New families, an old resource

We are ordinarily used to working with traditional families (parents with their children), but there are many other types of family, more numerous every day, such as:

• single-parent families;
• families that go back to living in the family of origin;
• families from different cultures;
• intercultural families;
• homosexual families with their own or adopted children;
• stepfamilies.

In this article we shall deal specifically with stepfamilies, focusing above all on the siblings in this type of family.

The “sibling resource” seems to us particularly significant because of the specific type of relationship that exists between members of the same family and of the same generational level. Each of them, in fact, shares the family history as regards facts, emotions and feelings, through an individual reading and reconstruction which is sometimes even unlike that of the other members. One can guess how all this heritage may be used in a family therapeutic setting where the differences constitute a wealth for the construction of readings alternative to those the families bring to the consulting room. It is precisely through this construction that it becomes possible to reactivate the life cycle of the family itself, an indispensable condition for a therapeutic change that the family will be able to use in evolutionary terms.

Dunn and Plomin maintain (13 and 14) that environmental factors intensely influence the different readings that are set in motion within families among the members of the sibling group. In particular, it is precisely the keys for reading reality and the environment that one sibling does not share with the others that he uses for his development. From this point of view, a differential interpretation of growth may become a useful ally within the therapeutic intervention. In this sense, each sibling can provide a personalised image and a key of his own for reading the family image, which may produce an innovative version of the collective image shared by the family in treatment.

In the family, siblings function as a subsystem: according to Minuchin (16), it is the “first social laboratory in which children can consolidate their relationships between peers. In this context, children support one another, isolate themselves, accuse one another and learn from one another. In this way, peers and children learn to negotiate, to cooperate and to compete”. The functions that each of the siblings develops within the family depend, to a large extent, on what has been acquired over time as role and as identity within family life.

In therapy with the sibling subsystem, the objectives we seek to reach have to do precisely with the possibility of setting in motion and redefining this particular subsystem, using the resources and competences that belong to it.

The bond that develops between siblings embraces the whole arc of the life cycle: a sibling is the closest relative and the one who lasts longest; he is a peer with the same duration of existence who, at the same time, shares a large part of the social competences and of the relational and affective experiences necessary for development. Our parents have been with us since birth, but nature requires that they leave us at a certain point of their lives; our partners or our children arrive later, usually when we are already adults, and they have not directly shared our childhood and adolescence; siblings (and the odd cousin) have always been there and will go on existing for the greater part of our lives. They are for this reason our “horizontal roots”, just as parents and forebears are the “vertical” ones.

They therefore constitute a great resource, because it is with them that childhood and adolescence are shared, of which they often have a reading that does not entirely coincide with ours: which turns out to be a great wealth for the therapeutic context, where the “other readings” of the same events are exactly what we need.

Frequently, other feelings prevail between siblings: aggressiveness and hostility, jealousy and separation. And it is on these negative emotions that it is most useful to act, because the construction of this type of relationship is the product of the parents and of their ideas.

Why are they so different from one another?

When one speaks in psychology of the constitutive components of personality, the schools of thought are two in number: that of biological heredity (Nature) and the one based on the influence of the environment (Nurture). The first question that all those who have studied siblings have asked themselves has consequently been: “why are they so different from one another?” What is it, then, that makes siblings become so different, when there is a genetic inheritance identical at 50% and they grow up in an identical family environment?

The literature reminds us that individual and family expectations, feelings and sensations concentrate on the foetus, linked to events that may occur during pregnancy, at birth or in the first post-natal period, or again as a consequence of resemblances and identifications between parents and children. In the same way, birth order is important (20), not only because of the specific meaning that the birth of the first child may take on, but also because, as Bank and Kahn point out (2), in most families only one subject can occupy a given psychological space in a given period of time (Pecchioli, 17).

This means that the first child acquires a sort of pre-emptive right over a particular functional position, which will usually not be able to be occupied by a sibling coming after him if the first has not left it free. The other children will have to become something else.

Parents too have the possibility of conditioning their children’s functional positions.

A positive functional assignment may be reinforced by the parents for years, until it becomes a satisfying positive identity (the good one, the intelligent one, and so on). Conversely, a negative functional assignment may weigh on the child’s development and strongly condition him. In healthy families these roles are assigned and modified flexibly, and this guarantees the possibility of development for everyone. But if, on the contrary, a functional position becomes stabilised at the request of one of the parents or of both, and there is complicity among the siblings, a space is being prepared for the symptom.

As for the role of the children and the order of their arrival in the couple, we have general rules that are statistically valid.

Dunn and Plomin state that each sibling grows up in a different family; a provocative assertion which underlines the great changes in the family, the variations in the couple, in the system, in personal factors. Bonds and relationships change if one more person intervenes, and this is also due to the fact that space is reduced.

Each parent and each sibling establishes different relationships with a newcomer, which are influenced by expectations, by resemblances, by the sense of belonging; various positions are taken up, owing in particular to the need to distinguish oneself, to develop, not only through resemblances but also by means of differences.

In analysing Ettore Scola’s film La famiglia, we notice that the relationship between the two brothers who are its protagonists is invalidated by the idea their father forms of them both, an idea that fixes for the whole arc of their lives their roles and their functions, and above all their way of seeing themselves.

In the film the situation remains physiological: there are no particular symptoms arising from these definitions, nor is there any possibility of personal development for either of the two brothers in relation to the other. Outside, in other relationships, each will be able to find other definitions of himself, but inside the family and between them, Carlo will always be the honest one, the reliable one, whom the father on his deathbed had asked to “look after” Giulio, unreliable, a liar and a black sheep.

In the parents’ expectations, which are in no way fortuitous, there are cultural transmissions from the families of origin themselves, frequently identifiable and different; and it is likely that the siblings select paths that may keep them apart for the whole of their lives. If there is a strong three-generational definition, the children feel “paternal” or “maternal” in a very strong sense, that is to say as if they belonged to two different and distant families.

A bond on alternating current

The strongly protective aspect that siblings develop between them is a helping resource characteristic of this subgroup; it has been observed that in adulthood the relationship functions physiologically “on alternating current”, that is to say that the bond, because of the strong reciprocal knowledge, is reactivated at the moment of need and lasts as long as the period during which the need for help exists.

We might add that these bonds frequently acquire strongly ambivalent characteristics: alongside affection and the sense of need, hatred, rivalry and jealousy are frequently present.

A bond which, for example, would necessarily have to continue for ever may take on pathological shades, possibly following on from the relationship between siblings who sacrifice the new couple or the new family.

According to Eugenia Scabini (19), family bonds are solidly united and possess a limited degree of freedom; they are hierarchically structured and are defined from attachment to loyalty. The meaning of these terms is naturally the one given to them by Bowlby (5) and by Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark (3).

High and low accessibility

The emotional bond between siblings depends further on the level of “accessibility”. Bank and Kahn divide siblings into two categories: high and low spatial and temporal accessibility.

In clinical work, on the other hand, we often meet situations that define themselves as of high accessibility while they turn out on the contrary to be of low emotional accessibility, probably because of jealousies and angers provoked by “poor” functions. In these cases the therapist’s attention shifts towards the elaboration of the resentment and of the pain bound up with it; this is carried out over a certain number of sessions, in order to lead the siblings towards a high emotional accessibility and, consequently, to be able to work with their resources.

In Carlo Verdone’s Al lupo al lupo, a situation arises in which the three siblings consider themselves to be of high accessibility, but when they meet again and tell one another their personal experiences in the field of sexuality, they discover on the contrary their differences: things never suspected and never said, which make them distant from each other.

Siblings with high emotional accessibility are consequently characterised by an intense bond. This may also be present for other reasons, for example because of an insufficient influence of the parents. In these cases a deep loyalty develops between them, which grows over the years, which touches powerful emotions, which needs years in order to increase and which influences identity in a stable way.

Loyalty between siblings may go in one direction only or, on the contrary, be reciprocal. The latter is characterised by the presence of a special, private code, mainly comprehensible to them because of their relationship: siblings are sorry when they are far from one another.

Closeness of age and of sex therefore favours accessibility to the events of shared life, while differences of age and of sex diminish it.

The siblings with the very highest accessibility are twins: what is more, monozygotic twins have an identical genetic inheritance and, in the case of dizygotic twins, they share the date of birth in any event, really do grow up together and have between them relational modalities absolutely different from those of other siblings.

They develop personal languages, both between themselves and in relation to the outside world, and with others they have complementary roles, with “interlocking” functions and roles.

This private language distinguishes them from other relatives and friends; they protect one another from physical and psychological attacks on the part of strangers, cooperate with one another, resolve conflicts and contain aggressiveness within acceptable limits, and develop rituals of forgiveness and understanding. The harmony of the group outweighs in importance any individual search for personal benefit; they are compatible and complementary as regards functions and identity.

These linguistic codes, with very concrete meanings that are incomprehensible to others, are defined with great clarity in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon (Lessico famigliare). But there may also be a way of speaking, a habit of organising things in a certain fashion (see the film The Accidental Tourist, in which the siblings agree to keep the larder arranged in alphabetical order, or play cards using a medical language known only to them).

The “Siblings’ Mente”

As has already been said at a recent congress (9), we use work with the sibling subsystem whenever this is necessary, that is to say whenever the resources for change offered by the parental subsystem prove insufficient or, worse still, non-existent.

No sooner does the “Siblings’ Mente” – the mind of the sibling group, the group they form together – appear to be constituted and stabilised than the therapist begins to propose more complex exercises whose objective is the rereading of family situations and, in particular, of their relationship with the parents. The discussion of these themes, experienced in the consulting room, then continues at home, during the meetings of the “Mente”, and the results are reported to the therapist, who becomes more and more an adviser to the re-elaboration and the definition carried out at home. This is facilitated by the fact that, as we said earlier, siblings can share the different readings each of them has made of shared family life and reach conclusions totally different from those that led to the creation and the reinforcement of the symptom.

But change may manifest itself not only on the cognitive level. The functions of each sibling, which were not interchangeable, may now rotate or be subdivided in a less differentiated way among the members of the subsystem.

This allows a different level of freedom for all, makes the remission of the symptom possible and prevents possible relapses, or migrations of the symptom, or of different symptoms, towards other siblings as soon as the identified patient improves.

This type of “experiential” situation allows all the siblings to experience a different relationship with the parents. In the end, it is also possible that one returns to the starting point. But nothing will be as it was before, because each will have a more varied stock of experiences to draw on, quite apart from the fact that the change has consequently had effects on the parents.

The siblings are asked to carry out a task aimed at making the identified patient understand that he is not the only one to have difficulties, as usually emerges from the contents expressed in the consulting room. In practice, the siblings’ task consists in recognising and sharing out among themselves the fragile, aggressive and depressed parts, and this with a double objective: on the one hand to support the identified patient, on the other to prevent the possible passage of the symptom to one of the other siblings.

This work with the sibling subsystem does not in itself constitute a novelty. In structural family therapy, families have frequently been divided into subsystems, with different tasks then being assigned to the different groups, in the consulting room and outside it. It is above all the point of view from which the sibling subsystem is looked at that makes this therapeutic modality different. The “Siblings’ Mente” is, in fact, built with the concrete task of rereading the history of family relationships, even if at the beginning the tasks are rather of a practical kind. We hypothesise that it is exactly this capacity to “reread” family reality that makes change possible.

Naturally, all this is possible only if one manages to establish between the siblings an intense bond founded on trust and on the desire to collaborate.

In the course of our work, we have sometimes come up against difficulties in the construction of the “Siblings’ Mente”. We quickly realised that we were taking for granted the existence of the sibling subsystem, including in cases where, on the contrary, the emotional distances were enormous. We thus became aware that there was another category of siblings with “low accessibility”. In this case, however, it was not the age gap nor the fact of having lived far from one another that determined the low accessibility, but above all the accentuation of the rivalry, the jealousies and the resentments that normally exist between siblings and which, in these cases, proved to be much stronger (9).

In this case, the formation of the “Siblings’ Mente” must be preceded by a re-elaboration of the jealousies and the resentments, carried out first in the consulting room with the therapist, then at home. The signal that this is necessary is precisely the resistance the siblings show to tackling the ordinary tasks of rereading the family system and their own functions.

The great wealth of siblings in therapy is also the possibility of rereading the parental subsystem: what was perceived between them, how they shared out tasks and functions, distributed competences, built and maintained relationships.

One can come to understand how one leaves this family, how one becomes an “adult”.

What is more, in adulthood siblings represent a unique family resource: the horizontal root, the one that survives the disappearance of the vertical roots (parents, grandparents). It is with them that history is shared, it is to siblings that one refers for one’s own culture, for one’s belonging.

Siblings in stepfamilies

A separate consideration must be devoted to stepfamilies, a fairly recent phenomenon; they are frequently families with a single parent, who in most cases is the mother, and who goes on looking after the children.

But there is a type of these families in which the two new partners bring with them the children of their previous relationships, who, besides learning to be siblings to one another, have to learn to be siblings, perhaps in their turn, to a newcomer.

In these new households there are very high expectations, frequently unsatisfied; in every case there appears the wish that everything should work immediately and well (when it is a long and complex journey) and the hope that there will be no manifest aggressiveness.

As regards stepfamilies, we must observe a few characteristics that concern the children-siblings subgroup:

• the strong problems of competition over roles that arise between the children;
• the importance of how the parents hold up if they do not see and do not elaborate the nascent aggressiveness;
• the fact that the youngest members have greater difficulty in being accepted;
• the fact that children who do not manage to fit in and to feel accepted with a role of their own in the new household frequently escape towards their respective families of origin;
• the fact that the firstborn of the new family is the favourite, because he is the leader who succeeds (a typical example: Sigmund Freud);
• the fact that the siblings protect one another and form alliances in this new situation.

It is very difficult to accept the irreversibility of this reality, just as it is complex to manage to cultivate expectations that are feasible and possible rather than fantasy-based, the latter frequently turning into a refuge. For new stepfamilies there are nevertheless favourable parameters likely to make the prognosis optimistic: it is essential to define clearly what the spaces are, the “territory”, and to define accordingly the boundaries of the two families. In the parent-children subsystems, the difficult task is to interweave adequate relationships and to widen the bond with the children.

It then matters that they should share the histories and memories of the earlier family, that no part should be amputated which belongs to the parent one does not live with and to his family of origin; children must have free access to that part of themselves and of their history. In the film The Great Flight, one sees the enormous violence that can be exercised on children, in a recomposed context, through the loss of their own history, sometimes of their surname, amputating the affections and the culture of belonging.

In this way one allows the children to be siblings immediately (it being understood that there is no saying they ever will be), because they have to confront realities of a different kind, in totally new ways; bearing in mind, moreover, that children are frequently asked for something that also runs counter to their life cycle. Let us think of adolescents who are asked to belong to a new household, when an adolescent, at that moment of his life, wants nothing other than distance and “escape” from every family system.

The functions that existed in the two earlier families need to change in the new family situation, and this creates a very strong competition among the new siblings. For example, there is only one firstborn instead of two, and the same holds for the other positions and functions.

One often meets a myth of equality which is false and which may create a denied aggressiveness.

Almost always, blood siblings are closer (the call of the blood) and, in order to create relationships, more time and effort are needed. The family must set itself realistic objectives and hope that with time relationships will be built.

Relational duties for the divorcing couple

Problems in the recomposed sibling group

Normally, blood groups and groups by alliance are created straight away.

Another problem is that the siblings do not have the same surnames or the same filiation, which may create embarrassing situations at school or with friends, especially among the youngest children. In fact, in the United States this problem is considered so important that judges often ask couples to change surname so that all the children bear the same one.

Another possible case: confusions are sometimes created in the sibling group, so that some blood siblings distance themselves and, conversely, others who are not blood siblings but live in the same family create a relationship of real siblings. An even more particular situation may arise: a boy and a girl who are not brother and sister but who have a little brother in common fall in love and cause confusion in the youngest child, who does not understand the new situation.

Differences of age and of sex

In general, the easiest situation is that of young children, who adapt better, or that of adolescents, who can leave home. It is worse for preadolescents, who already understand everything but can do neither the one thing nor the other. Another, more dangerous situation is that of the girl who runs the risk of suffering sexual abuse from her stepfather when she behaves seductively in rivalry with her own mother (a very frequent behaviour in a normal adolescence).

Other problems

Often, children feel guilty because they believe they are the cause of the separation. The parents do not imagine this and do not talk with them about that feeling. On the contrary, it is right to broach the subject, even when one is not sure that the children have this problem, in order to give them confidence.

At other times, children feel good with the resident parents and the new partners, but feel loyalty towards the non-resident parents, which leads them to develop feelings of ambivalence.

In families that join together, the sibling position changes: if there were previously two firstborns, there is now only one, and the same holds for the youngest; and this may change once again if a new brother or sister arrives.

To conclude

Research in this area is very interesting, but it is hampered by the fact that families with an only child are ever more numerous. This factor is certainly one resource less for the family system, and it creates the conditions for a less favourable prognosis for the identified patient.

It is perhaps worth stressing that the increase in the number of only children entails not only the disappearance of the sibling subsystem, but also, in prospect, the extinction of the figure of the uncle and the aunt, that is to say of frequently significant resources of the extended family. In this sense, it is particularly interesting for us that, lately, besides an upturn in the birth rate, two other factors have come to the aid of those who use siblings as a resource: the fact that in immigrant families there is a number of children higher than that of Italian families (fixed at an average of 1.3 children per couple), and the fact that in families recomposed after separation new types of sibling groups are formed.