Donald and Ivanka

Little love, solidarity and compassion are on display in the USA

Can this have something to do with the disfunctional family?

For most of us «child abuse,» is totally alien to our experience.

However, in Silently Seduced-When Parents Make their Children Partners, Kenneth Adams offers a wider description of what he calls «covert» incest.

His definition is quite broad, and no sexual act is required as such to meet the criteria of this situation. Therefore the phenomenon he describes could be much more widespread than recognized, even by victims and perpetrators—but in spite of its subtlety, the consequences are all the same.

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. 

Kenneth Adams

This can come in many modalities, combinations and permutations. A parent who is unhappy or dissatisfied with his or her spouse, to give but one example, may turn a child into a confidant and surrogate partner, while the other parent turns a blind eye—which relieves his or her burden of the relationship.  

Needless to say, continuing with the example, the child who is filling in for what is missing in the parents relationship, experiences complex and confusing conflicts that will affect how he or she will relate to others and the world as an adult.   

A victim will often times have a love/hate relationship with the opposite sex parent, an emotional distance from the same-sex parent, guilt and confusion over personal needs, feelings of inadequacy, difficulties with intimacy, compulsions and addictions.

According to Adam, as adults, victims may have many relationships without ever being truly committed, often taking recourse to one night stands or prostitution, as an outlet for what they feel subconsciously is lost freedom and independence—without the need for the emotional bonding, of which they have become incapable. 

A part of their emotional life will remain frozen. All appeals to love, solidarity and compassion will be useless. 

Alice Miller

Children who are victims of covert incest are naturally confused by the actions of their elders. They may feel shame and guilt along with anger, which is repressed and carried into adulthood. 

The abused often becomes the abuser, so this condition is difficult to eradicate. Could it be that a pandemic of covert incest is afflicting society (not only in the US obviously), and this has somehow rendered large parts of the population vindictive and capricious about its freedoms?

It has become commonplace for many parents to expect that their needs be fulfilled by their children (or conversely, for parents to let the children become the dictators at home, which also creates a deformity in their character).

Is that why so many in the US now love acting out through Trump? The face mask against a virus is seen by many as a violation of their rights. Equivalent to violating the freedom to own sub-machine guns.

Is that misplaced anger? Are the people who put children in cages acting out the abuse perpetrated on them? 

The problem may not originate with the government per se, not even with 38%, or whatever proportion of the electorate that support Trump. It may lie with a society that has become all too alienated from itself, and can no longer remember what a normal family looked like, or a time when children simply expanded the heart of the parents.

Whom they would teach virtues, such as discipline, but would avoid burdening with their emotional baggage, thus teaching them how to be loving parents themselves—a forgotten time when society knew how to heal its psyche, how to return to a center in consciousness.

Your children…are the sons and daughters of Life´s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.       

Khalil Gibran