Recently, I found myself sitting with a patient Elsa, crying uncontrollably in my office. It turns out that his sister had stolen his inheritance. However, it was not the loss of money that was devastating her; it was the shocking betrayal of his only brother.
Elsa’s sister Joyce had gotten her dying mother to change her will at the last minute, leaving everything to her. Her mother had been ill for a long time and Joyce had found a way to convince her mother that she and not Elsa really needed and deserved the substantial inheritance.
During our session, Elsa kept saying over and over: “I don’t understand how she could have done this. I don’t understand why!” Although they had never been close and, in fact, had only seen each other at family gatherings in recent years, Elsa didn’t think there was animosity between them; certainly not enough to make Joyce do something so horrible.
Even though Elsa was completely confused by her sister’s behavior, I understood it very well, as it was representative of a pattern of behavior between siblings that she had observed many times before. I have heard dozens of similar stories in which one adult sibling turns on another, shocking and horrifying the person who would never have expected their sibling to lower himself so low. Betrayal almost always had to do with inheritance money and always stemmed from a particular type of family dynamic.
Elsa and Joyce had grown up with parents who were extremely involved in the successful family business and very negligent of both. From the beginning, the girls had to learn to fend for themselves. Elsa was two years older than Joyce and had taken on almost a fatherly role with her, helping Joyce with her homework and listening to Joyce’s hopes and fears. Despite this, they weren’t very close growing up; have widely separated activities and groups of friends.
When they got married, they became even more separated, but they were always cordial when they saw each other on vacations and family events. This is why Elsa was so shocked by Joyce’s seemingly inexplicable behavior around the will. What Elsa couldn’t figure out is how siblings from dysfunctional families tend to end up at odds with each other.
A dysfunctional family is one in which there is abuse, neglect, or both. Adults may not get along and expose their children to terrible arguments or even physical fights. Rather, parents can be allies who care for and protect each other at the expense of their children.
In a dysfunctional family, parents are inappropriate or abusive. As a result, there is not enough love available for children. Sometimes there is no love at all. This creates unconscious competition among children for whatever love may be available. During childhood, a child may ingratiate himself with one or both parents in an attempt to get their attention. They are simply doing their best to survive in an environment deficient in the emotional necessities of life.
Joyce was one of those children. Despite confessing to Elsa on numerous occasions how much she despised her parents, around her was sweetness personified. Elsa had a different way of coping, preferring to find emotional support from her teachers at school, her friends, and her extended family.
As they grew up, Joyce maintained a closer connection with her parents, while Elsa had moved to a different city and sought fulfillment in her new family and in a meaningful career.
What Elsa didn’t realize, as she moved on with her life, was that Joyce secretly resented her for having received more than her fair share of her parents’ love. Although this was by no means true – none of the girls had received any love, actually – Joyce had convinced herself that since she had not been properly loved, Elsa must have been the one who received all the love from the family.
Psychologically, this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that, even for an adult, it is extremely painful to face the truth that your parents did not love you (enough). It’s easier to blame your brother, accusing him of taking all available love and leaving you with nothing. Paradoxically, it is the people who went to great lengths as children to win favor who most often feel this way, as opposed to those who sought emotional fulfillment elsewhere.
In a dysfunctional family where none of the children meet their emotional needs, there is often a child, like Joyce, who goes out of her way to get more attention from her parents. This child establishes a competition between them and one or more siblings. Even if the other siblings are not aware of the competition, they have entered it by default. Every time the actively competitive sister (Joyce) falls deprived of love, she imagines that her passive competition (Elsa) has stolen it from her.
The problem is that whatever happens, winning the parents’ favor is a futile proposition: if the parents ignore the child, then she feels even more hurt and deprived of love; if the parents pay more attention to the child, the child nevertheless feels deep down that there is still no real love for them, but rather an attention born of the parents’ self-interest.
Joyce had decided (consciously or unconsciously) that since she had never felt loved despite all her attempts at love, it must have been Elsa who had received all the love from her parents. Resentment seeped into her for many years until her father passed away and her mother was dying in her hospice bed. Elsa hadn’t visited her very often because when she did, her mother just talked about how wonderful Joyce was. It was clear to Elsa that she and her mother had no relationship and aside from doing the right thing by visiting her every now and then, Elsa was not interested in spending time with a virtual stranger.
No matter how much her mother praised Joyce and ignored Elsa, however, Joyce felt like the private child and saw Elsa as the “spoiled” one. Elsa, on the other hand, because she had given up receiving the love of her parents years ago, did not feel that she was competing with Joyce and, although somewhat estranged from her, she did not feel resentment or hostility towards her sister.
Paradoxically, the child who is best able to recognize that his parents do not have enough (or no) love to give is the one who ends up something better, because he is not constantly frustrated in his attempts to achieve it, and they are not wasting energy, competing with his brothers for her.
When her last remaining father was dying, Joyce panicked. The prospect of losing his mother also meant losing his last chance to finally gain his parents’ love. His anxiety quickly turned to despair, and his resentment towards his sister eventually erupted into his betrayal of Elsa.
Most of the time, money is the substitute for parental love, and Joyce was no different. Faced with the prospect of losing the opportunity to receive his mother’s love, he unconsciously transferred his need for parental love to the parents’ need for money. In his desperation for love, he found a way to convince his mother to give Joyce the money. Taking it all was intended to psychologically remedy his feelings of deprivation and jealousy towards his sister.
Unfortunately, this is also a dead end situation. Elsa feels deeply hurt and even more disconnected from her sister, and Joyce, whether she realizes it or not, will never find happiness or fulfillment with her mother’s money. In reality, there is no way I can make up for the love that was never there.
In a dysfunctional family where the natural resource of love is scarce or absent, the children end up competing by default for this necessity of life. This conversion of former allies and best friends into competitors is sadly the inevitable result of a dysfunctional family, and the classic low point often occurs when the last chance to love is about to disappear.
In a panic, the actively competitive adult girl (in this case, Joyce) represents a terrible betrayal of her passive competitor (Elsa), stealing the money that has come to replace lost love. The betrayal serves to destroy any tenuous connections that may have existed, alienating the siblings forever.
This tragic outcome demonstrates that the legacy of the dysfunctional family is not only the emotional trauma caused by parental abuse or neglect, but also significantly, a toxic breakdown of normal love ties that siblings would otherwise share.
(C) Marcia Sirota MD 2010