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Messages - Finding My Voice

#16
Emotional Abuse / Re: Emotional incest and enmeshment
September 02, 2014, 06:58:50 PM
Quote from: emotion overload on September 01, 2014, 02:27:15 PM
I really struggle with this now that I am OOTF, because I can't blame the enmeshment on uBPDm anymore.  I have trouble NOT telling her things.  It's why medium chill and boundaries are such a scary idea for me.  Especially now, when I am lonely and don't have a boyfriend, I go to her with most of my problems.  And it embarrasses me to admit this.  I know better.  I know that I am just giving her ammunition and perpetuating an unhealthy relationship.  But it's habit and conditioning, I guess.

I can empathize, I have my own trouble separating emotionally from my mom even though she's not even here anymore.  If she was your only emotional support growing up, as my mom was, it's hard to give that up.

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I will look into The Emotional Incest Syndrome again.  It's on my amazon wishlist, but I was afraid it was more directed towards mother/son or father/daughter relationships.  I wasn't sure how helpful it would be for mother/daughter.  But Finding My Voice, your recommendation lets me know it should help with me.

Yes, I was just thinking too that it might address what I think you were talking about elsewhere with rapid up-and-down mood swings -- I think she talks about that as an effect of being a "chosen child" (i.e. the child the parent leans on for support).
#17
Emotional Abuse / Re: Emotional incest and enmeshment
August 31, 2014, 09:30:54 PM
Quote from: Kizzie on August 31, 2014, 06:58:11 PM
I was just flipping through John Bradshaw's book: Healing the Shame that Binds You" (20050 and came across this:

What the shame based mother was unable to find in her own mother she finds in her own children. The child is always at her disposal. A child cannot run away as her own mother did. A child can be used as an echo, is completely centred on her, will never desert her, can be totally controlled, and offers full admiration and absorbed attention..... Now the child is taking care of the parents' needs rather than the parents taking care of the child's need ..... This caretaker role is strangely paradoxical. In an attempt to secure parental love and avoid being abandoned,, the child is in fact, being abandoned (p. 67).

Yes, that's pretty much what emotional incest is, as far as I understand it, and that's what happened to me.  I had a mother with BPD (who was herself the daughter of a BPD mother) and she used me to meet her emotional needs.  I listened to her talk about her depression and wishes to die, I had to reassure her that she was a good mother, etc.

Quote from: Kizzie on August 31, 2014, 05:47:07 PM
Welcome to OOTS Finding My Voice!

Thanks!

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Do you think you ended up developing CPTSD as a result of your M's EI?

It was more the overall package of living with a BPD mother, I think -- not being allowed to express thoughts or feelings that contradicted my mother's, isolating myself and silencing myself in order to avoid her rages, the EI and being used by her while my own needs were unmet, criticism that alternated with compliments I couldn't believe, etc.  I was an only child so I was both a GC and SG and got the full force of her maternal attention.
#18
Emotional Abuse / Emotional incest and enmeshment
August 31, 2014, 01:24:13 PM
Who here has experienced emotional incest (a parent relying on you for emotional support or fulfillment) and/or enmeshment?

Fully detaching from BPDm and getting rid of all the emotional programming is an ongoing task for me.  For anyone else struggling with this, I recommend The Emotional Incest Syndrome by Patricia Love.  The author is a therapist and experienced emotional incest during her own childhood with an alcoholic mother.