When it comes to being trauma-informed, certain key principles arise with respect to safety, trustworthiness, freedom to choose, mutuality, empowerment and cultural consideration. These are all important elements to ensure the well-being of individuals facing trauma. Just as with trauma, estrangement can appear invisible, until it is openly shared and spoken about. What would an estrangement-informed approach look like? This is what we’ll attempt to answer here.
Sibling estrangement, or any type of estrangement, can be multi-layered, and requires an understanding of the emotional impact that this can have on individuals. The complex challenges that present with sibling estrangement require an estrangement-informed approach that can look like the following.
Being aware of Estrangement Dynamics: Recognizing aspects and reasons behind estrangement, such as abuse, conflict, differing values, narcissism, neglect, alcohol/drug issues, mental health problems, and other factors, and whether a person is on the receiving end of this, or having to protect themselves for their own good.
The need for Empathy and Validation: Creating a non-judgmental space where one can feel heard, understood, and validated in one’s emotional experience. Recognizing that there is pain involved in this experience, the possibility of losing one’s self in this, as well as a form of grief at the lost relationship. These are necessary forms of acknowledgment to any type of relief that can come afterwards.
Ensuring safety and trust: This step involves making sure that people can feel they can discuss their sibling estrangement without judgment nor enforced pressure to reconcile, and disclosing as much or as little as they like. Psychological, social, and sometimes physical safety is to be taken into consideration, depending on the degree of volatility in one’s experience, as we have mentioned before in some of my online support groups.
Empowerment and choice: Because estrangement leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, it’s important to focus on what one controls, and on how we may want to self-govern our life and our relationships. That can include choosing to maintain estrangement, having a surface-level relationship, no relationship, or if the conditions are right, modifying our boundaries, and seeking more closeness or steps at reconciling.
Understanding its emotional impact: Sibling estrangement can leave us with a mixture of different emotions such as sadness, anger, guilt, despair, relief, and anxiety, to name a few. Like an iceberg that’s both visible and hidden, it’s important to realize how these emotions can play themselves out and impact an individual’s life and well-being in both family relationships and with others.
Offering support and coping strategies: The good news is that there are ways to help face the tide that comes with sibling estrangement. This can be through therapy with an estrangement-informed counselor, support groups, and in strengthening the bonds that we can develop outside of our estranged family relationships, as with a supportive network of friends and chosen family.
Non-Coercion: It’s important that people feel the freedom to be themselves and thus avoid experiencing pressure to reconcile or fix an estranged sibling relationship. Keeping in mind that estrangement is a process, and that it took time and numerous painful experiences for people to get to that point. It can be detrimental and invalidating to be told that you somehow have to do better and to fix the problem in your family. It’s up to each person to determine what is safe, desirable, and best for them.
Cultural Sensitivity: Recognizing how certain cultural, social and family contexts can play a part towards sibling estrangement is key. Certain norms and values can affect a person’s perception of the problem, and what, in particular, is needed to be worked through. Especially when certain cultural norms put the added pressure of family first above all else.
Avoiding retraumatization: While we can’t always predict what will be a trigger for an individual, it’s important to be conscientious of our speech and actions, when it comes to trauma, in order to avoid invalidating, demeaning or minimizing a person’s sibling estrangement experience.
In closing, if we’re able to consider these elements in an estrangement-informed context, we will be better able to acknowledge and validate each person’s experience of sibling or family estrangement, and thus avoid experiences of misunderstanding, marginalization, and making things worse. Sibling estrangement is increasingly common and is a worldwide phenomenon. The above practices will help in fostering the much-needed awareness of sibling estrangement and its impact on individuals and society today.
Ali-John Chaudhary is a Registered Psychotherapist with offices in Ontario and Quebec. He helps clients from different parts of the world going through sibling estrangement issues, and produces YouTube videos on the same subject, with Author Fern Schumer Chapman. He also hosts a twice-monthly online support group and an intensive workshop both on Zoom (see groups) for those looking to empower themselves with this rarely discussed subject.
For questions or inquiries, feel free to reach out to me through the Contact tab above.
Sibling Estrangement 