Feedback & Follow-up to "Mommy's Boy"

It’s been important for me to take time with the feedback from my recent blog “Mommy’s Boy.” Your messages arrived in my mailbox often and over several weeks following posting it.

Writing that blog was tough work for me. In fact, I call this kind of work “Slog Blogs.” Because I lived this particular kind of nightmare, I revisit scenes from my life, remember my naïve attempts to find support or help, and re-engage the travesty of how it all just escalated and reinvented itself in the “recovery” path and “treatment” he undertook (only as long as I stayed married to him.) The road I took in order to save myself and model for my adult sons that leaving abuse is both necessary and possible emerges eventually but it is not easy getting there.

As I said in that “Slog Blog,” I make that effort because I know the difficult and often ignored topic will resonate with some readers who haven’t known how to frame or understand their experiences. They gain support and validation that aren’t likely from the average treatment practitioner, and that is exactly what happened this time with “Mommy’s Boy.”

Thank you to all who wrote me with pain, courage and gratitude. I suspect there were many others who didn’t write but began to think differently about some parts of their story, and learn the questions they needed to ask themselves about what was actually going on.

If covert incest is a new concept, I have written about it before in other blogs. You can also search out clinical definitions online. Please look for credible sources when you do that. And please realize it isn’t just something that happens between mothers and their sons. It can happen in any configuration within a family unit.

Knowing about this topic is important for how you keep yourself and your children safe. This is because even if your spouse is assessed this way, you may never be told about it. You need to be able to connect the dots in your own wisdom about how his relationships with his parents operate, and how you are treated as a result. That knowledge helps you to make good decisions for yourself and your children.

With respect to how your children are impacted by a “Mommy’s boy” father, it is important to recognize when your spouse is infantizing himself so much that your children are being subversively asked to parent him. In this posturing these men seek emotional support intimacy from their children and find ways to offload parental roles to them.

You may be incredulous that information this important about the dynamics created by a “Mommy’s boy” spouse and father and how they can negatively impact our lives is not something you’ve heard much about in the search for help for wives and partners. I’m incredulous, too. Some practitioners may not have studied enough to know about it. Others may know but have no capacity to deal with it. Still others may be more concerned about what treatment posture will ensure the most income. It’s a bit of a crapshoot out there. This work is not for the faint-hearted—and I’m talking about the work wives and partners have to do to find the truth with which to rebuild their reality and make reasonable decisions for themselves and their children in it. Without the information, they can’t rebuild reality accurately. This is about informational justice.

My commitment in this work is not because I haven’t “moved on” in my life. I am so far from the life I was in with my ex-husband that it’s like another life entirely. I am a different person with different priorities and a much deeper experience of abundant life than I ever thought possible. There have been losses, too. I’ve had to grieve and accept those as they have settled, but I’ve lived long enough to know that things can change for the better, too.

You and your children are not a treatment center for a man whose psychological damage is beyond the capacity and training of those treatment practitioners available to him. In my opinion you cannot fix this with boundaries, better communication, tracking devices, marriage counselling or forgiveness. It is pattern of primary relationship intimacy in which the parent has created a psychological slave to his/her/their intimacy needs out of his/her/their children. That pattern does not transfer successfully to an adult primary relationship partner to the adult child. Instead it can create deep conflicts of loyalty, shame, and abuse directed at the person in our position as an adult partner. It’s not a pretty story, and you will be hard pressed to find many people who want to believe that was going on under their nose when they knew your husband/spouse, and especially if they knew the parent as well. Add a cloaking device of bad religion it’s even harder to succeed with the truth. It will always be your fault.

The stress of this experience may lead to serious health compromises. This kind of covert abuse of the adult partner creates and sustains a level of constant stress that triggers dormant health vulnerabilities that are debilitating and sometimes life-threatening. From autoimmune problems that negatively change your life for good to even more devastating illness and disease, the longer you stay and the more vulnerable your physical profile is, these dynamics can put your physical and mental well-being in jeopardy.

I want better for you than I got. I want better for your children than mine got. Please, do the research. Consult professionals in mental health, physical health and the legal field. Gather information, analyze, and make choices in line with core values of what you hold your life and their lives to be worth. In my opinion that isn’t someone else’s job. It’s ours.

With you,

Diane.