Family · Siblings
Brothers and sisters: the invisible bond that shapes our lives
The sibling bond is a fundamental relational terrain, often overlooked in family clinical work. Yet it is, most of the time, the longest relationship of our lives: it runs through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and sometimes outlives our parents. Giving siblings back a central place in therapeutic practice is exactly what Stéphanie Haxhe sets out to do.
A psychologist and family therapist, Stéphanie Haxhe works to bring this bond out of the therapeutic blind spot. Through her research, her publications and her clinical practice, she invites professionals to rehabilitate the sibling group — or, more accurately, adelphity — as a powerful lever of intervention in life trajectories.
An unthought in systemic thinking
Siblings long remained peripheral in the theories and practices of family therapy. Even though Minuchin (1974) identified the sibling group as a structuring subsystem in the family’s relational economy, very little work has been specifically devoted to it. Stéphanie Haxhe regrets this sidelining and insists on one point: this bond, like every human bond, needs care, attention and upkeep.
The sibling unthought shows up in a twofold tendency (Haxhe, 2024).
Idealisation
A naive belief in sibling closeness, which assumes that blood spontaneously produces alliance and solidarity.
Demonisation
A bond reduced to jealousy, rivalry, even fratricide, as though hostility were its hidden truth.
Between these two extremes, little room is left for nuance, for ambivalence and for the complexity of lived experience.
A matrix for learning ambivalence
Far from being secondary, the bond between brothers and sisters is, in her view, a genuine laboratory of ambivalence. You can love and detest. You can be close and go through moments of distance. You can share and have moments of selfishness. This bond exposes children to a diversity of emotional experiences, often contradictory, which have to be regulated: jealousy, admiration, competition, solidarity, exclusion.
In her work on new sibling configurations, particularly in stepfamily contexts, Stéphanie Haxhe offers a contemporary reading of these dynamics. She stresses that modern configurations — stepfamilies, siblings by birth, by recomposition or by adoption — require identity and affective elaboration that goes well beyond simple co-presence: it is a process of continuous adjustment, in which children have to redefine the contours of the bond.
A long-lasting bond, between transmission and suffering
Stéphanie Haxhe insists on one major feature of adelphity: its duration. Unlike marital or professional relationships, it spans an entire life. That makes it an invaluable resource… but also a potential vector of persistent suffering. If the bond between brothers and sisters is the longest of our lives, it also means it can hurt for a long time — right up to estrangement.
In her book Frères et sœurs, des liens à soigner (Brothers and sisters: bonds that need care), she develops the idea that this bond directly shapes the way adults build their horizontal relationships: friendships, couples, professional partnerships. These relational spaces, marked by symmetry, inherit the affective learning done within the sibling group: trust, place, conflict management, emotional expression. In coming-out situations, for example, siblings turn out to be key affective mediators, sometimes even before parents.
Therapists and their own siblings: a necessary reflexive work
Stéphanie Haxhe finally takes up a rarely addressed subject: the need for therapists to question their own sibling history. Without prior personal work, she argues, the clinician risks leaving that space fallow in the therapeutic encounter.
“If it’s a door you no longer open for yourself, it’s probably not a door you’re going to open with the families you see.”
Stéphanie Haxhe
This reflexive stance is central to her approach, echoing the contextual work of Boszormenyi-Nagy: it calls for recognising implicit loyalties and family silences, and for bringing to light the therapist’s personal resonances in order to avoid blind spots and projection.
A place to care for, a place to think
Thanks to Stéphanie Haxhe’s contributions, adelphity can be reintegrated into the field of family therapy as a clinical subject in its own right, and not as a mere side effect of the parent-child dynamic. It thus appears as a fundamental space for co-constructing the bond, learning complexity and offering mutual support through life transitions.
Working on this bond means not only repairing old wounds, but also restoring a potential for relational vitality for present and future generations. Seen this way, adelphity becomes a therapeutic, ethical and political lever.
References
Haxhe, S. (2013). L’enfant parentifié et sa famille. Érès.
Haxhe, S. (2024). Frères et sœurs, des liens à soigner. Érès.
Haxhe, S., & D’Amore, S. (2013). La fratrie face au coming-out. Thérapie Familiale, 34(2), 215-230. https://doi.org/10.3917/tf.132.0215
Haxhe, S., Cerezo, A., Bergfeld, J., & Walloch, J. C. (2017). Siblings and the coming out process: a comparative case study. Journal of Homosexuality, 64(9), 1305-1327. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2017.1321349
The full interview with Stéphanie Haxhe — in French — can be watched below.
How to cite this article
Besse, J. (2025, July 13). Brothers and sisters: the invisible bond that shapes our lives. Complexe Systémique. https://app.complexe-systemique.com/en_GB/articles/brothers-and-sisters-the-invisible-bond-that-shapes-our-lives
To go further
- What no one ever tells you about siblings, by Dr Robert NeuburgerThe myth of unconditional sibling love put to the test: within a sibling group, rivalry is often more present than affection.
- Contextual therapy embodied: an interview with Stéphanie HaxheAn in-depth interview with Stéphanie Haxhe on what the contextual approach changes in the way we inhabit relationships.
- Family estrangement: understanding, preventing and repairing broken bondsWhen the bond is cut: understanding what leads to family estrangement and what makes repair possible.
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