Hi {{ first_name | default: "Reader" }},
Emotional incest entered the language in 1990 as the title of a self-help book about parents who turn a child into a stand-in spouse. Today adult children use it for a mother who phones too often. This week I want to trace how a word that once named something close to a crime ended up in the boundaries speech, because if your child has ever used "enmeshment" about you, this is where it came from.
It's also the last of three emails on hierarchy. Back in September I argued you get to be friends with your children once. Two weeks later I showed you the cost of the early-years version. This one is the other way to lose the hierarchy, and the culture is currently misfiling it.
In the first of the two surveys Peter Anderson ran, he asked estranged parents which reasons their child had given for the cutoff. One of the most common answers was "boundaries", from 359 parents (Anderson and Blake, 2026). Kristen Carr's team saw the same gap in 898 estranged parents and adult children: children most often described toxic parents or feeling unsupported and unaccepted, while parents most often blamed the child's relationships or sense of entitlement, or said they had no idea why (Carr et al., 2015).
Where does the language of boundaries come from? Part of it is a concept that has been traveling. In 1990, Patricia Love published The Emotional Incest Syndrome. Kenneth Adams followed a year later with Silently Seduced, which popularised the term covert incest (Love and Robinson, 1990; Adams, 1991). Both described a specific thing: a parent, often after a divorce or a spouse's withdrawal, turning a child into a surrogate partner and confidant. Adams put the test plainly. You cross the line when the relationship exists to meet the parent's needs rather than the child's. Patricia Kerig's 2005 review sorted the academic version, boundary dissolution, into role reversal, intrusiveness, enmeshment and spousification. They share one feature. The child ends up carrying the adult (Kerig, 2005).
That pattern exists, and the parentification literature documents the damage. It is also nothing like what the word has come to mean online. Last summer a licensed clinical social worker argued on Medium that enmeshment, "otherwise known as emotional incest", should count as a form of child abuse (Gulbis, 2025). Mainstream health sites now run explainers on how to work out whether your parent's closeness qualified, complete with a 12-question self-test (Raypole, 2022).
Nick Haslam has a name for this, and regulars will remember it from the Newsweek email. In 2016, he documented how psychology's harm concepts, abuse among them, had expanded in two directions: outward to new kinds of cases and downward to milder ones (Haslam, 2016). He called it concept creep. Emotional incest fits the pattern exactly. A word that names a crime traveled to a role reversal, and from there to a mum who likes her son more than a stranger thinks she should.
So what happens at the mild end of that spectrum, where a parent is too involved rather than using the child as a spouse? Researchers have measured it, and the harm is small. The closest literature we have is on overparenting, the over-involved, over-protective style. Two meta-analyses, one pooling 52 articles and one pooling 44 studies and 21,607 people, mostly college-age, put the correlation between overparenting and anxiety at 0.14 and 0.16, and with depression at 0.15 and 0.20 (Zhang and Ji, 2024; Hu et al., 2025). Correlations of that size mean overparenting accounts for somewhere between 2 and 4 percent of the variation in how anxious or depressed a young adult is. Small is a long way from incest, and a culture that can't tell the difference hands adult children a ready-made word for ordinary closeness. Boundaries is the word that follows it.
So we have two failure modes that are mirror images. The friend-parent I wrote about in September hands the child adult decisions. The enmeshed parent hands the child adult feelings. In both cases, a child ends up doing a job they didn't apply for. The fix for both is the same: warmth with a hierarchy.
If you want a test, use Adams's. Ask who is carrying whom. If your child manages your loneliness, your marriage, or your moods, that is the thing Love and Adams wrote their books about, and it deserves a hard look. If you're the one setting the limits and absorbing the tantrums, you're doing your job, whatever a stranger online calls it.
The book is where I lay all of this out properly, including what you do if the cutoff has already happened.
It's called Cut Off, and it's out now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Hold steady,
Richard
P.S. If your child has used the word enmeshment about you, reply and tell me what they meant by it. I'm keeping a list of the definitions.
Disclosure: Peter Anderson designed and ran the survey quoted above through the ESMH Coalition, where I'm Vice President. My name sits on the OSF record because I wrote its public summary and limitations statement, not because I co-authored the study. Both surveys were self-selected samples of parents, with no data from the adult children involved. The full caveats are on OSF. I wrote the book this email promotes. No affiliate links in this email.
References
Adams, K.M. (1991) Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications.
Anderson, P. and Blake, R. (2026) Parental Perspectives on Family Estrangement: Two Large-Scale Surveys. Ethical Standards for Mental Health Coalition. OSF. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6XT53
Carr, K., Holman, A., Abetz, J., Koenig Kellas, J. and Vagnoni, E. (2015) 'Giving voice to the silence of family estrangement: comparing reasons of estranged parents and adult children in a nonmatched sample', Journal of Family Communication, 15(2), pp. 130–140. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2015.1013106
Gulbis, A. (2025) 'Enmeshment is gross: why emotional incest should be considered a form of child abuse', Medium, 25 July. Available at: https://medium.com/@alexandragulbislcsw/enmeshment-is-gross-why-emotional-incest-should-be-considered-a-form-of-child-abuse-9c2f8d458068 (Accessed: 19 October 2026).
Haslam, N. (2016) 'Concept creep: psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology', Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 1–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
Hu, N., Chen, K., Ye, L., Liu, H., Cai, D., Zhang, H. and Zhao, Y. (2025) 'Associations between overparenting and offspring's mental health: a meta-analysis of multiple moderators', Behavioral Sciences, 15(9), 1235. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15091235
Kerig, P.K. (2005) 'Revisiting the construct of boundary dissolution: a multidimensional perspective', Journal of Emotional Abuse, 5(2–3), pp. 5–42. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1300/J135v05n02_02
Love, P. and Robinson, J. (1990) The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life. New York: Bantam.
Raypole, C. (2022) 'How to recognize and heal from emotional incest', Healthline, 23 June. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health/emotional-incest (Accessed: 19 October 2026).
Zhang, Q. and Ji, W. (2024) 'Overparenting and offspring depression, anxiety, and internalizing symptoms: a meta-analysis', Development and Psychopathology, 36(3), pp. 1307–1322. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457942300055X