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.
