CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Adult Sibling Relationships with Dr. Geoffrey Greif

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

In this episode of the Calling Home Podcast, host Whitney Goodman discusses the topic of adult sibling Relationships with Dr. Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the university of Maryland and author of ��Adult Sibling Relationships”, co-authored by Michael E. Whoolley. Whitney and Geoffrey dive into the fascinating research behind the categories of sibling relationships as well as what can factor into creating these bonds as they evolve throughout the different stages of life. Join her Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram or TikTok.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Grife, an author and professor at the University of Maryland, who's here to talk with me about his research and his book on adult sibling relationships. I'm Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm glad you're here. Sibling relationships are so interesting because they're constantly evolving and shifting throughout pretty much every stage of a person's life. You could go from sharing a room with a sibling, to seeing them over the holidays, to then only connecting with them maybe every few years depending on what life state you're in and what's happening in your life. Dr. Grife is one of the few people I know who's really dug into researching these dynamics. And in his book, Adult Sibling

Relationships, which I will link in the show notes, he talks not only about the different categories of sibling relationships, but also what factors into creating them as well. This is a great episode and a great conversation for parents of adult children or young children who are looking to foster a good relationship between siblings, as well as adults like me, you, somebody else who has an adult sibling relationship that they would like to either improve, continue it, or maybe become estranged because things are not able to be repaired. Why do you think the topic of adult sibling relationships is so widely ignored? And why should we pay attention to it?

Great question to start off with. And I'll be talking about the work I've done with Michael Woolley, who's also at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. So your sibling relationships are the ones you're going to have for the longest in your life. They are there when you are born or soon after you. you're born and unless you have a dear friend who is there very early on, you're going to have these relationships for your whole life. During the natural course of our relationships, one of the greatest challenges for people is to figure out how to grow up, leave their family, and establish

other adult intimate relationships, yet still stay connected to their family. And very often in the normal course of life, we grow up, we partner perhaps, or we have a, you know, fruitful solo life. And we may not stay overly connected to our siblings unless we choose to until our parents age. And then we have to come back together with them and maybe negotiate how to do the caretaking, the long-term planning for them, and perhaps help to bury. them. And that requires siblings then at a later stage in life, maybe midlife for siblings to come back and have to figure out how do I negotiate a relationship that either has been very loving and supportive or has been a little bit more distant and as we'll get into ambivalent and ambiguous. Yeah, so that's really where I wanted to go next, is that you separate these

relationships into three different categories, right? So you just mentioned ambivalent, ambiguous. Can you walk us through that and what you've discovered in this work? Yeah, we think a good way of looking at these, and we have interviews with people that are recounting up to 700 different sibling relationships. We found that our relationships with maybe everybody, but particularly useful for our siblings, are calling them affectionate, ambivalent, and ambiguous. From our research, and we did extensive surveys, interviews with people, we found that there's, of course, a great deal of affection. Over half the people we interviewed said at least one of their siblings was like a best friend

to them, that they had been close with them their whole life. But at the same time, there were people that said, yes, I've been close, but I've also been distant, or I've had very mixed experiences, very mixed feelings with my siblings. And that's where the ambivalence comes in, that it's okay. And maybe we all have these with those who were intimate with. We have great affection for them, but sometimes we have mixed feelings for them. The third A in that affection, ambivalence, and ambiguous triumperant is the ambiguity that we feel as we get to be adults we don't quite always understand what our siblings are doing it could be why did she marry that jerk i can't understand that or it could be maybe more

troublesome in that why is he or she being nice to mom or dad after all the things that mom or dad did to them i don't understand how this level of closeness is being sustained when i know what dad did to him or to her or how it was. So that's where the ambiguity comes in. And there's another side of it that's sort of apropos of the holidays. And that is that my siblings don't really understand who I am today. They still treat me like the youngest sibling that I am. So at the Christmas table or the Hanukkah table, people get together and they fall back

into roles and a sibling may feel, you don't understand who I am today as a person. still treating me this way. So that leaves to a little bit of ambiguity of I can't understand why I'm being treated this way. You just brought up something that I think is what I hear for most people, you know, in my clinical work, because a lot of the people that come to see me as a therapist or the join calling home are dealing with difficult relationships with their family members, right? And one of those most troubling relationships is when there's issues between adult child and parent. And a lot of these adults are saying, I don't get how my sibling can have a relationship with my parent after they did X, Y, and Z. And I know you talk about this in your book that

no child experiences childhood the same, experiences their parent the same, or grows up, you know, really in the same household. And so I'm wondering how adult siblings can reconcile that, like, fundamental difference in how they feel about their parents. Well, I think you just put your finger on the important part. It's the recognition that I've never had me as a brother. So I don't have that experience. So number one, there's the difference in terms of siblings. Number two, parents are not in the same place across the lifespan as they are with their first child or their second child or their third child, they may be more financially strained or more financially wealthy or strong. They may have an emotionally strained relationship

or loving one that comes up and down, goes in and out during the marriage. That can get reverberated through children. It's not only that, of course, children can cause issues in parents too. We can all raise very easy children or we can all raise very difficult children just by chance and that affects the quality of the marriage too. So there's a natural waxing and waning of family dynamics and that of course means that people are not at the same age at the same time in their family. If I'm six when my parents split up and my older sibling is 12, we're going to experience that in a very different way. So there are different families that exist under the same household. I think that's one way of thinking about it. And part of what we're hoping to do with

the book, Adult Sibling Relationships, is to talk about the fact that we have to accept the fact that things are different. There is ambivalence. There's a lot of affection. And it's typical to not have this Norman Rockwell-esque view of everybody together at Thanksgiving and smiling. There's always somebody in the corner, maybe that may be a little more uncomfortable or extremely uncomfortable than somebody else. Yeah, you know, that image of like the family all smiling and getting along, I think is something that so many people can relate to. You know, during childhood you expect, and I think as a parent, you expect that your children will get along. in adulthood, and they will continue these close bonds. And I don't know anybody that doesn't

hope for that on some level. And it seems to me that just like through my own life experiences and my work as a therapist, that there's a lot of luck involved in that, you know, in terms of personality, temperament, what you go through as a family. I mean, what do you think are some of the factors that allow adult siblings to remain close? in adulthood. Is luck involved to some degree? I think luck is involved a lot in life. Yeah. I think, you know, how we play the hand we're dealt, I've been married to the same woman for 48 years, and we've had a good marriage, but if I had been in a car accident that I did not cause and had chronic back pain for 35 of those 48 years, that would make me a less pleasant person to be with.

And that's where issues around health come in or what happens that we have no reason to blame ourselves for or our spouse for. It's just bad luck. So I think there's a lot of that. And of course, the goal is to figure out, again, how to play that hand. We're dealt hands at birth, and then we are dealt maybe different cards across the lifespan. How are we going to cognitively or emotionally put together those? events that we have. And it's part of the narrative that we want to write in our lives. How do I want to think about myself as I age? How do I want my children to think about me or their own sibling

relationships? Because there's some intergenerational stuff that we found from our research that can get handed down from generation to generation. The intergenerational stuff, I think if I'm remembering this correctly, there was a finding that even like the birth order, of parents can impact kind of how they treat the lineup of their children, which I found to be so interesting. I haven't heard that before. And it makes sense. Yeah, it's a little hard to research. So a lot of that is anecdotal. For a research point of view, you can't get a large enough sample of older children and middle children and youngest children and order them by gender and age gap. But some of the anecdotal thinking and some of my own experiences are that perhaps a

parent who's a middle child and had a hard time with being a middle child might overly identify with their own child who's a middle child and favor them or try and do things for them or try and align themselves with that child. And of course, cross-generational alliances can be healthy, but they can also have a negative effect. There's Murray Bowen, the famous psychiatrist, has written about how sometimes the oldest children marry the youngest children because they're used to taking care of

and being taken care of. Whether or not there's any support for that is really hard to document, but it's interesting for each of us to consider, you know, what has made this attracted to or attractive to whoever we decide to partner with. And that has to do,

with also family closeness is one person attracted to somebody else because they will help them to become closer with their family or their siblings or more distant. If I am, for example, distant from my family, do I want to, I'm heterosexual, do I want to marry a woman who is also distant from her family because that matches me up or do I want to marry a woman who's going to help me to get close to my family or is close to her family? Or is close to her family? And that seems like a very attractive part of her. So all these things with siblings and parents get played out in some of those, but we call, you know, various things in our head about what we are trying to accomplish with somebody. Yeah. It's so true because even as, you know, I'm looking at

my own child and thinking about future children and my husband and I are both oldest children, which is an interesting combination sometimes. And I think about the awareness that I need to have not to project some of my oldest child tendencies onto my own oldest child and thinking about the unique roles that we maybe had to take on within our family system that aren't happening to our child in the next generation.

So let's kind of use that, I think, as a jumping off point to talk about parents and the role that they play in improving sibling relationships or destroying them. Well, a lot of what we found is that I think about a third of the respondents said that when they were a child, their parents interfered in their relationship with their sibling. Now, we did not define what interfered means, and there are a lot of cultural requirements around closeness. So certain cultures encourage much more community, much more closeness in other cultures. So we asked the respondent to define what interference meant to them. And we found that about a

third said their parents interfered. Now, it may be necessary for a parent to interfere and protect one child from the other on an extreme end. But ideally, you want your children to work out the issues on themselves to the extent that they can. And one of my daughters is very good at that when her children are fighting. She sits back and says, I wonder how the two of you are going to resolve this. Well, she's taking a position. She's commenting on the relationship, but she's not saying this is what I think you should do. Say, I wonder how you two are going to resolve this. And they're seven and ten, for example, at the time that I heard that comment from her. So parental interference, though, can also happen into adulthood. Also about a third, though not always the same third, said their parents

interfered in their relationship now as adults. Now, the obvious intervention for that is to instruct the parent to not interfere. If you are listening to your parent interfering in your relationship with your adult sibling, you can say very nicely to your parent or firmly, you know, this is not involving you. Please stay out of this. And you could also say, I don't want to get you involved in this relationship. So those things can be blocked. And I think one of the most important things to think about in terms of triangulation where three people, two siblings that a child may get pulled together, is to, if you're the parent, when you're talking to your adult child, don't talk about the other child, that sibling, that when I'm with my one daughter,

I'm not talking about, did you hear what the other daughter did? I'm with that one daughter. And so it's very, very clear that we're not commenting on someone that's not there. And that's one way that parents can train themselves and adult siblings can train their parents. Hi, Mom, I'm calling you up today. We're doing FaceTime. You're in California.

in Baltimore, let's talk for a little bit, and mom starts to talk about a sibling in Chicago. It's time to say, you know, thanks, I'm going to pass on that. Let's just talk about us. And parents, no matter their age, can be redirected or children don't have to accept that kind of potential triangulation, that kind of interference. Our finding was that, as you might expect, when there was interference, siblings tended to be as close to each other. Makes sense. Parents may mean well and say, I want my children to be close.

You know, she's your best friend, he's your best friend, they'll be there for you throughout life. I don't know how well that works, but it may work depending upon the culture that one is from because we do have some cultures that are more community and more communal base than others. Yeah, that's something that I talk a lot about with clients, is this like, mom calls me up and says, hey, talk to your brother about this, you know, or trying to kind of like recruit them to do something.

And that type of triangulation can really wear on you after a while. And I think like you're saying, it makes siblings want to separate because they don't want to be involved with one another in that way or to be like a minion, you know, for their parents trying to meddle in the other siblings' life. I see that happening a lot starting in childhood even with parents and their children, you know, trying to get them to be a mouthpiece for them. And it sounds like you're seeing within your data that parents avoiding that is one of the best things they can do to keep their children close. Right. With the one caveat that and there's a lengthy chapter where

there was a mother who had to interfere because the older brother was physically abusing the younger brother. There are times when you have to step in and say, stop beating up. Yes. Stop saying these things. A hundred percent. You just can't take a hundred percent hands-off position as a parent. Let's talk about that because that was a topic that I got so many questions about. Was sibling abuse, siblings bullying one another? I don't know if you've found this, but what I hear mostly from people is them saying, my parents always said, that's just how brothers are. That's how. That's how how siblings fight. And it's kind of this type of abuse that really gets pushed under the rock. Yeah, it's hard to know exactly what the context is of that. There are tropes out there about

boys, about the way boys fight with each other. I've done therapy with boys where I was watching them roll on the floor and fight. I realized it was play after a while. So when is it play, when is it fight? Yeah. And unless you're in the room, it's hard to know exactly what's going on to make sure that that does not go on or that you do have to intervene to do something and say, I'm going to separate you too. I interviewed a woman who has a model relationship with her two sisters, and she is a middle child. And she said when she grew up, her parents, if they fought, said, okay, you have to share a room until you stop fighting. And that was an interesting intervention that I had never heard of. All three girls are very, very close now. So, you know, different things,

the same thing may work with one family and totally fail with the next family. So it's hard to give a lot of general advice about this. For sure. I understand that. I think, you know, based on my knowledge about sibling bullying, sibling abuse, a lot of it can stem from parental favoritism or be triggered by that, which is I know something that you discussed in your book. Can you speak to how parental favoritism impacts sibling relationships? Yeah, parental favoritism, you don't want to be the favored because that actually can be uncomfortable or guilt-inducing and you don't want to be the disfavored. So you're pretty much in trouble if there's a lot of favoritism that is not seen in a broader context. It's not uncommon

in very healthy families for people to say, oh, dad, he always loves so and so more, or we always hung out with so and so more because they like to play golf together. It doesn't mean that dad isn't there for the others. They just kind of laugh about, oh, we'll let them go off and play chess together. It's fine. So a lot of this depends upon how much love there is. is how much is being played out and the way it's being played out. And sometimes you have to as a parent if you have a disabled child, you have to do more for that child. And there should be a conversation about that in a way that is not further victimized

that child too. It has to be put in a broader context, but children need different things. We don't raise children that don't need anything from us. One may need more help with money as an adult. may need more tutoring to help them read. There's always going to be some imbalance. You can't possibly balance your love and your time with each child, though you want to give the message that you're trying to do that and that you love everybody. So it's a difficult time to try and balance things out if children have different needs at different times of their lives.

The favorite child when young may be the one that becomes a school teacher or a social worker who's solo and doesn't earn money, somebody else is earning a lot of money or is married to somebody who's earning a lot of money. How do you divide up in a state in that way that is still fair to everybody if their needs are not the same? I guess we'll talk in to talk about what happens at that point in life too. Yeah, let's talk about that because I know when we're talking about when issues can arise, right? You mentioned that, of course, when parents are sick or dying, and then also when we're talking about dividing up things, which I think is something most adult siblings are going to go through in the life cycle. So what can go wrong here? What can go right?

Yeah, so one of the things that could happen is just a matter of health care or of the health status of a parent. You go in to see our mother and she promises you that painting that you always love that's over her shoulder in the bedroom. I go in there 10 minutes later and she promises me the same painting

because she's forgotten, whatever. So you get into those kinds of disputes that mom always wanted me to have this. Dad always wanted me to have this. You get into stuff. And I mean, that's what drives people in therapy sometimes is, of course, those kinds of disputes and who gets what and how is that decided.

The other thing that sometimes drives people into therapy is not just the dispute about who gets what, but it turns out to be that they have fundamental disagreements about what kind of health care parents should have. In general, daughters do more than sons of the physical health care, while sons may manage the money. If you want to talk about traditional roles, now those roles have changed. Women obviously manage money now as much as do men and men do more health care. So those kinds of, is it been fair that I've been spending all my time here while you live 3,000 miles away and are not, you know, doing your part? So doing that part is a lot of stuff that happens with parents and resentments

build up. The other thing that happens is that when people come into therapy, it's often because they are unhappy with their relationship with a sibling. And that drives people in. I want to see her more and she doesn't have the time for me or she wants more of me and I don't have the time to do this. So disputes about how close are we going to be drives a lot of therapy. And there's some cases in the book that are given there where people are very unhappy about their relationship with their sibling. Either they're estranged because estrangement is likely to happen the more siblings you have in a family. You have five or six siblings. Somebody's going to be living in the mountains and out of touch or will have sort of fallen off the radar.

And if you only have one sibling, it's much more intense. And you need to resolve that. And the reason to try and resolve that is you want to leave a legacy for your own children. You want to be close with your siblings so your children can have first cousin relationships that are a model. We did find that if people grow up seeing their father as being close with his siblings, they're more likely to be close with their own siblings. So something about having a male role model for women, it was not as much of a predictor, but most women were closer with. their siblings or reported that, then did brothers, then did men. I know you just mentioned, you know, leaving a legacy for your children and having them

connected with their cousins, but I had shared with my audience online that I was interviewing someone who is an expert on this topic, and I asked them, you know, what questions do you have? And I was kind of surprised by this, but one of the most frequent questions I got was like, what's the point? Why should I try to have a good relationship with them? What benefits is it to me. And so I wonder if you can kind of walk us through, like, why is this worth it to try to have a good relationship with our siblings in adulthood? Well, I think it's worth it to try and figure it out. Yeah. And decide you don't want to keep on chasing a relationship that's not going to be productive for you or is not going to

work for you. But if you're in a position of somebody who's not being responsive to you and you want them to be. The question is, how do you want to frame your own behavior? Do I want to be a person who has an identity who has sort of let that sibling go and is not sending them cards every Christmas, even though they're not responding? Or do I want to be a person who has a self-identity of, I'm sending a card? That's the way I feel you don't have to respond, but I like myself better if I am reaching out than if I'm sitting there like this, well, they're not responding to me, so I'm not going to respond to them. So the question is, what identity does one want to have in relation to one sibling? To go back to your other basic question, the benefit I see is that

if you can work together, you're going to be taking care of your parents better, A, and B, you're going to be sending a message to your own children, if you have children, that staying close with family can be beneficial. At the same time, I'm sure we could describe many families where staying close with a sibling is not a good idea. They are either self-destructive or they're going to be destructive to you. And you have to say to yourself, I've done the best I can and I need to move on with my life and not have an identity where I constantly chase after somebody that's going to be ultimately, you know, emotionally abusive to me.

So there has to be sort of figuring out who do you want to be as a person. and you have to be careful to figure out, is that connected to other intimate relationships that I have in my life? Have I learned to wall myself off from my sibling? And now I'm doing that to my partner, to my husband or my wife. So there's also that historic stuff that may not always affect your current relationships with your partner and with your children. You have to be sort of aware of that. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And from what you're saying, I feel it's so important for people to look at where they're at in the life cycle and where their siblings are at. There are seasons in life, right, where maybe you have children, a young

children, and your youngest brother is in college and is 25, and your lives at this moment are pretty incompatible in a lot of ways. And so it's like, can I have fondness and love for this person and care for them, but maybe we will not have a lot of shared overlapping interests in this moment. And that's okay. Things will be different in five years. And that's a unique relationship that you're always tied to this person, even if you wouldn't be friends in this exact moment. Nice. I think that's a nice way to frame it. I think that describes a lot of relationships certainly does with people that have half siblings or step siblings, too, where you have to figure out what's the relationship going to be, but I think you put your finger on it. Let's not try and make

this into a complete pie, but maybe we can have a slice of the pie, and that's fine for now, and find some connection five or 10 years down the road if that 25-year-old decides to have children. Maybe there'll be some connection at that point or something can still be there. Yeah, exactly, because I find in my work, and you can tell me if you see this as well, that like some people have trouble allowing their siblings to evolve as people, they kind of get stuck viewing them as the 12 year old or the five, whatever it is. And it's hard to move into maybe a position of equals when you've always been the one in charge of them or whatever it is that that can cause some discomfort in the relationship. Yeah, that goes back to what we talked about

initially about you go to your holiday party or your holiday, your family gathering at Christmas and they still treat you like you're the oldest or the youngest or they don't know who you are. So I think it's important to act the way you are now too and not unconsciously fall into those roles, but understanding that somebody else in your family may be trying to put you in that role. You have to necessarily respond in that way. That's so true. It seems so important for adult siblings to constantly be in the process of getting to know one another as they age. and learning who you are in this stage of life.

Good advice. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Grife as much as I did. You can get his book, Adult Sibling Relationships, written with Dr. Michael Woolley, anywhere books are sold. This is an especially great resource for any therapist listening. I also want to remind you that our final adult sibling relationship group for calling home is tomorrow, January 24th, at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

But all of the content about adult sibling relationships, all those articles, worksheets, scripts, everything else, videos, podcast episodes, and more will live on the calling home site forever. And you can access them by becoming a member of calling home at callinghome.com. As always, thank you so much for listening. And I'll be back next week with another solo episode. ...and... ...and... ...to... ...the...

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