We’ve broken the cone of silence around most forms of abuse and shame. However, sibling abuse often remains unnamed and unaddressed.
International estimates suggest that sibling-to-sibling abuse is one of the most common forms of domestic violence. In my clinical practice, I’ve had many clients who have attended therapy for difficulties arising from abuse by siblings, including sexual, physical and emotional violence. However, there’s little research about the phenomenon and almost no data about the prevalence of sibling abuse in Australia.
Ambika* started seeing me for help with managing her family relationships. She was a south Asian woman in her 40s and had had a challenging early life. She was raised in India until her family moved to Australia when she was 12. Her parents were extremely strict and had very high expectations of her but were far more lenient with her brother. Her brother was two years younger than her, and as the eldest child and daughter, she experienced gender-based discrimination. Her brother was the favoured child and received the lion’s share of resources, care and praise. She was expected to acquiesce to her brother’s demands and was often reminded that she was inferior to her brother. This is quite common in some south Asian families. While this reduced when the family moved to Australia, the thread of favouritism remained.
Because of this preferential treatment, her brother started to become entitled and demanding towards her. For instance, she said that he seemed to take pleasure in asking her to get off the couch and sit on the floor so he could have the couch, or to give him a treat she was saving. Each time they fought, he would be physically violent towards her, pulling her hair and hitting her. He also started to taunt her, saying he was the favourite child and she was just a burden on the family. Her parents usually blamed her for the difficulties in the sibling relationship and told her she needed to be nicer to her brother. They also accused her of lying about what her brother was saying to her during their fights.
Ambika was now estranged from her brother. She had some contact with her parents but was experiencing intense pressure from them to reconcile with her brother. She’d worked hard over the years to establish safety and had carved out a successful career as a florist. However, she had very low self-esteem and found herself plagued by social anxiety and fears of not being good enough. She also felt very angry towards her parents and brother, but experienced intense guilt about these emotions. She had decided she would no longer speak to her brother after his emotionally abusive behaviours continued into adulthood, but felt anguished about this decision.
Our work involved naming the dynamics in Ambika’s family when she was growing up, including the parentification she experienced (being forced to take on a care-taking role), the “golden child” versus “scapegoat” role she and her brother had been placed in, and cultural influences in south Asian cultures. It was helpful for her to have her brother’s behaviours identified and named as being abusive. She said that more than his actions, it was her parent’s refusal to see his behaviour as harmful that she found hurtful, as well as their insistence she was lying about the distressing statements he made. She felt as though she had no recourse as a child, and that her reality was denied and his behaviour brushed under the carpet for the sake of family peace.
This form of denial is common to many families, and perpetrators of harm are often implicitly or explicitly protected by the silence of others in the family. It can be psychologically threatening for parents to acknowledge that one child has abused another, especially if this involves recognising harmful parenting practices, such as modelling violence or encouraging sibling conflict, which contributed to the abuse. Most of my clients who have experienced sibling abuse have said their parents turned a blind eye to the abuse, and this remains a source of great pain for most. Often, the abuse meted out by siblings mirrored the behaviour of parents. Denial was protective for parents in this instance, as it helped them deny the reality of the harm they too inflicted.
Therapy for Ambika involved trauma treatment using eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing on specific incidents with her brother which still held a strong emotional “charge”. We also utilised schema therapy to help Ambika understand how the difficulties she had experienced had resulted in a sense of being defective, and an overcompensatory need to be perfect and to subjugate her own needs to those of others.
We explored some concepts of boundary formation, helping Ambika arrive at some boundaries which felt appropriate for her, amended for the cultural context within which she resided. And difficult as it was, learning to practise radical acceptance of her past was essential. Radical acceptance does not involve approval of difficulties, but rather acceptance of things which cannot be changed.
As Ambika started to own her own past and the difficulties stemming from it, she was able to move away from guilt toward self-compassion. She decided that her relationship with her brother could not be healed, but was able to reduce the self-blame she felt and instead learned to focus on building healthy and supportive relationships in her adult life.
*All clients discussed are fictional amalgams
• Dr Ahona Guha is a clinical and forensic psychologist, trauma expert and author from Melbourne. She is the author of Reclaim: Understanding Complex Trauma and Those Who Abuse, and Life Skills for a Broken World.
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org
