942: Ken Adams | The Confusing Dynamics of Covert Incest

24:44But these men, they're projecting onto their partners feelings that belong to their mothers. And so then they say, well, the hell with you. I'll betray you. I'll reject you. So they wind up betraying and rejecting the wrong woman. But we see the same issues of women and their mothers. Commitment problems, codependency, always people-pleasing. People-pleasing. Interesting. That makes sense. Not really having my own voice. Marrying somebody or getting involved with somebody who won't have any interest in being intimate with me. Besides, I'm not available to be intimate. So I'm going to pick somebody who really is not really available either.

25:18The people-pleasing and caretaking stuff crossing over, transferring, that makes total sense, right? Because if you're doing that with your parent your whole life, you just look for a partner that wants the same stuff. now you've got two black holes of need in your life. Dr. Adams, I find it so interesting that as you move away from the icky part of the spectrum, which is much easier to identify, right? It's easier to say, oh, my mom put me in these situations that made me feel very uncomfortable. I was sexualized or people commented on my appearance or whatever. But as you move more toward the more covert versions of this, the subtler versions of this, where perhaps you were your parents' confidant or advisor, or you had too much access to their emotional life.

25:57You supported them, nurtured them, cared for them. There was a real friendship there, but I think for some people it can take years, if they ever get there at all, to realize, oh, I actually wasn't really just close with my parent. We didn't really have this beautiful collaboration or friendship going on. I was actually playing a role for this person that I didn't even understand, and then it plays out in all these ways. The people-pleasing, the caretaking, the self-loathing, the feelings of inadequacy, the feelings, ironically, of abandonment oftentimes with some of these people. And also ironically, the emotional distance from that same sex parent you were actually so quote unquote close with.

26:32There's so many contradictions in this dynamic and I find it very interesting. But the sexual dysfunction that you just touched on a moment ago is perhaps one of the most interesting. You said that so many of the men you work with end up bringing those issues into your sessions or into your workshops. I can understand how a person who was raised in a house like this might become what we would consider a traditional sex addict, where the sexuality is very driven and it's very compulsive. But the opposite can also happen, where sexuality gets shut down. Why does that happen? Well, I think that, Jordan, you alluded to it earlier, right?

27:06That if I get too close to this person, it feels like I'm with my mother. Yeah. So this entanglement of that individual who's listening to mom's complaints, he becomes the loyal lover who never leaves her, right? Now think about even if we don't have a sexualized piece of it, maybe she's not talking about her dissatisfaction sexually or prancing around in her nightgown, but he grows up and he's mommy's loyal lover and he's never really moved out from that role. And now it's time to be sexual with his partner. And he gets past the early phase of excitement where everybody can be pretty much present.

27:42But then after a while, you've got to negotiate how to be both with somebody sexual and also separate and keep that spark alive. And he can't do it because it feels like my mother, you want too much from me. You're needy. It feels icky to me. I'm not your loyal lover. So how do I defend against that? I can't leave you. So I just shut down my sexuality. Okay. I'll neuter myself. So we get guys who don't function and then they go off to the side and say, I'll function over here. I'll do my thing over here. And so I'll betray the wrong woman. I'm going to be loyal and betray the woman I should have been betraying over here, right, my mother.

28:19I should betray her and say, no, no, you don't get me. When we work with these guys, we do a lot of work helping them take back this sort of unneutered process, which can be done, by the way. By embodying these guys back in their selves, this is my body, mom, you don't get your hands on it. I now am free. Now, I have no doubt that these guys would struggle a week later, they kind of relapse back into it. But it's very dramatic in that it points to the fact that these guys have not embodied themselves because they've felt too icky. I think what you're also saying is that being in touch with your sexuality, and not just your sexuality, but also just your healthy ego, like my sense of self, my identity, my individualism, that is dangerous, actually.

29:01Exactly. Because it would be sort of a threat or even a betrayal to the mother they haven't appropriately thrown over or redefined. Precisely. Tell me if I'm just overanalyzing this here, but it seems like essentially in this situation, you're being abused as a child. But then also, it sounds like you're idealizing your parent in all these other ways. So you're idealizing somebody who's also abusing you, which now that I say it out loud is probably more common than one would think with an abusive parent-child relationship. Learning to tolerate people in your life that really aren't good for you sometimes.

29:33So we see two extremes in these guys. They either miss a boat and they go, my God, I wish I could have committed to her. Invariably, most of these guys report losing the love of their life because they couldn't commit. It's profoundly sad to listen to this. Wow. That is sad. Yeah. I mean, literally the love of my life and I couldn't commit. You know, she wanted to commit for me and I couldn't do it. Or we see the other extreme, right? I keep committing to relationships that I have high tolerance for, but they're not good for me. That's where I was leading with this, right? If you're idealizing the abusive parent, do you then bring in that confusion around abuse and love as an adult?

30:12So then do I start dating women who are abusing me because that's what normal relationships are like in my pattern? Because my mom did that where she would be like, you're going to eat this and you're going to dress like that and you're not going to go do this. It's like, well, if I date a normal woman and she's not doing that. Maybe she doesn't love me. Let me find somebody else who tells me what to do every moment of the day. You would just recreate that. And then you'd go, wham, my wife's abusive. It's like, well, of course, you filtered out everybody who wasn't treating you poorly. So, of course.

30:40And the next person you find is going to do the same thing because that's all you know. Yeah, that certainly happens. We talk about the three Ps. When we are trying to rectify the past, we may pick somebody. So you're talking about picking a person that resembles our primary abusers in order to work through the past. Or we might project onto them that which isn't there. You're always too needy, right? When she's saying, what are you talking about? We've been dating for four years. I'm just looking for a commitment here, pal. Or we might provoke them, right? So let's say I do get attached to somebody who's pretty decent, pretty loving, but I betray her.

31:15I act out sexually with an affair partner or an escort or do something. Now she becomes a version of my mother, always controlling, always demanding to know where I'm at. But I did that to myself. So usually we see people pursuing the past through one of those three Ps, picking somebody, projecting out to them, or provoking them. And you're talking about picking somebody, which is always sticky because when we hear these guys tell their stories, it's not always clear to us whether they've provoked them or whether or not they've picked them to become that. And sometimes it's water under the bridge.

31:51Sometimes it's too late. And divorcing both the mother and the current partner have to become part of the emancipation process. How did you get interested in this kind of work? Because I know you're a therapist, but it just seems like a very specific niche to get into. Did you just have a bunch of patients like this and you got interested in it or what? There's a couple threads. This won't surprise you, but there was some enmeshment in my family. Okay. So my mother has enmeshed with her parents. So they were first generation and Hungarian, and then it kind of trickled down to myself and my brothers.

32:22That was sort of behind my work, to be frank with you. The first thing that I noticed professionally outside of the children that I was working with at Children's Hospital, who were school phobic, which is when I first discovered it, is I was working with adults who had grown up in alcoholic families, adult children of alcoholics. And this man was compulsively picking up prostitutes, escorts. And he was split between living in his own place and living with his mother, where he had to live in order to do his job, which was in the city. And so while he was living with his mother, he'd be picking up prostitutes.

32:54And he said, what should I do? I said, stop living with your mother. I was early in my professional career. I wasn't aware that you don't always give such direct advice. To my surprise, he stopped. He did it. He moved out. And his compulsion to pick up prostitutes dropped precipitously. Wow. It was stunning for me to see that. I understood that we had to work with him long-term on keeping boundaries and not reengaging in that. But the cathartic shift by moving out that decreased his compulsion was dramatic. I wrote my first professional article based on that case. So that was the first sort of dart on the board where I thought, ah, this enmeshment stuff affects sexuality.

33:34I wrote from there. I wrote Silently Seduced not long after that. It just came to me, as they say. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Ken Adams. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is just take a moment and support one of our sponsors, all the deals, or even more than one for that matter, all the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you're not sure how to find it, just email me. I'm jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

34:06I am more than happy to surface that code for you. Yes, it is that important. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Ken Adams. It reminds me of when somebody is getting clean from drugs or alcohol and they're like, don't go back to the same places. And it's like, yeah, yeah, don't hang out with my friends who do drugs. And it's like, no, no, no, don't even go down the same road. Take a different path to work. Move out from your mom's house. Well, what does that have to do with me picking up prostitutes? Well, obviously at home, there's some trigger that you can't not run into every single day or every time you do this.

34:40So if you move out and you're not hitting that trigger, the addiction stuff doesn't necessarily kick off or it's way less often and easier to break. And it sounds like that's kind of the pattern that we're looking at here. I would imagine triggers all kinds of addictions, right? There's got to be substance abuse problems that go along with this. Like, oh, I drink because I don't know. And it's like, well, you live with your mom and your mom tells you all this icky stuff and then your wife gets mad at you. And it's like, oh, oh yeah, that might have something to do with it. So we like to use the word ritual space.

35:08everybody's crowded into my little center space, right? I'm not alone. I can't be alone. I've never been alone. I don't know who the hell I am. And mother is central to that space. But if I move out, now I can breathe. Now I have a ritual space in which she's not intruding. So my need to escape diminishes. So that's what you just described is that if I'm at home, my sense of ritual space, safety is always being intruded on. So if I'm calling my mother five times a day or she's texting me 10 times a day, I never feel a separateness, right? I don't want to answer everyone in your text here, right?

35:46And if I don't answer, it doesn't mean I don't love you, right? So please don't say that again. So these guys can't do that. They can't really set boundaries like that. So there's no spatial separateness. There's no breathing space. So the need to escape addictions become a primary way to do that. Or I just shut down and I avoid everybody, right? I isolate and I don't get involved in friendships or romances because, as you said earlier, I just shut the whole thing down. I'm glad we're talking about this. I would love to explore for a moment some of the non-romantic impacts of covert incest. You know, we've talked about the dating stuff, the sex addiction stuff, but I would love to hear a little bit about how children of these parents navigate things like friendships, relationships, careers, creative pursuits, the world in general.

36:33You touch on both of your books on a number of interesting themes, indecision, fear, ambivalence, and inability to know how they really feel about a topic or an issue or a person. Sometimes it's even difficult to make a basic decision, you know, like, do I do this or do I do that? Do I go to this restaurant or do I go to the beach? And also procrastination. Can you talk about that? Why do those qualities develop in children like this? That's a good question. You just, again, outlined another series of eye color symptoms in the group. 95 % of the guys will report what you just described. So let's think about that for a minute, right?

37:06If you're this sensitive, empathic boy, you're absorbing the dominant emotional landscape of your parent, and yours is being subjugated, right? Your needs and wants, you begin to set them aside. I don't want to accept mommy. I really want to play football, but she doesn't want me to play football, whatever the issue is, right? And so I begin this process early on in my development of losing my voice in the service of allowing mother to have her voice in my presence. And so when it comes time for me to intuitively or instinctively know how to make a move, you know, this is the career I want. I'm going to take my chances.

37:43You know, we get guys who have built careers based on what their mothers want. They're changing careers when they're 45 because they realize this is not what I've wanted to do. And so you can get dramatic examples like that all the way to I can't decide what dinner I want to go to tonight because I don't really know who I am. I don't know what my needs are. And if I get to what I really want, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint somebody. So I'm going to move away from that and remain ambivalent or placating or people-pleasing. I won't really assert what I want. In fact, I've lost track of what I want.

38:15So ambivalence, indecision, self-doubt becomes sort of this repetition in me around multiple topics. And also friendships, you know, I wind up getting friendships where I'm always the one doing the work. My buddy's not reciprocating or taking me to a ballgame or whatever it is, right? And so, you know, sometimes we get friendships in which I'm doing all the heavy lifting. Wow. And so because my value is what I can give to you, how I can support you, not what's good for the both of us here or what I want. You can say what you want without being narcissistic. I'd really like to go to the Thai restaurant.

38:53Right. How about you? What do you want to do this time? Okay, you want to go to this. Well, this time we'll go here. Next time we'll go to Thai. Right. So that ability to negotiate preferences and needs in relationships from friendships to careers to romances is really burdened by I don't get a vote. In fact, I've lost the fact that I even can vote. It's sad. They might have a very specific career. So sometimes you can see somebody who's managed a career. And maybe they've got a career that they really like and they've found some way to fight. And they just are kind of locked into that. That's the one thing they know.

39:29It's the one thing they can hang on to. It's the one thing they can identify with. But if you move them outside that path, they start to get a little wobbly about who they are and where they are. So you're right. You know, we all need an intuitive sense of self. My son, his first car, he says, well, I'd like a sports car for my first car. I said, no, man, that's not going to happen. And so he had it all laid out how I was going to save money and gas and insurance five years down the road. So he had a little PowerPoint presentation. And I said to him, no, bud, I'm sorry, that's not happening. He goes, you know, it just doesn't feel right.

40:04Sometimes you make decisions based on a feeling. So you lose the ability to do that when you are absorbed by somebody else's feelings and needs. That's the reason for that ambivalence, uncertainty, indecision. Which would make uncertainty and crises and wide open ocean very anxiety-provoking for a child of this template, I would imagine. In Silently Seduced, you wrote that the adult covert incest victim remains stuck in a pattern of living aimed at keeping the special relationship going with the opposite sex parent. It is a pattern of always trying to please mommy and daddy. A privileged and special position is maintained.

40:41The pain and suffering of a lost child denied. Separation never occurs and feelings of being trapped in the psychological marriage deepen. this interferes with the victim's capacity for healthy intimacy and sexuality, in addition to all of the other things you just mentioned. I wrote that. That's well put. Yeah, you're not bad. You should look into writing more. Time for a new edition. We've talked a lot about what covert incest does to people. I think we need to talk about how to recover from it. What does healing from this look like? Well, I think doing what you guys are doing, first of all, your education.

41:17You guys are doing a great service here. Somebody out there is going to hear this and it's going to change your lives. So way to go, guys. Way to go. Oh, yeah. We're going to get emails about this. Like, I never knew that this was it, but this is it. I totally have this relationship with my mom or dad. It is a slice of the pie, right? Yeah. I can't keep up with it. We have a workshop every month. I get emails from all around the world. I just can't keep up with it. So the first order of business is to come to some awareness of what is the truth, to break through the denial and to realize that what you've been calling love is not love.

41:47And it's a hard pill to swallow. But unless you can face that, everything else becomes too problematic. If you don't confront the belief system and see the reality for what it is, you can't really set a boundary. But if I come to terms with the fact that, well, at some level, sure, my mother probably loved me, but what she's doing now is not love. And this is transactional obligatory assignment in that love is a currency to get me to not leave her. It's not really love. Now, I can better begin to think about citing a boundary. So challenge the belief system, confront the denial, educate yourself, and be prepared to give over the responsibility to the parent to manage the loss.

42:33Kids are supposed to emancipate from their parents and move on. It doesn't mean they don't circle back. We hope that our kids do, right? Yeah, come home for Christmas. Right. You break through the denial, you educate yourself, and you shift the responsibility in your mind to your parent. This is not my job. Take care of you. And you don't worry about negotiating it. So emancipation is not a negotiation. You do not need your parent's co-signature on this. It'd be nice to get their blessing, but don't go into family therapy with your mother. It'll feel like couples therapy. Oh, man. We have some guys, best intention, but misses the point, brings the mother into the therapy session, and it feels like it's marital therapy with my mother.

43:13And the guy relapses in his sex addiction the next day, man. So it's declaring that, look, mom, I know you've been having a hard time with your life with dad, but things are going to change. I know you love me, but things are going to be different. I got to put my energy in my life and my career, my wife, my kids. We're going to shift things around. And I'm going to trust that you're going to figure out a way to deal with it because you say you love me. So you have to step up and have a position of emancipation. There's an interesting tension here because you talk a lot about assigning responsibility to the parent, holding them accountable.

43:46But how do you hold a parent like this accountable in cases where they don't even realize that this is what they were doing? Well, I'm saying this more from the perspective of an internal dialogue with the self. I see. More than I am an external negotiation. So there has to be an internal shift in the belief system in the way that you narrate your story, right? Because that's what we're talking about. We're talking about changing the narrative of how you hold your life story. Everybody's got a story, right? You guys got a story. I have a story. We all have a story to tell. It has to change, and you change it internally.

44:24My job is not to carry my mother's disappointment for her. It's her spiritual assignment to figure this out before she dies, not mine. So you change the internal dialogue, and then the external is limited. It might mean, look, we've got to change things. We're not vacationing every year in Cancun with you anymore. We're going on our own vacation. So sometimes the emancipation is just a declaration occasionally about what I'm doing differently. You know, I won't be visiting this Christmas. We're staying in the motel down the street. No, we're staying in the house, by the way. You'll begin to need boundaries.

44:58So belief system, internal shift, boundaries, and then commitments to yourself, to your partner. These are my priorities. And to push back on guilt. Okay. Do I confront my mom on this or my dad or whatever? And what if they're dead? You don't really need a boundary from a dead person, but you kind of do because if they're this ghost in your mind that's telling you like, your wife's not good for you, what do you do with that? So that's the business of the therapy world, right? That's what our business is about is activating experientially bringing to light and to feeling that internal presence and doing the job of confrontation therapeutically, right?

45:39So you're shifting the emotional landscape and narrative enough times and enough protests that you can start to breathe. Should that translate to a confrontation with your parents? I would say in general, not necessarily. So this is not about going home and grabbing your parents by the lapels and shaking them and saying, look, you guys smothered me. I want my own life. It's having your own life and letting them deal with it. Because what happens is if you go and you start getting enraged with your parents, you're going to provoke your guilt. And once you provoke your guilt, you're going to wind up resubmitting yourself back to your parents.

46:12So you have to be careful about how you declare your independence. Now, it might be if you've got parents who will listen. We always like to say that the best you can hope for is your parents will resign themselves to keeping their mouth shut. If they're smart, that's what they'll do. They don't want to lose you. They want you to circle back. If I had more time, I would do a workshop for parents and I would say, look, it's in your best interest. My son and I used to play baseball all the time together, play catch every day. It's not his thing anymore, right? But he's a young man now, right? So we have a different relationship.

46:44Your kids will circle back to you if you get out of the way. So your job is to keep moving forward and letting your parent or parents deal with the loss and not do too much negotiation about that. But it might mean that you could say things are changing. I've put more emphasis in my life. I just want you to know I won't be responding as frequently to emails and texts. Does it mean X, Y, or Z? So you could make a declarative position, but know that it's not going to go far. You can't use it to get assurance that it's okay. So if you're doing that to get your parents to say, good for you, don't do it because it's not coming.

47:22Got to be so hard to do that, right? Because you're in a position that seems like it's privileged and special. You're mommy's special boy. You don't really want to lose that at some level, I assume. But then also you're like, oh, and by the way, I'm not going to Cancun with you. I'm going on vacation with my wife because we're normal adults. That's not really going to fly if you're mommy's special boy and you're trying to be this. And then you're also like, and by the way, I'm going to have my own life with my wife and you're going to lose your pseudo boyfriend, partner or whatever that you've had since I was born.

47:50I can't imagine that going over too well. And that sort of leads to wonder if people recover 100 percent from this or will children of these parents always at some level wrestle with these feelings and conflicts, even if the parent dies and is like, I forgive you. Guilt is really hard to shed. It's really, really hard to get rid of entirely. It's a one day at a time deal. You can keep creating real estate and spaces at which you're free, but you're always going to be provoked into some degree of relapse around that. You have to keep coming back to remind yourself about the freedom that you have a right to and deserve.

48:27So you've always got to, you know, have your private little dialogue with your mother, whether she's dead or not, and say, I need you out of the room. Sometimes we'll have guys come into the practice, for example, and we don't come in and let them bring their spouses in to the same session. because they've never had a space just for them. So practicing over and over again, the ritual of space that's mine becomes a necessary piece. And that is probably ongoing. So the earlier this stuff occurred in childhood, the longer it's gone on, the deeper the template. Wow. So cutting it off when you're 20 and you move out is going to be easier than trying to do it when you're 45, you're married with two kids.

49:08I guess that makes complete sense. You can restart your life when you're 20, if you want to. It's a lot harder when you're married with two kids and you're in your 40s. One of the big consequences of covert incest is feeling objectified and used, as we talked about, not loved unconditionally. Right. I like the phrase, not love for love's sake. I like that too. Not love for love's sake. So how does a person cultivate or rediscover that feeling of being loved for love's sake or even being worthy of that love? That's a big question. So first of all, I think we need to confront the faulty belief system so that they understand that the transactional currency love was not really loved.

49:48That's the first order of business. So assuming that's essentially challenged and out of the way, you know, I think it becomes a daily practice and being around people who are reciprocal. Pat Carnes, who did all the work on sexual addiction, said in recovery, relationships change or they end. I always like that phrase. You can't be in recovery from drugged alcohol and sex addiction and keep going to Las Vegas with your buddies. Relationships change or the end. There's no middle ground here. I think that you start cultivating relationships that are reciprocal, in which you're not the only one providing the service to the other so that you can begin to feel what it's like to have somebody hold you lovingly and to permit yourself to do the same, right?

50:31Because the other thing that gets in the way, I remember this with my mother. I'm going to be a little bit of I had a lot of grief about regret. And I thought, you know what? That's not on me. She got in the way. You talked about grief earlier. One of the things that's lost here for the son is he doesn't get that sweet, loving connection that I watch my son have with my wife. Sometimes my son will turn to my wife for his counsel more than me, right? And so that's lost to this man. And it's not on him. It's on the mother. Parents' job is to get out of the way so the kid can come back around and love them differently.

51:05So I would say surround yourself with people who can be reciprocal and so that you can begin to take a chance on loving. Because it's hard to do, right? If you've been suffocated and engulfed and enmeshed, opening your heart up is not an easy job. Needing to learn that you can open yourself up to somebody romantically, lovingly, sexually, merge with them, and then unlook and come back, let yourself miss each other, right? So guys who have been in mesh don't know that dance. They think they've always got to be emerged with their lovers. And then separateness means I never come back. But the dance of intimacy for these mesh guys is to learn to move in and merge and collapse and come back up.

51:48And not to bring the lover with you and have her collapse in your sacred space, but to move into a different space with her. So it's a tough dance, but it is the dance we see that works. So this is going to sound a little weird, Dr. Adams, but there are some benefits that come from this level of enmeshment slash trauma. It seems to me, based on your books, that people who have these parents often tend to be very empathic. They can be very good listeners. They can be excellent caretakers, which in certain situations can be very helpful or useful, sometimes beautiful. There's some beauty to that level of care, but obviously it can become compulsive.

52:26It can come at the cost of the person. It can become a whole identity. How do you break out of that mold? Can people with these parents stop living up to the expectations of other people and start living for themselves? How do they do that without losing some of these admirable qualities? I think the empathy precedes the role. I think most of these people are naturally so temperamentally empathic. Some kids are more, screw you, I don't want to deal with it, right? There's a little more punch to their temperament. I think the empathy is temperamental and also developmental. So yes, I do think these roles increase caring and empathy.

53:07I like to use this phrase, I think you have to learn to regulate your empathy. You can't give it away to everybody. When I worked with therapists, therapists were always burned out by the end of the day, right? You give yourself to eight people in a session. This is one of my experiences. I come home from work and I didn't want to talk to my wife or my son. I was just burned out. You have to learn, I can care and feel for you, but I'm not giving it all to you. Learning to regulate the empathy is your key. Mom, I love you. I care about you, but I'm not going to listen to your problems with dad anymore.

53:41You got to work it out with him. I'm sorry. How's the weather? So regulating how much you give. I already have this much in the tank, and that's all you're going to give. Learning to do that becomes a skill that helps you navigate so that you don't feel depleted in relationships. Dr. Adams, thank you so much. It's a world I didn't know existed, and I think a lot of people probably didn't know they were even in these kinds of relationships with a parent. So I think it's really informative and very helpful. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. You guys did great. Love working with you. Take care.

54:15Nice to see you guys. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a guest who committed a white collar crime, went to federal prison, and now advises lots of people that you've heard on the news. I'm going to speak openly about breaking the law. I'm going to speak openly about living in denial. I'm going to speak openly about what I've learned from this experience. I'm going to speak openly how I was a privileged rich kid who had all the breaks in life and I deserve to be scrutinized. I deserve to be punished. I'm going to talk about how I'm going to climb back up. I knew that it was wrong.

54:47I knew that while I was sitting in a meeting and someone was being told that a certain return existed, I knew that it was a lie. And people were hurt as a result of that. Even though in my case all of the money was repaid, all the victims got their money back, some of the humanity was stripped away. It comes back to intent. The government doesn't care. It doesn't matter if you were swept into this. They think you broke the law. They have a narrative. And they are out to punish. And they love cooperators. I broke the law. I cheated. I created victims. It is a lifelong stigma. You know, it takes some time.

55:19It takes some peppering and understanding of reading and learning and thinking. You've got to find that perspective. You've got to become grateful for what's left versus all that's lost. And that was really a big transformation for me, focusing on what was left, my family and my mind and a willingness to work hard and be competitive versus obsessing over everything that had crumbled down. The hardest part isn't prison. It's frankly the easiest part. There is a value in being in prison and losing everything, there is a freedom that comes with it. I didn't have a career to return to. I didn't have money to return to.

55:50I didn't have a relationship to return to. Everyone has to find value in the climb. I found great value in climbing back to a sense of respectability. To hear why Justin Paperni says his 18 months behind bars was one of the best experiences of his life, check out episode 226 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Interesting conversation. Again, I'd never thought about most of this stuff. Sometimes covert incest victims pick a similar partner to their parent, but sometimes they choose somebody very different. Somebody who's actually incompatible so that they have an excuse for a marriage that just doesn't work.

56:23And I, this happens subconsciously a lot of the time and it shows up in dating. It shows up in partner selection. And often these folks divorce because they're actually trying to divorce their parent and dissolve that emotional bond. So the whole thing kind of gets projected onto their partner. So they just keep repeating that pattern because divorcing their actual spouse doesn't solve the problem. It's the parent they need to kind of distance themselves from. And Dr. Ken Adams, he is big on setting boundaries with the parent in question. This is like the most important part of the healing process, which is allowing for, as he puts it, the unfolding of your true authentic self as opposed to playing the role that was defined for you by your parents.

57:02And if you're a parent listening right now and you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm doing this to my kid, you're not a bad person. but you got to identify the line between healthy intimacy with a family member and what's called covert incest. I definitely recommend picking up the book. A therapist is a good place to start. Again, you're not a terrible person, especially if you nip this in the bud. And there's a difference between being close with your child and being enmeshed. And if you're doing it with young children, obviously, you know, good, stop now. But if it's an older child, it's not too late to stop.

57:29Like you can rescue these relationships and help them become more healthy at pretty much any time. So how can you identify the line between healthy intimacy and covert incest? Well, when the relationship primarily serves the emotional needs of the parent, not the child. And I asked Bruce these questions, so these are his answers, not just me speculating. When the child's closeness to one parent is used in a tug of war with the other parent, that happens a lot in divorces, but it also happens a lot in families that are still together. When the implicit and explicit demands for obligatory loyalty, love is used transactionally in this case, to the parent interfere with the child's identity unfolding and becoming like a standalone adult.

58:06Also, when the parent's needs and demands interfere with the romantic relationship of the adult child, leaving the partner essentially second fiddle. So like you're in a weird relationship with your mom so that your current wife or girlfriend can't really form a healthy bond with you. There's a lot more to this, but essentially the line between the sweet and normal love between parent and child, it crosses into this covertly incestuous feeling when the parent parades the boy or girl around as sort of a romanticized person who will never leave them. And this can occur, again, I want to highlight this, without any inappropriate sexual touch at all.

58:41And it's still icky, right? It's still icky. It's still too much. It's still too invasive. The best options for parents who find themselves doing this is to seek adult companionship needs outside the bond with their child, obviously, to encourage autonomy and independence, to extend a feeling of confidence and trust in the child's independence to contain worry, neediness, and helplessness that would normally be expressed to the child and to extend space and respect for separateness to the child and sort of see this as an act of its own love. And I know there's a lot there, but I think for people who are really listening because they need this stuff, they get it and they know where the rewind button is.

59:14There's a lot more in the book, especially, which of course will be linked in the show notes and on our books page at jordanharbinger.com slash books. Transcripts will be in the show notes as well. advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. You're welcome to email me. I'll surface any code for you. Yes, it's that important. Also, hey, newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons from it. If you are a fan of the show, you want some important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that.

59:46jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. And we are going to be doing giveaways on there as well. I know I've said that before. There might even be something in there by the time you listen to this. So keep your eye on your inbox. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Thank you for tag teaming this one with me.

1:00:14Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who could use this episode or the advice from this episode, and you probably do, feel free to share this episode with them. Actually, please do so. You could save their life or at least their relationship with their future romantic partner and or their parents. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.