Sibling bonds are the longest in our lives, preceding the formation of a couple and surviving our parents. However, few studies are devoted to it. Stéphanie Haxhe's book fills this void. The sibling relationship constitutes the laboratory par excellence where socialization and attachment, support and sharing, but also rivalry and competition, aggressiveness and injustice are experienced.
It is the place where each child distinguishes what belongs to them in a process of differentiation between self and other.. This is why parents must ensure that everyone finds their own niche where they can assert their otherness, their singularity and their specificity.
The quality of the sibling relationship weighs on social skills in adulthood : benevolent warmth favors them, where latent aggressiveness often reduces them. However, conflict allows one to make one's position heard, to have it respected and to see how interests are sometimes divergent by finding ways to resolve the confrontation.
Resentments, oppositions and accumulated and unspoken expectations pose mines that can explode later. But the relational debts thus accumulated can come from past generations as well as transmitted to those who follow. Helping anger to progress does not weaken siblings, but rather strengthens them.
Stéphanie Haxhe works with siblings who call on her, using contextual family therapy developed by Bosszormenyi-Nagy. It describes the concepts that structure this approach: distributive and retributive justice, relational ethics and the ontic dimension or even constructive/destructive legitimacy and multidirectional partiality.
So many notions with barbaric titles, but easy to understand and see applied in the practice that she describes to us. She uses them in the multiple family configurations that she details for us: the only child or the parented child, the conflict of loyalties faced with separated parents or the siblings separated between each member of the parental couple, but also those who are recomposed …
Multiple clinical vignettes illustrate the proposed work. Ensure that the therapist's recognition of the child's needs does not override that of the parents. Everyone is entitled to ask for and receive care, love, protection and concern, but just as much to give, thus respecting the give-receive-return cycle. But also and above all encouraged to send their claims/complaints to the right place. Vast issue in which each reader will find a little or a lot of their personal and family history.
This article is part of the “Open Book” section
It is signed Jacques Trémintin
Don't miss his blog « Tremsite » : https://tremintin.com/joomla/
Featured photo: monkeybusiness sur depositphotos
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