Unspoken Bonds: Sibling Drifts

RELATIONSHIPS

6 MIN READ

Sometimes, healing requires us to sit in silence, confronting the questions we've long avoided and the hard truths we've sealed in a box and tossed into the ocean, hoping that would bring a sense of ‘letting go.’ It’s a process that makes you feel incredibly fragile, yet somehow, like you’ve just reclaimed the entire universe.

I’m currently reading Bailey Reemus’s Healing the Feminine Energy & the Wounds of Your Inner Child, and just thirteen pages in, I had to stop. I was forced to put the book down because I couldn’t answer her question: “The first step of healing your soul’s wounds is getting to know the little girl inside of you. When you strip away all the painful experiences you have endured, who are you?”

And there it was—that silence I was forced to sit in.

It confronted me with all of the questions I’d avoided while handing me boxes full of secrets.

Secrets that, somehow, washed ashore from the depths of an ocean I thought would keep them forgotten forever.

I sat there with that question—for many, many days.

I didn’t have an answer.

I still don’t.

What is left when you strip everything away? Who was I as a little girl before the world piled on its expectations, its wounds, its scars?

I was saying all of this in my head, but somehow, the only thing I could focus on was just how loud my inner monologue is.

I’m in my head almost all day, every day, and when I say that, I’m not exaggerating. Her and I, we’re close. I call her "her" because she feels separate from me. Not quite me, but a part of me—like a different version of myself, a personality I can’t quite shake off. (I know, I know. This is the kind of thing that would have most people questioning my sanity, but in truth, she and I are worlds apart. We’re just sharing the same physical body.)

Anyways, this had me thinking...

I tried to recall my inner monologue as a little girl—the things that shaped my thoughts, the things that pissed me off, that made me silently scream-cuss in the mirror with the door locked. I closed my eyes and thought back… like really thought back… like second-grade me who was sleeping in the closet with her sister because she was scared of the monsters under the bed. (Because if you’re in the closet and on the floor, no monsters can hide under you or around you—you get it.)

But all I could hear was a the loudnesss of absolutly nothing.

It was as if my childhood had been consumed by… nothing?

But, that memory, oddly enough, felt like safety. I remembered how my sister and I were each other’s protectors. We were conspirators and guardians, trying to make sense of a world that often didn’t make sense at all. There was solidarity in those closet-sleeping nights—an unspoken promise to watch out for each other. Trauma tends to create these silent pacts between siblings, binding them together like soldiers who have survived the same battlefield.

But what happens when you grow up and those bonds fray under the weight of adulthood? What happens when shared trauma becomes a distant echo, and you find yourselves on separate paths that no longer intersect?

Nobody talks about the siblings that grow up in traumatic households together but grow apart as they get older.

It’s a grief that often goes unnamed—a type of mourning for relationships that once felt like lifelines. You carry the same stories, but each of you remembers them differently. One sibling might want to forget, while the other clings to every painful detail, desperate to make sense of it all. And somewhere in the middle of that tension, the shared language of your childhood starts to disappear.

Sometimes, it’s because healing looks different for everyone. One sibling may choose to confront the past head-on, unraveling every wound in search of closure, while another chooses distance and silence as their path to peace. Neither way is wrong, but the divergence can feel like abandonment.

Then there are the times when you simply grow into different people. The children who once curled up together in a closet to feel safe may no longer recognize each other in their adult forms—and that hurts. The bond of surviving childhood trauma together is powerful, but it doesn’t always guarantee a future of shared understanding. Sometimes, love is not enough to bridge the gap between who you were and who you’ve become.

And in my case, I have a little brother—four years younger than me—who had lived in the same house as me my whole life, who I barely knew as a child but cared for like a parent. Now, he and I are incredibly close.

Then there’s my older brother, someone I didn’t meet until I was fifteen. We don’t talk every day, but I know he’d pick up the world and spin it backwards just to undo a bad day for me if he could.

And my sister? Just eleven months apart her and I. She was my twin soul. You never saw one without the other, I mean we literally slept in the same bed together until we were sixteen, by choice.

Stitched together by late-night giggles and the kind of secrets that felt sacred.

And now, we don’t speak.

It’s a grief that odd and unexplainable—one that I’m not even sure how to put into words.

So what do we do with this grief?

I don’t have all the answers. I only know that healing is a deeply personal journey, and it doesn’t always mean reconciliation. Sometimes, healing means letting go—of expectations, of resentment, of the fantasy that you know your siblings and that your relationships can, and will always be, what they once were.

To learning how to honor the love that existed then without demanding that it look the same now.

There is a bittersweet beauty in acknowledging that people can both be our greatest sources of comfort and our greatest sources of pain. It’s a paradox that we live with, especially when it comes to family. And perhaps the hardest truth of all is that healing ourselves does not always mean healing the relationships we hoped would heal along with us.

But here’s what I’m learning: even when we walk separate paths, the memories we share remain. The little girl who slept in the closet with her sister is still part of me. That connection, however fractured, is forever woven into the fabric of who I am. It shaped me—just as my healing now shapes the person I am going to be in 30 years.

So, to the siblings who have drifted apart after surviving trauma together: I see you. I honor the love that once bound you, the pain that separated you, and the healing that may or may not bring you back together.

Whatever your path, as always, know that your story matters.

The silence, the secrets, the questions—they are all part of the journey. And even if no one else talks about it, we can start the conversation here.