Are you entangled in difficult relationships or painful emotions? Do you suffer from old trauma? Do you suffer from your parents' drama or your partner's demands? Soulwork can help you untangle your life.

Emotional Incest

Life and death; sickness and health; suffering and happiness are relationship issues that reflect how members of human systems (such as couples, families and teams) behave and communicate.

Emotional incest results when a parent loves a child as a replacement for a partner. If you are affected by it - you can benefit from our coaching or coach training. Free yourself - or your family suffers.

Emotional incest is cross-generational. It spans generations. There is no one person to blame. It reflects chains of suffering going back into the family history. If entangled people do not recognize the symptoms of emotional incest, become aware of their role in it, and end it - these chains of suffering will likely continue into future generations. Your children may suffer, carrying your burden.

The symptoms of emotional incest center around identity loss - lost access to human qualities and emotions. Identity loss is also a common consequence of trauma, physical incest, abuse and cult membership. A common symptom of identity loss is an inability to define what you want. Other symptoms are:

1. Relationship Bonds: You are bonded to another person - you lose independence
2. Identification: You "follow" a role model - you live someone else's life
3. Identity Conflict: Your behavior swings between two poles - you live in endless conflict
4. Lost Identity: You cannot express your "sense of self" - your life has little meaning

Do you want alleviate the consequences of emotional incest? Do you want to control...

Our relationship coaching can help you recognize, resolve and prevent identity loss.

We are all emotionally connected to people in the human systems to which we belong. We can feel a special sharing, empathy, compassion for those people. Family relationships reflect family history. Relationships at work reflect an organization's history.

Entanglements are more complex - entangled people carry the burdens of other people - living, missing or dead. Entangled children may try to carry their parents' emotional baggage. Entangled parents may try to partner their children. Entangled partners may cling to fantasies and avoid responsibility.

If your parents were unhappy, you may forever strive to fulfill their unfulfilled desires. You may be emotionally entangled - and you may be diagnosed as having attachment disorders, personality disorders, impotence & frigidity, sexual dysfunction and/or depression.

If you try to carry the emotional baggage of your family, you will fail. If you try to complete the unfinished business of your parents or grandparents - you will fail. Instead you may retreat into depression. Or you might distract yourself from your failure with obsessions and addictions.

The first child often carries the heaviest emotional burden. First pregnancies have a higher risk of abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth, first children have a higher risk of crib death or fatal disease, and first children more often suffer from chronic mental and physical diseases. Soulwork can help you.

Parents who Sabotage Children

With the exception of abortion, few parents deliberately choose to harm or kill their children. Most parents have good intentions - and often strive to give their children what they lacked. Most parents feel enormous love for their children, and wish to protect and support them to adult independence.

But something can go wrong. A lonely mother may use a son as an object of her lonely love - and love the child in a way more appropriate for a partner. An immature father may love his little girl - in ways more appropriate for a wife. Does a parent love a child as a substitute for a partner?

Mistaken Identity & Transference

Mistaken identity is sometimes called transference. Consider a mother who acts as if her son were her partner - or a father who loves his daughter in ways that are appropriate for a wife. (A first son may be overly loved by a lonely mother; and the youngest daughter may be adored by a lonely father). See Mother-Son Bonds and Father-Daughter Entanglements.

If you are bonded to someone, and that relationship ends, you may transfer relationship bonds from that person to someone else. For example, if you transfer a bond to a parent onto a newly met person - you may immediately feel close to this person. (Transference may be used by sales people to build rapport to influence you - see NLP.)

Transference brings short-term pleasure at the cost of long-term happiness. And when a transference loop fails - as it must, being a lie - one or both people may withdraw into distractions or depression.

Emotional Incest: Entangled Relationships

We offer solutions for relationship behavior and diseases caused by entanglements. We refer to the solutions as systemic, because they apply to human systems - e.g. families, teams and organizations. We regularly resolve family entanglements.

Do you want relationship coaching or systemic coach training? We can train you to coach individuals, partners and teams to resolve emotional, educational and relationship challenges to find emotional maturity, freedom and independence.

Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996 - 2005 All rights reserved.