Why cant you just be like your brother or sister? You get away with everything and I am constantly punished. That’s not fair. Ever heard any of these phrases? Sibling rivary It’s one of those quiet wounds that british society doesn’t want to talk about. When brothers or sisters stop speaking — not for a week, not for a year, but indefinitely — there’s no funeral, no ritual, no sympathy card. You’re expected to “get on with it.” But estrangement between siblings can haunt the background of a man’s life like unfinished music. It lingers in the silences between birthdays, weddings, and Christmas gatherings. It changes the story of who we think we are.
Common Sibling Roles in Family Systems
The Golden Child (The Hero)
The high achiever, the “good one,” who brings pride and stability to the family. Often the parent’s emotional caretaker or symbol of success. They are diven by the need for approval, love, and safety through perfection. The Golden Child carries enormous pressure, failure feels catastrophic. They often struggle with anxiety, imposter syndrome, and difficulty expressing vulnerability.
The Scapegoat (The Rebel)
The “problem” child who acts out, breaks rules, or speaks the family’s unspoken truths. The scapegoat often absorbs the family’s collective shame or dysfunction, they become the lightning rod for tension. They are often blamed, rejected, or excluded. Yet, paradoxically, they’re the most emotionally honest member of the family.
The Lost Child (The Invisible One)
Quiet, withdrawn, and self-sufficient. They avoid conflict and often disappear emotionally to stay safe. They are diven by fear of rejection and overwhelm. By being invisible, they reduce stress in the home. They grow up disconnected from their own needs, often struggling with loneliness or dissociation.
The Mascot (The Clown or Peacemaker)
The family comedian, using humour or charm to diffuse tension. They are diven by anxiety and a deep desire to keep the peace. Laughter becomes a survival strategy. They are liked but rarely seen deeply. Beneath the jokes, there’s often sadness or fear.
The Caretaker (The Parentified Child)
Takes on adult responsibilities early, caring for parents or siblings emotionally or physically. They are diven by the need for stability and belonging through usefulness. They often become over-responsible adults, drawn to fix others while neglecting themselves.
The Overachiever vs. The Underachiever
A common sibling pairing. One excels (to please), the other “fails” (to escape pressure). They are diven by family polarisation, children define themselves by being the opposite of their sibling. Both are trapped in identity roles that are reactions, not choices.
The Golden Scapegoat (Hybrid Role)
Some children are praised publicly but punished privately — loved conditionally. They are diven by inconsistent parenting or narcissistic family systems. The impact on them is deep confusion, they don’t know who they really are or what’s “true” about them.
The Ghost Sibling
When one sibling dies, disappears, or becomes estranged, others live in their shadow. They are diven by family grief and idealisation of the absent one. Surviving siblings feel invisible or guilty for being alive or different.
The Outsider (The Black Sheep by Choice)
Chooses distance, leaves home early, cuts contact, or defines identity against the family narrative. They are diven by desire for authenticity and autonomy. The impact for them is freedom mixed with loneliness and guilt.
The Proxy Parent (Often in Immigrant or Working-Class Families)
An older sibling who raises the younger ones due to parental absence or stress. They are diven by family duty and cultural expectation. The impact for them is deep empathy but also emotional exhaustion. Struggles to form identity outside the caregiver role.
Sibling roles are rarely static, they are relational contracts that shift depending on context. The “golden child” might become the “caretaker” after a parent dies, or the “lost child” might emerge as the family’s quiet stabiliser in crisis. For men, these roles are often masked by masculinity scripts: stoicism, pride, competitiveness, or silence. In therapy, exploring these sibling identities can help men understand the origin story of their emotional habits, the first arena where they learned how to win, lose, hide, or help.
The Unspoken Grief of Losing a Sibling Who’s Still Alive
In counselling rooms, this grief often arrives disguised. A client says he’s “fine with it” — that his brother “just went his own way.” But if you stay quiet long enough, you’ll often hear the fracture underneath:
“I don’t even know who he is anymore.”
“She blocked me on everything after Dad’s funeral.”
“We used to be inseparable.”
Unlike bereavement, sibling estrangement doesn’t allow for closure. There’s no final goodbye. Instead, it’s a living loss, a person who still exists in the world but no longer belongs to yours. We sometimes call this ambigious loss. Ambiguous loss, a term coined by researcher Pauline Boss, describes a loss without clear definition or certainty, making it difficult to process and achieve emotional closure. It occurs in two primary forms: physical absence with psychological presence (e.g., a missing person) or physical presence with psychological absence (e.g., dementia). This form of loss can lead to frozen grief, confusion, and prolonged emotional distress because there is no verification of death or certainty of the person’s return
Research from Stand Alone and YouGov shows that roughly 1 in 14 Britons have permanently cut contact with a sibling, and around 17% have done so temporarily. Behind these numbers are untold stories of betrayal, control, resentment, and silence. But estrangement isn’t always about conflict. Sometimes it’s about protection. When one sibling steps away to preserve their mental health, the family often treats it as betrayal, not survival.
The Rivalry That Never Ends
Sibling rivalry is often seen as a childhood phase, two kids fighting over toys, grades, or attention. But studies like the UK Millennium Cohort Study and NOW’s adult poll show it rarely ends there. Around a quarter of adults say they still feel some form of rivalry with their siblings — in career, success, or even parenting.
For many men, rivalry quietly evolves into comparison anxiety, the sense that their brother’s achievements invalidate their own.
“He bought a house before me.”
“He’s married, I’m not.”
“Mum’s always more proud of him.”
In therapy, this rivalry can hide behind humour or avoidance. Men may downplay it as “banter,” but beneath the surface there’s often a sense of failure, shame, or invisibility. And that shame becomes the emotional fuel of estrangement.
When Brothers Become Strangers
What makes sibling estrangement so psychologically complex is its mixture of shared history and fractured identity. Siblings are witnesses to your beginnings, they know your voice before it changed, your face before it aged. When that bond breaks, it’s not just the relationship that ends, it’s the mirror.
For men, who are often socialised to measure their worth through loyalty and control, estrangement can feel like losing both. One man told me in therapy:
“He’s my brother. But I can’t trust him. I can’t even talk to him without feeling sick.”
He wasn’t just mourning his brother, he was mourning the version of himself who believed that family meant safety.
Counselling research shows that men frequently experience moral injury within families, that deep conflict between what they believe is “right” and what they’ve been forced to do to protect themselves. Walking away from a toxic sibling can feel like breaking a sacred code.
The Family Myth: “Blood Is Thicker Than Water”
Culturally, we’ve built an entire mythology around family unity. “You only get one family.” “Blood is thicker than water.” These sayings are moral chains, they keep people tied to relationships that may be abusive, manipulative, or emotionally barren.
Estranged clients often describe enormous guilt. They replay childhood memories in search of what they “should have done differently.” Society tells them that family loyalty is a virtue, but psychology tells us that loyalty without boundaries is self-betrayal. In many sessions, I’ve seen men cry not because of what their brother or sister did, but because they still feel like they owe him forgiveness.
The Invisible Dynamics Beneath Estrangement
Research from Edge Hill University found that adult siblings who become estranged often describe a pattern: one sibling plays the caretaker, the other the critic. One gives, the other takes. Over years, these roles solidify until one person collapses under the weight of emotional imbalance.
Other studies highlight that estrangement often follows major family transitions — parental death, inheritance disputes, divorce, or the exposure of long-suppressed abuse. These events act like earthquakes, revealing fractures that have always existed beneath the surface. Yet few families know how to process conflict healthily. Instead, silence becomes the default language, a kind of cold emotional warfare.
From the Counselling Chair
When a man talks about a broken bond with his brother or sister, he’s rarely just talking about that relationship. He’s talking about what love costs, the price of being misunderstood, the exhaustion of being the “strong one,” the shame of being cut off.
In therapy, we have to resist the urge to push reconciliation. Instead, we help men redefine what family means, sometimes from scratch. That might look like:
- Reframing estrangement as an act of self-preservation, not failure.
- Allowing grief without forcing forgiveness.
- Helping clients develop emotional language for loss that doesn’t involve death.
- Exploring chosen family — communities, friendships, or faith groups that restore connection without obligation.
Breaking the Silence: A New Framework for Healing
What if we treated sibling estrangement not as a scandal, but as a rite of emotional passage, a painful but necessary separation that allows individuals to become whole?
In pluralistic counselling terms, that means integrating different approaches:
- Existential therapy to explore meaning and identity after loss.
- Compassion-focused therapy to address internalised guilt and shame.
- Narrative therapy to rewrite the family story in a way that honours both truth and survival.
For men, especially, therapy must create a space where emotional disconnection isn’t pathologised but understood. Many men haven’t been given the vocabulary for complex loss. They say “I’m fine” because they’ve never been taught how to say, “I’m grieving someone who’s still alive.”
Reimagining Brotherhood
Maybe the point isn’t to go back, but to grow forward. True brotherhood isn’t just blood or surname; it’s recognition. It’s being seen, respected, and met halfway. In some cases, reconciliation happens. In others, it doesn’t, and peace must be found elsewhere. But in every case, healing begins when the silence breaks. When a man finally says: “I still love him. But I can’t lose myself again.” That’s not weakness. That’s evolution.
Top 10 Reasons for Sibling Rivalry
Parental Comparison and Favouritism
When one sibling is seen as the “golden child” and another as the “problem,” rivalry takes root early. Even subtle comparisons (“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”) can plant deep resentment and shape lifelong self-worth struggles.
Competition for Attention and Love
Children often compete for emotional resources — affection, validation, and approval. In families where love feels scarce or conditional, siblings may see each other as rivals for survival rather than allies in growth.
Birth Order and Roles
Family systems theory shows how roles — the responsible eldest, the rebellious middle, the spoiled youngest — can breed tension. These roles can become prisons, shaping personality and perpetuating rivalry into adulthood.
Unresolved Family Trauma
When parents carry unprocessed trauma (addiction, abuse, loss), siblings often take on different coping roles. One becomes the rescuer, another the rebel, another the invisible one. These patterns create deep emotional divides that mimic the parents’ own wounds.
Unequal Parental Expectations
Some siblings carry the family’s hopes (“You’ll make us proud”), while others are treated as disappointments. The burden of expectation can isolate both — one resented for being the favourite, the other for being the scapegoat.
Jealousy and Insecurity
When self-esteem is low, a sibling’s success can feel like a personal failure. Instead of pride, achievement triggers comparison. This is especially common in adulthood — careers, relationships, and financial stability become new battlegrounds.
Parental Divorce or Family Breakdown
Divorce can polarise siblings: one may align with Mum, another with Dad. They inherit adult conflicts they never chose, and the rivalry becomes a way of managing grief or divided loyalty.
Cultural and Gender Expectations
In many cultures, boys and girls are treated differently — sons may be favoured or burdened with responsibility, daughters expected to serve or sacrifice. These cultural scripts fuel resentment and create emotional hierarchies within families.
Personality and Temperament Differences
Some siblings are simply wired differently — introvert vs extrovert, compliant vs assertive. Without parental understanding, these differences are misread as defiance or arrogance, fuelling ongoing friction.
Inheritance, Money, and Adult Roles
Rivalry doesn’t always fade with age — it often intensifies around family assets, care of ageing parents, or financial inequality. These disputes reopen old wounds about fairness, love, and recognition.
As I have been saying, sibling rivalry isn’t just about conflict, it’s a mirror of the family’s emotional economy. Who was allowed to be seen, who had to disappear, who carried the guilt or shame. In therapy, exploring sibling dynamics can unlock generational patterns of comparison, control, and conditional love.
Class, Culture, and the Weight of Expectation
Sibling relationships don’t exist in a vacuum, they sit inside the machinery of class, culture, and family expectation. What it means to be a “good brother” in Reading or Surrey is not the same as what it means in Uganda, Birmingham, or Brixton. The rules of family — who speaks, who sacrifices, who stays loyal — are written differently depending on where you stand in society’s hierarchy.
Working Class Families
In many working-class families, siblings aren’t just relatives, they’re co-survivors. They’ve shared the same bedrooms, the same second-hand clothes, the same shouted arguments over unpaid bills. Brotherhood, in this context, isn’t about emotional intimacy but loyalty under fire. When estrangement happens here, it can feel like a betrayal of everything the family stood for.
“We went through hell together, how can you just walk away?”
For working-class men, therapy often reveals the unspoken rule: family problems stay inside the family. Talking about them to a counsellor feels like disloyalty, another form of class shame. So the pain of estrangement is swallowed rather than spoken, often emerging later as depression, addiction, or rage.
Sociologist Richard Sennett wrote about this in The Hidden Injuries of Class — how shame and pride intertwine in the lives of working men. A brother who “gets out” (through education or success) might be resented for “thinking he’s better.” A brother who stays might feel like he’s failed. These unspoken comparisons fracture love into competition.
Middle-Class Families
In middle-class or affluent families, sibling estrangement often hides behind politeness. You might see each other at Christmas, but conversations are rehearsed performances. Here, the pressure isn’t survival, it’s presentation. Who’s doing well, whose kids are thriving, whose house looks like something out of Grand Designs.
Underneath that civility, rivalry can turn toxic. Research from sociologist Katherine Davies (University of Sheffield) suggests that middle-class families tend to “curate” closeness, maintaining a façade of harmony even when resentment runs deep. When estrangement finally happens, it’s treated as a scandal — something to manage, not mourn.
For male clients, this can feel emasculating. “We’re supposed to be the sensible family,” one man told me, “but I haven’t spoken to my brother in eight years.” His family didn’t talk about the silence, they just edited it out of the group chat.
Culture
Culture dictates how far loyalty stretches. In collectivist cultures — African, South Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern — family is not just personal, it’s spiritual. You don’t just belong to your family; you owe it. When a man distances himself from a sibling in these contexts, it’s rarely seen as self-care. It’s seen as rebellion — or worse, disrespect.
In Ugandan or Caribbean families, for instance, the idea of cutting off a sibling may be unthinkable. You’re expected to “forgive and forget,” no matter the cost to your mental health. The cultural expectation is that the family name must stay intact, even if the individuals within it are breaking. That’s why many Black and Brown men sit in therapy rooms and whisper their truth like a confession:
“My brother’s toxic. But if I say that, I’m the problem.”
For men raised in diasporic families, estrangement can also echo colonial wounds — the pain of disconnection, of migration, of losing home twice. The act of cutting ties with a sibling sometimes feels like replaying an older trauma: leaving one’s land, language, or ancestors behind.
The Class-Culture Crossover
Class and culture don’t exist separately; they merge to create unique patterns of silence. In some working-class Black families, masculinity means endurance — you take hits, you don’t talk. In middle-class immigrant families, success becomes proof of belonging — so failure or emotional breakdown are hidden. In white middle-class British families, politeness masks estrangement so effectively that people forget to grieve it. Across all of these, men often internalise the same message: “You’re not supposed to feel hurt. Just handle it.”
Counselling Through Class and Culture
For me as a counsellor, the challenge is to read these invisible contracts. When a client says, “We just don’t talk anymore,” it’s rarely just about the brother. It’s about class shame, cultural duty, or the fear of betraying one’s upbringing.
Pluralistic counselling can help by adapting its lens:
- For working-class men: normalising therapy as an act of strength, not betrayal.
- For men from collectivist cultures: exploring how boundaries and honour can coexist.
- For middle-class men: helping them strip away the performance of success to access genuine vulnerability.
What’s needed isn’t just empathy, it’s cultural reflexivity. The counsellor has to ask, “What rules of family and masculinity has this man inherited, and who would he be without them?”
Rewriting the Family Code
If the old script says, “Blood is everything,” the new one might say, “Peace is everything.” If class once said, “Stay in your place,” the new one might say, “Find your pace.” Healing estrangement isn’t about defying family values, it’s about redefining them. It’s about creating a new kind of loyalty, built not on silence or sacrifice, but on honesty. Because sometimes, the most loving thing a man can do is to step back — not to abandon his family, but to preserve his soul.
Sibling estrangement is one of the last taboos in family psychology, an invisible epidemic hidden behind politeness and Christmas cards. Yet in the counselling room, its echoes are everywhere: in anger that won’t settle, in loneliness that doesn’t make sense, in men who carry unspoken guilt for simply choosing peace.
If we can bring this conversation into the open — in therapy, in men’s groups, in public life — we might finally allow those cut by bloodlines to heal in their own way. Because sometimes, the bravest thing a man can do is to stop chasing a family that refuses to see him, and start building one that does.
If You’re Reading This and It Resonates…
If you’re a man in Reading, Wokingham, Newbury, or the wider Berkshire area struggling with family estrangement, rivalry, or silence — you’re not alone.
At Male Minds Counselling, I a male therapist in Reading who specialises in supporting men to:
- Understand their emotional patterns.
- Heal old family wounds.
- Build healthier relationships — with others and with themselves.
Sessions are available in-person in Reading and online across the UK.
Visit malemindscounselling.com or message me directly for a confidential consultation.
Cassim
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