A three-hour lunch that finally explained a lifetime of beatings

For years, a man in one of Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish's later workshops avoided his twin brother, Eric, who had spent their childhood beating him up, sometimes for turning off a television, sometimes for no reason he could name. Their parents rarely intervened. By the time they were teenagers, the fists had turned into a sharper weapon, Eric humiliating him at the dinner table over books and politics, and the man defending himself the only way he knew how, with a biting, sarcastic tongue aimed at all of Eric's weak spots.

After the workshops, something pulled him to call his brother anyway, after years of distance. They met for what became a three-hour lunch, and what he heard upended everything he'd assumed about his own childhood. Eric told him he had always been the favorite, that people were drawn to him from birth, tiny and perfect featured, while Eric felt like the big, awkward kid nobody picked up. Eric said their mother was always angry at him and always protecting his brother, and that all his own achievements, the sports, the sharp intellect at the dinner table, never felt like they earned him anything that mattered. 'The praise didn't mean anything,' Eric told him. 'You had the love.'

The man asked him outright if that was why he'd hit him all those years. 'Damned right,' Eric said. 'I was mad and frustrated, and you were my scapegoat.'

By the end of the lunch, both men realized how much they had each spent decades assuming the other one had it easy, and how wrong they'd both been. Neither of them, it turned out, had been the evil one. They'd been two boys caught in a dynamic neither of them had chosen, doing damage to each other in the only ways they knew how.

Faber and Mazlish point to stories like this one as evidence that the pull between siblings to reconnect, however long the estrangement, however deep the old wounds, doesn't simply disappear with age. What it usually takes is one person willing to make the first call, and both people willing to actually listen instead of only waiting for their turn to explain themselves.

If there's a sibling you've drifted from over old wounds, consider being the one to make the first call, even if you have no idea how it will be received. When you talk, resist the urge to only explain your own side, and ask instead what the relationship actually looked like from where they were standing, since it's often nothing like what you assumed. Let them finish before you defend yourself, even when what you hear is hard to accept. If old resentment surfaces, name it honestly rather than smoothing it over, and be willing to say plainly that you didn't know, and that you're sorry for the part you played. Give the conversation time, since some of the most important things get said only after the easier ones have already been spoken.