Hey Not Therapy Newsletter Community!
My name is Kaimei and I’m one of the coaches at Not Therapy. I’m also Head of Brand and Marketing, so if you haven’t seen our new website, social media, or YouTube channel yet, go take a peek 🫣!
I wanted to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately, and it started with one of those two hour plane conversations where you end up knowing a stranger’s entire life story by the time you land.
She was decked out in backpacking clothes and gear, like she was planning to summit something the second we touched down in Utah. I’m very outdoorsy myself, so we struck up conversation about our love for the mountains. Her name was Lizzie. I told her about my hobbies, what I do for work, etc. When I told her what Not Therapy is all about, she shared that her older brother had been a lot like the teens and young adults we work with. Wilderness, residential, the whole run of it. He’s doing well now. He works full time as a server at a restaurant in San Diego, surfs before every shift, has a girlfriend, has a life that actually holds together. I told her how great all of that sounded, how much better he seemed to be doing, and she agreed. I was about to open my book and settle into the flight when I realized I still didn’t really know much about her. We had only talked about her brother.
Oops.
I felt bad. So I asked her: What about you? What are you doing right now?
She’s taking a gap year, she said, because she’s been feeling really lost and is finally starting to work on her own mental health. All her gear was for the Uinta Highline Trail, which she was about to go hike solo. And then we returned to the topic of her brother, except this time she told me what it was like from her side of things. What it was like for her when he was lashing out, doing drugs, falling apart. It was not easy for her.
There was a five year age gap between them, and she said her parents assumed she was too young, too preoccupied, too different from her brother to really understand the gravity of the situation at the time. Her words: “I understood a lot more than they think I did.”
She’d hide in her room while her brother and her parents had explosive arguments, and one night she wrote a promise to herself in her journal. She would never fight like that. She would never argue like that. She would Never. Get. Angry.
Quick question for everyone reading this. Um…Do you get angry?
I’m going to assume the answer is DUH. Yes, of course I do.
And you know what? I damn hope so.
Anger is a normal human emotion, and a genuinely healthy one when you’ve got a healthy way of expressing it. Lizzie made herself a promise no human being on earth can keep, and she made it as a kid sitting on her bedroom floor listening to a situation she had no part in creating and no power to fix.
The person in the other room
When one member of a family is going through mental health struggles, everyone reorganizes around it. Parents usually end up doing their own work at some point, whether that’s therapy, a coach, a parent group, or just a lot of reading at 1 am. Which is good, and necessary.
But there’s almost always someone else in the house getting overlooked and it’s usually the sibling.
How much it affects them depends on a lot of things. Older or younger. In the house every day or off at college. Already dealing with their own mental health struggles or not. Close with their sibling or barely speaking.
Still, in the work we do at Not Therapy, I very rarely meet a family where the siblings come through unaffected.
These are the four patterns I see most often:
💙The sibling who bottles it up. Nothing is ever wrong. They’re fine. They’re always fine. This is Lizzie.
💙The sibling who becomes the golden child. They turn into the proof that the family is okay. Straight As, no trouble, no needs, a shelf of external accolades. A lot of pressure for a young person to carry, and most of it is invisible.
💙The sibling who disappears. They’re at a friend’s house, at practice, at work, anywhere the house isn’t. Physically gone, or checked out and separate from the family while still living in it.
💙The sibling who explodes. They react hard and loud, or they rebel into their own set of behaviors. Sometimes because they’re genuinely angry at their sibling. Sometimes because they just have their own big emotions they don’t know how to handle. Sometimes because it’s the only way anyone in that house has ever gotten attention. Sometimes because it’s just the example of communication they were given.
The patterns can also be any combination of these four, or something I haven’t listed. Leave a comment below if you can think of other permutations, because I’m sure I’m missing some 😅.
So what do you actually do
Here’s the question I’m sure you want the answer to. How do you address the needs of the other sibling or siblings when you’re already fighting to keep one young adult afloat?
I’m no expert in this, so take everything below as what it is, which is my own lived experience plus what I see working with families at Not Therapy. Here are three things.
1. Small, intentional, repeated check-ins do more than you’d think. You don’t need a whole sit-down conversation. Maybe just ask about something specific in their life and then actually listen to the answer. How did the soccer game go. Are you and Maya still hanging out, how’s that going. What are you watching right now. What’s the last thing you laughed at. Did you like that steak I made for dinner last night. Specific beats general every time, because “how are you” gets you “fine” and everybody knows it.
The other version of this is one-on-one time that belongs only to them. Sometimes that’s a movie or a hike or dinner out. Sometimes it’s fifteen minutes sitting next to them on the couch not saying much of anything. The point is presence. Literally just being present.
2. If you don’t have the capacity right now, hand some of it out. This is not a failure. If you’re deep in crisis with one young adult, you may genuinely not have the bandwidth to also be fully present for another, and pretending otherwise usually means nobody gets you. So bring other people in. Ask an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent, an older cousin to check in regularly. Get them into a sport or a job or a club where there are adults and friends who’ll notice them. Hire them their own therapist or coach if that’s available to you. And if you’re already working with us, the sibling is a completely fair thing to bring to your coach or your Family Manager. We hear about it more often than you’d guess. A sibling having one adult outside the house who is reliably in their corner changes a lot.
3. Let them have the ugly feelings, and watch what you praise. Siblings often feel things they think they’re not allowed to feel. Anger at the sibling who’s struggling. Resentment about how much of the family’s attention and money and energy is going one direction. Guilt for not being able to fix any of it. And sometimes relief when their sibling is out of the house, which comes with a whole other layer of guilt on top.
If the only feedback a sibling ever gets is some version of “thank God you’re the easy one,” they learn very quickly that having needs makes them a burden. So say the opposite out loud. Tell them it makes sense to be mad or worried about this. Tell them they’re allowed to want things, and that none of what’s happening with their sibling is theirs to carry or fix. Tell them you don’t need them to be the easy one. Tell them they can screw up, come home upset, be a mess for a night, and the family won’t fall apart. The world won’t end.
Back to Lizzie and the main point (thanks for hanging in there with me)
Lizzie is getting to this now, on a gap year, years after she needed it. Her brother is surfing before work in San Diego and she’s only just starting to unpack what it cost her to be the one who never made noise.
What stuck with me was how naturally our whole conversation had organized itself around her brother. Neither of us steered it there. It just went, the same way it probably goes at a lot of dinner tables. I do this work every day and I still almost didn’t ask. If a conversation drifts that way in two hours with a stranger, it drifts a lot faster over years in the same house.
So if you take one thing from this, ask yourself who in your family you haven’t asked about lately. Doesn’t matter if they’re younger, older, at home, or out on their own. Go find them this week, ask about something specific, and stay long enough to hear the whole answer.
Oh and also, quick one for the sibling who somehow ended up on this newsletter: reply to this or drop a comment. Let me know what’s up 🙃.
Peace,
Kaimei