Your brothers and sisters can have a powerful effect on your adult behaviour.

‘It was easy to make me cry’

Catherine* (84) lost both her older sisters some years ago. But she has been left with the crushing sense of self-doubt they inflicted on her. When she was born, her sisters, Joan (4), and Jennifer (5), were already a tight unit. When Catherine joined their world at school, the intimidation began.

“The relentless bullying started from them. They would say I was fat, and would tease me about a particular boy, again and again. I was such an awful boob. It was easy to make me cry. It made me unwilling to do anything, it made me unwilling to try anything, because they would laugh at me and mock me.”

Catherine’s parents didn’t intervene. Her mother advised her to laugh it off; her father fumed but did nothing. Jennifer was the dominant personality in the household – the best-looking, the cleverest and the wittiest. She was also a highly competitive girl. Anything Catherine was particularly good at, such as playing the piano or making things, was mocked. The girls told Catherine her only future was domestic drudgery as a farmer’s wife with 10 children, but the older girls would pursue exciting lives. They may have been childish jibes, but they coloured Catherine’s outlook for years.

“I took far too much of what they said as gospel. I think it cheated me out of the pleasure of having a baby when I was married and became pregnant. They were overseas at the time, doing clever things. I had an awful feeling that all they said was going to come true, that I would have all these children. I was stupid enough and sensitive enough to let them have that influence over me.”

The bullying permanently sapped her confidence. “I may seem outwardly brash and full of confidence, but you just have to say something nasty to me and I’ll burst into tears. I have hesitated to do anything, because I know if I do and anyone says anything nasty to me, I will fall to bits. I haven’t ventured out and taken risks. I have always been extremely self-critical, telling myself, ‘You can’t really do that, can you’? I really have not got completely over it.”

In time, Joan made her own way, marrying and ditching the role as Jennifer’s junior sidekick. Jennifer had her own troubles – her first husband died, her second marriage was to a bullying, unpleasant man who had done time in jail for dishonesty and drained their finances with gambling debts. She was too proud to admit the marriage had been a mistake. Jennifer died 18 years ago, Joan more recently. Says Catherine: “My whole life I wanted to please Jennifer. It has taken me 18 years to realise just how much influence she had on me. You just have to learn by inches.”
* Names have been changed.

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