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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Older Siblings and Neglectful Parents




I have lately been coming across another interesting pattern of family dysfunction. It takes place in families characterized by having several siblings and in which the parents were severely neglectful of them when they were growing up. This pattern is particularly likely when the adult who neglected the kids was the mother.

The neglect might have stemmed from any of a number of factors: parental depression, parental alcohol or substance abuse, mothers who had been bullied by demanding and violent husbands, husband who had made sure that their wives were perpetually pregnant, parents who were overly-enmeshed with their own families-of-origin, families subject to religious strictures against birth control and/or mothers working outside the home, and probably a host of others.

In many of these families, childcare duties fell on the oldest of the siblings, who was pressed into service to take care of the younger ones. This situation is a setup for disturbed sibling relationships after everyone has grown into adulthood.  There are three reasons for sibling discord in such a situation that I would like to focus on and describe:

1. The siblings are angry at the neglectful parents, but they protect their parents from those negative feelings by displacing them onto the older, mother-substitute sibling. 

2.  The older sibling, having no real power in the family and being ill-equipped to be a parent, becomes verbally or even physically abusive to the younger siblings. 

3.  When the oldest sibling is a male and the younger ones female, and when there is no parental supervision as there often is not in such cases, the boy sexually molests the girls. (Occasionally, older sisters will also molest younger sisters).

Problems #1 and #2 frequently occur together, although not always, leading the younger siblings as adults to isolate or even completely exile the older one from the rest of the family. As the parents age, the younger siblings may get together to keep the eldest away from the parents, and to make sure that he or she is disinherited in one way or another. Vicious gossip about the eldest may make the rounds. The children of the eldest siblings are often gossiped about and/or exiled as well.

Whenever I hear about incest between siblings, I find that, at least among my patients, parental neglect is nearly ubiquitous.  Sometimes the unsupervised children are literally never taught that there is anything wrong with doing this. When the elder sibling grows up, he (or she) becomes totally ashamed of what he had done. Usually the siblings, as adults, will never even discuss what happened. They may go on and act like nothing at all untoward had ever happened. They may avoid one another, but sometimes they may even become quite close!

Patients that grew up in such families often report that everyone in the family stuffs their feelings when in one anothers’ presence, and that no one speaks up when someone else displeases them. Family members are also highly prone to giving one another the “silent treatment” when upset with one another, or cutting off contact for years at a time.

I have often heard patients who were severely neglected as children opine that they would rather that their parents had been abusive rather than neglectful if they had to choose between the two.  At least then they would seem to matter to the family. There are few feelings worse than having your whole family act like you just don’t count for anything and that your very presence is a big bother.  

8 comments:

  1. There may be a connection between the parental ambivalence that contributes to BPD and parental neglect as mentioned in your above post. If you have one parent who is significantly ambivalent about parenthood, then the other parent almost by definition has to be be compromised in their own way, leaving the kids, while perhaps not neglected in a material sense, neglected in an emotional modeling sense. The elder children learn to cope in whatever pathological way that was most effective, and teach the younger siblings, exclusively through modeling, how to cope with their neglectful situation. I wonder if anyone has researched on this kind of less explicit neglect scenario?

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    1. Hi Richard,

      There is precious little research on family dynamics at all; I see them clinically because I ask probing questions to my therapy patients about family interactions. On that basis, yes, I see a lot of this pattern with my patients with borderline personality disorder.

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  2. Dr. Allen,
    Just saw this posted on Psychology Today. Pretty frightening.

    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201312/are-pharmaceuticals-the-answer-treating-adhd

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  3. For years, I have been struggling to understand why my younger siblings shut me out.

    I was the only child (female) of marriage #1. Mom remarried when I was 6 and had 4 more children. She was busy dealing with my stepdad alcoholic abuser and I was placed in the role of helpful aunt. It was so weird to be the oldest of 5 and yet feel like an only child.

    I used to always blame my stepfather since he also (and his family) made certain I was treated like an outsider and created wedges between us. It is only recently have I even dared to see my Mother's role in this. He committed suicide and after that I thought there would be a shift as they became adults and his influence waned, but it did not happen.

    I was a bad sister-mom. I resented them and was not kind until I was older, I feel bad about this but I was just a kid, too. I was not abusive in any way, but my role meant we never really bonded as siblings do.

    I never had children since I felt like I already did that and I have a hard time forming relationships. I often feel deeply lonely and isolated from my family. My Mother is closest to two siblings and rarely has time for me.

    I am heartbroken over this dynamic and have spent many years trying to close the distance but all in all my attempts to get close are met with a passive agressive resistance.

    This causes me so much emotional grief. I am a good person. I did not deserve any of this that has happened to me. Your blog post is the first thing I have ever read that has absolutely described my dynamic.

    Thank you for putting into words something I have long suffered form and could not put my finger on as why.

    Honestly, I do not know how to accept this or process this.

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    1. If you have access, a therapist who is familiar with family dynamics might be able to help you, although therapists who know how to do that are getting hard to find. The therapy treatments I recommend that come the closest are listed at the end of my post http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/matter-personality/201205/finding-good-psychotherapist. You can ask about a therapist’s theoretical orientation before making an appointment.

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  4. This article has strongly resonated since I first read it four years ago. When I sought it out recently, I was touched by the comments from Anonymous May 24, 2017. There is whole community of people who have experienced the same dynamics of family exclusion who find validation, stories and support at https://transcendingnarcissisticabuse.quora.com. Most of us have grown up with the abuse of being scapegoated, by narcissistic parents. But the cause is less important than the effects.

    Your article is the only one to so closely mirrored my own experiences: the oldest, a female with three younger sisters, severe emotional neglect by parents, especially our mother; punished by sibling as the mother-substitute for what our mother did to them; shut out and isolated from our parents, and trying to have me cut out of my inheritance.

    There is the double whammy of being punished as the mother-substitute plus the scapegoating abuse copied from my parents. Like most dysfunctional families, we used each other to work out our emotional distress and demons, and avoiding all responsibility, along with family values of selfishness, blaming the victim, passive aggressive insults, and family as a license for cruelty and disrespect. Scapegoated by a selfish, cold, and self-absorbed mother since before I was two, I was rejected for the favor of my sisters, as my mother was rejected by hers for the favor of her brother, unworthy of love and cast aside, and blamed and punished for all the ways she failed as a mother, including jealousy of my father's attention and threatening what she wanted in life.

    My father, with unresolved anger from being abused by his father, projected his anger onto me by teasing and goading a small girl a little too far, and identifying me as "an angry person" in the family. (The difference was that my mother is mean; my father did it for comic relief.) My siblings, finding this just too, too funny, created their own weapons as I grew up mocked and bulled with my mother’s tacit approval.

    When my father died, my mother refused to give me my inheritance (she controls in trust). Since she was cut out of her mother's inheritance, I am likely to be cut out—despite the fact that my mother and sisters enjoy very comfortable lives with everything they want given to them by successful husbands, including financial security for the rest of their lives.

    Meanwhile, the only one who has worked with responsibility for the entirety of my life, I’ve been consumed in trying to recover from a series of extraordinary tragedies (death of my husband at 36, a major house fire, a disastrous move, financial distress due to recession, a ruinous and unnecessary bankruptcy railroaded into by my father, forced to shutter my business in the pandemic, and other sabotage and setbacks), as well as hang onto to who I was under routine emotional abuse reinforced by religious self-righteousness from a family who blame and shame me for my troubles; financial abuse and manipulation; and struggling with soul-crushing loneliness, ongoing depression, PTSD, panic attacks, and chronic health problems. To say I fell on hard times is a bit of an understatement.

    I think the hardest thing, among many, is being unable to talk about any of this with prejudices that dispose people to not believe me. Even I have a hard time believing much of this. If anything, I have learned to discard any naïve notions about cruelty and evil, even in families. Although I can understand the motives of their dysfunction, there is no excusing the cruelty they inflict.

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    1. Sounds like your family's defenses are formidable. My self-help book ("Coping with Critical, Demanding and Dysfunctional Parents") is meant for somewhat more functional families, but a lot of the strategies in it are the same ones I taught my psychotherapy patients who had abusive parents. And you seem very well tuned into your family dynamics. It's a shame most therapists are not.

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