The Brother- & Sisterhood Wound, Healing Sibling Rivalry and Betrayal

In this Soul teaching on healing the brother- & sisterhood wound you will learn:

• The true cause of sibling rivalry and how our perception plays a role in it
• How our siblings help us heal unresolved pain and trauma from the past
• The importance of healing the brother- & sisterhood wounds
• Why the soul contracts with Earth family siblings are unique
• And more….

Playing ‘the favorite’ game

Every family has a black sheep or at least someone that identifies themselves as the black sheep in the family for whatever reason. In my family of origin, it was my middle half-sister that was considered the black sheep of the family. When she was caught getting raped by my father and later acted out sexually, the women in my family responded to her by keeping her away from their men.

Nobody at that time, which was in the 1970s had a real understanding of incest yet and how my half-sister’s need for sexual attention had been a trauma reaction to the years of incest she had experienced. Because of her behavior, she was seen as the one that had seduced my father when of course it is up to the adults in the room to make sure such things never happen even IF a child would be the one to initiate it. Instead, my half-sister like many girls of her time in such situations was branded a harlot and her ‘reputation’ followed her far into her adulthood at every family event where all the women nervously kept an eye out for their hubbies getting too close to this immensely wounded woman, with a heroin-chic body and an air of utter brokenness that made men want to rescue her.

Yet, still, you would never catch my father treating her any less than any of his other children. He may have let her take the rap for his bad behavior, he never talked down to her or made her feel as if she was not welcome or a part of our family. I think if you would ask each daughter, we would all say that we were our daddy’s favorite which was a game that my half-sisters continued to play even after our father had died.

It’s a game that I grew up in, a constant competition for my father’s attention, approval, and praise between the women surrounding him which later included my step-mother. It was the reason I bowed out and in the end, didn’t have the relationship with my father that I would have liked to have had because I wasn’t willing to fight my way to him. In his final years, I would only visit him when I knew that he would be alone not to have him all to myself because I would take my mom and kids with me. But just to avoid the inevitable backstabbing and undermining by the other women that had continued to fight over his ‘love’.

The self-selected black sheep

For the longest time, my mother was considered the black sheep in her family as she left for the United States in the 80s to live in a hippie commune in California where we learned about the Ascended Masters, the violet flame, Eastern spirituality, yoga, homeopathy, Bach Flowers and so on. Nowadays, both my aunts take yoga classes, and my one aunt has become the new spiritual ‘nutjob’ in the family (the title my mother once held).

My aunties are biological non-identical twins and my one aunt, the one currently deeply exploring spirituality was one in four daughters who is convinced that she was the least loved by her mother. She believes that my grandmother loved the others and her twin sister more than her. My aunt is also on the healing path and working on healing this misperception, but it’s not uncommon for people to believe that one or other siblings were a parent’s favorite or more loved.

In many families, there is the feeling whether it is factually correct or not that one child is being preferred above the other. My daughter, for example, felt that her younger brother got away with more and would at times be favored above her. In reality, she is five years older than him and so was expected to do more of what was age-appropriate for her. When he was eight and she was thirteen, he could unload the dishwasher but couldn’t load it because it takes different skills. On the other hand, my youngest son was not allowed to stay up till midnight in the weekends watching Twilight and she was. He would be envious of the fact that she was allowed to do things, he wasn’t allowed to do because he was still too little.

Sibling rivalry

This often creates sibling rivalry in children in a close age range. Although it depends, my oldest son and daughter are eight years apart and my son has always been her champion literally adoring the ground she walked on since the day she was born. When I had my youngest son, with my second husband, my oldest son felt replaced no matter what I did. His subconscious anger towards his little brother has even resulted in him punching him in the stomach as an adult while the little one was only six.

My oldest son wasn’t allowed back in the house for months, he struggles with drugs-related psychosis and this was during one of his episodes. My daughter called 911 as I got him out of the house to protect the kids, I am certain if you would ask my oldest son if I loved the younger children more, he would say yes. When in reality as the mother of all three I have simply had to choose what is best for the family unit, no matter how much I love my oldest son I cannot allow him to pull us all into the self-destructive rampage he has been on since his early teens.

I have supported him in innumerous new starts, left him my house completely furnished and he was not able to get his life back on track. Instead, he was subletting all three bedrooms. sleeping on the couch and instead of saving the money squandering it. He lost the house, everything in it, and ended up in a psychosis yet again. Sadly this will continue to happen until he faces the unresolved pain underneath and that is the one thing that he has refused to do for the past decade, go into therapy and heal the hurt under his addictive behavior.

My half-sisters would fight like cats and dogs too and deliberately get each other in deep trouble not only with our parents but with other people as well. My two youngest kids would sometimes break loose in a fight over nothing. In the car, as a single mother I would have one in the front and one in the back, simply to prevent all hell from breaking loose while we were on the road.

Whether we are parents or part of a family with other siblings, we have all seen examples of sibling rivalry to various extents. But what is underneath it all? Why is there so much struggle and strife between brothers and sisters or same-sex siblings?

How sibling rivalry wounds wreak havoc in our lives

Healing these in essence inner child wounds not only heals the relationship with our siblings and deeper underlying trauma, but it can also heal other areas in our lives as well. I remember reading about this young woman in The Healing Code by Alex Loyd that kept getting passed up for promotions at work. Underneath her trouble to advance in her career was a childhood memory.

‘When she was 5 years old her mom gave her sister a popsicle one day at lunchtime. Her mother wouldn’t give her a popsicle because her sister had eaten her lunch and she had not. Well, you can imagine what happened. She threw a temper tantrum because she didn’t get a popsicle and her sister did.

Now, this is a pretty harmless event and I’m willing to bet a fairly common “traumatic” experience for a kid. For a 5-year-old, however, this is the sort of memory that can take hold in your subconscious and chip away over the years. I call these popsicle memories. That memory is literally alive in your subconscious — your unconscious mind treats it as if it is live and happening in the present and not 30 years ago, but the original memory is viewed from the viewpoint of when it happened. And in her case, it was from a 5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.

Her deep-seated issues that took root revolved around her sister enjoying the popsicle in front of her and her mom not giving her one. As a 5-year-old her perception was that sister got a popsicle and mom didn’t give me one because she doesn’t love me as much as sister. And that unfolds into, well if she doesn’t love me as much as my sister, there must be something wrong with me.’ Source Dr. Alexander Loyd

After healing this memory with his client her career took off. This gives us another solid reason, to address these often deep subconscious wounds as they are holding us back from fully being all that we can be.

It’s all in the perception & interpretation

I have already shown in some examples that it is often a matter of perception and interpretation and not what is actually happening that creates these feelings of others being favored above you, getting away with more, having more privileges, being loved more, and so on…

It all depends on our trauma filter through which we view our reality.

Whatever we believe about ourselves and our own worth is what we will see mirrored back to us in our external reality. Anything that happens externally is compared to the subconscious tape that we have running 24/7 about who we believe we are based on our past experiences.

This is how my oldest son interprets me protecting the younger children as loving them more than him. Or how my youngest son interprets his older sister being allowed to stay up late as completely unfair and my daughter stuck with loading the dishes in the dishwasher when the adults don’t do it as her younger brother getting off with the easy jobs.

These current-day incidents are being held against past experiences, which subsequently triggers the unresolved pain of that past.

For example, when my youngest son was born my oldest son wanted to live with his father. Initially, his father was all in, making me the bad person, even trying to take away my custody because of his own personal vendetta against me. We went to court and on my suggestion, thanks to our divorce lawyer who wanted to help me, but couldn’t represent me as that would be considered a conflict of interest – a three-month trial period was agreed upon. Two weeks after the court decision, my son’s father called me at 8 am or so in the morning to tell me that he was bringing our son back to me as his new wife had threatened to leave him and he couldn’t lose her, he said.

Out of nowhere, with no second chance whatsoever my son was dumped on my doorstep after he had been told for weeks what an awful mother and person I was. It was after this experience that my oldest son started using drugs and coming home completely wasted – only 13 years old.

This deeply being rejected by a parent, gets triggered when he gets into a situation where he forces me to choose between him and protecting his underaged siblings.

However, none of this process is conscious, it all happens subconsciously so he doesn’t even see another perspective than his own because his pain is getting triggered and his trauma now colors his perception of reality. The unbearable pain of being rejected by a parent.

At that time when all this was going down with my oldest son and his father, we lived in Germany and the next step in Germany was putting him in a children’s home, as it had escalated that far with school and social services involved because this was clearly a child in trouble. Because my oldest son was homesick for the Netherlands, all parties agreed that it was worth a shot moving him back to help him get his life back on track. I enrolled him in a Dutch school and started the process of moving back home. Amsterdam is one of the hardest cities to get into if you don’t have a lot of money in the bank and so it took me six months to secure a home in a village near Amsterdam, but still, a thirty-minute drive by car away.

Because my daughter was almost six at that time I sent her ahead to my mother so that she wouldn’t get behind in the Dutch school system and so that she could start the school year with the other kids as I didn’t know yet how long it would take me to get a place to live,

She was still five years old but would turn six in three months, her little brother was one-and-a-half. He was the only child to stay with me because unlike the other children he wasn’t going to school. I sent my daughter ahead for purely practical reasons, not because I didn’t love her or because she was less important to me and yet this might be why she was and still is convinced that I favor her little brother over her because she was ‘sent away’ and he got to stay with me.

I called her every day, I went to visit her as often as I could in the six months in between her leaving our home and me finding a place for us to live in the Netherlands. None of that changed her perception and interpretation that it must be because I love her less that she went to grandma’s and that her little brother got to stay with me.

Pair that with the fact that her father, my first husband refused to have anything to do with her until she was nine years old and you will understand that there was already an existing pain to whatever degree around not being loved (rejected) by a parent. In fact, her father, ‘favored’ her older brother above her who he saw as his son while he referred to her as his semen but not his child because I had her against his wishes. We never told her any of this of course, but she lived it. Things got so crazy that my oldest son wasn’t allowed to have contact with me and his sister when he was with his father every other full week.

It was again our divorce lawyer that advised me to move as far away from the father as possible so that he could not enforce the co-parenting agreement, as he was taking his anger towards me out on our children and the legal institution at that time was not equipped to handle these kinds of cases. Because of his history of violence, I had agreed to everything just to get myself and my child out alive. He had often told me that if I would ever leave him, he would kill us or burn everything to the ground.

I got pregnant with our daughter while we were in the divorce procedure because I had to extricate myself slowly not to set him off. When I found out I was pregnant he demanded we get married again. I told him that that would only be an option if he went into therapy, he decided right then and there that he wanted nothing more to do with me or the baby growing inside of me and started telling everyone he left me because I was mentally ill. He had tried his best to save me, but I was beyond all hope – that way he didn’t look like the bad guy. Years later in his second marriage, he finally went into anger management therapy and they had a happy relationship according to his wife until he recently died unexpectedly.

So my daughter’s perception of her reality was colored by this already existing pain, when I sent her ahead to the Netherlands (of course completely oblivious to all I am able to see now). This only made the existing pain deeper because now it seemed as if I was also favoring my younger son above her.

When in reality her father acting the way he did had nothing to do with her and everything to do with his own unresolved trauma and pain left unaddressed from his childhood. He himself had grown up in a very abusive environment where he got his own mother out of a violent marriage, by threatening to kill his father with a fire poker if he ever laid hands on his mother again. This happened when he was sixteen years old. His mother realized that she had to leave at that point, filed for divorce, and took her oldest son with her. Her youngest son, born from an extra-marital affair stayed with her ex-husband.

My ex-husband had projected much of the drama that had gone on between his parents on our marriage, his biggest fear being that I would leave him for another man. If I was five minutes late, he would interrogate me on who I was sleeping with behind his back. His father had in his eyes always favored his younger brother and it could be that this trauma from that time period was reactivated when I became pregnant with our second child also while we were separating as had happened in his parent’s case as well.

It had been so traumatic for him that his father had in his eyes treated the child of another man better than his own flesh and blood, that he perhaps subconsciously saw this as an opportunity to do what he felt his father should have done and that was, favor his own child above the child of another man.

How our trauma filters are created

Above I have shared some of the examples of my children’s life to illustrate how our childhood and early life experiences create the trauma filters through which we perceive and interpret our reality, but that is not the only way how our trauma filters are created.

Our initial trauma filter is created through the incarnation wound that I wrote about here.

After that, there are four ways that the accumulation of trauma on top of the original wound can take place:

• Through unresolved past life trauma and pain
• Through unresolved ancestral trauma and pain
• Through unresolved childhood trauma and pain
• Through unresolved current life trauma and pain

In fact, much of our childhood trauma serves to reactivate past life and ancestral wounding in order to be able to heal it this time around. In this way, much of this sibling rivalry wounding helps us bring into our awareness deeper unresolved trauma and pain from previous lifetimes and/or our ancestral lineages.

I know only one past life between me and my oldest son, where I had to end his life for the greater good of the community. He was too big and too strong for his own good, while at the same time not fully mentally developed. In that lifetime, his behavior got so out of hand that I had to stop him from hurting (raping) the other women and girls in our village. I was a shaman and I brewed him a potion, that let him fall asleep and never wake up again. Because I took his life in that lifetime, I was obligated karmically to give him life in this lifetime.

Based on that past life and my oldest son’s current life experiences, it would seem that he is playing out the same scenario in both lifetimes.

This is something that I have seen over and over again in working with over 1000 clients in a five-year time period with the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. When we carry unresolved pain and trauma with us from previous lifetimes, we play out the same experience in our current life reality in an attempt to heal it.

This happens in adulthood, but very often it already starts in childhood, because the reactivation of the trauma is needed for the development of the personality that corresponds to the karmic load (click on the link to read the teaching on karma) that the person is bringing in to heal in this embodiment.

You could say it heightens the trauma perception that is ready to be healed. It would also make the trauma feel more our own because of the lived experience in our present reality, instead of belonging to a past life or ancestral pattern. Although this reactivation process is beneficial, it doesn’t mean that trauma is beneficial or good for children because we know that it’s not.

There is zero argument, to justify children being exposed to trauma on purpose, that is not how this works.

Trauma is not good for children or adults, however, sometimes trauma is part of our life experience through no fault of our own, and then we have to deal with the aftermath of that experience. In this case, it can be good to understand that there is a deeper underlying cause to our experience that lies outside of this lifetime to assist us in the forgiveness process. Because here is the plain and simple truth, until you can forgive the people that have hurt you – you cannot fully heal. You are bound to those people and the experience until you can let it go and move on.

Many people trick themselves into believing that they have forgiven, but often they are still carrying unresolved pain from the experience which indicates that they are still at some level subconsciously holding on to it without even realizing it. When this is the case, we continue to attract similar people, situations, and experiences to help us release those stuck layers. Because the subconscious doesn’t know time – when we can come to the understanding and forgiveness needed in the current timeline experience it heals all corresponding past life and ancestral experiences simultaneously.

Brother- and sisterhood wounding

Having seen many of my own past lives I have seen an interesting theme within brother- and sisterhood wounding and that is that it was meant to help heal a deeper underlying wound. This is true in most cases of current life trauma and drama, that it is meant to help you heal unresolved pain and trauma from the past. But, I have seen this even more evidently within sibling trauma more than for example with parent-child or partner/lover trauma.

For example, the girl my Twin Flame (for lack of a better word) married has been my sister in many previous lifetimes. She has killed me, stolen my husband from me by pretending to be me when we were identical twins and more. This girl has ‘stabbed me in the back’ over and over again and yet I still carry that sisterly love for her. I have never hated her or wished her ill, I have often even felt protective of her. But let’s be real from an ego perspective it would seem that this girl is bad news and for a long time I had no clue what she was helping me heal this way.

I have also had a lifetime with the Twin, the only one where he has physically hurt me where we were brothers searching for gold and he killed me when I found a big chunk of gold in the river. Revisiting that lifetime, I saw that he was helping me heal the lifetime I mentioned above where my sister (his current wife) had stabbed me in the heart and stole my lifework pretending it was her own when I was an alchemist.

It wasn’t till recently that I understood why this sister (now Twin’s wife) had betrayed me over and over again in all these lifetimes – until I saw further details on my incarnation wound life. It turns out that it was my own half-sister (who in this lifetime is my mother) that had cast doubt on me in that lifetime, which had led to me being shunned by the community after being more or less demonized as a thirteen-year-old boy by the spiritual hierarchy within our tribe.

I was also shown in a later session with a healer that the whole experience was simply what was needed to initiate the souls present at that time into the next step of our soul evolution, which in this case was creating separation between the ego and the soul.

When I saw this, I realized that she (Twin’s wife) had tried to help me heal this what I saw as a betrayal by my half-sister (my current life mother) when the truth was that everything in that incarnation life in early ancient Egypt went exactly how it was supposed to go in order for us as human beings to be able to self-actualize. If this doesn’t make sense I recommend reading the teaching on the incarnation wound.

In my current life my oldest half-sister also deeply betrayed me and it was again to help me heal deeper underlying unresolved pain from a more recent (a millennia ago) past life and I now realize as I am writing this, the ancient Egyptian life as well. After healing the other past life, my half-sister who I had banished from my life because of what she had done contacted me out of the blue with a situation in which she needed help and let me know that she had not believed what she had claimed at that time, that had in a different way cast doubt on me.

It had been no small thing what she did, which could have had very negative consequences and I had to fight hard to convince people that she was lying.

In the chaos of trying to save my oldest, my half-sister unable to conceive children of her own at that time and almost fifty had tried to take my daughter from my mother. When I realized what was going on, I forbid my mother to have contact with my older half-sister with whom I share a father and not my mother. My half-sister desperate to have a child of her own had set her sights on my daughter, when I cut her off she retaliated with full force. I wasn’t demonized, but it came close and even my mother and father were not sure whom to believe. It was to a lesser degree as in the ancient Egyptian lifetime, but I was ostracized by my family somewhat.

My mother and father did continue to support me, but much of the extended family were looking at me critically – especially because by then my oldest son had run away from home and was living in a squat house, doing hard drugs and having unprotected sex with a 29-year-old while he was only fourteen!

As is very common in the child welfare system, the mother is blamed – while the father is absent and stays fully out of the picture. This also happened in our case, I had my son incarcerated for his own safety, and during the court hearing, his father said to him that this was all my fault that he was being put in a home now instead of realizing that it was the adult thing to do, to protect your child against himself in such extreme cases.

In the backdrop of all this going on, it was a piece of cake for my half-sister to make people think that where there was smoke, there’s fire….

Again back then which was the early 2000’s we didn’t know as much about domestic violence or people with narcissistic tendencies as we do now. One quick Google search nowadays gives a plethora of hits on the relationship between domestic violence, mother blame, and absent or invisible fathers within the child protection system as well as within social work.

That’s exactly what happened in our case, I was moved front and center as the cause of my son’s issues while the years of domestic violence that my son and I both endured in my first marriage were swept under the table and never got looked at again. I was under full scrutiny, while all the father did was point the finger at me and he got away scot-free in doing so.

In a way, this was a recreation of my incarnation wound trauma where it wasn’t the whole community now but my family and parts of government scrutinizing me – fired on by my ex-husband’s claims that I was mentally ill (crazy) which was a good way for him to try to invalidate my accusations of years of mental, emotional and physical abuse against us by him. My half-sister more or less siding with my ex-husband, with her own agenda she was pursuing (i.e. getting the child my ex-husband didn’t want anyway) only made things look worse for me.

Although only temporarily as in the end, in such cases, the truth always comes to light, and all false claims were eventually debunked and my name was fully cleared. After a year-long investigation, child protective services again decided as they had done in the case of my ex-husband that these were false accusations.

This was something that they had already believed prior to the investigation because they had conducted multiple interviews with me and had gotten to know me. However. all of this happened ‘coincidently’ right at the time that child protective services itself was under scrutiny because of children being severely hurt or dying within families that were known to them through other children in their custody belonging to the same family. Because my oldest son was incarcerated, he was partially in state custody and this made our family a family known to child protective services which now obligated them to investigate any claims just in case they may be true.

Things aren’t always as they appear to be on the surface

On a surface level, my sister was envious of me. She had great difficulty conceiving, while I was super fertile. A man only needed to look me deep in my eyes and I was pregnant with his baby. I had also just published two books in a row and was getting some low-key media attention for it – when she had always dreamed of becoming a published author like our grandfather. But most of all my father was impressed by my work and didn’t hide this from my sisters, at one time while in the room with my other half-sister my dad had said that someday my work may qualify for a Nobel prize and that he felt that I could possibly be on to something.

Even though this did all play a role on a surface level, sharing my story also illustrates that there was a way deeper purpose underneath it all that helped me heal two very traumatic lifetimes from which I was still carrying so much unresolved pain and trauma in me. On the surface, my oldest half-sister acted like a total b*tch, but at the same time living through that experience helped me heal what I myself had subconsciously brought in with me from previous lifetimes and timelines. Which means that on a soul level my half-sister did me a great service through her actions that seemed so mean and treacherous of her on a surface level.

I pray that in sharing these examples from my own personal life and that of my children and ex-husband, that it helps you heal any misinterpretations that you are still subconsciously holding around current life as well as past life brother- and sisterhood wounds. Based on my own experience, I can only say that the sisterhood and brotherhood bond is truly unique and that despite outer appearances these soul contracts are really made to have your back through thick and thin in a way I have not seen present in other types of soul contracts.

This would seem to indicate that you of course choose the siblings you have, in the same way, that you choose your parents and ancestral lineage to help you heal the unresolved pain and trauma you subconsciously carry from previous lifetimes and timelines.