April 18, 2025
Siblings Shape Our Lives More than we Realize
Today we rewind and delve into the much overlooked topic of sibling relationships. We speak with Fern Schumer Chapman author of the book Brothers, Sisters, Strangers. Siblings are the longest relationship we will have in our lives - and our children's.
Whether you're navigating your own sibling estrangement or watching it develop between your children, this conversation offers both validation and practical wisdom for one of life's most painful but least discussed family challenges. It also makes you question: "Do you have a favorite child?"
Chapman shares her personal life story that led her to write this book and highlights a number of key points:
• Sibling relationships can last 80 years, making them our longest connections
• Estrangement often occurs during "perilous moments" like marriage, having children, or parental illness
• Parental favoritism significantly contributes to sibling rifts
• The "dignity model" approach to reconciliation requires genuine listening without challenging each other's stories
• Some relationships are too toxic to repair, especially with narcissism or mental illness involved
• Birth order affects sibling dynamics and relationships
• Estrangement ripples through families as relatives often align with one sibling
• Strong sibling connections are cornerstone of emotional health, according to Harvard's longest study of well-being
Huge thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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00:00 - The Ripple Effect of Sibling Rejection
03:43 - Introduction & Sibling Estrangement Background
08:51 - Risk Factors & Perilous Moments
18:10 - Harry & William: A Royal Example
24:11 - Rebuilding Broken Sibling Relationships
35:13 - Journey Through Reconciliation
42:14 - Mourning the Living: The Emotional Toll
49:34 - Final Thoughts & Key Takeaways
WEBVTT
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Sibling rejection ripples into many parts of life and identity.
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It profoundly affects self-esteem, who you are, how you see yourself, your friendships, your social relationships, your well-being, your ability to trust and then, of course, many of your family relationships.
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As people then align themselves with one or the other sibling, Hello everyone, welcome to Bite your Tongue the podcast.
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I'm Denise and I'm Kirsten, and we hope you will join us as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children Together we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you.
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Get ready to dive deep and learn to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when, to bite our tongues.
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So let's get started.
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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Bite your Tongue, the podcast.
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I'm Denise Gort and I'm here with my co-host, kirsten Heckendorf, and today we're talking about sibling relationships.
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I've heard so much about adult-child estrangement but I've never really heard people talking about sibling estrangement and since we planned this episode I've heard it a million times from people and I've said well, it's coming up and it's very foreign to me because my sister and I are so close.
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So this whole sibling family relationship stuff is very top of mind for me.
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Yeah, I am very fortunate.
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My kids all get along for the most part and check in with one another, but I also know how difficult it is on them when one of them is struggling and they're either not able to help or they don't know what the right thing to say is and they may or may not want to tell us about it, I think it's a myriad of experiences for everyone and I think we're going to learn a lot about that from Fern today.
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But before we start I have to do one quick shout out again biteyourtonguepodcastcom, please think about supporting us becoming a sustaining member.
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I'm not going to say much more about it.
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Everyone knows, just get on and give us a few bucks.
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So, kirsten, why don't you?
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introduce Fern Absolutely.
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Thanks, Denise.
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We are thrilled today to have with us Fern Schumer Chapman.
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She has written several award-winning books, but her focus lately has been on brother-sister relationships.
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We're going to talk about her most recent book, Brothers, Sisters, Strangers Sibling Estrangement and the Road to Reconciliation, and the Sibling Estrangement Journal.
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She also writes a blog on psychologytodaycom called Brothers, Sisters, Strangers, and she co-hosts a podcast by the same name.
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Finally, Fern offers her expertise and personal experience by providing one-on-one coaching for those struggling with difficult sibling relationships.
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Welcome, Fern Schumer Chapman.
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Thank you, it's great to be with you.
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We're so glad to have you.
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Your interest in sibling relationships, it sounds like, began with your own personal experience with your brother.
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Why don't we start by you sharing a little bit about that with us?
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People may have similar journeys or something they can relate to to that may have similar journeys or something they can relate to, to that.
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My brother and I didn't have much of a relationship for many decades, and we would see each other at funerals and weddings occasionally and really stay on opposite sides of the room.
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The reason for this was unclear to me.
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We were never particularly close as children, but then, when we started our own lives, we became increasingly distant and disconnected, like I said, very unclear as to why this happened, and it haunted me, as it does for many who are estranged.
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My brother had gotten into a very dark place and he did continue to have limited contact with my mother, and my mother left a voicemail one day on my answering machine and said that he's in a terrible place and I needed to intervene and do something because she didn't know what to do, and so that was the launch for this entire journey of reconnecting and ultimately reconciling.
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Wow, what brought you to write the book?
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Well, actually I had a conversation with my agent and she listened carefully and said oh my gosh.
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I suspect this is something that is much more common than most people recognize, and actually one of the things I've discovered is it's a kind of me too movement that the minute you start to admit that you cannot have a sustained relationship with a sibling, other people step in and say yeah, me too.
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In your book you talk about your brother being complete opposites, which obviously is really common in siblings.
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You also say that the break between you did not really start until he was a newlywed, like you just said, when you guys were getting busy in your lives and everything.
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Do you know now what the trigger was?
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Yes, I do, but I didn't at the time and it was particularly difficult because I didn't know.
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You list trigger points in your book and I think in the outline I sent you I even pulled those out of your book and I'd like to go over those because it might help people who are dealing with things not recognizing what are the trigger points that usually begin to separate a strained sibling.
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There are both risk factors and perilous moments.
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So a perilous moment is when the relationships change.
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So, for example, during adolescence, when one leaves for college, you have to renegotiate what the connection's going to be.
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Marriage is a big one, because a lot of times people choose spouses who do not promote relations in the original family, so that can be a perilous moment.
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The birth of a baby, as people then decide to invest in their own families, their nuclear families, and distance themselves a little bit from their original family.
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Divorce or illness is another one.
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Helping somebody through a divorce or sickness can be overwhelming and often create a lot of resentment because of the burden of it.
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And then, of course, the most perilous moment is parental illness, death and inheritance, and at that point siblings often engage in a last effort to establish who has the most power or love or family loyalty, and conflicts can arise over how to care for a parent and who's going to pay for the parent and, of course, how the estate will be settled and precious treasures, family treasures will be divided.
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What strikes me about what you just said is that all of these things you just listed are life things.
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Right, who doesn't go through at least three or four of those things at some point?
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That's scary.
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It just makes it much more common.
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Yeah, these relationships are fragile and they're competitive and they can be very difficult, and so sustaining them requires work.
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And these relationships are the longest in most people's lives they can last 80 years.
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There's a lot of interesting research about siblings which is largely unknown.
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Which is largely unknown.
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One thing you should recognize is that siblings have not been a topic of psychological research for decades, and the reason is that people like Freud didn't think it was very important.
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In fact, in recent years, siblings have been discovered to be extremely important, and in fact, there are some sibling therapists.
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I have a friend who wrote a book called Sibling Therapy, and she talks about this idea of sibling transference.
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In other words, you actually marry the person who is like your sibling.
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I think that's very true, very interesting.
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I want to go back to the trigger points for one quick second and then you go off on your tangent and tell us everything you want to talk about Fern.
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But I really can get the point where parental illness, the will inheritance has caused a lot of angst for a lot of friends.
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Is there anything us, as parents of adult children, can help to have things set in place that may not cause that kind of sibling separation during that time?
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There are a lot of things you can do.
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One of the big things is not have a favored child, because that creates more competition and pits one child against the other.
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The other thing that's really important is how you model communication skills so that children learn how to navigate differences, because if you don't learn those things in the family, then you're left to your own devices.
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If you don't have those skills, you cannot resolve the differences.
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It's wonderful I hear this often that people like you, denise, have wonderful relationships and they absolutely cannot understand how this could possibly happen, and all I have to say is what good fortune.
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There are a lot of risk factors for this.
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One of the things I didn't understand when I did this book is that there were actually risk factors in social science that identify where things go off the rails.
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So, for example, family trauma is a big one.
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My brother and I are the son and daughter of a Holocaust refugee.
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That kind of trauma for our mother has intergenerational consequences and it's really important to recognize that family trauma is a huge factor in these estrangements.
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What other risk factors are there?
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Okay.
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So I was about to talk a little bit about Harry and William, and they're really a good example of why there is estrangement.
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So we were just talking about family trauma.
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Those boys had horrific family trauma and, as you know, they are estranged Now.
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Obviously one does not necessarily follow the other and I could never assess all that, but I do think it's interesting that they have had that.
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But they also have a lot of other issues.
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So, for example, parental favoritism.
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The monarchy presents the ultimate in favoritism, as William will become king and Harry will always be relegated to a supporting role.
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So there's that there Poor communication skills.
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By the way, the monarchy is notoriously bad at resolving personal problems, and so the brothers probably never learned how to negotiate their differences.
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Family values, judgments and choices.
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This is a really interesting one.
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When somebody marries someone outside the family identities, the family often doesn't tolerate that very well, and actually, if you think about it, harry married somebody way outside the family identity and the family has not tolerated that very well at all.
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Then you get into other issues like political differences and I've talked about that a lot recently Addiction and mental health issues.
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This is a very big one.
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Money is another big issue with one child gets more money than the other.
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And then another really interesting point is when there's a narcissist in the family, because who would do this?
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Somebody who lacks empathy, and oftentimes you get a narcissist, or you get somebody who might be autistic.
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Oftentimes you get a narcissist or you get somebody who might be autistic, and these factors can divide siblings.
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How do you bring it back together?
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There could be a lot of listeners who are estranged from their siblings.
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In fact, I just got an email from a listener that said she said she raised two wonderful daughters, they grew up together and now they don't speak to each other, so your mother played a big role.
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I felt really bad for your mother when I was reading this and she would call you up for help and all this sort of thing.
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What kinds of roles can our generation play?
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Let's start with our own adult children and then let's go to our personal siblings.
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So with our adult children.
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If we see them becoming estranged from their siblings right now or, like this woman said, her daughters don't talk at all what role can we play?
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Anything?
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I don't think there's a lot you can do.
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I hate to say it.
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My mother put a lot of pressure on both of us and it just turned into more resentment towards her.
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And then she would make choices, as you know, to go to my brother's house for a holiday and I wouldn't be invited and I would resent that it's a no win.
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And she would argued as you know from the book.
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She said well, you know, I don't want to lose contact with my grandchildren.
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I'll take the crumbs I get, so you can see how this builds a lot of resentment.
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Yeah, I listened to this and when I read it I want to say, if that happened, I guess maybe I'm just a real communicator.
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If that happened, I'd say I'd call my brother and I'd say listen, mom's going to your house for Christmas.
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We don't even have to eat, but we all want to be together.
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Can I come over just to give Mom a hug and say Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah, whatever it was?
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I feel like I don't know that I could let any of that go.
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What if your sister-in-law doesn't want you there and makes you feel like you are an unwelcome?
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visitor.
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Yeah, boy, that's okay.
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Now you're adding another level to it and there's no communicating with your brother.
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Why doesn't Sally like me?
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No, I mean, maybe she's made that decision and she's telling him that it's not that I don't like them, they don't like me.
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How do you argue with these narratives, so you?
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ended up coming together with your brother.
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Can you take us through the journey?
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Yeah, I should say a couple of things before I do those.
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Some relationships are simply too toxic to repair.
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Some have violence, some have abuse, and in those cases you have to protect yourself If you decide that you do want to repair the relationship, you have to really sit down and ask yourself some hard questions Like why is this relationship important to me, and not to my family, but just to me?
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Does my family member want to resume the relationship?
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You can have all the goodwill in the world, but if your partner doesn't have any desire to reconnect, it's not going to go anywhere.
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You mean your sibling partner, not your partner partner.
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Sorry, your sibling, okay.
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Can I set aside the anger and pain and resentment that led to the break in the first place and change our pattern of relating?
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Do I want to resume the relationship if I discover that neither of us has changed?
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Do I have the time and energy and emotional resilience and support of other loved ones to reconcile and rebuild the relationship?
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And finally, am I gonna compromise too much of myself if I try to sustain the relationship with this sibling?
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So those are sort of the starting point for all of this.
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If you decide you're going to go forward with it, you have to sit down together, face to face, and, by the way, this particular model is based on what's called the dignity model and it's used with parties in a genocide warring parties in a genocide.
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You have to listen without interrupting and without challenging each other's stories.
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The one goal is to seek understanding.
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Experts agree that reconciliation is almost impossible without genuine listening.
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Reconciliation is almost impossible without genuine listening.
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You have to acknowledge with empathy the other person's hurt, anger or alienation, give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have sincere, trustworthy intentions.
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And when each party accepts both parties' experiences, then neither one feels devalued.
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You have to stress and act on your willingness and desire and hope to create a bond and finally, and this is the hardest part, you have to let go of the anger.
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It's not that much different than we've talked to people on a strange relationship with their children, but it's usually the adult that has to do the things that you just said Listen, not criticize.
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Accept what they've done wrong or even if they don't think they have, don't argue it if you want to create the bond again.
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But you wonder how long that bond's going to last, because everyone goes back to being who they were.
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Yeah, a lot of these relationships lapse back into estrangement.
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Before you tell us your journey, I want to go back to the favorite child.
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Do you think everyone has a favorite child?
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What creates that whole idea of a favorite child number one, and does birth order have anything to do with it?
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Well, the studies show that most mothers do have a favorite child.
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I don't know whether birth order has anything to do with it or not, but it definitely gets communicated, and a lot of times it's because somebody is more like you or you see yourself in one of your children.
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Yeah, I think I've had favorite children, but they change.
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You know what I mean.
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There's times I like one better than the other and I'm pretty honest with them.
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You know, right now you're not on the top of my list.
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Right, that's exactly what I say.
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Yeah, yeah, I think the key is actually not to show any favoritism and try to acknowledge the uniqueness of every child.
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What are ways you show favoritism and don't show favoritism?
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What you just said was that you're not on the top of my list, yeah, but I'm saying that sort of tongue in cheek a little bit.
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But how a parent show favoritism like giving one child a down payment for the house and not giving the other child or things like that.
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Yeah, money's a very big issue in families.
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It's a very much a statement of love, favoring one child over the other in a will, giving them precious treasures, slipping them things without the other kid knowing.
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Well, these are all the things to avoid.
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Yeah, all right, let's go to your journey, unless there's more backdrop you want us to hear about.
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You know, I would like to say a couple of quick things in general.
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So people think, well, you don't talk to your brother, that's too bad, but it's not the worst thing in the world, and actually I would argue it's so much more than not just talking to my brother.
00:18:47.653 --> 00:18:53.441
Sibling rejection ripples into many parts of life and identity.
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It profoundly affects self-esteem, who you are, how you see yourself, your friendships, your social relationships, your well-being, your ability to trust and then, of course, many of your family relationships as people then align themselves with one or the other sibling.
00:19:09.738 --> 00:19:18.865
So I think that's a really important point to recognize that we're not just talking about not talking to one sibling.
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We're talking about how this affects the well-being of an individual and what happens is it's a form of grief and in many ways I call it mourning the living, because you walk around ruminating about this one person who is a part of your shared history and wants nothing to do with you.
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And it's not like death which is final.
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There's somebody walking the earth who you have an expectation you'll have a relationship with that's lifelong, and they want nothing to do with you.
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So it's a profound rejection.
00:19:54.526 --> 00:20:04.817
Brothers and sisters are our first playmates and they instill in each of us certain social qualities, so they include tolerance and generosity and loyalty.
00:20:04.817 --> 00:20:10.349
It's kind of a blueprint for your friendships and your relationships with colleagues and lovers.
00:20:10.349 --> 00:20:14.228
And that's where that sibling transference comes in that we were talking about earlier.
00:20:14.228 --> 00:20:24.172
There's a lot of research that shows that a strong sibling connection is a cornerstone of emotional health.
00:20:24.172 --> 00:20:40.513
The longest study of well-being, which was done by the Harvard Study of Adult Development it's been underway since 1938, found that a close sibling relationship during the college years provided a reliable indicator for emotional health later in years.
00:20:40.513 --> 00:20:49.710
There are a lot of other studies that show that adolescents who perceived that their siblings validated them reported higher levels of self-esteem.
00:20:49.710 --> 00:21:03.529
They had better academic performances, they had improved chances of being well-adjusted as they get older, less loneliness, lower levels of depression and a greater satisfaction later in life.
00:21:03.529 --> 00:21:07.818
And this is all the various studies that have been done in the last couple of decades.
00:21:08.685 --> 00:21:12.977
Boy, you'd never think that sibling relationships place that much into your life.
00:21:12.977 --> 00:21:16.412
But as you say that I get it, I mean that is a huge rejection.
00:21:16.412 --> 00:21:18.432
So you're evaluating yourself too.
00:21:18.432 --> 00:21:22.536
What is wrong with me that my brother or sister wants nothing to do with me?
00:21:22.536 --> 00:21:31.175
I could go into a very deep hole over something like that, and it could even be a cousin too that you were very close to, and suddenly they want nothing to do with you.
00:21:31.175 --> 00:21:34.432
And then I hear you say it's the whole family.
00:21:34.432 --> 00:21:44.349
So maybe some holidays Aunt Sally invites everybody else but you, because brother and his wife or sister and her husband are going, so you're completely left out.
00:21:44.349 --> 00:21:48.827
Then Aunt Betty invites you, so the whole family becomes somewhat estranged.
00:21:48.827 --> 00:21:50.592
It's very fractured.
00:21:50.592 --> 00:21:52.435
Fractured is the word.
00:21:52.435 --> 00:21:53.577
Right, Right, Okay.
00:21:53.825 --> 00:21:55.127
Well, and then our children?
00:21:55.127 --> 00:21:59.727
Right, I mean, it's just as simple as pulling it back to our children.
00:21:59.727 --> 00:22:07.862
Our adult children then don't have those relationships with their cousins and it hasn't been modeled for them.
00:22:07.862 --> 00:22:10.507
It's very complicated.
00:22:11.469 --> 00:22:30.488
It's very complicated and you remind me of a story that I included in the book, where this woman told me that her son was on a train in New York City and he took his phone and took a photograph of the guy he was sitting next to on the train and, he said, sent it to his mom.
00:22:30.488 --> 00:22:31.892
He said is this uncle Mike?
00:22:31.892 --> 00:22:38.291
Of course this was his father's brother, but they hadn't had any contact in 20 years.
00:22:38.291 --> 00:22:51.211
You're absolutely right that this affects generations to come and it affects your knowledge of medical issues and it affects family stories.
00:22:51.211 --> 00:22:55.673
So it's really really deep together.
00:22:55.733 --> 00:23:12.986
Social media this must make it even worse, because then on a holiday, everyone else is having a great time and every sibling's in matching pajamas, and you weren't invited to the party.
00:23:13.767 --> 00:23:15.069
That's exactly right.
00:23:15.069 --> 00:23:23.935
And actually another really hard holiday for strange siblings is National Siblings Day, because on social media everybody puts up their-.
00:23:24.164 --> 00:23:24.436
Oh puts a picture of their brother or sister.
00:23:24.436 --> 00:23:24.729
That's right.
00:23:24.729 --> 00:23:26.182
Social media Everybody puts up their oh puts a picture of their brother or sister.
00:23:26.182 --> 00:23:26.256
That's right.
00:23:27.506 --> 00:23:37.932
And I actually was just invited to National Siblings event in New York to celebrate the day and I'm like are you sure you want me?
00:23:37.932 --> 00:23:43.032
Because I'm actually the opposite, I've had the estrangement for so many decades.
00:23:43.032 --> 00:23:47.569
And she said, no, we want you to speak because we want to understand these relationships better.
00:23:48.332 --> 00:23:49.054
That makes sense.
00:23:49.054 --> 00:23:52.108
There is a point in your book where you talk about what is estrangement.
00:23:52.229 --> 00:24:02.257
A friend of mine wrote me a letter after he saw that I was soliciting respondents to my survey and he said I see my brother at weddings and funerals.
00:24:02.257 --> 00:24:03.719
Am I estranged?
00:24:03.719 --> 00:24:12.606
Funerals Am I estranged?
00:24:12.606 --> 00:24:23.053
And if you go by the typical definition, yeah, it's a process where at least one family member voluntarily or intentionally distances themselves from another family member because of an ongoing perceived negative relationship.
00:24:23.894 --> 00:24:25.696
Perceived is the key word there.
00:24:25.696 --> 00:24:42.006
I've certainly had experiences with my siblings where my kids were quite a bit older than my sisters, and then I have a brother whose kids are way older than my kids and during those really busy, crazy times we really didn't speak as often.
00:24:42.006 --> 00:24:50.201
We've continued to speak throughout, but there were those gaps in time where it didn't.
00:24:50.201 --> 00:24:51.542
I didn't even think about it.
00:24:51.542 --> 00:25:09.086
To be perfectly honest, I don't feel guilty about it, but what I do like is that when the moments arrived, we were all together as if we hadn't skipped a beat, almost like your old best friend like your old best friend.
00:25:09.126 --> 00:25:18.836
Well, imagine if you have a conflicted relationship with those siblings and then you have to negotiate care for your elderly parent, the inheritance and settling of the will and dividing the precious family treasures.
00:25:18.836 --> 00:25:20.582
Everything reemerges.
00:25:21.284 --> 00:25:27.712
I tell you what my mother did, and I still think it's the smartest thing, and I've told my kids the same thing what my mother did, and I still think it's the smartest thing, and I've told my kids the same thing.
00:25:27.712 --> 00:25:28.333
She said put two numbers.
00:25:28.333 --> 00:25:29.234
There were only two of us.
00:25:29.234 --> 00:25:30.415
Each of you pick a number.
00:25:30.415 --> 00:25:33.099
Whoever's first pick something first.
00:25:33.099 --> 00:25:37.209
Then it goes back and forth One, two, one, two.
00:25:37.209 --> 00:25:38.290
That's a solution.
00:25:38.310 --> 00:25:40.977
I mean, I think that's a fine solution.
00:25:40.977 --> 00:25:44.965
It's just all the issues.
00:25:44.965 --> 00:25:45.508
It doesn't always work.
00:25:45.508 --> 00:25:49.217
Yeah, all the issues that were divided, you reemerge.
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