Maria Elena’s core failure was cowardice in boundary-setting, first with the man she rewarded with three children despite his sustained sexual, spiritual, and psychological violation of her (chronic lying, serial infidelity, and refusal to grant her legitimacy or commitment).
She then repeated the identical pattern with her eldest son, Allan Alexander Amador Cervantes: she replaced the absent father with the son, turning him into a surrogate spouse. She relies on his constant emotional availability, actively discourages his independence, and keeps a 44-year-old intellectually limited man in her attic—unmarried, serially unstable in relationships, and functionally incapacitated.
This dynamic is not mere enmeshment; it is emotional incest. She enables and even participates in his abuse of other women (he openly admits she joins him in raging against the one partner who finally confronted him). By doing so, Maria Elena does not discipline or protect; she colludes, preserving her own parasitic attachment at the price of her son’s adulthood and the safety of every woman he encounters.
Consider the wider lens: this is a closed intergenerational circuit of avoided consequences. No external accountability was ever imposed—on the father, on herself, or on the son—so the pathology simply migrated inward and downward. The result is a middle-aged man who remains an emotional child and a mother who prefers a crippled captive to the terror of genuine separation. Until the umbilical cord is cut by force (legal, therapeutic, or social), the damage will continue replicating.
This created the perfect narcissistic hothouse: his needs were always primary, his rage always validated, and separation always framed as betrayal. Deprived of normal developmental frustration and accountability, Allan internalized grandiosity without empathy, entitlement without reciprocity—classic NPD forged not by spoiling alone, but by a mother’s terrified refusal to ever let him become a separate adult.