DISRUPTIONS IN THE GROWING-UP PROCESS WHEN A CHILD MUST CARE FOR EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE PARENTS
A normal parenting process implies that as the child grows up, they become less dependent on the parent, who can then shift their parental relationship into a friendship-like connection with their adult child. This allows the parent to redirect attention toward themselves and their partnership, thereby increasing the likelihood of aging without chronic issues.
In the case of emotional incest, however, the parents do not mature—they remain equally immature despite growing older, which places the child in an unnatural situation. The child is forced to care for emotionally immature parents without the gradual relief that should come through the natural influence of time on body development, as is the case for a child growing up in a healthy environment.
Thus, a child living in emotional incest carries the same burden for longer and longer, which causes increasingly severe chronic issues as they grow. The collapse of the child’s system typically occurs during mid-puberty, precisely when they should be separating from immature parents—but the parents, due to their own dependency on the child, do not let go. The energy they should invest in raising their emotional maturity is instead spent on keeping the teenager close. The conflict between the interests of the teenager’s body and their subconscious—programmed to maintain the emotional stability of the parents—becomes so intense that it leads to chronic injuries, pain, and illnesses in the teenager, which are atypical and unnatural for their age.
The truth is always simple, but if we live in illusion, it is never easy to accept—because the energy potential difference between truth and illusion is vast. Truth is eternal; illusion is temporary.
The fact that truth can be so persistent proves that it is simple, as only something simple can exist while consuming little to no energy. At the same time, this means that untruth (a lie, illusion) must be the opposite of the simplicity of truth in order to make sense—as something that denies, hides, or distorts the truth. Because it is not simple, it requires more energy to exist and function than truth does. This is the fundamental law of truth and untruth as understood and applied in AEQ. The positive effects of respecting and applying this law can be seen in ourselves and our clients—both in those who respect it and get better, and in those who, knowingly or not, break it and get worse.
The more elaborate a lie must be to conceal the truth, and the longer it must persist, the more it must feed on hatred, because syntropic aggressive emotions do not have the strength or persistence to sustain long-term illusions. Larger and longer-lasting illusions require a state of chronic helplessness, which generates hatred and thus the energy source for untruth. The greatest chronic helplessness is created in our childhood environment, as we are then powerless and chronically dependent on the strength of our environment (primarily our parents) to protect us and give us meaning. Meaning and significance are assigned to us when our parents use their time and strength to pull us out of helplessness and sacrifice a part of themselves for us. Through this, we learn how to be strong, how to recognize the onset of helplessness, and how to use aggressive emotions in a timely and effective way to prevent it.
The greatest long-term strength is given by truth, as it does not weaken us with the need for chronic and increasingly greater energy investment, which untruth requires. But to have more and more truth in and around ourselves, we need sufficient emotional maturity and accordingly low SMA. A beginner in the process of learning the AEQ method never has this.
Since untruth consumes more and more energy to exist, it must sooner or later collapse into truth. The energy released during this collapse creates pain, a need to stop, a shift of attention to the pain, and a transfer of the consequences of past untruths and their influence on our past, present, and inevitably also future. Even though we face painful consequences of past untruths in the present, this does not mean that the future will be free of their influence—but their effect will be smaller, and the influence of truth proportionally greater.
