How a Child's Mental Illness Can Psychologically Stamp a Family
- Fern Schumer Chapman
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
A new novel explores a sibling's lifelong struggles with a mentally ill sister.
When a sibling suffers with mental illness, family members may feel anxious, overwhelmed, and resentful.
Some brothers and sisters stay in an unhealthy job or relationship out of loyalty to a mentally ill sibling.
Through transference, old childhood feelings toward a sibling often resurface in adult relationships.
“No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.”
These words appear on the opening page of Betsy Lerner’s first novel, and it’s certainly the case in Shred Sisters. The veteran literary agent and editor’s novel tells the gripping story of a family struggling to live with the mental illness of one of two daughters. The book spotlights how mental illness can ruin a sibling relationship, destroy a family, and lead to periods of estrangement.
Amy, who narrates the story in a vulnerable, intimate voice, has had to endure her sister Ollie’s erratic conduct since they were children. Each family member denies or enables Ollie’s volatile and unpredictable behavior, which exacts a great toll on Amy as well as her parents’ marriage. Lerner vividly portrays how supporting someone with a mental health condition can lead to feelings of frustration, exhaustion, and guilt.
How mental illness can stress the family
As the book illustrates, when one sibling suffers with mental illness, family relationships can shatter for the following reasons:
Emotional strain: Siblings of a mentally ill brother or sister frequently feel overwhelmed, anxious, and resentful, as the responsibility for managing the situation can be emotionally draining.
Lack of understanding: A mentally ill person’s behaviors can be hard to understand. Tension and distance may damage the relationship when a brother or sister misinterprets or feels unable to relate to a sibling's experiences.
Unrealistic expectations: It’s difficult to know just how well a sibling can function, especially when capabilities fluctuate. The resulting uncertainty can lead to unrealistic expectations, frustrations, and disappointments.
Communication difficulties: Because mental illness can affect communication skills, siblings may find it challenging to have open, honest conversations. The limitations of these sibling conversations may lead to misunderstandings and conflict.
Stigma: Some family members, perceiving a stigma, feel embarrassed and uncomfortable discussing their issues. This happens throughout the family system, to both the healthy and the mentally ill family members, and it can create or increase isolation.
Feelings of helplessness: Some siblings feel powerless to help a brother or sister suffering with mental illness. This can compound feelings of guilt and frustration.
The Sibling Ghosts of Childhood
Shred Sisters also accurately depicts what marriage and family therapist Karen Gail Lewis calls the ghosts that are at play in sibling relationships. In her book Sibling Therapy, Lewis outlines four underrecognized ways in which memories and feelings haunt brothers and sisters throughout their lives.
Frozen images: The childhood perception or characterization of a sibling can become “frozen” and sustained for years, no matter how much individuals have changed. These frozen images can be applied to adults who re-enact childhood behaviors through sibling transference (see below). Lewis offers the example of a brother who taunted a sister when they were little. These taunts can become internalized; long after the scars dim, the memories and emotions remain, she writes.
Crystallized roles: Parents sometimes “label” their children, assigning roles that shape their behavior: the clown, the smart one, the troublemaker, etc. Once assigned a role, children tend to fulfill it. A crystallized role shapes identity, and—unless an individual becomes aware of the role and decides how to alter behavior—it can define adult life.
Unhealthy loyalty: This is a subtle behavior pattern in which a sibling holds back out of worried loyalty to a brother or sister. A sibling may feel disloyal if, for example, he or she moves on in life while their sibling remains stuck in an unsatisfying job, challenging circumstances, or an unhappy emotional state. In this situation, some siblings feel as if they are abandoning a brother or sister.
Sibling transference: Transference describes the phenomenon in which an individual redirects emotions, often unconsciously, from one person to another. Old childhood feelings toward a sibling often resurface in adulthood, in both personal and work relationships. The person may respond to people in their present-day life as they did to siblings when they were children. The transference may be positive or negative; either way, it works against clarity in relationships with friends, lovers, and colleagues.
In Shred Sisters, Amy is especially driven by these "ghosts" that Lewis has identified. The sisters are stuck in frozen images and crystallized roles. Amy early on describes herself as small, skinny, and clumsy, while “good things come in tall, willowy packages like Ollie’s.” Amy is convinced that Ollie always gets special treatment; snooping in files, she discovers that their parents, who have high expectations of her, let Ollie get away with abysmal grades.
Amy’s unhealthy loyalty to her sister may help explain why she forfeits a thriving career in science. After finishing her undergraduate degree in three years, she dedicates herself to studying and caring for lab animals. Having distinguished herself by logging more hours in the lab than other researchers and receiving recognition on several research papers published in scientific journals, Amy suddenly and surprisingly quits when some of her grant proposals are rejected.
The book explores the idea of sibling transference in terms of Amy’s choice of men. When Amy gets involved with a man who is just as erratic as her sister, her therapist suggests that “what happened with Josh had to do with Ollie.” Lerner writes from Amy’s perspective: “I refused to believe that she [Ollie] permeated all my relationships. …”
Lewis would argue that, yes, Ollie has permeated all of Amy's relationships, as siblings are our "first marriage” partners. “Siblings provide the first experiences of living intimately with peers, people of the same hierarchical level and the same generation,” Lewis explains. People are often surprised to recognize that how they feel in their marriage, friendships, or even in a relationship with a coworker bears a resemblance to “how they felt in some problematic situations with siblings in their ‘first marriage.’”
For those who would like to learn more, Shred Sisters thoroughly explores in a dramatic, most engaging way the impact and long reach of Amy’s “first marriage” to a mentally ill sister.
References
Lews, Dr. Karen Gail (2023) Sibling Therapy, The Ghosts from Childhood that Haunt Your Clients' Love and Work, Oxford University Press, New York, NY
Lerner, Betsy (2024) Shred Sisters, Grove Press, New York, NY
