So first off, if you clicked on this video and if this issue is one that you experience and something that you've been sort of asking for, I wanna say right off the bat that I believe you, and why I say that is this issue is usually something that we don't talk about. That we don't sort of share with others and is sort of a long time coming to just simply have somebody say, I believe you.
And the second thing I want to say about the start of this video is just to give you guys a trigger warning. We're gonna talk about a lot of sort of difficult issues within this, this issue of sibling abuse. And just to give you a heads up, if you feel like you're not ready, you can stop the video at any time.
So there's that. So sibling abuse is a twofold kind of child abuse that society and many therapy settings will not fully get into and write it off as rivalry. It's kind of a quickly forgotten about and avoided issue. Sibling abuse is the least reported category of toxic family abuse, and 80% of youth will experience some kind of maltreatment from their siblings.
In this video, we're gonna look at the variations of sibling abuse and why I think that the whole family system, the whole dysfunctional family system, is often the root cause of sibling abuse that comes from our own siblings. Um, so I want you to grab some paper and a pen because I'm also gonna give you guys.
Some writing prompts later and therapy ideas about what you can do around this issue
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I'll have all the links to the description box of the video below, or maybe somewhere up here. So to start, when I think of sibling abuse, I don't separate the abuse from the entire dysfunctional family system as a whole. Children abuse each other when they are being abused themselves, when their needs are not met developmentally.
And I think we can't look at sibling abuse without considering what the whole family system was like in terms of parents and parenting. It's part of the whole story. And I know you may already be feeling sort of like, but, but, but you know, it was just my sibling. It didn't involve my parents. They didn't know.
Just hang on and hear me out through the course of this video. So some top factors in sibling abuse, according to the research, it's usually done by the oldest who is statistically male with the majority of victims being younger sisters. And it definitely can be different genders, but that's the majority of the research.
That's what it dictates. You know, of course sisters can abuse sisters, brothers can abuse brothers. You can have any kind of combination there. But the majority is an older male abusing a younger female. Sibling, and it's usually focused on exploiting the weaker sibling who and younger siblings are focused on the approval, the acceptance, and being included by their older sort of brother or sister.
What I mean by that is like, um, the 4-year-old wants to play basketball with the 10-year-old and their friends. It's just part of human development. That's kind of like what we all do. So now let's look at the categories and examples about, um, the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that happens in these families.
So coming back to the trigger warning, here's where it might kind of get hard. These examples I'm about to give are not, and I repeat, they are not in any way to be dismissed as sibling. Rivalry. Sibling rivalry is about being in competition for a family, which is sort of a normal human development, um, dynamic.
They're in competition for attention from their parents, and that's kind of like a normal thing that what is, what it means to have sort of siblings in, in a nuclear family system. But too often abuse gets listed as sibling rivalry, so that's not what this stuff is. So the first category is emotional abuse.
This can include excessive teasing. Manipulating mind games messing with the younger siblings, friendships or their relationships, hiding security items like hiding the blankie, hiding the, the, the teddy bear, terrifying the younger sibling about parents not loving them, or maybe not coming home, singling that younger sibling out, or setting them up for blame around something.
Or simply saying that they weren't a planned child or they were adopted. And these aren't like teasing as isolated events. This is a consistent emotional targeting of the younger sibling, um, in the, in the sibling abuse dynamics. Not always the younger sibling, but you know what I mean. So some behavioral scenarios related to that.
Scenarios. Um, let's just say a 10-year-old sibling makes a younger 4-year-old watch a horror movie. Like plenty of that stuff happened in the eighties of my generation. Um, or that they tell the younger sibling that the parents are now dead and they keep that lie going for the afternoon just to horrify them.
Let's just say the sibling who was abusive is babysitting and locks the younger ones in a closet for hours. I mean, if you think about that, like that's horrific. Let's say the, the sibling, the abusive sibling, breaks a household item. To ice household item to frame and set up the younger one to be in trouble with their parents.
Let's say the abusive sibling disrupts and destroys personal belongings or friendships of the younger sibling or the abused sibling. Um, and a lot of the stuff can even be sadistic stuff like even killing the um, younger sibling. Pet in retaliation to something like killing the goldfish or something like that.
Um, maybe exploiting the younger child by holding some kind of ransom in something. Also, emotional abuse can be in the form of the child is. Um, the abuse child does not cisgendered. Let's just say that, that you were a tomboy or you were an, you were an effeminate boy, is that the abusive sibling will turn that into a very long nightmare of singling them out and abusing them for those sort of traits that they were sort of born with.
Um, and toxic parents don't really step in or care too much about that. So those are some examples of the emotional abuse. Moving on. Here are some examples about the physical abuse. And a common example in my mind is the restraining of a younger sibling, like straddling their chest, sitting, sitting on their chest, where they can't sort of get up and tormenting them by slapping or spinning in their face, um, or even tickling them till the till they lose control of their body functions.
And remember, the research dictates that the sibling is usually older and considerably bigger and more advanced. So what I mean by that is that, you know, just even to think about the difference, the size difference between a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old is sort of huge. With a 10-year-old being stronger, smarter, more ability to manipulate and coerce.
Physical abuse can also include pinching. Kicking, choking, biting specific targets like hitting the child in the groin, like below the belt stuff. Um, when we were kids, there was this thing called doing something called a gas pedal on a kid, which is holding their legs. It's just like really, kind of, really very painful, sexually targeted sort of actions.
Um, there's also like the near breaking of bones, like the arm behind the back stuff, um, or even sort of kids spitting on each other. And I know I didn't even cover all the different types of scenarios in this stuff, but, um, it can even be sadistic like what the older, giving the younger child a firework to hold and having and not telling them that it was gonna sort of explode.
Or the abusive siblings super gluing their siblings hands together. Um, just, just for kicks. But the, all of that stuff, what I would cat fall into the category of sadistic behaviors. Um, another one that I've heard of is that, um, and this is, this is hard, but the older sibling put Icy Hot on their younger sibling, telling them that it was sunblock.
And, you know, younger children have a much lower threshold to pain because their, their systems are so much smaller. Um, icy Hot is this extremely painful cold. We, they put on mu athletes put it on their body for, for, um, muscle relief, that kind of stuff. So. Moving on into the, probably the hardest category would be the sexual abuse category and incest this would be, is the most violating type of sibling abuse.
This can range from grooming, exposing the younger sibling to other kids, forcing direct sexual exchanges and making, or making the, the, the abused sibling watch pornography or watch that sibling masturbate in front of, um. Having the, the older child makes the younger child watch them masturbate. A lot of clients will report to me.
Much of this stuff would happen in shared rooms without parental knowledge. That seems to be a theme in my mind that sort of the 10-year-old boy should not have been sort of sleeping with the 4-year-old daughter in this sort of room. But that's kind of like where a lot of the abuse sort of came from.
There can be exploitive behaviors from perpetrating siblings that include. Physical or emotional threats. If the abused, the sexually abused siblings talk about it, there can be a lot of emotional abuse tied into sexual threats, manipulation, and secrecy. Um, there can even be that the younger sibling is used for sexual favors from others.
So there's a lot of her horrific sort of scenarios and examples that go into this. And in all these categories, this is an important side note. I want to acknowledge that sometimes the abusive sibling, um, was displaying significant mental health issues that weren't addressed, um, that, or that they were enabled because of those issues.
Like I've had clients who were abused by a sociopathic sibling. Or a sibling who was on the spectrum who was not getting any kind of care or services about being on the spectrum, um, or that the sibling was the old, the abusive sibling was showing signs akin to like cluster B symptoms or that they had severe cognitive limitations that the parents just sort of, because of those limitations, gave them way too much freedom or leeway, or the parents were like sort of terrified of that sibling themselves.
Which is a sign of immaturity, which was what some we'll get to later. Um. So I wanna be thorough and, and address these things as best as I can. These examples which are, which are hard. Okay, so now let's shift and look at sibling abuse. From a family system view. Let's look at a healthy system first to get perspective.
Just for the sake of simplicity. I'm doing this from a heterosexual couple who are cisgendered. So you know, what we are looking at is a simple genogram or a family map. I have a whole e-course available that teaches you guys to put together this functional family tree and get into it in depth to know your story more in a deeper way.
So what we're looking at here is a family tree, a simple genogram of a nuclear family. And the squares are male. The circles are females. We have two people who got together, who had three children. With the middle child being a male, the in a healthy family system that you know that the energy or the direction is going from top down and is child centric.
That the parents are a team and they are parenting these three children. From the, from the realm of sort of oversight and care. They know what's going on with them. They have emotional maturity. They know what their job is as a parent. And this is an example of sort of healthy parenting that the teachers, I mean the, the parents or the teachers and the guide, they know what's going on with their children.
They know their children and they have a system of values. And energy that is sort of child-centric. What is child-centric? It doesn't have to be all child-centric. We want healthy parents to have lives, but child-centric, meaning that the children are not required to have tasks beyond their developmental sort of stage.
They, um. They can have some justice when things go wrong from with sibling to sibling. They are, they know sort of what the values of the family are and the rules and the parents are sort of encouraging those family values and rules, and I'll get to some of that stuff later.
So, I know it's weird, but I know you guys have heard me say in other videos that healthy families should be like military structures, or at least how military structures should be or how they should look on paper. And what I mean by that is the military is a top down system with rules and values. The chain of command goes up with specific leadership positions and in a simple way, and through this genogram that we're just looking at this system as parent child in the military, it would, let's just call it general and sort of the lowest totem pole, which we kind of, we'd be grunt.
Um. Okay. Generals are ideally not toxic and don't complain down to grunts, nor is the leadership in the generals totally missing an action when it comes to being aware of what is going on in lower ranks. So I know that that's a weird note loaded analogy, but that's kind of what I mean by this stuff.
Healthy families are also rooted in parenting values. Some examples like the parents sort of saying, as a family, we don't hit. We discuss feelings as a family. There's enough love to go around for everybody. Everyone gets sort of a fair amount of time or energy or whatever, and each child is valued and that that statement is actually backed up, um, with how the parents behave.
And the parents have and use resources for the kids. And all of these concepts are, are stuff that I talk about in the Children's Bill of Rights that's available on my website. And I know you are probably skeptical of this kind of family system, but it do actually does exist because more and more parents are.
Becoming mentally healthy or psych minded. And there's plenty of families that are moving towards this for not wanting to carry on the generational trauma through the generations. It's slow. Sure. But this sort of like sort of healthy parenting system is growing. Um, and I think, just think about like where we were at in the eighties or even the seventies or the nineties.
God forbid you were born in the fifties. If you think about how sort of, uh, what a normal family, how they would sort of parent with either like shaming and hitting and all that kind of stuff. So there is progress and this stuff does exist. Now let's look at a family system rooted in neglect where the parents are immature, and this is not military top down, this is bottom up.
Where it's a leadership reversal, so simply put, the children are neglected and the parents are either uninvolved or they're missing an action or that they're immature, not realizing what their job is. As a parent, I often think about addicted parents, workaholic parents or parents who are now divorced or in the middle of a divorce and there's just kind of every man for himself kind of a thing, and the children are left to figure it all out.
So some examples of immature and parent in a parent focused family system say that a very victimy or martyr parent, um, is, is neglecting of their kids, and the kids are required to take care of the parent's needs rather than their own. That's an, that's an example of being immature. Let's say a parent can't handle, like I said earlier.
The abusive sibling or enables 'em somehow. That's an example about being immature. Let's say the parents are self-consumed and don't know how to address any kind of sibling problems because of their addictions or their workaholism or their own sort of trauma, and these are all uninvolved and immature parenting scenarios.
Now let's look at. What can happen in a family system like that amongst the children? Let's just say the oldest child is parentified and given a lot of power and abuses it like, um, the oldest being the caretaker, and that oldest abuses their younger siblings as a way to act out their own trauma and neglect or resentment for being the caretaker.
I don't say this to change your mind or generate sympathy or compassion. For the, the, the sibling who abused you. I know that that sounds weird, but that's not my goal here. My goal is to look at the root causes about why siblings abuse each other. We can't look at sibling abuse as isolated from outside the entire family system.
I can't stress that enough in my mind. The children here can also be policing each other to not make things disruptive for the parents. Because you know it is parent focused or they can become extremely competitive to gain limited resources of the parental care and attention. Lastly, let's look at another common family system where the siblings are more, more prone to be abusive in this genogram.
We have an abusive marriage that is focused on power. Uh, parents are definitely not a team. They're definitely not happy. Um, and this is sort of the family that is, is rooted in chaos, violence, and power struggles. This is an example of toxic parenting. Here. There is abuse between the parents. Therefore, it can be strongly indicated that there'll be abuse amongst the siblings.
When we think about our abusive sibling, we need to ask. Where did they learn to be aggressive? Where did they learn to sexually abuse? Where did they learn to be that manipulative or uncaring abuse? Kids often vent their own abuse onto siblings. Or are acting out from it. Chaos would be things like violence, drugs, drinking, poverty, living in acute, like the whole family system is living in acute survival mode.
Um, and I call many toxic family systems, pressure cookers where there's rage, there's sadness, there's pain, there's energy, there's violence. Or there's like even sort of sad, quiet desperation 'cause no one talks about feelings and there's just rooted in neglect. Um, can be very, or the family that's extremely noisy.
That pressure needs to go somewhere. Some kids start taking drugs, some kids start acting out sexually. Some siblings start to abuse siblings as a result of what's going on in the whole family system. So there's that. Here are three treatment ideas. About sibling abuse or childhood abuse in general? Um, my first is find a therapist or he or a healer of some kind, a reiki person, a somatic person, whomever.
It doesn't really just have to be in the therapy world. I would recommend that top tier. But you know, this stuff is extremely hard to find and it's like a, a needle in the haystack. But we need to find someone who can guide us through this and also be a witness and advocate. For what happened to us witnessing the, the impact of it and advocating that we sort of are able to sort of heal and grow out of it.
Um, this is such a huge issue that it just does require some significant work for reference. What I do in my own practice is that I will recreate a traumatic experience for the client with a completely different outcome. From how it actually originally went down. It's called experiential therapy, and I will do this in either a group setting or individual.
When the client is ready, I will bring in, say for example, doing some empty chair work where I'll bring in an empty chair or many chairs of the abusive sibling and the parents. And let the client speak their truth to them, to both the abusing sibling and the parents or the caretakers who didn't take any action that's recreating the trauma and bringing it up in the room, but having a different outcome.
Where we are the ones talking, we are the ones expressing, we are the ones having a bit of sort of some of the power. Um, and as a therapist, I'll also speak to the abusive, um. Sibling as well as the parents in a, in a way to like let them have it and hold them accountable. Um, another sort of tactic I use or, or or tool that I use is I will do some what I call, I call it more truth now, but it's a lot like rage or anger work where I have the client get a Nerf bat or hit a karate bag with something.
Um, and I'm sort of encouraging them to use their voice. To be speaking to the perpetrating sibling or to be speaking to the parents, um, and sort of be able to physically make contact and most importantly be using their voice. While they're advocating for themselves or speaking the truth, and I'm sort of as a coach, they're, you know, I'm coaching them about what to say to their perpetrator.
I'm sort of like rooting them on, like, this may sound nuts in your mind, but it, this is actually what sort of like one of my most effective tools that I have in my toolbox as a therapist. I will have the client be hitting the bag saying, get away from me, and really making contact with that sentiment and really saying it as loud as they can.
Usually when they start, they're like. First of all, it's awkward, but once they start to kind of get into it. But the most important piece is to be able to use your power and reclaim your voice. For those of us who are sort of in the realm of energy work and reiki work, we have a shocker right here when that's constricted.
These are some of the reasons why is when we can't speak up when we're being abused or when something is going wrong in the present that tells us that something is going on here. You don't have to subscribe to that. That's just one of my own sort of personal sort of. Um, ways to look at the trauma stuff from an energy and a body perspective.
So they're hitting the bag, get away from me. Um, I, they're also sort of, I'm encouraging to say like, I have the power now, even to say like, shut up. You don't get to, you don't get to talk here. You threaten me to keep this secret, but I'm sort of talking about it now and the client. After doing that, they feel very energized.
They feel very grounded in their truth. And it's sort of, that's some, that's what we mean by processing, or that's what I mean by processing. Um, this stuff is all done in a therapy session, not with the original family, because that's really not safe. Um, and it's also not safe for us to be bringing that to the family, sort of, you know what I mean?
We are doing this an inanimate object on inanimate object and rage work, or we're doing the empty chairs. All of that's done in the therapy room without the family system because in many ways, you know, our parents would dump all these energy onto us. So we are sort of preventing that and just doing the focus there for two reasons.
Um, we don't wanna be abusive ourselves. And the other piece is our family is usually not safe to be doing that with that in the room. And this is just my opinions, this is just my stuff. This is not sort of like, you know, like. How every therapy, this is actually a very rare type of therapy. Um, but that being sort of said like, that's some of the stuff that I will do.
And lastly on that is I don't start therapy there. I might, might take six months for us to work up to get to that place. Takes a long time to get to the kind of experiential therapy that I just described. So that's the first suggestion is find a therapist and whether they're EMDR, whatever. To start to work on this.
And I know that that's a hard thing to find, so I want to acknowledge that. So the second suggestion is to some, some resources. An amazing self-help book around this stuff is The Courage To Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. This is a classic. I highly recommend it. It gets into all kinds of sort of sexual abuse.
It does cover some sibling sexual abuse, and it's really a great resource for the sexual side of the abuse. There's also some great resources. About if you just type in sort of sibling abuse, there are some really great books that you can get on your own accord. Um, I, you know, on my website I have sort of three courses that are available to look at your family system as a whole.
There's the family Rules, there's the Children's Bill of Rights, and there's a genogram, which can help with this stuff about looking at the family system on a greater whole when it comes to sibling abuse. So there's that. The third prompt I have is some journaling prompts. That you guys can do from the perspective of the adult and the inner child, with the adult bringing, being the one to sort of bring some stuff up and to be exploring with the inner child what it means now in the present to be exploring and looking at the sibling abuse.
So what I mean by that, what the goal here is to become, to have it to be more integrated with your sort of self, that the adult and the inner child is sort of sharing the conversation about these dynamics, not just the inner child being sitting on it without any help. So. These prompts are a lot like inner child sort of starters of having a dialogue about what the dynamics are about the sibling abuse.
For example, prompt one is to be to, to write down to your inner child that I want you to know that I believe you, and that you have the right to be really mad and sad about this. What comes up when we think about what our sibling did to us. That's prompt one. Um, prompt two would be, do you still feel like you won't be believed by our family?
Or what might they say about us? What might they still say about this kind of thing? And the inner child might like, sort of write down and sort of just say like, mom would deny it, dad would laugh it off. You know what I mean? Or they would blk at us or that kind of a thing. And the third writing prompt would, this is really about letting the inner child sort of like.
Maybe talk more at length about it. If you could say anything, what would you say to your sibling? And it'd be the, would be wonderful to be able to sort of let the inner child just sort of like really sort of as if it was a letter, you know what I mean? You did this to me, I never trusted you, blah, blah, blah.
And you could do the same thing. What would you wanna say to our parents about it? So those are some writing prompts, some journaling ideas, um, to sort of, to, to get. What I'm trying to get there is to be a little bit more integrated to have these two parts being more of a unified force about this stuff.
I hope this video was helpful to you guys. This is both a hard video to watch and a hard video to make, but if we're not real with ourselves, more so if we're not brave and kind of getting into it, these things just kind of keep hanging out and that's not good for us. And lastly, I will leave you guys with as I do, as always, may you be filled with loving kindness.
May you be well. May you be peaceful and at ease. May you be joyous. Take care, and I will see you guys next time.
