11/15/2025
It looks like closeness. It feels like a secret, a special confidence. When a parent leans in and says, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but your brother..." or "I'm just so worried about your sister, she's..." it creates a momentary illusion of intimacy. You feel chosen. The responsible one. The one who "gets it."
But that feeling is a trap.
This isn't bonding. It's demolition. It's the slow, careful work of breaking the natural bonds between siblings, one whispered conversation at a time. This manipulation has a name in psychology: triangulation. And it is indeed a profound form of emotional abuse, cleverly disguised as casual conversation.
I need you to understand this clearly: a parent who pits their children against each other through gossip is not building a relationship with you. They are using you. They are making you a tool in their arsenal of control.
Here’s what’s really happening in those moments:
They are making you their confidante, but it's a poisoned chalice. The "trust" they place in you is not about valuing your opinion. It's about recruiting you. You become their listening post, their source of information, their ally in a silent war they are waging against your own sibling. This role feels powerful, but it's a prison. Your loyalty is being hijacked.
They are destroying the foundation of sibling trust. How can you have a genuine, straightforward relationship with your brother or sister when your head is filled with your parent's critical narrative about them? Every interaction becomes filtered through this lens of suspicion and pity. The parent creates a reality where you see your sibling not as a peer, but as a problem you and the parent are managing together. It isolates you both. It makes you dependent on the parent's version of events.
They are avoiding accountability and real communication. Instead of addressing their concerns or conflicts directly with the child in question, they route it through you. This is the behavior of a coward. It avoids any real, messy, but ultimately healthy conflict resolution. The actual issue is never solved; it's just spread like a virus, infecting everyone.
They are securing their position as the central, indispensable figure. In a healthy family, relationships are a web of direct connections. In this manipulated dynamic, the parent makes themselves the sun, and the children become isolated planets orbiting only them. All information, all affection, all conflict must flow through the parent. This makes them feel powerful, needed, and in control. Your individual relationships with each other are a threat to that control.
The cost of this is immeasurable. It results in a lifetime of siblings who are strangers, rivals, or enemies. It creates a family culture of mistrust, where you learn to be wary of everyone, where you assume there are always hidden agendas and secret conversations happening about you. The person who should have been your lifelong ally—your sibling—becomes a source of tension, because a parent taught you to see them that way.
Breaking free from this cycle requires brutal clarity and courage.
It means recognizing that whispered conversation for what it is: not a gift of trust, but a tool of division.
It means shutting it down, gently but firmly: "That sounds like something you should talk to them about directly. I don't want to be in the middle."
It means going directly to your sibling and building your own relationship, based on your own experiences, not on a parent's manipulated narrative.
It is the hard work of cutting the strings and refusing to be a puppet any longer. The silence that might follow from the parent is not a punishment; it is the sound of their control ending. The bond you build with your sibling, against all odds, is the ultimate act of rebellion and healing.
You were not a bad son or daughter for wanting that confidential closeness. You were a child seeking connection. But now you know the cost. Now you can choose to build real bonds, based on truth, directness, and respect—the very things that manipulative conversation was designed to destroy.
