Did You Marry Your Sibling?
The childhood sibling relationships is, in some ways, a laboratory for all subsequent relationships. It’s your first experience of living together with peers. You were sharing not only your toothpaste, but maybe bedrooms, toys, and then later, friends, and clothes. In early childhood (pre-school), this is where you learned (or didn’t learn) to start, resolve, and avoid fights. Where you learned (or didn’t learn) to compete, save face, negotiate, cooperate. You learned (or didn’t learn) to move between loving and fighting and back to loving again, to exert your power and when to withdraw. And, if you had less physical power, you learned (or didn’t learn) to draw upon other skills to “get even.” Skills such as humor, manipulation, blackmail, tattling, bartering – and lots more.
First, let me credit Sandra Watanabe who first used the concept in a chapter in my (co-edited) book, Siblings in Therapy: Life Span and Clinical Issues. (You can read a description of contents here.)
So, when you think about what you learned or didn’t learn back in your first living together peer relationship, you can see how many of those same issues come up in all subsequent marriages or love relationships. Many of the skills you learned back then to deal with problems are the same that you encounter now in your adult love relationships. Hence, it makes sense to refer to your first go-round with these issues your “first marriage.”So, you may not be surprised, if you think carefully about this, that the problems you had in your “first marriage,” may be the same problems you have had with subsequent one(s).
There used to be a joke about couples arguing about whether to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube from the bottom or the middle. And, the therapist’s response was how did you handle that when you were little with your siblings. (I rarely hear this joke now, perhaps because couples have their own tubes or their own bathrooms!)
Using a grandiose over-generalization (but one that is valid whenever it fits), all the same skills you need for sharing your adult love life, you learned well or not so well back then – before you knew anything about toothpaste jokes.
If you have an interest learning more about this or in improving your "first marriage," click here to get information about my upcoming teleseminar on siblings, Wednesday, October 19, 2011.
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