Anthea and David Hammon went 10 years without speaking due to difficulties within their relationship.
“David was a great tormenter all through certainly my childhood and into teenage years, and look, I was pretty happy when at 15 he left and went to university and moved out,” Anthea told Insight.
David admitted that as children, and then as teenagers, he would tease Anthea which usually resulted in tears from his younger sister.
“I have got four sisters, and so Anthea would react the best, which was probably why she got a bit more treatment than the others,” David said.
After David moved out of the family home, that’s when the relationship effectively ceased.
“I don't need to have a relationship with him if I am going to be treated like that, he felt the same, yeah, we just sort of avoided each other really,” Anthea said.
“We then didn't speak for the better part of 10 years to be honest.”
John Pickering, an academic who specialises in sibling behaviour, told Insight that conflict between young siblings, if left unresolved, can continue right through to adulthood.
Anthea and David Hammon. Source: Insight
“The sibling relationship is one of the longest - possibly the longest - you will have in your life,” he said.
“It tends to outlive your parental relationship and romantic partner relationship, and so if you have an early pattern of conflict it can come up again in later life, unfortunately over things like, for example, disputing parents' estates and things like that.
“It never ends in that regard and it's certainly something that I think we ought to be taking seriously.”
Pickering said sibling rivalry and conflict is a very normal and healthy thing, to a point.
“It can spill over to that point where it's marked by, you know, physical aggression, hostility, when it is persistent.”
Fortunately for Anthea and David, they were eventually able to repair their relationship when they began working together in the family business.
“We had a conversation, we started working together and we realised Anthea is a mechanical engineer and I am an accountant economist and so we had quite a good complimentary skill set,” David said.
“Each one was quite good at what we did, we started to respect each other out of that.”
In time, this working relationship led to conversations about their past.
“Then I had to have the emotional intelligence to one day sit with Anthea and we had a conversation where I just apologised for being such a silly jerk for a long time,” David said.
“That sort of freed us then of all that sort of baggage and everything else that we'd had, and that allowed us to then just have an adult relationship with each other, and just go on and yeah, run our business successfully.”
Anthea doesn’t regret the time the pair spent apart, and believes it helped heal their relationship in the long term.
“I think it was important to have the gap that we had, the 10 year gap where we didn't see very much of each other, because during that time we grew into adults and we became experts in our own fields and then when we came back together we could both look at each other and go, ‘Wow, you are good at what you do and I am OK at what I do so let's make that work together’.”
