When you no longer speak to your brother or sister: what lies behind sibling estrangement

Your mother’s seventieth birthday. The table is long, the cake is the same one as every year, and everyone knows who will not be sitting next to whom. You are at one end, your brother at the other, and in between sit aunts, children and neighbours who act as a buffer. When someone asks, “How’s your brother doing?”, you answer, “Fine, I think.” And you really do only think so. The last thing you know about him, you heard from your mother.

We talk very little about losing contact with a brother or sister. For a break-up with a partner we have words, rituals, even greeting cards. For the fact that you have not spoken for three years to someone you shared a bedroom, parents and a childhood with, we have almost nothing. What remains is an awkward silence at family holidays and the sentence “you know how it is with us”.

In this post I am not going to look for a culprit, and I am not going to claim that every relationship has to be repaired. I would like to show how family systems thinking looks at being estranged from a brother or sister: as something that almost never happens between two people alone, even when that is exactly how it looks.

Estrangement is not rare, only quiet

The American sociologist Karl Pillemer of Cornell University carried out a national survey of 1,340 adult Americans for his book Fault Lines. 27 per cent said they were currently estranged from at least one relative. That is more than one in four. The figure is American and should not be transferred blindly elsewhere, but it does say something important: family estrangement is not a rarity that befalls only especially “difficult” families.

The psychologist Richard Conti reached a similar conclusion with a smaller sample of students: the experience of being estranged from at least one family member was not an exception among those he asked, but something a large share of them knew. I am not aware of comparable research on siblings in Slovenia, so I will not guess at a number.

Why, then, does it feel as though you are the only one? Because people keep quiet about it. Those who have no contact with a brother or sister often dread the question “but what on earth happened?”, because they have no short answer to it. Sometimes they have no answer at all. And because everyone keeps quiet, everyone believes theirs is the only family that failed.

It rarely happens in a single day

In films, contact ends with a slammed door. In reality it mostly resembles a slow cooling. The family communication researchers Kristina Scharp and Elizabeth Dorrance Hall describe estrangement as a process and a continuum, not as a state you either have or do not have. On it are people who never speak, and people who see each other three times a year yet tell each other nothing that matters.

This picture is useful for two reasons. First, it shows that the question is not simply “contact or no contact”. There is a great deal of room between the two extremes, and many people live in it for years. Second, it shows that the last argument, the one you remember as the cause, was almost never the cause. It was the last drop in something that had been filling for a long time.

In his conversations with estranged families, Pillemer describes several pathways that lead to a rift: the long shadow of childhood, the parents’ divorce, a partner the family does not accept, money and inheritance, unmet expectations, and differences in values and lifestyle. I have written about how siblings fall out over an estate in Siblings and inheritance: when you argue over a watch but it’s about something else, so I will not return to money here. What interests me is what all these pathways have in common underneath.

Why the conflict is not just yours

Family therapy grew out of a simple observation: you cannot understand a person by looking at them alone. A family works as a system in which everyone has a place, and when one person moves, everyone has to move. The relationship between two siblings is therefore never only theirs. It contains the parents, their marriage, the grandparents, and everything that was never talked about at home.

Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family therapy, used the term emotional cutoff for broken contact. With it he described a way people manage unresolved tension in their family of origin: by moving away, falling silent or severing the relationship altogether. His key idea is an uncomfortable one. A cutoff reduces the tension, but it does not resolve it. What was left unfinished travels with the person into their marriage, into their relationship with their own children, sometimes into work. I describe how this shows up in everyday relationships in Fused or cut off: two ways a relationship loses its balance.

This does not mean that distance is always wrong. It only means that distance by itself is not yet an answer to the question of what happened between you. Against the cutoff Bowen set differentiation: the capacity to remain who you are even in the presence of people around whom you were once someone else.

Roles you were given, not ones you chose

In many families, roles are handed out to children early. One is “the good one”, the other “the difficult one”. One is “sensible”, the other “sensitive”. These labels do not describe the children; they describe what the family needed from them. The responsible child took the load off a tired parent. The difficult one drew the attention that would otherwise have fallen on the tension between the parents. You can read more in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?

The trouble starts when you both grow up and one of you steps out of the role. The sister who was always “the one you can rely on” says at forty-five that she will no longer look after Mum on her own. The brother who was “the problem” sorts his life out and expects finally to be seen differently. A system rarely answers such a shift with congratulations. More often it answers with pressure to keep everything as it was, and that pressure comes precisely from the sibling who stands to lose something in the new arrangement.

This is also where the question of whom the parents preferred belongs. The sociologist Jill Suitor and her colleagues showed in adult children that perceived maternal favouritism is linked to poorer relationships between siblings, regardless of who the favourite was. Even for the one who received more, the bond with a brother or sister is soured. That quiet inequality is the subject of The favourite child: a quiet inequality in the family.

Loyalty and coalitions: who is on whose side

The second layer is loyalty. Family therapy has spoken for decades of invisible loyalties: the faithfulness a child feels towards their parents even when they cannot put it into words and even when it costs them dearly. Between siblings this shows up very concretely. If the father was left alone and embittered after the divorce, then to the son who stayed by him, each of his sister’s visits to their mother can feel like a betrayal. On the surface the conflict is between brother and sister. In truth the brother is continuing his father’s war.

The third layer is coalitions. Salvador Minuchin, the founder of structural family therapy, described what happens when a parent in conflict with their partner leans on a child. An alliance forms across the generational boundary: mother and daughter against father, father and son against mother. The two children are thus placed early on opposite banks of a conflict that is not theirs. By the time they are adults the parents’ conflict may be long gone, but the banks remain. How such alliances are drawn and recognised is described in more detail in Siblings, alliances and coalitions: the invisible geometry of a family, and you will find the concept itself in the knowledge base under triangulation.

The fourth layer is boundaries. Where it is unclear in a family what belongs to whom, siblings start arguing about things they ought to settle with their parents, or each with themselves. Who will drive Dad to the doctor. Who is allowed to know about the sister’s divorce. Who tells Mum she can no longer live alone. When the boundaries within a family are blurred, everyone carries something that is not theirs, and everyone feels they carry more than the others.

A loss with no funeral

The family therapist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss for losses without a clear ending. She described two forms. In the first, a person is physically absent but very present in your mind, as with someone who has gone missing. In the second, they are physically here but no longer present in the way they were, as with dementia. Estrangement from a sibling belongs to the first form: your brother is alive, perhaps twenty minutes away, and at the same time he is not there.

Grief of this kind is hard precisely because it cannot be completed. There is no day on which it happened. There are no people offering their condolences. And there is always the possibility that something will change, so hope and pain arrive in waves: on a birthday, at news of an illness, at a photograph in which you are both still children. Boss stresses that with such a loss there is nothing wrong with you if you cannot “work through” it. The problem lies in the circumstances, not in your resilience.

I have written about this kind of sorrow at greater length in Grieving someone who is still alive: dementia, addiction, estrangement. Here I will add just one thing: with a sibling you are not grieving only for them. You are also grieving for the only witness to your childhood. No one else knows what Grandma’s kitchen smelled like, or what it meant when Dad went quiet.

What lies beneath “I have nothing to say to her”

When an adult says they do not care about their brother or sister, sometimes that is true. More often, indifference is the top layer. Beneath it is anger, and beneath the anger is usually something more vulnerable: the disappointment that the person who should have known you best did not see you. A conversation like that might go as follows (composed, not a real person):

“My sister and I haven’t spoken in four years. Honestly, I have nothing to say to her.”
“What would you tell her if you knew she would listen right to the end?”
“… That I was alone at Dad’s funeral. She came, but she stood with Mum’s relatives.”
“Where do you think she should have stood?”
“Next to me. Once in her life, next to me.”

Both systemic themes are in this short extract. The sister stood where she had stood all her life: on their mother’s side. He stood where he had always been: with their father, alone. The scene at the cemetery was not a new quarrel; it was the family’s old arrangement put on display. As long as he sees it only as his sister’s coldness, he is left with anger. Once he sees it as a pattern in which both of them were children, something else may appear.

A cut-off never affects only two people

When two siblings stop speaking, the whole family has to rearrange itself. The parents are often the first to be torn by it: they celebrate twice, watch what they say to whom, and unwittingly become a letterbox. “Your brother was asking how you are.” “I told your sister you’d had an operation.” It is understandable, but it cements the cut-off, because contact that runs through a third person is never really contact.

Children are affected too. Cousins who grew up together stop seeing each other without anyone telling them why. A child rarely draws the conclusion you would wish from this: they learn that in this family, people who fall out are simply erased. If you have children, you do not need to explain the details. It is enough for them to hear the truth in a form suited to their age: “Your uncle and I aren’t getting on at the moment. It isn’t your fault and you don’t have to choose.”

And then there are the turning points: a parent’s illness, a funeral, the sale of the house. That is when siblings who do not speak suddenly have to agree on the hardest things of all. It makes sense to think about this beforehand, not at a hospital bedside.

An exercise: a map of the cut-off

This exercise does not require you to write to or ring anyone. Its purpose is to let you look at your story from above for twenty minutes. You need a sheet of paper and a pen.

1. Draw the family. Your parents, yourself, your siblings, and grandparents and partners where relevant. A simple genogram will do: circles, squares and lines.
2. Mark who was with whom. Use a thick line to join those who were close in childhood, and a zigzag for those who were in conflict. Do not think too long; the first thought is usually the right one.
3. Give everyone a role. One word beside each name: good, loud, invisible, go-between. For yourself and your sibling, also note who gave you that role.
4. Look for earlier cut-offs. Did anyone in the previous generation stop speaking to a brother or sister? An aunt who was never mentioned? Cut-offs tend to repeat in families, because they are a way of handling conflict that children learn by watching.
5. Finish one sentence. “On the surface our conflict is about …, but really it is about …” Write down whatever comes. You do not have to show the page to anyone.

The exercise will not repair anything. It can, however, shift the question from “whose fault is it” to “what did we both inherit”, and that is often the first moment in a long time when the story holds something other than anger.

When distance is the right answer

Everything above could sound as though behind every estrangement there is a misunderstanding that merely needs to be understood. That is not so. The systemic view has a limit, and it is only fair to name it.

If your brother or sister was violent towards you, if they sexually abused you, if they still humiliate, threaten or exploit you today, then distance is not an emotional cutoff but protection. Understanding a family pattern obliges no one to return to a relationship in which they are not safe. A sibling’s severe addiction or untreated mental distress can also mean that contact is possible only on clear terms, or not at all for now. If you feel in danger in a relationship with a relative, in Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55, or the police on 113 in an emergency.

A second limit: reconciliation takes two. You can do everything “right”, write a carefully considered letter, and receive no reply. That is not your failure. And a third: forgiving and resuming contact are two different things. The first you can do alone, within yourself. For the second you need a sibling who is willing to behave differently. The difference is explained in Forgiveness is not reconciliation: what forgiveness is and what it does not require.

If you want to try again

Alongside the estranged, Pillemer also sought out people who had restored contact after years of silence. Two things stand out in what they told him. First: many gave up the demand that the two of them agree about the past. Not because they accepted the other’s version, but because they realised nobody was going to win that battle. Instead of “admit what you did” they began with “I want us to be in touch again, and this is what I need now”.

Second: they set clear terms for the future. Not general ones, but concrete ones. We do not discuss my partner. You do not turn up unannounced. When we start shouting, we end the call and speak again in a week. A boundary here is not a punishment; it is what makes the new contact possible in the first place.

If you are considering a first step, let it be a small one. A short message on a birthday is less risky than a four-page letter about everything that happened. And before that, answer one question honestly: could you manage contact even if the apology never comes? If the answer is no, that is entirely legitimate. It is simply good to know it before you send the message.

How therapy can help

People rarely come to therapy directly because of a sibling. More often the subject opens up alongside something else: caring for ageing parents, their own marriage, a sense that the same conflict keeps repeating with colleagues or friends. Relational family therapy, in which I am training, starts from exactly this: that the relational patterns of our family of origin repeat where we least expect them.

The good news is that you do not need your sibling in the same room to work on this relationship. You can come alone. The aim is not necessarily reconciliation. The aim is for you to know what happened, which part of it is yours, and to decide about contact freely and not from an old role. If you are curious how cut-offs and alliances in your family were passed down the generations, the longer, 90-minute genogram session A Look into the Past is designed for that. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• Being estranged from a brother or sister is not rare; in an American survey, more than one adult in four reported estrangement from at least one relative.
• Estrangement is mostly a process and a ladder, not a single event. The last argument is rarely the real cause.
• Beneath the conflict there are almost always family roles, loyalty to parents, old alliances and unclear boundaries. The conflict is not just yours.
• What you feel is ambiguous loss: grief with no ending and no ritual. Not being able to “close” it is not a weakness of yours.
• Distance is sometimes protection and entirely the right answer. Where you decide to try again, small steps and clear terms help, not an agreement on who was right.