Enabling and Sibling Estrangement
Brothers, Sisters, Strangers: A Podcast on Sibling Estrangem... by Ali-John Chaudhary, Psychotherapist and Fern Schumer Chapman, Author
Episode notes
In this informative podcast, we discuss how enabling can serve as the lifeblood to toxic relationships, encouraging, perpetuating, and facilitating a sibling's hurtful and devastating behaviour. We explore how our early life responses -- fight, flight, freeze, or fawn -- may become relationship patterns that have adverse consequences later in life. Some of these negative patterns may sow doubt and ambiguity in who we are, creating low self-esteem, and limiting an individual's sense of identity. In extreme cases, enabling a toxic sibling can lead to more narcissistic abuse; with parents, enabling can create a reversal of the parent-child relationship. We encourage viewers to become aware of their own relationship patterns, and we offer strategies on how to stop enabling toxic relationships to regain a sense of well-being.
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