The disappointment of a sibling who chose better

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan's work at Penn on relative deprivation in families — published in various places through the 2010s — gives a name to a feeling most siblings will recognize and most will not admit to. The feeling is: my sister made better decisions than I did, with the same starting resources, and I am happy for her and quietly furious at the same time. The fury is not at her. The fury is at the proof. Siblings function, in the psychology of self-assessment, as the closest available control group. You cannot tell yourself you would have been a doctor if your circumstances had been different — your sister had the same circumstances and she became a doctor. The control group is in the kitchen at Thanksgiving and it has invalidated your excuses. What people do with this, badly: they pull away from the sibling, they get critical, they look for the catch in the better life. What people do with this, well: they let the comparison be a comparison and not a verdict. The sister who became a doctor did not steal your medical degree. She made a different sequence of small decisions. The sequence is not closed to you; it is just no longer the sequence you can take. The grown-up move is to stop using your sibling as your control group. Use your past self. The question is not 'why does she have what I don't.' The question is 'what do I have that I did not have at twenty-eight.' The first question has no winning answer. The second one always does. The phenomenon Wilkinson-Ryan describes, of siblings functioning as the closest available comparison group, has consequences that go beyond the obvious. The comparison is most painful in the domains where the parents valued specific outcomes. If the family of origin valued academic achievement, the comparison is most painful in the academic domain. If the family of origin valued marriage and children, the comparison is most painful in the relational domain. If the family of origin valued financial success, the comparison is most painful in the wealth domain. The pain follows the specific value structure of the household, even decades after the children have left. This is, in clinical observation, the source of most of what people experience as sibling rivalry in adulthood. The rivalry is rarely about anything happening in the current relationship between the adult siblings. The rivalry is about the way the siblings are being implicitly evaluated, by the parents and by the family system, against the value structure that was installed in childhood. The evaluation persists even when the parents are dead. The evaluation is internalized. The internalized evaluation produces, in the less-successful sibling, an ongoing comparison that the more-successful sibling may not even be aware is happening. The more-successful sibling, in many cases, is also experiencing something the less-successful sibling does not see. The more-successful sibling is, depending on the specifics, either guilty about the asymmetry, anxious about maintaining it, or consciously distancing from the family of origin in ways that the less-successful sibling registers as withdrawal. The more-successful sibling has their own version of the difficulty. The difficulty is less sympathetic, in cultural narratives, than the less-successful sibling's difficulty, but it is real and it is doing work in the relationship. What is required, for adult siblings to have a working relationship after the comparison has become visible, is the explicit renunciation of the family of origin's evaluation system. The renunciation has to happen on both sides. The less-successful sibling has to stop ranking themselves against the value structure the parents installed. The more-successful sibling has to stop performing the value structure or, alternately, has to stop feeling responsible for the less-successful sibling's feelings about the value structure. Both renunciations are hard. Both renunciations are usually only partial. The partial renunciation is still useful. The fully unrenounced version is the one in which the siblings, across decades, develop the specific cool distance that many adult sibling relationships drift into. The cool distance is polite. The cool distance is also the slow death of what could have been a real relationship. The partial renunciation produces, at minimum, a relationship that has more warmth than the cool version and that can sustain itself across the decades when the parents are gone and the siblings are the remaining witnesses to each other's early lives. The shift from sibling-as-control-group to self-as-control-group is, in practical terms, a shift in the comparison you do daily, often without noticing. The person who has been doing the sibling comparison asks, several times a month, some version of the question 'how am I doing compared to her.' The question is rarely asked consciously. The question is a background operation of the self-assessment system. The background operation, redirected to past-self comparison, becomes 'how am I doing compared to me at twenty-eight.' The second question almost always produces a more favorable comparison. The favorable comparison is earned. The favorable comparison is also more honest, in many cases, than the sibling comparison, because the sibling comparison assumes that you and your sibling had identical starting conditions, which is almost never actually true. Siblings, even twins raised in the same household, have different starting conditions in many ways that the family of origin's evaluation system obscures. They are born at different times to different versions of the parents. The parent at twenty-six raising a first child is not the same parent at thirty-two raising a second child. The household economics are different. The parents' marriage is at a different phase. The siblings have different extended family configurations available to them, because the grandparents are at different ages and have different energies. The siblings have different peer cohorts in the same neighborhood, because the neighborhood changes across years. The list of differences is long. The differences are the actual cause of different outcomes more often than individual decisions are. The family of origin's evaluation system treats the siblings as having identical starting conditions, which is convenient for the evaluation but is not accurate. What the more honest self-comparison produces is a relationship with your own life that is not contingent on your sibling's life. The relationship becomes available to the sibling relationship, instead of being performed against it. The sibling can become, again, a person you grew up with rather than a person you have been secretly scoring yourself against for decades. The relief, when this shift happens, is substantial. The relief is also available to most people, with deliberate work, regardless of how long the comparison has been running.