CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Navigating Sibling Estrangement with Fern Schumer Chapman

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

In the first episode of the second season of Calling Home, Whitney discusses adult sibling estrangement with guest Fern Schumer Chapman, author of Brother Sister Strangers.  They discuss the complexities of sibling estrangement, including the feelings of rejection, self-blame, and the impact on family dynamics. Fern shares her personal experience of a 40-year estrangement from her brother, which was followed by a 10-year reconciliation.  They discuss the factors that can lead to estrangement: family trauma, parental favoritism, poor communication skills, and differing family values. Fern advises that estrangement is not always permanent and maintaining even a limited relationship can be beneficial for all family members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, everyone and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am so excited to be back for season two. Thank you all so much for listening to Season 1. And remember, if you'd like to keep this podcast going, please do not forget to subscribe or leave us a review. It really, really helps the podcast grow. My guest today is Fern Schumer Chapman, the award-winning author of Brothers Sister Strangers, who's here to talk with me about adult sibling estrangement and share some of her own experience with it. I'm Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast.

I'm glad you're here. This is an important topic to me because adult sibling estrangement is something that's really not talked about enough and I think is far more common than most people realize. There are many reasons why someone might initiate estrangement

with any family member and each situation is extremely difficult and nuanced. But I find that this can be especially tricky when you haven't been given an explanation or reason why your sibling has cut off contact with you. And it also really complicates like all the other family dynamics, your relationship with your parents, with other siblings, aunts, uncles, etc. In this episode, Fern shares a really personal story about her own estrangement with her brother. And she shows that reconciliation can

be possible. I'm hoping that you're able to take something from this episode, especially if this is a situation you or your family has experienced. And just a reminder for the month of January, we are focusing on adult sibling relationships inside the calling home community. So if you need more assistance or support with this topic, please go to callinghome.com and check out our group offerings. We have articles, worksheeds, scripts, and a lot of other things that could help you out with this. This is a deeply personal topic for you to tackle in this way. And I wanted to know what pushed you to write this book and to come out publicly with your story.

Actually, I've been writing books for a number of years and I had lunch with my agent in New York. And I told her this long saga of what had happened between my brother's, me, which involved a 40-year estrangement and a remarkable, for the last year, 10-year reconciliation. When I told her the story, she was just mesmerized and she said, you shouldn't write about this. And actually, it's been an interesting journey because when the editor who bought the book went into the sales meeting, she pitched the whole story, and everyone went silent. And then somebody said, you know, I struggle with my relationship, with my sibling, and one person after another started to admit that they could not sustain relationships with a difficult

brother or sister. And of course, that's why they bought the book. So what's happened is I've realized through the writing and the release of the book that this is almost like a Me Too movement. Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to admit to it. It has a terrible stigma. And once you say that, yes, I have not been able to sustain a relationship with my only brother for decades. Lots of people come out of the woodwork. So true. So true. What was the status of your relationship with your brother when you started working on the book? We had begun to reconcile, and I was thinking a lot about how do you build a relationship again with somebody in the wake of so much mistrust and betrayal?

And I started to take notes. And then I asked him to take notes, and he was much less comfortable with that. But he did show me a few things he wrote. And then about three or four months into this, I said, you know, how would you feel if I wrote about this? And to my shock, he said he thought it would be okay and it would be interesting. And he's been really supportive, surprisingly, so supportive that he actually wrote the afterward for the book, which I couldn't believe. You know, so you get my whole perspective through the memoir portion of the book. And then at the very end, he steps in and says what he has felt.

That's really incredible. And it seems like maybe it was a vehicle to help the two of you get closer. Oh, yeah. And understand what had happened between the two of you. Yeah, it actually created a bond in its own way. Mm-hmm. I think he had a lot of trepidation and a lot of concern about how I was going to tell story and whether I was going to wag the finger at him because he was the one who initiated the

distance. And when he read it, I think he felt like I had tried to be as fair as possible. And I really didn't point the finger at him. I think in general, these things happen for a lot of deeply brooded reasons, which we can talk about. Absolutely. I want to go back to this story that you told about, you know, pitching the book to this room of people and the reaction that you got. I think that is a similar reaction that I've got as I've started to talk about this topic more publicly, that it is something that many people have experienced, but no one seems to want to talk about. And you speak to this in your book. I think what you say is something along the lines of like,

if I can't maintain a relationship with this family member, with this person that is supposed to be part of my life, like, what does that say about me? And what will people think about me? Can you talk to me a little bit more about that question that you were asking yourself? What I've discovered is sibling estrangement isn't just about my brother not talking to me. It's a rejection. And it ripples through so many parts of. your life in identity. It affects your self-esteem and who you are and how you see yourself. It affects your friendships and your social relationships and your well-being and your ability to trust. And then, of course, it metastasizes to family numbers as they decide which side

they're going to be on. So it's so much more than simply a breakdown in a relationship between siblings. And I think the grief is so powerful and unique in sibling estrangement because somebody you love is blocking the earth and has made the choice they want nothing to do with you. You know, death is final. There's no negotiating. But when there's estrangement, there's a crack in the door. And there's always that little hope that, oh, maybe we'll get. together at this birthday, maybe he'll call me or maybe we'll find a way at that funeral to have some connection. And I think that really works on rumination and your thought patterns. I think that grief from sibling estrangement is one of the deepest, most nagging experiences you can

have. Yes, I so agree with that. And sometimes, thing that really stood out to me about your story of a stranger with your brother is that he was really walking around like kind of living his own life, right? He had a life and he was doing things. And I find, I wonder if that's so much more difficult than people who have a sibling who possibly has a substance use issue and they can't have a relationship with them or they have a mental health condition that it makes them violent or whatever it is that I find that those estrangements are a little bit easier because the person on the other end is like, well, I can't have a relationship with them because of this thing. They have this, like,

defining thing. But when it's more amorphous like the one you described, I imagine that would be more painful. Yes, in my case, and in many cases, you don't know the reason. Somebody has chosen to cut you off and you're left with all the questions that accompany that. You know, what did I do? well, how can I fix this? How did I hurt him? And you have no answers. And there's another piece of it, which is you're rendered voiceless. You can't apologize because you don't know what you did wrong.

And you can't correct your behavior because you don't know what it is that's upsetting that person. Now, to your point, my brother actually had a very specific reason for not having anything to do with me. And it was actually more than one reason, but one of the reasons is he was hiding a vice. which was drinking. So sometimes they cut out because they don't want you to know about their shameful behaviors and how they're coping.

And I personalized that. So I thought this is all my fault. That is such a common thing that happens, right? When someone cuts us off, we have this feeling like, okay, well, what did I do? How did I let the relationship get to this point? It really becomes very like me focused. And in a lot of situations, it is that way.

You know, maybe you did do something. There are certainly people who have relationships with siblings where the sibling did something very harmful. But there's also this other side that you're talking about where like sometimes people isolate from us because they don't want us to see them. They don't want us to know what's going on with them. Right. And sometimes they isolate from us because we are triggers to them for traumatic history. Very true. So my brother could not look at me without seeing my dad, who was the source of a lot of pain in his life.

How did that feel for you to realize that, that you were kind of a reminder? Well, during the reconciliation period, I used to joke with him all the time, and I would say, I'm not dad. I'm not dad. You know, and I had to actually remind him. Yeah. And we would kind of laugh about. it. But yeah, I mean, it's frustrating because you feel like they don't see you. Well, and they lump you in, you know, with things that maybe someone else has done, which I think brings me to

this other thing that like when you talk about siblings being a reminder and we think back into the history of the family and how certain dynamics happen because of parents, there are siblings that may do hurtful things to one another because they are simply trying to cope with the dysfunction within the family. Is that something that you've come up against in your work? Absolutely. That's largely what my brother was doing until he found that his coping mechanism wasn't working anymore. And he was getting into a darker and darker place and needed to help getting out. He and I came from an extremely difficult. and dysfunctional family.

Interestingly, we are the children of a Holocaust refugee, and there is a very big correlation between Holocaust families and estrangement. And the reason is that the children have one of two reactions to the parent who was defined by this experience. One is they had for the hills and distance themselves, which my brother did.

when the other is that they take care of the parent who was in so much pain and distress. And that was me. And so our opposite ways of coping actually divided us as well. That makes so much sense because I think when siblings are, of course, dealing with the same situations in childhood, they're, of course, interpreting them, integrating them, and dealing with them in profoundly different ways. And sometimes we can look at our siblings and be like, how could you do that? How could you react in that way to this traumatic event? And they're kind of

pointing the finger back at us like, well, how could you react in that way? You know, and it becomes this even deeper divide. Absolutely. And that was the response each of us had. And we've actually only recently been able to discuss it. Being the child of a Holocaust refugee or survivor is so complicated, there is more, there's probably, I think I've read that post-traumatic stress disorder is almost as common in Holocaust survivors and refugees as it is in veterans of war. Makes sense. And of course, if you have that kind of erratic behavior in the family, you will transmit PTSD to the child. So both of us struggled.

And actually, while I was getting help for it, I kept thinking, even though we were estranged, he's got to be struggling as well. And ultimately, I was able to get him the help that I had received so that he could address some of that PTSD. Right. Do you think that you ultimately became like the image or the person. that stood in for the pain of the family for your brother, like he was rejecting you as a way to reject the pain that he had experienced? Yes, he separated himself from everyone in the family. Okay.

But he maintained a limited relationship with my mother only. I remember reading that in the book, and I think that that's a complicated part about sibling estrangement is that, of course, the siblings may maintain relationships with other people in the family. And I'd love to hear what that was like for you, for your mother to be straddling both relationships. This is what I mean about metastasizing in the family. Any choice my mother made, if she were invited to a party at his house, and I wasn't invited, she felt that she was going to hurt me. And she was because I had no other family. So I wasn't allowed to be a,

an aunt or a sister-in-law or a sister. So every time she made the choice to go to these events, it was in a way condoning the cutoff. And I felt very hurt, and I felt very angry at her for allowing this. On the other hand, she would argue that she was getting crumbs from my brother, and she didn't want to be cut off from her grandchildren. And so she was going to take what she could get. I imagine she was fearful, like you said,

that she was going to end up in the same position as you. And so she was kind of trying to walk that very fine line. And I think, too, that she knew I would be there for her. And so she tended to take advantage of me and take me for grand. And she was much more careful with him and clashes with him. Right. And that's another thing that can certainly drive siblings apart, right? And you talk about this in your book, that siblings are inherently, you know, fighting over the same finite resource, right? You talk about parental attention and how siblings differentiate themselves in order to connect with their parents. And I'm wondering like how you saw that playing out even in adulthood, between you and your brother and your mom. I guess what we were just talking about, this idea

that she was going to, number one, not set a limit with him. I mean, she was in a terrible spot. I'm not sure the best way to handle it. On the other hand, in the book, I say, I think if you are members of the family, everybody should be invited. If somebody's uncomfortable, then they shouldn't go. but the guest list cannot be restricted.

Now, others have argued with me on that point and said that, well, when there's violence in the family, they think that you can't include that person. So, of course, that's a different point. And, you know, I should say right here that there are simply some relationships that are too toxic to sustain, and you should not reconcile those relationships. In the case with my brother, there was no. abuse. There was no, I was hurt, but there was never physical or sexual abuse or violence. Like you feel like the two of you could have been able to be in a room together and nothing really

bad happened, like just coexist. I mean, we were in rooms occasionally together. We went to funerals or weddings. We just stayed on opposite sides of the room and didn't say a whole lot to one another. I want to pivot back to talking about, you know, the shame that comes with this type of estrangement and how people navigate it publicly. Since I have been working with more people who deal with this and I have come to learn about what it's like, I have even noticed myself like maybe not asking people if they have siblings when I meet them because I'm so cautious of forcing them to disclose something to me that maybe they're not ready to.

And I wonder if you could speak to what it was like for you during that time to talk to people publicly about this or when it was asked during the estrangement. I think I talk about this a little bit of the book. Someone would say, how's your brother? And I was quit to turn it around and say, oh, fine hours' yours,

or to find some way to dodge. Yeah. Because I didn't want to talk about it. And it was a source of failure, I guess, or just great disappointment. And I, especially because I didn't know what I had done, I felt particularly embarrassed about it. I only have one sibling. I have one brother. And so to lose that relationship meant I lost that entire connection and branch in the

family. And that was devastating, particularly when I was raising children. My children didn't have cousins on my side. Now, I'm often asked what it's like now. And I have to say, my brother and I have a relationship now, but you cannot go back and restore those relationships with the children because there is a developmental window when kids are young and they bond. And the cousins really don't have much connection because they have almost no shared experiences. That makes sense. Do you think that your brother or do you know if your brother had a different experience than you being on the end of the one that initiated the cutoff when he would talk about this with other people? Or was it similar? I've asked him quite a bit about it. And actually,

it's pretty interesting in the book. He talks a little bit about this as well. He claims that he wasn't thinking clearly because he was very deep into alcohol. And so he had a pattern of living where he really didn't face anything. But towards the end of the book, we have a really interesting exchange. And I said to him, when we were estranged, how often did you think of me? And he said, every day, he made another really interesting point in the book. And I don't know if I'm going to get the exact quote right, but the gist of it was this, that by exiling you, I exiled myself. In other words, he had lost his own sense of who he was by cutting off from me and the family. Yeah. Yeah, I think that really speaks to what we were speaking about earlier, that when someone isn't ready to face

themselves and maybe what they've done or who they've become or what they're doing, they will isolate from the people that they know will see them, right? And will be like, I know you and I know that something is not right. And they don't want to be called out yet. They're not ready. They're too fragile. Whatever it is. And so that's not coming from a place of like hate or distrust.

I think it's coming almost from a place of love of like, you love me too much to see me like this right now. and I can't let you see me. I think that's such an important point, Whitney. It's very painful, but very important. Yeah. And I think that's exactly what he felt. Oh, it's, it's so painful.

It's so painful. And it's exactly what he felt. Yeah. And you want to help them so bad, right? Like, makes me, like, choke up thinking about it because I think it's just people imagine that estrangement is always this clear-cut thing, right? Like, you did something bad to me. This other person is evil, and so I cut them off.

And I think it's important that we talk about these dynamics where you have children all growing up in a house that all experienced certain things and had different outcomes as a result of that. And that's what gets between them having a relationship. Yeah. There's no one to really, like, blame for that, you know? It's not black and white. It's absolutely not a lack in white. And in many ways, it's different perceptions as well as you know me so well. And like you said, I cannot face you.

Yeah. And the third piece of that is what I did, which is, oh, and it must be my fault. Yeah. Yeah. Which that is what drives the rumination. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

I mean, you talk about, I wrote down some of these questions that you ask in the book, right? Of like, am I alone in my suffering? Do others live in a constant state of mourning, the living? What did this failure say about me? How should I explain to my children? Could I prevent other family members from being caught in the split? Like all of these things that you're thinking about. And I ran a group this morning on mother-daughter relationships and somebody in the group

said, does anybody just wake up in the middle of the night panicked about this stuff, thinking about it, dreaming about it, whatever? And I was like, I think that's one of the most relatable experiences to being estranged from someone and not knowing why or when you're going to reconnect. Is this absolute, like, feeling overcome with it? I mean, is that what it felt like for you? Well, it was for so many decades. So at times, yes, it felt like that. And then it got to a point where I guess I said to myself, it's never going to change. I need to accept this and make my best life given this reality. But it still hurt. And it was more like I was simply trying to avoid thinking about it. Yeah. I don't think I ever came to peace about it.

And I'm part of a lot of these estrangement support groups, and that is the piece that people struggle with. How do I accept this and make peace and live my best life, given that I have no relationship with this family member? Yeah. You mentioned getting to a place where it was almost easier, I guess, to pretend that he was dead or to imagine that, like, you just didn't have a brother. and I could see how that would actually be an adaptive way of coping with that. Yeah, I hated running into anyone we both knew or anything that reminded me of him because I had somehow found a quarter of my brain to live in where he didn't exist. Yeah.

Did it feel like that was just like the only way to keep moving forward? Yeah. Yeah. I've been asked a lot about this situation and if I had another sibling, if it would feel quite this intense. And of course, I can't really answer. But I do think this was particularly difficult because there was so much loss involved. One brother, two nephews, no cousins. And, you know, very little family. connection. I agree with you. And I think in my experience, it is easier when there are other siblings, especially in the realm of blaming yourself. Because when you have other siblings that you're able to maintain a relationship with, it's easier to have that proof, right? Of like, well, I can maintain a relationship with this sister or this brother. And I don't have issues with them. So it's not all me or like my inability to do this if I can do it with some people. I think you're right, and I think there's a lot of compensatory response to this.

So, you know, you go out into the world and you're like, see, I'm really likable. I'm not like he thinks I am. Yeah, yeah. I know I did some of that because you feel such a sense of low self-esteem as a result of this. And this gets back to what you were saying about, if my only brother wants nothing to do with me, And am I likable? Am I lovable? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that brings me back to something you mentioned. I know you mentioned you're involved in a lot of estrangement groups, and you probably see this. This is something that I see is that many people on one side will say, I have no idea why we're estranged and they will not tell me. And the person on the other side will say, I've told them a million times. And I'm wondering if that was at all the dynamic between you and your brother.

Yeah. I think he thinks I should have known. There's this feeling like, if you don't know, I'm not going to tell you. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I think that expectation can sometimes be fair when it's between adult child and parent. You know, when we're talking about this big power differential, but it's a little bit different between siblings. When you're talking about things that maybe happen when you were both children or when you both were not like developmentally able to understand what the other person was going through. I think he had his own hurts. I had my own hurts, and we were mired in them, and couldn't see each other's pain. Since reconciling, we've had incredible conversations where we mine history and remind each other of our perspectives on what happened. and why it happened. And it's really interesting, too, because actually, you just had one of these conversations yesterday. And I remember everything. And he remembers nothing. So there's a lot

of me telling him, oh, but he'll tell me something that he vaguely remembers and I'll say, yeah, that didn't happen then. That happened three years earlier. You know, I've got this little roll-a-dacks of days in my brain. Right. And he's locked the whole thing out. And he said, that's why I hope so well. Right. Oh, I should have known. But that's such an accurate representation also of how the two of you handled your childhood and the way that it manifested between the two of you as adults, that he is avoidant

and compartmentalizes to such a degree. Right, until he couldn't anymore. And that was the break point when he actually sought me out to some extent to help them. He got into such a dark place and that changed everything. Right. Which is also an incredible testament, I think, that you can go that long without having a relationship with someone and there's still the person that you reach out to in a moment like that. Well, the beginning of the book is quite interesting for a lot of reasons. It opens with my mother leaving a voicemail on my old machine, my old answering machine telling me that she's absolutely

desperate, that she doesn't know what to do, my brother's in a terrible place, and I need to do something. So I call her up. I'm like, you know, what do you think I'm going to do? What can I do? I haven't talked to him in decades. Well, I don't know, but you need to do something. And we get into this big argument, and she said, you know, you're part of this family. You owe this to your brother. You owe this to me. And then, of course, I'd start to question, what is my role? You know, what do I really owe anybody when my brother hasn't talked to me for decades? And I've maintained this relationship with my mother, but he's really not been a part of it. And so the whole beginning of the book raises a lot of questions about family relations and what are you supposed to

do when they haven't been present in your life. Right. You're speaking to a dynamic also that I find to be quite common, especially with daughters, that the daughter will sometimes become like a second parent and be expected to step into that role when someone is struggling. And when that happens between siblings, the other sibling that's struggling becomes quite resentful of the one that's being asked to take on that parent role because now they're being put below their sibling, right? And it's like, you know better than them. You're going to fix them. You're going to do something for them. And that can create a lot of resentment when parents put a child in that role with the other child. Yeah. I think we had some of that going on. And then through the

reconciliation, we've been able to create more equilibrium in the relationship. But of course I was in that spot because number one, my mother put me there, and number two, he really needed help. That brings me to my next question of, like, I would love to hear what you think that parents can do to avoid these rifts between their children or to make them less likely. Well, one of the things that surprised me when I did the research for this book. And by the way, the book is divided into a memoir portion, other people's voices, and then the social science. And the thing that surprised me is that there are actual risk factors for estrangement. I never know there were risk factors. So family trauma

is one. Parental favoritism. And this is a big one. Poor communication skills. So if the parents out there are trying to avoid estrangement. They need to model skills so that your children know how to negotiate differences. Family values, judgments, and choices. That's a complicated one because people make all sorts of choices for themselves and they may not fit into the family identity or what's called a family myth. And that's this idea of who we are. So, for example, sexual orientation or political views or even the choice of a spouse, if this person does not fit the family's sense of who they are, that member of the family is often cast out, sadly. Addiction and mental health issues, we've discussed a little bit of that.

Sometimes siblings feel this is just more than I can handle. I am not going to take this on. Money is another one that often causes problems in families. I would not encourage people to dole out money to one child and not the other. And finally, one of the interesting parts of all this as well has been that I have found, and Whitney, you could probably talk about this quite a bit, but oftentimes there is a narcissist somewhere in the mix when there is a strange man. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I hate to say this, but who cuts off? Often it's somebody who lacks empathy and can't understand the effect of their behavior. Right, right. I see that among siblings often when there is a parent that is that way, and each of the siblings have maybe chosen to interact with that parent in a different manner or they each serve a different role for that parent. so one has chosen to cut themselves off or the parent has cut them off.

That's what I mean by in the mix. Somewhere in that universe, there's a narcissist. I'm not saying it's necessarily the sibling. I'm saying somewhere in the family constellation. For sure. I think that's a good assessment. So it seems like if parents can be aware of a lot of these things, which we know requires emotional maturity,

and insight and, you know, treating things like PTSD and a trauma history, like some of those things, they sound easy to list, but I think they're things that plague so many families, right? I agree. I was going to say that there are really perilous turning points in these sibling relationships, and they tend to be when the relationship roles change. So, for example, adolescents when one sibling may go off to college or go out into the workforce, marriage. Who a sibling chooses has a big effect on whether the relationship between siblings are sustained. If you marry somebody who wants to remove you or, as I say, appropriate you from the rest of the family, extract you from the family, there's not a lot. the rest of the family can do to save the relationship.

The birth of a baby is another perilous moment as siblings begin to focus on their own family. Divorce or illness. We talked a little bit about that, you know. Sometimes people don't want to take on the issues of the sibling. And one of the most perilous moments in the wife of siblings is parental illness, death, and inheritance. because that is the last stage of competition and the vying for power and love and family loyalty and a lot of conflicts arise over health care and payment for the elderly parent and then, of course, how the family treasures and assets will be divided.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. And I think I have seen all those situations. you know, play out, sometimes several of them in one family, you know, to lead to that outcome. So to wrap this up for everyone, I'd love to know if you have a piece of advice or something that you wish you could have heard when you were in the midst of this long estrangement and needed some encouragement or guidance. Estrangement is not necessarily permanent.

relationships throughout a life with siblings, wax and wane. And there are times when you grow closer and other times when you become much more distant. And it's important to realize that you have to ride it a little bit. And I'm saying this as somebody who was estranged for years. So I was absolutely convinced nothing would ever change. but they did. It did. And I'm so relieved it has because I would say if you can even sustain a limited relationship with a sibling, that's better than a complete cutoff, not just for you, but for all the other family members that are dependent on those relationships.

That's very helpful. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. We will link your book, everything on the show notes. I'm so grateful for the work you've done on this topic. It's so needed. Thank you.