People often think sexual abuse is overt and easy to identify.
And it is equally devastating.
What is emotional incest?
Overt sexual trauma is exactly what it sounds like: “hands-on” sex abuse.
Covert sexual abuse is more subtle.
With emotional incest, the child is used by the adult for emotional fulfillment.
Typically, covert incest happens when a child’s parents have distanced themselves from one another physically and emotionally.
(Often, this is brought on by an addiction in one or both of the adults.)
Mostly this is because they weren’t actually touched in a sexual way by the perpetrator.
I am nothing more than an emotional/sexual object for other people to use in whatever way they want.