Sibling Trajectory

Earlier this year, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about my one sibling, and how we could have become such diametrically different people. We shared the same room in the same house, the same parents. I was convinced that we did something very different in our early years that has birthed very different approaches to life. I wanted to understand what that was.

I thought about our parents and how normal and smart they seemed in my early years, and how different they seemed by the time I was around nine or ten. Literally, I watched them decline to become reclusive alcoholics. I didn’t enjoy what I saw and experienced. They did many things that to me were wrong, and I didn’t like that because it made me sad to see my parents going in what seemed to be an obvious wrong direction, obvious even to a kid. I knew they were my parents and I had to obey them, but I didn’t like the way they lived and the people they had become.

Interestingly, my older sibling had a very different attitude about their lives. Her attitude was one of oh well, who cares. I cared; not only because I had to live in what over time became a very toxic environment, but for what they were becoming. I loved my parents, but I desperately wanted to see them become better people, and I definitely did not want to follow in their footsteps.

As I watched their steady and slow demise, I made judgments about the things they did. But let me clear that up. I didn’t judge them, but I did judge their actions and activities. I decided early on that alcohol was not something that would control my life even though I did drink it in my early adulthood. My refusal to accept their antisocial behaviors even caused me to be treated as a state enemy with my mother. Nevertheless, I simply refused to participate in her dealings, which she didn’t like very much at all.

The point is, my sibling seems to have inherited quite a few of their weaknesses. In other words, the very things she refused to judge in her own heart and consciousness, are the very things that have her bound today. It’s almost as if life expects us to learn from our environment even as children, and to make decisions at the age we are consciously able to do so.

When our awareness informs us that something is wrong, I’m beginning to wonder if we have an internal obligation to judge it as wrong and to not consent. As I said before, we can’t tell our parents how to live, but we can adjudicate the things they do and learn from them. In my experience, those who turn a blind eye to wrong are much more likely to repeat it.

So what do you do if you were among the group as my sibling? Are you simply doomed? I don’t think so. I believe this is the place where truth can make us free. To do so, you must go back and re-look at your parents and judge their behaviors for what they were. Let me stress, this is not to condemn, and it doesn’t mean we don’t love them. It means that some things they did are not the standards we want for our lives. Making this decision allows us to close those doors. Until we do, we may remain bound by what we consented to.

One caveat. Wrong does not always come dressed as what we might call overtly wrong such as over-indulgence of alcoholism or drugs. Sometimes it appears even as a virtue. Go back and be honest about how you felt about what you saw and experienced. It just may be the big break that sets you free from the past.