Siblings can be a source of both connection and pain: Family therapy for adult siblings helps untangle the complications of these relationships

Sibling relationships can be immensely complicated—a source of profound intimacy and connection, as well as injury, betrayal, and pain. Siblings have a unique insight into each other as people because they are the keepers of a history that no one else knows about. That creates the possibility for a particular type of closeness but also a risk of being hurt in excruciating ways.

While you didn’t choose your siblings when you and they were born, working on these relationships as an adult is a choice that can have an enormous benefit. Many siblings overlook the possibility of attending to these relationships by going to family therapy, but doing so can help untangle years of conflict and create a path forward that feels healthier and more fulfilling. A family therapist skilled at facilitating hard conversations with safety, honesty, and vulnerability can help determine what repair might be needed and how that could look, as well as discern what siblings want from their family relationships.

Working with a family therapist can bring siblings’ differing experiences within their family into the open

Although commonalities exist in a shared family of origin, siblings often grow up having wildly divergent experiences of their parents, each other, and family events. These differing perspectives can come from occupying different roles in the family. Birth order influences this, as well as many other factors. These distinct perspectives can serve as a barrier when they become off-limits for discussion or a trigger for conflict.

With the help of a family therapist, getting your siblings together to talk about shared and different histories can create closeness and build trust. There are a multitude of narratives contained within a family. Working with siblings in family therapy can bring these stories, memories, and feelings out into the open so they can be talked about, acknowledged, and shared.

Milestones and transitions can disrupt even strong sibling relationships

New romantic relationships, marriages, births and deaths, career achievements, and milestones related to finances—all of these transitions can wildly disrupt sibling relationships, even for the most communicative sibling sets. New events can reveal or reignite old feelings like jealousy, resentment, competition, and fear, which may have been lying dormant for years.

Families become accustomed to the well-worn grooves of how the system works. When things happen that alter those dynamics, everyone feels it. For instance, if parents fall ill or die, siblings can be confronted with the question of what their roles are in the family now: Who or what is the glue that keeps everyone connected? Who occupies the leadership role(s) if parents no longer do? Using therapy as a place to talk about and collectively work through difficult feelings and these roles can help siblings stay connected through all kinds of change, from joyful occasions to loss.

How do I get my sibling—or all of my siblings—to opt into family therapy?

Siblings typically come to therapy in a state of crisis, usually when conflict has escalated to an untenable level, or when the relationships feel threatened by estrangement. We often find it helpful to have separate conversations with siblings individually to see what they might need to engage in therapy together. Sometimes we also need to start with several different dyads or sibling configurations before everyone gets in the room together.

Ultimately, it’s essential that everyone opts in fully. This can be more complicated than someone simply saying, “Sure, I’ll go to therapy with my sibling(s).” In order for therapy to be viable, everyone in the room has to freely choose to be there, and continue to choose to be there throughout the work. If that isn’t the case, it’s the therapist’s job to notice and insist that either the conditions change or the treatment needs to stop. For conditions of safety to be present, siblings need the therapist to be attentive and keep things from going off the rails, make sure conflict stays at a manageable level in sessions, and not allow bad behavior like name-calling to proliferate.

Meet our founder and clinical director, Matt Lundquist, LCSW, MSEd

A Columbia University-trained psychotherapist with more than two decades of clinical experience, I've built a practice where my team and I help individuals, couples, and families get help to work through difficult experiences and create their lives.