Extended Breastfeeding & Emotional Health

Ask an adult child of an addict or abuser what it was like to be them as a child and they’ll say they weren’t preserved. They were made to be strong in areas they shouldn’t have been and forced to be weak in areas they need not be. They were alone no matter who they were with and they were in control to keep the inevitable next trauma at bay, but their control never made it end like they’d hoped it would.

Ask an adult child who was breastfed for extended periods what it was like to be them as a child and they’ll say something like this. “I’ve never felt safer in my life than the years of nustling and nursing that my mother gave to me.” “I was preserved.” “My first years were the foundation to a life I’ve well lived. The love of those moments shaped me into more of who I am, rather than lessened me the way trauma inevitably will.”

As a child of the former and mother of the latter, I have a thing or two to say about the perversion people place over what is the foremost most sacred relationship that will ever exist in anyone's life. Like any relationship with two sovereign parties, it should end on intuition, not on cultural persecution.

I received this comment from a well intended man. “Please stop nursing your daughter. In psychology we call this emotional incest.”

I know alllll about emotional incest. I’m a psychology professor and a psychotherapist specializing in the subtleties of such things as “emotional incest,” as it was something that shaped me, and there were never any tits involved.

I facilitated a session with a doctor recently who’d just weaned her four and a half year old. Bluntly, the words, “I firmly believe that if you don’t want to be giving the kid the tit when they’re 35 in covert ways, it’s best to give it to them until they’re ready to be done with it when they’re young,” came out of my mouth. She laughed at the delivery and agreed.

As a mother of four whose seen the ramifications of doing things in a range of ways as life has required me to, and as a researcher and experimenter, that’s what I see happening.

I see people projecting true emotional incest where a parent uses the child for their own emotional needs, pervertedly overlaying a relationship in which the child is still allowed to use the parent for theirs.

I see mothers who didn’t give their kids what they needed when they were “supposed” to give it to them, trying to make up for it 50 years later, and their grown men sons still covertly begging for the tit they never got. I’m not trying to be vulgar here, and it shouldn’t sound perverted. It’s sad that it does.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a lactivist for breastfeeding reasons, nearly as I’m a lactivist for healthy individualtion reasons. I know how important healthy individuation is to the psychological development of a whole human being. By the time most adults in our society become adults, they’re a severely minced down version of what they actually are, and the gap between who they know themselves as and who they actually are is sorely covered up by pursuit or pharmaceuticals.

I was a never breast fed kid searching for a metaphoric tit my whole life, until I realized our relationship with our authority figures mimics the relationship we have with God. When I re-established my relationship with God, by giving myself the metaphoric tit my mother didn’t have it in herself to give, not only did I finally get right with my mother, I got right within myself.

I wonder when she’ll be ready but I remember all of the stories of adult children who were breastfed for extended periods of time, as I watched them step into the vibratory rememberance of those times, which helps me not forget to let her stay in the “wonder” of safety until she’s ready to wander elsewhere.

All of the adults I’ve interviewed who’ve been breastfed for longer than expected, and I legit mean ALL of them, are strong, confident, independent, and gorgeous adult animals! Ask around! You’ll be surprised!

I’m aware that some women don’t have the energetic or physical resources to nurse their child at all, let alone in an extended way and I’m sure their kids will turn out just fine, but as a woman who has it within me to give, to take something away that my daughter hasn’t yet individuated from merely because society says she “should” be done with, could be considered emotional neglect for the sake of a society that considers our first act of emotional and physical fulfillment to be a gluttonous act of sexual and emotional deviance past a certain point.

I don’t care what “they” say. Emotional incest comes when mothers care so much what “they” say, she uses her own child as a toy in her pursuit to have people who may be wrong, see her as right. She negates her child’s needs for her own desires for acceptance in a culture that no matter what she does, will find a reason not to accept her fully. That’s not what this is. I hear what my daughter doesn’t have the words to say and I honor her accordingly, as I’ve honored my older two when I, and they, knew, we were done.

I didn’t intend to nurse her this long. I especially didn’t intend on tandem nursing, but as nature would have it, this is where we are. I feel blessed to receive within myself the thing it is I’m given to give. May these be times she, like the adults I’ll never get to be a child in the experience of, experience herself and the world she was born into, as safe, ever allowing, abundant, and nurturing in the most innocent sense of being. May this vibratory signature be the foundation in which she, when she’s ready, launches herself into the world beyond me, fierce, trusting, but most of all, ready.

@Renee Dee Photography