Adult Sibling Relationships: Preface

preface

between us, geoffrey greif and michael woolley,

we have seven siblings, which include full, step-, and half brothers and sisters. One of us (Geoff ) is the youngest of three, and the other (Mike) is the second oldest of six. Our own sibling relationships range from the very close (Geoff ), to quite distant (Mike has both). We have marveled at the sometimes very large differences in our sibling relationship experiences and how that reflects the range of experiences of the people we interviewed for this book. We grew up with two parents who were married once, to each other (Geoff ), and with a constellation of parents who, counting just the two progenitor parents, were married seven times (Mike). We observed our parents and stepparents who had varying degrees of closeness to their own siblings, our aunts and uncles, whom we have come to see affect our own relationships with our siblings. Between us, we have experienced both parental support of and parental interference in our sibling relationships. Some of our parents have shown favoritism (Mike). Both of us have buried parents (Geoff one and Mike three, two biological and one step) and have participated in (Geoff ) or acted as the sole executor of (Mike) their estates. The divisions of those estates ranged from the amicable (Geoff ) to the complicated and conflictual (Mike). Our wives also have complicated relationships with their siblings and have sibling-like relationships with first cousins. One of us has both a sibling and a sibling-in-law with a disability (Mike). One of us (Geoff ) has two children, and the other (Mike) has one child. Geoff keenly watches his adult children’s relationships with one another develop, and we both observe how all three of our children interact with our siblings’ children, their first cousins, and our sibling-like cousins’ children (Mike).

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Each of these three generations (and an emerging fourth; Geoff has young grandchildren) of sibling interactions stands on the shoulders of the previous generations and are interconnected in ways that we can see more clearly after undertaking the research we describe in this book.

This topic was of interest to us because of the important and understudied role of adult siblings in all our lives. In researching the topic, we could not escape seeing reflections in our own relationships, which has given us a new appreciation for our siblings as well as insight into problematic dynamics that clinicians may need to attend to in therapy. Those reflections, coupled with our experiences based on our gender, race, socioeconomic status, birth order, age, and our combined total of more than sixty-five years of teaching and practicing family, child, and group therapy, affected our conclusions and recommendations for improving those relationships. In turn, clinicians working in this area should be aware of their own projections onto their clients. Although vertical parent-child relationships have been the focus of most professional training, the horizontal relationships we describe in this book may be new territory for some readers and may present challenges, both personal and professional. (Sibling relationships have long been overlooked in mental health therapy, for reasons that we discuss in chapter 1.) A few decades ago, one of our clinical supervisors advised us that when we were working with a client who was struggling with an issue with which we also were struggling, “if you can stay one valley ahead of your client, who may be traveling the same road, you can be helpful.” So while we therapists need to start focusing on our clients’ sibling struggles, we first need to get on that road.

This book is based on interview and questionnaire data from 262 siblings aged forty and older, with at least one living sibling. For three years, from 2011 to 2013, trained master of social work (MSW) student interviewers located and interviewed people who fit our study criteria and interviewed one sibling from each family. Together, our respondents shed light on more than seven hundred sibling relationships, as most had multiple siblings. We expanded these interviews by conducting additional in-depth and followup interviews, plus interviews with a few siblings and sibling sets together.

We have slightly changed some of the quotations to make them easier to read, and we have changed the names and identifying details of the interviewees to protect their confidentiality. We have been careful, though, not to change the intent of what was said. To ensure the accuracy of the

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in-depth interviews in chapters 7, 8, and 9, we had all the interviewees read what we had written.

Our exploration is both retrospective and oriented to the present.

We provide a framework for viewing sibling relationships using family therapy theories. We offer in-depth examples of well-functioning relationships as well as examples of relationships ranging from unsatisfactory, or conflictual, to nonexistent. In addition, we present findings from our own survey of mental health practitioners and their views of sibling relationships in therapy. In our conclusion, we provide suggestions to clinicians, and others, for improving sibling-related struggles. Those insights and suggestions come directly from those we interviewed as well as from our analyses of those interviews using family therapy theories and a framework that considers the affection, ambivalence, and ambiguity inherent in these interactions.

Why are we focusing on siblings aged forty and older? Not only have other researchers used that age as a beginning point for adult research,1 but we also believe that by forty, a midlife marker, most individuals, as well as sibling relationships, have run their initial course of ups and downs and have stabilized. We say “initial course� because these relationships still may change significantly after forty. But because by that age, people are more settled in their own life, their sibling relationships have likely become less mercurial. For example, most siblings have left home and established an identity outside the family. They have settled into other adult relationships with a partner and most likely have children, as 75 percent of our sample do. The influence of the family of origin, though often still strong, is not as strong as it once was.

Forty years of age is also when many children have to begin taking care of their parents, which forces siblings to interact on meaningful issues at a level and in a manner not often encountered since childhood. That means siblings not only must be adults but also must be adults together.

No longer can siblings ignore or tolerate one another as easily when they must take care of a parent and make weighty, sometimes life-and-death, decisions together.

We hope that reading this book will lead to a new understanding of sibling relationships and to new insights into both therapeutic work and personal growth. To this end, chapter 1 looks broadly at sibling relationships to show how, in turn, clients might perceive them. We all decide how these

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relationships should operate by looking at how others in our immediate family and broader society, including friends, well-known sibling sets, and fictional characters depicted in literature and film, manage theirs. Chapter 2 focuses on research that we believe will be relevant to issues raised in therapy. We then present our research findings in the next four chapters, starting with a descriptive overview and zeroing in on the relationship of age to how these relationships are maintained. This is followed by the importance of parental influences on sibling interactions throughout the life span. The serious problems that many sibling relationships encounter are discussed in chapter 5, followed by a chapter on how having step- and half siblings influences closeness.

Part 3 of this book contains three in-depth case studies. The first is a heartbreaking account of a family in which the three siblings have had little to no contact for decades. The next two chapters offer healthy models for how siblings can cooperate and handle conflict; one is based on a group interview with three sisters following the death of a fourth sister, a twin.

The other chapter is based on a group interview with three brothers shortly after their second parent died.

Part 4 begins with two guest chapters by experienced practitioners. The first, provided by the main partners in Aging Network Services, describes their ongoing clinical work with siblings struggling with their parents’ aging issues. These skilled clinicians describe how treatment with siblings unfolds over weeks and months. The second chapter recounts what happens in an emergency when adult siblings need to be organized to respond to a parent who is entering a hospital burn unit and for which the clinical work is often brief and intense. The next chapter lays out our own recommendations for clinicians working to improve siblings’ interactions and includes the results of our survey of mental health practitioners as well as our respondents’ own suggestions, which are sure to resonate with many of the readers’ own experiences. The concluding chapter offers our observations of where sibling relationships could be heading and includes general recommendations that may appeal to lay readers.

We could not cover all the topics related to siblings in our research. For example, we do not discuss in depth siblings with developmental disabilities or the increasing recognition of the influence of genes on sibling relationships. Finally, we offer one, in-depth case study of the unique influence of twins on family and sibling relationships that was not in the research

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chapters, as only three respondents (1 percent of our sample) had a living twin at the time of the interview.

We hope that our readers will gain a deeper appreciation for the complexity of sibling relationships, their centrality in the lives of adults across the life span, and how they may be approached in therapy. Just as important, we hope that readers will gain a better understanding of the role that siblings play in their own lives and in the lives of those whom they love.