Do you struggle with sibling rivalry and wonder whether your early life holds pointers to understanding your current relationship dynamics? Children often feel that they are in receipt of unequal amounts of parental attention, discipline, and responsiveness. Some studies have shown that sibling abuse is more common that parental-child abuse. Adult siblings more commonly re-enact hurt and resentment toward each other that perhaps should be directed at their parents. Rather than being there for each other, they can very easily become adversarial, alienated or estranged. If you have strong animosity towards a sibling it could be useful to explore what is behind the animosity.
However looking at the influence of siblings is not just about rivalry. A baby is always born in context, whether that is a modern nuclear family or a tribal grouping where others could play the role of siblings (such as close cousins or other significant non-blood others). The effects of sibling dynamics are always present in our adult life, unless we do some major psychological blocking. The effects are especially present in how we are in organisations, in personal relations and in peer associations. Our family was our first experience of being in a group, our father was modelling the role of men and likewise our mother for women.
Throughout my training I was always intrigued by the impact of my own sibling dynamics and how that had informed my attitude to authority and power and feelings of inclusiveness or perceived isolation in groups. I have read quite a fair amount of the works of Alfred Adler, founder of the school of individual psychology. Adler is considered the first to have emphasised the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual. He was a colleague of Freud in Vienna and became president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1910 but a year later he and a group of his supporters formally disengaged from Freud’s circle. This represented the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis, preceding Carl Jung’s split from Freud in 1914. Adler was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favour of two chairs to seek to transform the perceived power imbalance between patient and analyst.
Psychotherapy theorists on siblings tend to be individual analysts. Writers like Juliet Mitchell, who referred to the annihilation of a rival, Prophecy Coles, who referred to sibling ambivalence, Judy Dunn, who referred to the psychological development of siblings, and Margaret Rustin, who offered a view on siblings from child psychotherapy, were all individual therapists.
I now think that the deterministic ideas of birth order can be overly simplistic. Birth order can be one aspect of a large jigsaw in explaining personality development, one’s views of the world and one’s attitudes to power, authority and level of inclusiveness with others. Social environmental matrix is our web of communications and how we make connections with others. Birth order is one aspect of the web but I suspect a far more important factor is how our caregivers reacted to us and how the issues of power and equality were addressed in the household. There might also be many other environmental factors at play such as early bonding (including the impact of early separations), peer association, early emotional wounding and initial educational experiences. There might also be unconscious factors at play such as whether a baby had been planned, whether it was wanted and whether the gender was wanted which might influence the social environmental matrix. Other factors might be whether there was bereavement before a birth (perhaps a sibling died young or sadly there was a miscarriage), such a loss might remain an unspeakable topic in the family. Or perhaps one of mother’s (or father’s) parents, or other members of their own family, died during pregnancy or immediately after the birth and whether that child ends up carrying something for the family?
With twins people might always be asking who is the eldest. When sharing a womb, there might always be a comparison. Was the first “put aside” thereby setting up an ambivalence of attachment with that child in later development.
With an only child there might always be a lingering question as to why the parents did not have other children. Melanie Klein speculated that there is an expectation of siblings in the child, when she spoke of innate phantasy, whereas Winnicott believed children really wanted to be on their own and he referred to the role of usurper. Might there be a weight of responsibility to be everything for the parents, if you are the only one. It would be interesting, for instance, to know the effect of the one child policy of the Chinese State and to what extent that impacts on the child’s weight of responsibility.
There are, of course, many other factors that could be hugely influential in a social environmental matrix such as the effect of ill or disabled siblings, half siblings, socio-economic conditions, social class, cultural factors, racism, sexism, trauma and so on.
How can counselling and psychotherapy help with sibling matters?
Families can assign a role for better or worse and sometimes the work of counselling and psychotherapy can be about exploring what that role was for you. How specifically, for instance, did your social environmental matrix affect your relational style as you grew up. There might also have been specific factors such as house moves when perhaps one sibling did not remember the previous home and thereby feels separate to other members of the family when stories are subsequently shared. Parents can often be the glue that keep siblings in communication with one another. Crunch points can come when parents die and the responsibility for staying in touch falls to each individual sibling.
Individuals often avoid the thorny issues of their sibling matrix because it is so painful. The work of therapy could explore whether you became a rescuer, a facilitator, an avoider of conflict, a mascot, a scapegoat or a victim to circumstances? Did you you seek to always find an ally with someone else in groups? Bringing insight to your early family life can shine some light on explaining how you operate in the world today, specifically in and out of groups. Specific areas to look at could be whether you expect others to envy you in groups, and where and from whom you expect threats to come from? What do you anticipate from others in groups especially when making connections with new groups? Will you fear that you will be picked on? Do you avoid conflict?
Siblings can have a form of secret language, they can press buttons like no-one else can and can move from peace to war in seconds. It can be painful to look at your sibling matrix but it can be very beneficial to unpick your own sibling dynamics so that you can enjoy more powerful and assertive relations with others in your adult life.
Noel Bell is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist and can be contacted on 07852407140 or noel@noelbell.net
