My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend
Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds
by Dorothy Rowe
New: Dororthy Rowe interviewed on ABC Radio National (Australia) on Friday February 15th, 2008. Listen to it free of charge on ABC's website.
"It's a fact that your sibling knows you very well and when we know someone that well, we know just how to please them but also how to destroy them."
Dorothy Rowe interviewed in The Guardian, April 2007
When people mention their siblings in conversation they often do so with passion and reveal something of considerable significance.
Parents have never lacked advice about how to bring up their children, but perhaps only a chapter of most parenting books covers the problem of sibling rivalry - and little attention is paid to the child's point of view. Similarly, adults may still have passionate feelings of love and hate for their own siblings, but there is nothing in the current literature that really explains these emotions and offers advice for those people whose sibling relationships remain troublesome.
In this book, Dorothy Rowe helps us better understand the intricacies of sibling relationships. Using the latest research in neuroscience and psychotherapy, she shows how our relationships with our siblings are dependent on our own psychological constructs - we create meaning from past experience, so our view of the world affects how we interact with each other. Only with this knowledge and understanding, she explains, can we learn to forgive, or at least tolerate, our siblings and find happiness in family life.
Paperback Book: ISBN: 978-0-415-39048-4 / £9.99 / $17.00 (US)