse.
You might feel frustrated, over-involved, or totally obligated in your relationship with the parent. The long-term effects extend far beyond that single relationship, shaping how you relate to yourself and everyone around you.
Research confirmed that childhood emotional incest is associated with significant difficulties in adulthood, including boundary issues, relationship struggles, and emotional dysregulation.
Common effects among adult survivors of covert incest include:
Emotional and Psychological Effects:
- Feeling responsible for others’ emotions or happiness
- Chronic guilt, shame, or anxiety that feels “baseless”
- Difficulty recognising or expressing your true emotions
- Feeling guilty or selfish when prioritising personal needs
- Persistent feelings of inadequacy or “never being enough”
- Emotional numbness or dissociation during conflict or stress
- Anger, resentment, or guilt toward the parent, often all at once
- Depression, anxiety, or low self-esteem rooted in childhood role confusion
- Difficulty knowing who you are or what you want outside of others’ expectations
Relational Effects:
- Struggling to set or maintain healthy boundaries
- Fear of abandonment or rejection, even in healthy relationships
- Attracting or staying in one-sided or codependent relationships
- Difficulty trusting or feeling safe in intimacy
- Alternating between craving closeness and fearing it
- Overachieving or people-pleasing to earn love or approval
- Sexual difficulties or intimacy disorders
- Repeating unhealthy dynamics with your own children or partners
Physical Effects:
- Physical signs of chronic stress: fatigue, headaches, tension, digestive issues
Understanding these effects helps build self-awareness.
However, because these patterns are deeply learned survival mechanisms, they are extremely difficult to unlearn alone. That is why therapy is the most effective path to recovery.
Treatment centres like The Dawn Thailand have helped many survivors of covert incest heal, combining trauma-informed therapy with a supportive environment designed for deep emotional recovery.
How to Heal From the Damage Caused by Emotional Incest
Healing from covert incest is absolutely possible, and it does not require confrontation with or estrangement from your parent unless you choose that path.
What it does require is professional support to help you untangle patterns that have been ingrained since childhood.
The survival mechanisms you developed, people-pleasing, hyper-responsibility, emotional suppression, once served to protect you.
But they now keep you stuck, preventing authentic relationships and genuine self-expression. These patterns are not character flaws. They are learned responses to an abnormal situation, and they can be unlearned.
Here is what trauma-focused therapy helps you do and how it works:
Acknowledge and Validate What Happened
Many survivors minimise their experience, telling themselves “it was not that bad” or “my parent meant well.” Healing begins by naming what happened and recognising that it was harmful, regardless of intent.
In therapy, you work with a clinician who understands covert incest and can help you see your experience clearly.
This validation is often the first step toward release. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help you identify and challenge the beliefs formed in childhood, such as “I am responsible for everyone’s feelings” or “My needs do not matter.”
Reconnect With Your Own Emotions
Children in emotionally incestuous relationships often learn to suppress their own needs and feelings to focus on the parent. As adults, many survivors struggle to identify what they actually feel or want.
Somatic therapies and body-focused approaches help you reconnect with physical sensations and emotions that have been numbed or dissociated.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is particularly effective for processing traumatic memories and reducing their emotional charge.
Rebuild Healthy Boundaries
Learning to set boundaries is often the most challenging but transformative part of recovery. You may have been taught that boundaries are selfish, disloyal, or hurtful.
Therapy helps you understand that boundaries are essential for healthy relationships.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) teaches practical skills for assertive communication, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation. These skills are particularly valuable for survivors who struggle with guilt when prioritising their own needs.
Repair Self-Worth and Identity
When your value as a child was tied to meeting a parent’s needs, developing a stable sense of self becomes difficult.
Survivors often describe feeling empty, undefined, or as though they exist only in relation to others.
Inner child work and trauma healing approaches help you reconnect with the childhood self that was forced to grow up too fast.
By meeting your own needs with compassion, you can rebuild an identity grounded in your own values and desires rather than others’ expectations.
Learn to Trust and Love Safely
Covert incest survivors often struggle with a painful irony: they can love someone but struggle to be intimate with them, while intimacy feels easier with unavailable or anonymous partners.
Commitment may feel suffocating because closeness has always come with obligation.
Attachment-focused therapy helps you understand how early experiences shaped your relationship patterns. By exploring these dynamics in a safe therapeutic relationship, you can learn that intimacy does not require self-sacrifice and that healthy love is possible.
Why Covert Incest Survivors Choose The Dawn Thailand for Recovery
For survivors of covert incest, residential treatment abroad at The Dawn Wellness Centre and Rehab Thailand offers advantages that outpatient therapy cannot match.
Physical distance from family dynamics and daily triggers creates space to focus entirely on healing. The immersive, structured environment allows for intensive therapeutic work that would take years to accomplish in weekly sessions.
We provide specialised trauma programme for adults healing from childhood experiences like covert incest. It addresses not just the trauma itself but also co-occurring conditions such as anxiety, depression, or addiction that often develop as coping mechanisms.
Here is what sets The Dawn apart:
- CARF-accredited programmes: The Dawn is the only centre in Asia that holds CARF accreditation – an international gold standard that ensures adherence to rigorous clinical standards and ongoing quality assurance of evidence-based treatment.
- Western-trained, trauma-informed clinicians: Our therapists from the UK, US, and Australia specialise in complex childhood trauma.
- Integrated treatment approach: Evidence-based therapies including CBT, EMDR, somatic work, mindfulness, TMS, and inner child therapy combined with holistic wellness activities.
- Personalised treatment plans: Programmes address the unique impacts of covert incest alongside co-occurring conditions such as anxiety, depression, or addiction.
- Peaceful riverside setting: Our Chiang Mai location offers privacy, calm, and distance from family pressures and emotional triggers.
- 24/7 clinical and emotional support: Round-the-clock care ensures you feel safe and supported throughout your recovery.
- Strong aftercare programme: Continued online sessions support lasting recovery after you return home.
Your healing can begin today. Contact The Dawn for a confidential consultation and take the first step toward reclaiming your emotional freedom.
FAQs | Emotional Incest Syndrome
Q. How is emotional incest treated?
A: Emotional incest is treated with trauma-focused therapy, which may include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), somatic therapies, and inner child work.
Treatment helps survivors process the trauma, rebuild healthy boundaries, develop a stable sense of self, and form healthier relationships. Residential treatment programmes offer immersive healing for those with deeply ingrained patterns
Q. How long does it take to heal from emotional incest?
A: There is no fixed timeline for healing from emotional incest. The duration depends on the severity of the experience, co-occurring conditions, the quality of therapeutic support, and individual commitment. Many survivors see meaningful progress within several months of consistent therapy. Residential programmes can accelerate healing by providing intensive, daily therapeutic work. Recovery is not linear, and healing continues as survivors practise new skills in their daily lives
Q. Is emotional incest intentional?
A: In most cases, parents who engage in covert incest do not consciously intend to harm their child. They may be driven by loneliness, unresolved trauma, personality issues, or a lack of awareness about appropriate boundaries. However, intention does not determine impact. The effects on the child are harmful regardless of whether the parent understood what they were doing. Understanding that it was likely unintentional can be part of healing, but it does not excuse the behaviour or invalidate your experience
Q. Can I heal from emotional incest without cutting off my parent?
A: Yes, many survivors heal while maintaining some form of relationship with their parent. Healing focuses on changing your own patterns, setting healthy boundaries, and processing past trauma. It does not require confrontation or estrangement unless you determine that is what you need. Therapy helps you navigate the relationship in a way that protects your wellbeing, whether that means limited contact, clear boundaries, or a different kind of connection
Q. Why do I still feel guilty or protective of my parent even after understanding what happened?
A: Guilt and protectiveness are common responses among survivors of covert incest. You were conditioned from childhood to prioritise your parent’s needs and emotions. This loyalty was formed before you could question it. Feeling protective of the person who hurt you does not mean the hurt was not real. Therapy helps you hold both truths: you can love your parent while also acknowledging the harm they caused. Releasing guilt is a gradual process that unfolds as you strengthen your sense of self and validate your own experience