my older sibling was physically abusive up until adulthood when i accepted i had grown significantly stronger/larger and told them i would retaliate if they kept it up.

they transitioned fairly quickly into emotional abuse and steadily eroded their friend network just by being a generally self-absorbed horse’s ass.

now we’re decades into adulthood, they are a full blown cry bully when confronted with the consequences of how they treat others and whine incessantly about how nobody wants to be around them.

it took me decades to realize i don’t owe them anything and recognize that the pattern of them having no friends was due to how they treat people. random explosions/lashing out with cruelty when frustrated, completely absorbed with consumerism and its trappings, etc. nobody wants to be around that shit.

Maybe because it’s so common and so many instances are of very young children doing it to other very young children and people don’t know how to handle that beyond more close supervision? Or they just hand wave it away because “kids just being kids”? It’s crazy how often kids end up bullying, SA-ing, physically and emotionally beating up on their siblings. Also peers doing this shit to each other.

There’s the developmentally “appropriate” stuff of kids in puberty who talk about there development and compare in school locker rooms. But that can quickly turn into the same kind of abuse. Part of it may also be because so many of us go through it that it’s just accepted as normal. But normal and okay or acceptable are two very different things.

A lot of the time sibling abuse is the result of parental abuse and/or neglect. My sister and I were both incredibly dysregulated all the time and often found ourselves deliberately pitted against each other by our abusive mother.

We were both incredibly angry and powerless, and conflict became our primary method of interaction. After I came out of the closet, it only became worse.

Neither of us has any interest in repairing or maintaining any form of relationship.