Coincidence, match, or whatever you want to call it, in the last month three pairs of teenage siblings have come into my office. So I hear, several times a week, “my sibling“. Different voices, different purposes.
We talk, we debate, we try all kinds of reconciliations in couples, in work relationships, in social relationships. I realize we’re not really looking at sibling relationships. At least not in therapy, although deep sources of emotional imbalance are often found there too.
Love you, love you not
From the strong emotional bond and latent rivalry to the long-term influence on individual identity and behavior, the sibling relationship is one of the most complex, profound, and immutable relationships in a person’s life.
I listen carefully to people who say “my brother”, “my sister”. It may just be my impression cloaked in subjectivity, but the emotion put into these words reveals the nature of the family context and how those who now call themselves “siblings” were taught to love each other. And maybe even the way they felt loved, seen, compared by their own parents.
I think it’s natural to compare. And I think it’s just as natural that parents have a hard time keeping the balance scale in the right position.
Siblings are not the same. Only a parent knows that. “Oh why can’t you be like your brother/sister?” And look how the seed is inoculated that one of the children is not as good, lovable, desirable. And a different seed in the other brother: So I deserve more and better. The land is fertile, only good for sowing for the later fruit. It is the time when the behavioral models are imitated, the received messages are internalized, the first signs of the subsequent construction of the personality are seen.
To my rival, my love
I never came first to my parents. My brother was the tallest, the most beautiful, the most creative. And he still is “the best”. My brother and I are incredibly close now as adults. In childhood we were rivals. It was bad. It was war. Something our parents don’t feel or simply can’t recognize.
Competition for attention, affection, and sometimes even material or financial resources causes, at least in childhood, jealousy, express or tacit rejection of the other sibling.
I always carried with me the impression that I was in the shadows, whether it was in a relationship as a couple or in a group of friends. Until recently. The woman I met keeps pulling out, as if from a dusty chest, images of me that I keep marveling at. Yes, it’s me, I recognize myself. But where have I been so far? Nobody told me anything about those things. My parents don’t see me even now. I’m still “the little one”. This is how they talk about me to their friends. “The little one”. 35 years…
Competition naturally exists between siblings. Observed and guided, it can become a strong, lasting bond.
If we always look at the one who does better, who does more, we create rivalry. If in every action of each sibling we find what is valuable, beautiful, good and to the same extent what could be chiseled, added, removed, this is the motivating competition. It is practically impossible for one to always be extraordinary, without blemish, and the other to always be the black sheep of the family.
And if the “extraordinary” is also the firstborn, all those who may come after that can be expected to exist in this picture.
We are not the same. Individual identity is a value in itself. Discovering it, in all its aspects, becomes a journey where the parents are the treasure hunters. Is one of your children clumsier than the other? Or maybe more messy? Or surely not as perceptive, clever? It is possible. But how are they otherwise? What talent do they have? How much humor? How generous are they? And so, so many more.
What about later in life?
About the way in which those who grow up with siblings develop their social skills and degree of empathy is written in different ways. Even contradictory sometimes. What is certain, however, is that a childhood and adolescence lived near brothers or sisters creates a unique, unrepeatable framework for learning communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills.
Later, in adulthood, the relationship can remain the one that the parents instilled or on the contrary, as in the case of Andrei, whose confessions about “my brother” you read earlier, it can be reshaped according to the new meanings that each sibling gives for the past lived together.
I have met deep rivalries, distances that nothing could cover. Conflicts smoldered for years, decades and explosions that destroyed the decks forever. People who forgot how to say ”my sibling”.
But I also know brothers who grew up in love and admiration for each other, because that’s how the parents looked at each other and at their children.
And who remained faithful to these feelings, regardless of the opinions they built over time about things, events, people.
