All About You — Day 6: Sibling Rivalries

Friday, August 1st 2008 by Shanel Yang         Email this article to a friend

[For “Day 5: Childhood Triumphs,” click here.]

ALL ABOUT YOU — DAY 6:

SIBLING RIVALRIES

All of us, as very young children, had to go through the natural but highly stressful stage of simultaneously having very low impulse control and very many irresistibly strong impulses.

No wonder toddlers and preschoolers who are left alone together soon end up fighting over toys and otherwise making each other totally miserable!

Without constant and vigilant adult supervision, little kids rarely “play nice” for long. Add a sibling or more to the mix, and you now have the potential for mild to intense sibling rivalries from at least a few competitive/combative/jealous/resentful years to possibly your entire lifetimes.

Most of us have siblings. Wikipedia reports, “82% of people in Western countries have at least one sibling, and siblings generally spend more time together during childhood than they do with parents.” And, “Sibling rivalry is not unique to Western culture. For example, there is an Arabic saying: ‘I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.’”

If you have siblings—unless there were big age differences between each of you—you probably had sibling rivalries. Depending on how your parents handled it, your rivalries might have been nothing more than the usual vying for parental attention and approval, culminating to its worst between ages 10 to 15, then gradually fading away naturally, as each of you moved on with your adult lives.

However, if your parents managed to make it a whole lot worse—like mine did—by constantly comparing each of you unfavorably to one or more of the others (based on arbitrarily subjective, yet emotionally-loaded, traits such as attractiveness, intelligence, usefulness, loyalty, and goodness), that highly stressful situation probably resulted in much deeper and more complex rivalries that ended up causing a lingering—and often unresolved—rift in your relationships with your siblings.

A. FAMOUS SIBLING RIVALRIES

Wikipedia provides examples of some famous sibling rivalries from various sources.

1. Stories from the Bible

“The story of Cain and Abel tells of one brother’s jealousy after God appeared to favour his sibling, and the jealousy ultimately leads to murder. Jacob tricks his brother Esau out of his inheritance; sisters Leah and Rachel compete for the love of Jacob; while Joseph’s brothers are so jealous that they sell him into slavery.”

2. Stories from Literature

“A number of Shakepeare’s plays displays incidences of sibling rivalry. King Lear provokes rivalry among his three daughters by asking them to describe their love for him; in the same play, the Edmund contrives to force his half-brother Edgar into exile. In The Taming of the Shrew, sisters Kate and Bianca are shown fighting bitterly. In Richard III, the title character is at least partially motivated by rivalry with his brother, King Edward.

“In Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are in conflict with each other due to their different views on life and proper conduct. In East of Eden (John Steinbeck) the brothers Cal and Aron Trask are counterparts to Cain and Abel of the bible story.”

3. From Film and TV Shows

“Sibling rivalry is a common theme in media that features child characters, reflecting the importance of this issue in early life. These issues can include jealousy on the birth of a new baby (for example, Dil and Tommy Pickles in The Rugrats Movie), different sibling roles such as troublemaker versus nerd (Bart and Lisa Simpson in The Simpsons), frequent arguments (Malcolm and Reese Wilkerson in Malcolm in the Middle), bullying (Linus and Lucy van Pelt in Peanuts), and tensions between step-siblings (The Brady Bunch, Drake & Josh, Life With Derek).

“Adult siblings can also be portrayed with a rivalrous relationship, often a continuation of childhood conflicts. Situation comedies exploit this to comic effect (for example, Ross and Monica Geller in Friends, Raymond and Robert Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond). Sibling relationships may be shown as alternately loving and argumentative (Rose and Maggie in In Her Shoes). Brothers or sisters in a similar line of work may display professional rivalry (Frasier and Niles Crane in Frasier). In serious drama, conflict between siblings can be fatal (Michael and Fredo Corleone in The Godfather).”

4. From Real Life Celebrities

“Occasionally real-life instances of sibling rivalry are publicized in the mass media. Siblings who play the same sport will often be compared with each other; for example, American football players Peyton and Eli Manning, or tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. Musicians Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis are portrayed as having a turbulent relationship, similar to that of Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks.

“Actresses Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine had an uneasy relationship from childhood and in 1975 the sisters stopped speaking to each other completely. The rivalry between singers Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle is often talked about in the Indian media, in spite of their insistence that these are just tales. Twin sisters and advice columnists Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren had a relationship that was alternately very close and publicly antagonistic. Journalists Christopher and Peter Hitchens have had many public disagreements and at least one protracted falling-out due to their differing political and religious views.”

B. DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESSION

Wikipedia provides the following explanations of the causes of, and factors that often influence, sibling rivalries. All citations can be found at the original article.

“According to Kyla Boyse from the University of Michigan, each child in a family competes to define who they are as individuals and want to show that they are separate from their siblings. Children may feel they are getting unequal amounts of their parents’ attention, discipline, and responsiveness. Children fight more in families where there is no understanding that fighting is not an acceptable way to resolve conflicts, and no alternative ways of handling such conflicts. Stress in the parents’ and children’s lives can create more conflict and increase sibling rivalry.

“Sibling rivalry can continue into adulthood, and sibling relationships can change dramatically over the years. Events such as a parent’s illness may bring siblings closer together, whereas marriage may drive them apart, particularly if the in-law relationship is strained. Approximately one-third of adults describe their relationship with siblings as rivalrous or distant. However, rivalry often lessens over time and at least 80 percent of siblings over age 60 enjoy close ties.”

C. MY OWN SIBLING RIVALRIES

1. South Korea to Los Angeles (1968 - 1972)

I have three younger sisters. When my first sister was born, in 1968, I was almost 3 years old, and our family still lived in South Korea. Naturally, I don’t remember much from that period of my life. My parents didn’t share any happy stories about it, either. Rather, they dragged out all their old, deep emotional scars from every betrayal, disappointment, and shameful act they ever did to each other, carried forever in their hearts, to throw in each other’s face every time they had another huge fight—impossible to ignore or escape—which was about once every month.

My point is I wasn’t close to either of my parents in the usual sense. They pretty much ignored me except to bark out orders at me, beat me, and pour all of their troubles and negativity into me (mostly my mom did this; but, my dad did this, too, whenever he was drunk, which was every weekend when he was home). So, I didn’t need to worry that my parents would shower less affection or positive attention on me when my sister arrived. I simply did not know what I was missing. The truth is, in the shantytowns where we lived in South Korea, especially during the post-war years, most of the children were similarly abused or neglected.

When my first sister came along, I know I was expected to take care of her almost immediately. By the time my next sister came along, about 1 1/2 years later, I was 4 years old and already a veteran at watching my first sister all day long while Mom went about her daily activities and Dad worked out in the field for months at a time. Not surprisingly, I was also entrusted with the care of my next sister and, finally, with my last sister about two years later, in 1972, when I was 6 years old.

2. Torn between Two Parents (1975 - 1978)

In 1975, Mom and Dad bought our first house. It was a very small house with only one bathroom for the six of us. But, it was far enough away from our neighbors that it enabled much more vicious fighting between them and Mom’s beating of us kids without interference from the neighbors. In addition, Dad decided, against much resistance from Mom, to start his own part-time welding business, straight out of our house garage. Suddenly, Dad needed my help and claimed much more of my free time away from Mom, which began a lifelong power struggle for my loyalty and services between them. I had previously only helped Dad with monthly bills and random English translation work on an as-needed basis, while Mom used me almost exclusively the rest of the time to help her with her sweatshop sewing work, cleaning the house, taking care of my sisters, and cooking most of the meals.

I was only 9 or 10 years old when, during yet another one of their middle-of-the- night, knock-down, drag-out, bloody, messy fights, one of them got me out of bed where I was pretending to sleep but scared to death, just hoping it would all blow over as it had always managed to do before. This time, Dad, always as cool as a cucumber when he wanted to be, even during such craziness, calmly took me aside and explained that they were really splitting up this time and I had to wake up my next oldest sister and each of us had to decide which parent we wanted to live with—starting that night! He explained that the two youngest sisters would be staying with Mom because they were still too young to decide such things.

Of course, I hated to do it. But, I always did whatever was asked of me, hoping not to escalate the already crazy volatile situation. So, I immediately woke my sister. (I don’t know if she was actually asleep; we all had the habit of acting asleep whenever there was trouble in the night.) She was frightened and started crying when I told her the news. What scared her the most was when I told her my idea that we should each choose a different parent so that neither of them felt totally rejected. She hated the idea of being separated from me. It was also breaking my heart to imagine being separated from any of them. I feared for all of them. Dad rarely beat us, and I knew he could always earn a living; so, naturally, I would have preferred to live with him. But, I simply could not bear the thought of abandoning my two youngest sisters to—not only the certain poverty that living with Mom would entail—but, by far more terrifying to me, the fact that they would have no reliable protection from her savage beatings and mental and emotional cruelty!

So, that is why I decided to choose our mom and told my sister, through sobbing tears, that she had to choose our dad. When Dad came to us and demanded to know our final decisions, I told him. In that single moment, we two little kids, me 9 or 10 and she only 6 or 7, unwittingly sealed our fates in the black, manipulative, unforgiving hearts of our parents forever. I actually watched my dad’s face harden into that all-too-familiar contemptuous glare that I had only ever seen him use against Mom until then. He kept his hard accusing look on me as he took my sister’s hand and led her crying, inconsolably, away from me. He broke our little hearts.

Of course, they never stayed “broken up” for long. On that particular night, Dad didn’t even leave the house. It was all a big show. One thing did change, however. After that fight, I was Mom’s “favorite,” and my first sister was Dad’s “favorite.” And, both of them never let us forgot it. The main problem was I now had to spend most of my spare time with Dad helping him on his new welding business while my sister had to spend most of her spare time with Mom at home, suddenly forced to do at least some of the work that I had been doing there all those years. Both of us had to endure frequent criticisms that began with, “Why can’t you be more like your sister? She’s so much more [fill in the blank with any positive trait] than you!”

3. Divided and Conquered (1978 - 2003)

1978 was when our parents uprooted us yet again and moved us all to the town where I had the disastrous run-in with the Chola while defending my next-to- youngest sister and her friends against that Chola’s younger brothers, which directly resulted in my miserable year as the helpless victim of unrelenting peer abuse that I described in “How to Be an Extrovert.” I was 12 years old.

I still helped Dad with his business, which was successful enough for Mom to stop slaving away at her sweatshop work. But, she still managed to get me to do most of the work around the house. I wish I could say we kids had a more or less normal childhood, but we really didn’t. Mom and Dad continued to escalate their fights, perhaps to convince each other or us that each time it was for real because everyone had pretty much become jaded with that old show over the years. So, threats of separation turned to divorce, then suicide, and finally homicide.

When a gun became the latest prop in the old show, the police finally had to be called. Guess who had to call them. Actually, I didn’t want to call them. But, Mom woke me and begged me to, saying that Dad had pointed the gun at her and had threatened to kill her. I still resisted, knowing how much more Dad would hate me if I did, and I hadn’t actually seen him pointing the gun at her. I really had been asleep this time and hadn’t even heard them yelling at each other, so I had my doubts. By then, I was 14 or 15 years old; and, I had already seen hundreds of their false alarms, albeit none with any guns. I kept resisting until finally she got up to leave my room in disgust and hissed at me, “Fine! Then don’t call! Just remember that when you wake up in the morning and I’m dead that it was all your fault!”

That did it. I called the police and told them exactly what Mom told me Dad had done to her. As soon as the police arrived, Mom begged me to tell them to leave Dad alone, which I did. However, they advised me that they had found Dad’s semiautomatic pistol with a bullet already manually loaded in the chamber, so they were not at liberty to use any discretion in the matter. Mom, as usual, thought I was doing a poor job of interpreting her needs, so she began begging the officers herself to let Dad free. All this to no avail, and he was taken away in handcuffs.

I couldn’t sleep anyway; but, a few hours later, I received a phone call from Dad, who apparently used his one phone call from jail to call me to deliver this creepy, cryptic message: “Live well.” That just about said it all. He had completely written me off in his mind. He came home and pretended to resume his life as normal.

However, less than one month later, during yet another fight, he somehow managed to get Mom very drunk (even though I had never seen her drink any before) and so thoroughly depressed that she kept wailing loudly about wanting to join her deceased parents in heaven and trying to strangle herself with the vacuum extension cord! Dad argued, coaxed, and pleaded with me for about an hour before he finally convinced me to pick up that dreaded phone to call the police station again, this time presumably for her own protection. I really hated to do it, and I tried to calm her down first for an hour, while Dad physically restrained her from further attempts to strangle herself. So, I called the cops on her, too. They came, took her away, and locked her up for 72 hours. Dad had gotten his revenge.

Needless to say, with parents as manipulative and crazy as this, when they set out to intentionally divide and conquer us kids, destroying every alliance we ever attempted amongst ourselves, they invariably and ultimately succeeded. We kids had far too many of our own melodramatic “break ups” and reunions. When I saw “The Lion in Winter,” I was painfully reminded of our scheming parents’ intricate mind games and use of us kids as mere pawns in their constant grabs at power.

Although Dad died in 1992, our family continued to wage internal wars with one another at different times and with different people, such that there were always at least two of us in some serious fight or mutual avoidance at any given time. Finally, in 2003, I walked away from all the madness. My last words to my sisters about our possible future together was that, after years of painful group therapy together, I was no longer willing to tolerate any more hateful language or behavior from them. If they wanted to, at any point, resume a relationship with me, it would have to be without any more painful group therapy and with mutual respect.

4. Unwritten Futures (2003 - ???)

Since 2003, I have had no contact with my mom or sisters. Gradually, I became the happiest I have ever been in my whole life! My long history of horrific nightmares finally ceased. I’ve been able to leave the worst romantic relationship I ever had. And, I even left a “dream” career that was just not fulfilling my need to truly make a difference in this world. It’s amazing how much peace, love, joy, creativity, strength, and courage you naturally have when you’re not surrounded by people who hate you! If I never have a relationship with my family of origin again, it’s not because I don’t love them. I do love them! But, I also finally love myself enough to no longer subject myself to their horrible treatment of me. If and when they ever want a relationship with me that is mutually loving and respectful, I would not hesitate for a moment to join them! But, never again am I going to just sit there and let anyone treat me badly just because they feel it’s therapeutic for them.

D. YOUR TURN TO ANALYZE YOURSELF

Take at least 15 minutes to answer these questions about yourself in writing:

1. What are your earliest memories of each of your siblings?
2. Up till age 10, did you feel positive, negative, or neutral toward your siblings?
3. Same question as No. 2 but between ages 10 to 15.
4. Same question as No. 2 but after age 15.
5. If you felt negative at any of those times, what you do think caused it?
6. If you felt negative at any of those times, do you blame anyone?
7. If you answered “yes” to No. 6, who do you blame and why?
8. If you answered “yes” to No. 6, could you let go of all blame for your own good?
9. If you have intense sibling rivalries, could you let go of them for a while?
10. If you have intense sibling rivalries but don’t want to let go, what do you fear?

After all these years, I finally understand the meaning of the ancient Chinese proverb: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.” We can never possess anything we cling to for fear of losing it. That kind of “possession” is a prison of our own making that not only imprisons our captives but also ourselves as the captors. If we try to force a relationship to work that just doesn’t want to work right now, or perhaps ever, we are working against all that is truly natural, including all of our own natural personalities.

TO BE CONTINUED …

This is going to be an adventurous journey into our past, present, and future lives. None of us can be prepared for what we might find along the way. So, just sit back and enjoy the ride! Also, I hope at least some of you brave souls will share your answers, insights, and revelations in the comments below for everyone’s benefit!

When you’re done, collect your answers and keep them in a safe place. I recommend a diary. It makes a precious gift to someone you love, especially you!

[For “Day 7: Peers (Allies & Enemies),” click here.]

[For entire “All About You!” series, click here.]

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