When Siblings Stop Speaking

Brother and sister estrangement is a surprisingly common, and unspoken, phenomenon. Why ties break down and how real families reconciled.

- Sara Eckel

Hope rising used to dread holiday dinners with her family. Her older sister made meals miserable, with snide comments about nearly everything Rising said or did. After one particularly insult-laden meal, Rising’s father asked her sister to apologize or leave. She left, husband and kids in tow.

That was when Rising decided the relationship was over. It took 14 years and a fatal cancer diagnosis for the sisters to speak again.

Blood Enemies

In many families, there comes a time when a decision is made that someone is done. Sometimes childhood dynamics can metastasize into toxic resentment. Or an awareness dawns that you have never liked the person and you see no reason to trek halfway across the country to see her. Sometimes an ageing parent’s needs—or the prospect of an inheritance—fire the burner under simmering dysfunction.

Only 26 per cent of 18- to 65-year-olds in an Oakland University survey reported having a highly supportive sibling relationship; 19 per cent had an apathetic one, while 16 per cent said it was hostile. Research on the subject is limited, despite the fact that it’s one of the most enduring relationships life gives us.

When University of Pittsburgh psychologist Daniel Shaw, who studies sibling relationships in children, discussed a paper on his research on radio shows, he was surprised to get many calls from adults eager to talk about the pain of their relationships with their sisters and brothers. “Something happened, and they never forgave each other, so now they were calling in … to talk about how they had decided to forgive or how they hadn’t spoken for almost 20 or 30 years.”