Betrayal and estrangement between siblings in dysfunctional families
Recently, I found myself sitting with a patient, Elsa, who was crying uncontrollably in my office. It turns out that her sister had stolen her inheritance. However, it wasn’t the loss of her money that was devastating her; It was the shocking betrayal of her only brother.
Elsa’s sister, Joyce, had gotten her dying mother to change her will at the last minute, leaving everything to her. Her mother had been ill for a long time and Joyce had found a way to convince her mother that she and not Elsa really needed and deserved her substantial inheritance.
During our session, Elsa kept saying over and over, “I don’t understand how she could do this. I don’t understand why!” Although they had never been close and had in fact only seen each other at family gatherings for the past few years, Elsa didn’t think there was any animosity between them; certainly not enough to make Joyce do something so horrible.
Even though Elsa was completely confused by her sister’s behavior, I understood it very well, as it represented a pattern of sibling behavior that I had observed many times before. I have heard dozens of similar stories in which one adult sibling takes on another, shocking and horrifying the person who would never have expected her sibling to stoop so low. The betrayal almost always had to do with inheritance money, and it always stemmed from a particular type of family dynamic.
Elsa and Joyce had grown up with parents who were extremely involved in the successful family business and very neglectful of both. From an early age, the girls had had to learn to fend for themselves. Elsa was two years older than Joyce and had almost assumed a motherly role with her, helping Joyce with her homework and listening to her hopes and fears. Despite this, they were not very close growing up; having very separate activities and groups of friends.
When they got married, they became even more distant, but they were always cordial when they saw each other at parties and family events. That’s why Elsa was so surprised by Joyce’s seemingly inexplicable behavior around her will. What Elsa couldn’t know is how siblings from dysfunctional families tend to end up at odds with each other.
A dysfunctional family is one in which there is abuse, neglect, or both. Adults may not get along and expose their children to terrible arguments or even physical fights. Rather, parents can be allies who care for and protect each other at the expense of their children.
In a dysfunctional family, the parents are inadequate or abusive. As a result, there is not enough love available for children. Sometimes there is no love at all. This sets up an unconscious competition between the children for whatever love might be available. During childhood, a child may curry favor with one or both parents in an attempt to gain their attention. They are simply doing everything they can to survive in an environment deficient in the emotional necessities of life.
Joyce was one of these children. Despite confessing to Elsa on numerous occasions how much she despised her parents, all around her was sweetness personified. Elsa had a different way of coping, preferring to find emotional support from her teachers at school, her friends, and her extended family.
As they grew older, Joyce maintained a closer connection to her parents, while Elsa had moved to another city and sought fulfillment in her new family and a meaningful career.
What Elsa didn’t realize, as she went on with her life, was that Joyce secretly resented her for receiving more than her fair share of her parents’ love. Although this wasn’t true at all—neither of the two girls had actually received love—Joyce had convinced herself that since she hadn’t been loved properly, Elsa must have been the one to receive all the love in the family. .
Psychologically, this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that, even for an adult, it is extremely painful to face the truth that your parents did not love you (enough). It’s easier to blame your brother, accusing him of taking all the love available and leaving you with nothing. Paradoxically, it is the individuals who went out of their way as children to curry favor with those who most often feel this way, as opposed to those who sought emotional fulfillment elsewhere.
In a dysfunctional family where none of the children get their emotional needs met, there is often a child, like Joyce, who does everything she can to get her parents to pay more attention to her. This child establishes a competition between them and one or more siblings. Even if the other brothers are not aware of the competition, they have entered it by default. Whenever the actively competitive sister (Joyce) feels deprived of love, she imagines that her passive competition (Elsa) has stolen it from her.
The problem is that no matter what, currying favor with the parents is a dead-end proposition: if the parents ignore the girl, she feels even more hurt and deprived of love; if the parents pay more attention to the child, the child feels in the depths of her being that real love is not coming to them yet, but rather an attention born of the parents’ own interest.
Joyce had decided (consciously or unconsciously) that since she had never felt loved despite all her attempts to get love, it must have been Elsa who had received all the love from the parents. Her resentment seeped into her for many years until her father passed away and her mother lay dying in her hospice bed. Elsa hadn’t visited very often because when she did, her mother would only talk about how wonderful Joyce was. It was clear to Elsa that she and her mother were completely unrelated, and apart from doing the right thing by visiting once in a while, Elsa wasn’t interested in spending time with a virtual stranger.
No matter how much her mother praised Joyce and ignored Elsa, however, Joyce felt like the deprived child and saw Elsa as the “bratty one.” Elsa, on the other hand, because she had given up on really getting her parents’ love from her years ago, didn’t feel like she was competing with Joyce, and although somewhat distanced from her, she didn’t feel resentment or hostility towards Joyce’s sister. she.
Paradoxically, the child who is most capable of acknowledging that their parents do not have enough (or any) love to give ends up somewhat better, because they are not constantly frustrated in their attempts to get it, and they are not expending energy, competing with their parents. brothers for it.
As her last remaining parent was dying, Joyce panicked. The prospect of her losing her mother also meant losing the last chance to finally win her parents’ love. Her anxiety quickly turned to despair, and her growing resentment toward her sister finally erupted into her betrayal of Elsa.
Money is often the substance that becomes the substitute for parental love, and it was no different for Joyce. Faced with the prospect of losing the opportunity to receive her mother’s love, she unconsciously transferred her need for parental love to the need for parental money. In her desperation for her love, she found a way to convince her mother to give the money to Joyce. Taking it all was meant to psychologically remedy her feelings of deprivation and jealousy toward her sister.
Unfortunately, this is also a no-win situation. Elsa feels deeply hurt and even more disconnected from her sister, and Joyce, whether she realizes it or not, she will never find happiness and fulfillment with her mother’s money. In reality, there is no way she can make up for the love that she was never there.
In a dysfunctional family where the natural resource of love is scarce or absent, children end up in default competition for this necessity of life. This turning of former allies and best friends into competitors is unfortunately the inevitable result of the dysfunctional family, and the classic low point often comes when the last chance for love is about to disappear.
In a panic, the actively competing adult girl (in this case, Joyce) enacts a terrible betrayal of her passive competitor (Elsa), stealing the money that has come to replace lost love. The betrayal serves to destroy any tenuous connection that might have been there, driving the brothers apart forever.
This tragic outcome demonstrates that the legacy of the dysfunctional family is not only the emotional trauma caused by parental abuse or neglect, but also, and significantly, a toxic disruption of the normal loving bonds that parents would otherwise share. siblings.
(C) Marcia Sirota MD 2010
