For those of you with siblings, I’m sure you can remember feeling everything for them. Hating them one day, being furious the next, laughing with them crying with them and all the while loving them and being fiercely protective. No matter how much your tormented your brother or sister or how they tormented you, you’d never have let anyone else hurt them. I was always the same with my little brother, I may have been a bit of a bully growing up but if anyone else ever even raised a finger to him I was on them in seconds. He was my brother to torment and befriend as I saw fit and nobody else’s.
The issue with siblings is going from this state of uneasy love to one of friendship in later life. It’s a quite a transformation and at the end of the day this is a person you’ve known your whole life or vice-versa, if anyone’s going to be your friend genuinely it’ll be your siblings. It’s a balance though, you want to be friends but you don’t want a repeat of the give and take of childhood, they’re older now and they can fight their own battles. Your defensive services aren’t needed any more and for some people it can be very difficult to get out of the mindset of protective brother or sister.
Co-dependence in siblings in fairly common, especially if the two have been through a traumatic experience together. Simply put, it means allowing another persons behaviour to effect yours and becoming obsessed with controlling their behaviour. Essentially you’ll start to believe your sibling is incapable of their own life choices and you’ll try and get involved in everything that they do. It can get to the point in which your sibling starts to believe that they’re incapable of things too!
So, as I say it’s a balance. It’s important to be close with your brothers and/or sisters. They’ve got the capacity to know you better than anyone as they’re the closest thing to people who’ve been through almost everything you have that you’ll meet. You should have something in common. At the same time you don’t want to become too close or co-dependence could initiate to the detriment of both of you!
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