Hi, I'm Mike.
A google search on "Emotional Incest" led me here and I was happy to find a Canadian Psych website/message board run by a Therapist in my area near Ottawa.
I'm 45, reasonably happily married (but with issues) and am very happy (though at times, exasperated etc.) to have a 3 yr old girl and 6 yr old boy. I married a woman who is much more like my very loving (deceased) grandmother than my awful (living) mother. I credit this to the therapy I started 12 years ago, but which I haven't worked on much in the last 8-10 years.
I'm currently in the last few weeks of short term disability for depression from my job. I'm happy it was approved but have some anxiety that LTD could be denied. On the plus, I feel relatively OK about our financial situation, though my wife has big anxiety issues, just like my grandmother did. I AM VERY concerned that the economy could (or already has) crumbled to a state worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
I never met my father until 10 years ago, when I tracked him down several times and appeared on his doorstep. My parents split when I was 1, and my mother instilled in me a great anger for him. Now I just pity him, from afar, as another victim of depression etc. My genealogical research on his extended family convinced me there is dysfunction aplenty throughout our trees.
I still have some doubts about the validity of this thing called "Emotional Incest". The incest word is VERY charged of course, but this emotional variant does not necessarily include actual, physical sexual child abuse (although in some cases it could include parents exposing themselves etc.)
As far as I'm aware and can remember and now see, my mother effectively used me as a surrogate spouse. She was a "child-woman" and looked to me for love and support she SHOULD have been getting from adult friends/lovers. I had to grow up too early and be the "man of the house". She tried to program me to take care of her in her old age, even when I was 5. Even my very loving grandmother participated in this I guess; She urged me not to argue with my mother and to help my "poor mother" out in any way I could.
I effectively "divorced" my mother when I was 23. I had moved back home at that time and my mother STILL wanted to be able to set a curfew for me. I stayed at my best friends place for a week and when I went back she had a boyfriend who is now my step-father. (Thank GOD, finally she was off my back !) Mere months later I had my first adult girlfriend. It's like I now had "permission" to have a girlfriend, I think.
Growing up (and still now) I was EXTREMELY shy and anti-social. Suppressing my urges for love and sexual intimacy drove me nuts. When young, I was extremely naive about love and sexuality.
My work history is extremely fragmented. I would leave jobs when feeling depressed or repressed somehow. Also, the high-tech fields are littered with the carcasses of companies that went under. My obsessive electronics and computing hobby became my career after college. On the plus side, I made very good money on contract during, and even after to some extent, the dot-com boom of the mid to late 1990s.
On the current minus side, the field of software development in this former Nortel town is very dim and I'm rather old in this field now. My current employer (on disability now) is a largely Chinese slave driving company and that depresses me greatly; I'm not sure I can ever return to that job, and I feel the good times in my field are long gone.
I have no real friends at present. My best teenage hometown friend killed himself 3 years ago, and my local friends, haven't really been real friends for years now. I still see one of them occasionally, but largely just because he supplies the "self-medication" I've been using pretty much daily for 20+ years.
I think I have SAD; I always seem to have bigger issues in winter-time.
I allowed my mother to re-enter my life a bit more after we had "her grand-children". Since an incident last year however, she is no longer welcome in our house and we don't visit her, 400 miles away. Telephone contact is pretty limited and mostly used to let her speak with our kids. I don't expect our relationship to ever get better, and I'm as OK with that as I can be, except that I will always carry grief over the emotionally healthy mother I never had, and will never have.
When I last saw my father I told him how disappointed I was with him; never a letter to me or anything; he even failed to live up to his promise to call me back after I first contacted him. But I feel that my father issues are as resolved as they can be now. I don't think I will ever similarly resolve my mother issues. Part of her knows she's wronged me greatly, but she's also very defensive and just plain "permanently nuts", IMO.
Long rambling intro here, huh ?
Thanks for reading my intro vent...
Mike.
A google search on "Emotional Incest" led me here and I was happy to find a Canadian Psych website/message board run by a Therapist in my area near Ottawa.
I'm 45, reasonably happily married (but with issues) and am very happy (though at times, exasperated etc.) to have a 3 yr old girl and 6 yr old boy. I married a woman who is much more like my very loving (deceased) grandmother than my awful (living) mother. I credit this to the therapy I started 12 years ago, but which I haven't worked on much in the last 8-10 years.
I'm currently in the last few weeks of short term disability for depression from my job. I'm happy it was approved but have some anxiety that LTD could be denied. On the plus, I feel relatively OK about our financial situation, though my wife has big anxiety issues, just like my grandmother did. I AM VERY concerned that the economy could (or already has) crumbled to a state worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
I never met my father until 10 years ago, when I tracked him down several times and appeared on his doorstep. My parents split when I was 1, and my mother instilled in me a great anger for him. Now I just pity him, from afar, as another victim of depression etc. My genealogical research on his extended family convinced me there is dysfunction aplenty throughout our trees.
I still have some doubts about the validity of this thing called "Emotional Incest". The incest word is VERY charged of course, but this emotional variant does not necessarily include actual, physical sexual child abuse (although in some cases it could include parents exposing themselves etc.)
As far as I'm aware and can remember and now see, my mother effectively used me as a surrogate spouse. She was a "child-woman" and looked to me for love and support she SHOULD have been getting from adult friends/lovers. I had to grow up too early and be the "man of the house". She tried to program me to take care of her in her old age, even when I was 5. Even my very loving grandmother participated in this I guess; She urged me not to argue with my mother and to help my "poor mother" out in any way I could.
I effectively "divorced" my mother when I was 23. I had moved back home at that time and my mother STILL wanted to be able to set a curfew for me. I stayed at my best friends place for a week and when I went back she had a boyfriend who is now my step-father. (Thank GOD, finally she was off my back !) Mere months later I had my first adult girlfriend. It's like I now had "permission" to have a girlfriend, I think.
Growing up (and still now) I was EXTREMELY shy and anti-social. Suppressing my urges for love and sexual intimacy drove me nuts. When young, I was extremely naive about love and sexuality.
My work history is extremely fragmented. I would leave jobs when feeling depressed or repressed somehow. Also, the high-tech fields are littered with the carcasses of companies that went under. My obsessive electronics and computing hobby became my career after college. On the plus side, I made very good money on contract during, and even after to some extent, the dot-com boom of the mid to late 1990s.
On the current minus side, the field of software development in this former Nortel town is very dim and I'm rather old in this field now. My current employer (on disability now) is a largely Chinese slave driving company and that depresses me greatly; I'm not sure I can ever return to that job, and I feel the good times in my field are long gone.
I have no real friends at present. My best teenage hometown friend killed himself 3 years ago, and my local friends, haven't really been real friends for years now. I still see one of them occasionally, but largely just because he supplies the "self-medication" I've been using pretty much daily for 20+ years.
I think I have SAD; I always seem to have bigger issues in winter-time.
I allowed my mother to re-enter my life a bit more after we had "her grand-children". Since an incident last year however, she is no longer welcome in our house and we don't visit her, 400 miles away. Telephone contact is pretty limited and mostly used to let her speak with our kids. I don't expect our relationship to ever get better, and I'm as OK with that as I can be, except that I will always carry grief over the emotionally healthy mother I never had, and will never have.
When I last saw my father I told him how disappointed I was with him; never a letter to me or anything; he even failed to live up to his promise to call me back after I first contacted him. But I feel that my father issues are as resolved as they can be now. I don't think I will ever similarly resolve my mother issues. Part of her knows she's wronged me greatly, but she's also very defensive and just plain "permanently nuts", IMO.
Long rambling intro here, huh ?
Thanks for reading my intro vent...Mike.
