Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once described a sister as “a special kind of double” - “somebody who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves”. The same might be said of a brother. But does this unique dynamic make siblings better colleagues and collaborators? Does it make them less competitive and more cooperative?
Probably not, but the relationship we have with our siblings is often the longest of our lives, and – built on years of comforting and caring, challenging and criticising, inspiring and infuriating each other – forges a kind of emotional shorthand that can, in later life, form the bedrock of a deeply effective partnership.
Below, four pairs of siblings who either work closely together or collaborate frequently reflect on their childhood relationships, and how those bonds have shaped the adults they’ve become, and the career paths they’ve taken.
‘At our core, we’re absolutely the same people’
Founders of chocolate brand Bean and Goose Karen and Natalie Keane
Karen and Natalie Keane, the two eldest of five children who grew up in Co Wexford, are three years apart, but they were always paired up because of a big age gap between Natalie and their next two siblings.
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“As children, I was seen as the more creative one,” says Natalie. “I was a dancer and I was good at art. What I wasn’t good at was school and structure and academics, whereas Karen really excelled in these areas. I probably slotted into being the creative one because of that.” Karen agrees. “Yeah, I loved school, but I think we leaned into our differences as children to avoid competing with each other and having to worry about not being as good as the other.”
They describe themselves as very independent from a young age. “Back in our day, parents set the overall rules, which were really important, but we navigated the day-to-day of being kids together,” says Natalie. “So we very much influenced each other.”
The relationship was close from a young age. “There was no separating us,” says Karen. “We always had each other’s backs, and if one of us got into trouble over missed homework or poor test results, the other would always cover for her.” Natalie was the one most likely to make mischief. “My role as the older sister was to help Natalie out,” says the 54-year-old.
The supportiveness of their childhood relationship laid a strong foundation for a successful business partnership. The sisters set up a premium chocolate company, Bean and Goose, at Last Tree Farm in Gorey in 2014. “We’re really, really lucky; we’ve been able to navigate 12 years of running a business together and still remain close,” says Natalie.
They describe themselves as having fundamentally different personalities but shared values. “So at our core, we’re absolutely the same people, with the same beliefs, the same moral compass and the same vision,” says Natalie. Having such distinct personalities has shaped them in so many ways, they say. “I’d be a much more boring person without Natalie,” says Karen. “I have a tendency to always want to be top of the class, a good student; I’m very competitive in that way. But I think having Natalie – just being so mad – taught me that there’s room for all sorts of people in the world. I also think she’s brought more of my personality out and encouraged a fearlessness and a ‘just get on with it and don’t worry what people think’ mindset. I wouldn’t feel as free without her.”
For Natalie, Karen brings equilibrium to her life. “Karen helps me create some balance between work and my personal life. And I don’t think I’d allow myself to be so creative or to have such big plans if I didn’t have Karen there beside me making sure everything is executed 100 per cent.”
‘Simon is a good yin to my yang’
Simon and Warren Atkins, reality TV producers
Competitive sport brought Mayo brothers Simon and Warren Atkins closer together as teenagers. “There’s a six-year age gap between us,” says 45-year-old Simon, “and when you’re young that’s huge; you’re at completely different life stages. As a child, I was closer to our eldest brother Damien, as there’s only 18 months between us.”
They were both talented tennis players – Warren was no 1 in Ireland at age 14 – and they travelled the country together playing tournaments. It wasn’t their only shared interest. “Our parents’ business took off at this time so they pumped a lot of money into extracurricular activities,” says Simon. “I played the clarinet,” adds Warren, “and Simon played the flute. I was a champion Irish dancer and we both played badminton. We did drama, we were part of the town band. We spent so much time together that inevitably we became closer.”
Over the past five years, Simon and Warren have cemented this bond. Although they started their careers in banking and recruitment, respectively, they now both work in television – Simon as a freelance executive producer and presenter and Warren as a series producer – and they recently bought a house together in London, which they happily share. “I don’t think many siblings could buy a house and live together, but we’re very similar with a lot of shared interests,” says Warren. “We laugh a lot when we’re home together. We belly roll. And our glass is always half full. We’re very, very positive people always looking on the bright side of life.” Simon agrees: “I think our positive energy just bounces off each other all of the time.” Warren adds that both being gay is probably part of why the relationship works so well.
“I think all of the competitive sport and extracurricular activities as teenagers was an attempt to mask the fact that we were young gay men in the west of Ireland,” says Warren. “We were a very close family in general, but Simon and I had this in common.” Each of the brothers navigated coming out in his own way. Warren “burst out of the closet in flames at 18 and had a great time”, says Simon, while he waited until after university at age 26. Both agree having the support of the other made an enormous difference.
They believe this support system has massively shaped the men they are today. “We inspire each other and drive each other,” says Simon. Warren adds: “I love Simon to bits. I love his creativity and his flair and his tenacity; he never gives up and he’s always thinking of the bigger picture, of where we can go and what we can do next. But I’m a bit more OCD and more organised, which makes Simon a good yin to my yang.”
‘I overthink everything but Izzy is cool as a breeze’
Ailbhe and Izzy Keane, founders of Izzy Wheels
Ailbhe and Izzy Keane grew up in Galway and are the two youngest daughters in a family of four. “Although there’s four years between us,” says Ailbhe, “we’ve always been more than sisters; we’re best friends.” The 33-year-old’s earliest memories are of playing with Izzy and her mobility devices. “I remember thinking how cool they were and how much fun it was. Izzy was born with spina bifida and I was told before Mum brought her home from the hospital that she would be a bit different from me, but her disability was always spoken about really positively in our family.”
Izzy, who is 29, remembers how Ailbhe would decorate her wheelchair at Christmas and Halloween. “Ailbhe always helped me to jazz up my wheelchair for special occasions. We’d make it look really cool and it was something we both loved doing together.” Although they didn’t realise it at the time, these playful endeavours were the genesis of Izzy Wheels, the company they founded in 2017 to provide a range of removable wheel covers designed to match a user’s personality. In the past nine years they have collaborated with global brands such as Disney and Hello Kitty as well as independent artists.
“We’ve always been on each other’s team,” says Ailbhe. “We were never rivals as children because we each had different personalities, strengths and weaknesses so we were never competing against one another. We’ve always wanted the best for each other.”
Izzy describes herself as “a catastrophiser” and says Ailbhe has helped her to step outside of her comfort zone. “When Izzy Wheels was in its infancy, I was 18 and I had never used public transport alone, but soon I was travelling up and down to Dublin on the train independently to meet Ailbhe for Izzy Wheels events. Since she moved to Amsterdam two years ago, I fly on my own to visit her and she meets me at the other end. She has always given me the push I needed.”
Ailbhe doesn’t see Izzy as a catastrophiser. “I’m a massive planner and I overthink everything, but Izzy is cool as a breeze. She’s off-the-cuff and everything always works out perfectly for her.” Ailbhe believes Izzy has not only shaped her career but the person she’s become. “She is the warmest, most positive, bubbly person and that has rubbed off on me so much. Obviously, we grew up in the same family with the same parents, we went to the same schools, but her experience of the world is so different to mine because she’s a wheelchair user. She just gets on with it and never complains. She’s an incredibly positive person to be around.”
Both sisters agree the strength of their relationship is based on having the same values and wanting the same thing in life. “But we also slag each other off constantly,” says Izzy. “We’ve been told that when people meet us for the first time after seeing us in the media, they expect us to be deadly serious, but we’re definitely not. We’re really passionate about what we do, but we’re always having a giggle together.”
‘We’ve morphed into each other’
Interior designer Helen Turkington and fashion designer Rae Feather
Sisters Helen Turkington and Rae Feather grew up in Co Tyrone, but they weren’t close as children. “We were brought up in the same house, but I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was very young, and Rae spent more time with my parents and my brother,” Helen says.
“Our brother was very involved in showjumping and I was expected to help out, but Helen was allergic to horses,” says Feather.
“I don’t think we really knew each other then,” says Turkington. Travelling to and from boarding school together in Coleraine as teenagers helped bridge the gap between them, but the relationship really evolved when they moved to London in the mid-1980s.
Feather, who at 61 is the eldest by two years, moved over first, and Turkington followed. “You become closer in a big city like London,” says Turkington. “And you realise that there actually is a bond there that perhaps you didn’t notice before you moved away. We had Irish friends in London so we all started going out together, and that brought Rae and I closer; we were spending more time in each other’s company and experiencing more together.”
They both took indirect routes into their respective careers of interior design and fashion – Turkington worked in food and as a PA, while Feather spent time in Formula 1 marketing. Settling into sectors that are intrinsically linked strengthened the sisters’ bond.
“We have another sister who we also get on really well with,” says Turkington, “but she’s in a completely different industry.” By her own admission, this third sibling doesn’t have a creative bone in her body, the sisters say. “Rae and I both travel a lot, we love furniture shops and clothes shops and that shared interest has definitely had a massive influence on our relationship.” But their bond goes deeper. “We can be vulnerable with each other,” says Feather. “I’m closer to Helen than I am to anyone else. Even when I don’t want to talk about something, but I feel I have to get it off my chest, I can dig deep and go to Helen. She’s always the person I turn to.” Helen agrees. “I think we instinctively know when something’s not right with the other.”
Feather jokes that they’re even beginning to look alike. “We were never similar, not even remotely, but we’ve morphed into each other.” Their girlfriends certainly think so, “but that’s probably because we laugh at the same silly things,” says Turkington. This shared sense of humour is one of the bedrocks of their relationship. So is honesty. “Sisters don’t have an angle,” says Turkington. “It’s straight shooting.”
For her, this forthrightness comes naturally. “I’m very direct,” she says.
“Whereas I’m very good at pretending to be comfortable,” says Feather. “Helen doesn’t like to do that. If she doesn’t want to go somewhere, she will just say no.”
“But that’s the great thing about being sisters,” says Turkington. “You can totally be yourself.”
What the experts say
“Every piece of research comes to the conclusion that the relationship you have with your family and friends is the greatest predictor of happiness and life satisfaction and fulfilment,” says psychotherapist Richard Hogan, clinical director of the Therapy Institute in Dublin. “So when you have a sibling who supports you, is not jealous of you, not destructive around you and who loves you, wants the best for you and is there to give you advice, that is so important. That relationship can be such a sustaining gift throughout your life.
“Attachment is heavily researched: parental – mothers especially – children and relationships, but sibling rivalry, sibling connection, disconnection, is massively significant and under-researched.”
Galway-based holistic therapist Mary Lynn agrees that the shared experience of siblings is special. “There’ll always be a sibling you get on with, and another who drives you mad. There’s a saying about siblings I love – I think I have it on a mug – siblings are different flowers from the same garden.”
Hogan agrees. “It’s so unique to have this shared story with someone who knows you so intimately. You know each other’s buttons, you’ve shared a bathtub, you’ve grown up together and you share the whole family’s story. It’s an incredibly unique experience.”
But Lynn regularly encounters sibling-related issues in her therapy room. “There’s a big emphasis on the parental role, but siblings shape so much of who we are. They’re our first playmates, so there’s loyalty and fun in that, but there can be a lot of rivalry as well, and this comes up in therapy all the time.”
Lynn, who was an only child herself for six years until her sister was born, finds that birth order and sibling archetypes often come into play. “I usually ask patients what role they played in their family; were they the caregiver, for example, or the hero child. They may have been the scapegoat or the ‘lost child’ – that’s sometimes the middle child, but not necessarily; it’s the child who feels they weren’t seen but forgotten about. The peacemaker is another, and there’s usually the joker, who is often the youngest child.”
Hogan says it’s common for adults to project these archetypes on to other relationships in their lives. “People can have what are called gestalts, which are whole images of people; so we might have a gestalt of the oldest sibling as dominating or the one who always takes control, and you could project that on to your boss. Or as the eldest sibling, you could project the idea of the youngest being carefree and never taking responsibility on to a work colleague.”
He adds that there’s nothing more complex than our family of origin and the roles we were assigned within it. “That’s generally why we get so sick in the second week of January, because our whole vagus nerve system is low after being in our family of origin over Christmas. There are simmering tensions; when you ask someone to pass the salt at Christmas dinner, it’s loaded with 30 or 40 years of meaning,” he says. “The analogy I always think of is, when the youngest in the family is put sitting on a piano stool at the bit of the table that’s actually a tennis table, while the rest of the adults are around the mahogany dining table. And then the eldest child says, ‘Are you okay down there, Richard?’ and all of a sudden, the battle erupts because there’s so much meaning attached to meaningless things.”
Hogan says the stress comes from playing a role we were never meant to play. “We leave those environments feeling like nothing authentic happened, that we’re all just playing this weird game that we’ve played for 30 years.” He says the most freeing thing is to understand that these roles were never fit for purpose in the first place and that if we don’t buy into them, maybe we won’t be so stressed by them.
However, this can be difficult given what Lynn refers to as Freud’s repetition compulsion theory, which describes an unconscious drive to re-enact painful past experiences or relational dynamics. “You might have heard someone ask, ‘Why do I keep gravitating towards the same man?’ This re-enactment can apply to the role you were assigned within the family too.” As children, our prefrontal cortex responsible for reasoning isn’t fully developed, says Lynn. “There’s a lot of subliminal messaging in families that I don’t think either parents or siblings realise is happening. You’ll sometimes see this when there’s a really high-achieving sibling in a family. Their brother or sister will often find their direction elsewhere so they don’t have to compete. They search out their own niche.”
The challenge in adulthood is to shake off any negative sibling dynamics. “It is difficult to do,” says Hogan. “The way to approach it is something people don’t like to hear either – it’s having empathy for your sibling’s side and their opinions and what has happened to them in childhood. And here’s the thing that really needs to happen,” he says. “If you’re going to try to get past these earlier relationships, which might have been very fraught, forgiveness is a really important part of moving forward. It involves a conversation that you don’t go into expecting to win, one where you’re not thinking about blame. Instead, you might say, ‘This is my experience, I’d love to hear what your experience was. We have a long piece of life ahead of us, I’d like to have a better relationship with you. I’d like to understand your position a bit better.’ That’s what it takes,” he says, “and a lot of people aren’t able to be that honest.”
Where siblings have narcissistic personalities, Hogan says estrangement might be the only answer. Lynn agrees that cutting off a brother or sister should happen only in extreme circumstances. “There’s a lot on social media right now about cutting family members out of your life. But it should be a last resort, only if a relationship feels unsafe.”
Lynn believes the key is creating healthy boundaries rather than punitive, immovable boundaries. “You need to understand what’s healthy for you. It’s not about having really strict boundaries where there’s no movement, or really loose boundaries where you’re just being totally reactive all of the time ... Remember that disagreements in sibling relationships are okay – you’re not the same person. What’s important in any relationship dynamic is that rupture is followed by repair. Ruptures will happen, but how do we repair them?”
