When my parents were alive, I had to navigate this kind of thing:
It’s an incredibly difficult question, one that comes most often from a parent of a young adult survivor of sibling sexual abuse. It goes something like this [1]: “My daughter recently told me that her older brother sexually abused her when they were children. We knew the relationship had been difficult, but we had no idea anything that egregious was going on. We have supported her healing by paying for her therapy, respected her decision to cut contact with her brother and her wishes that we not mention him in her presence. Yet, she still feels betrayed that we are still keeping our own contact with her brother and his two small children. She says we need to choose between the two of them; that if we continue even minimal contact with him, she will go no contact with us. We want to support her, but it seems unfair not only to us but to our little grandchildren to go along with her request. What do we do?”
Parenting through Sibling Sexual Abuse | The Impossible Choice
Diane does a good job digging into this. It’s not easy, and every situation is different. My ask of my parents did not include cutting off contact with my brother. It did include understanding that I was, and that I did not want to hear about him at all. They mostly respected that. As they got older, dealing with various ailments, they’d forget, but they had little contact with either of us by then, as we both lived out of state. (The funerals were a whole other thing, but that’s a post for another time.)
My point is that my brother already lived out of state and had sparse contact with my parents by the time I told them about my abuse. I didn’t have contact with him, and asking my parents to have none when they already had so little wasn’t much to ask. If he lived in town and we had to navigate family get-togethers, holidays, etc., it would have been much harder. It probably would have looked very different, and I would have felt betrayed every time I had to skip a family gathering to avoid seeing him.
A lot of other survivors of sibling abuse are dealing with this every day, trying to do what is right for their own healing, and we shouldn’t judge them for it. But parents have their own decisions to make, too. Those decisions come with consequences. That’s life. When you children are both the survivor and the abuser, you can’t ignore the reality of the situation. Too many parents expect their children to “get over it” in the name of family harmony, which translates into choosing the abuser over the abused, in the name of your own comfort. When the survivor asks you to also cut off contact with their abuser, you don’t have to do it, but understand where that is coming from. It’s very likely they don’t feel believed or understood, and seeing everyone treat their abuser like nothing changed is going to impact them.
There’s no easy solution for you as parents, but understand there’s no easy way to heal as a survivor, either. It’s messy, and things are going to get spilled.