I’ve been in and out of therapy as an adult. Not because something catastrophic happened to me. Not because I had a single defining trauma. But because growing up as a sib left marks I didn’t fully understand until I was well into adulthood — and some of them I’m still sorting out.
June is PTSD Awareness Month. And while most people picture combat veterans or survivors of acute trauma when they hear those three letters, the reality is more complicated than that. Trauma doesn’t require a single dramatic event. For many siblings of individuals with disabilities, it accumulated quietly — crisis by crisis, year by year, in a childhood where someone else’s needs consistently outweighed your own.
If you’ve never considered that what you carry might be trauma, this post is for you.
What Trauma Actually Looks Like for Sibs
Research published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies specifically examined siblings of individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism through the lens of trauma theory, and what it found is validating. Growing up in a household shaped by disability-related stress, chronic crisis, and emotional unpredictability creates a real psychological impact. Studies consistently show that siblings experience elevated rates of anxiety, guilt, depression, and hypervigilance — that constant low-level scanning for what might go wrong next.
You might recognize it in yourself. The way you startle easily. The difficulty relaxing even when everything is fine. The sense that you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The pattern of putting everyone else’s needs first without thinking. The way certain sounds, situations, or family dynamics can send your nervous system into overdrive before your brain even registers why.
Research confirms that siblings show physiological markers of chronic stress — elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, a nervous system that learned early to stay on alert. That’s not a personality quirk. That’s your body doing exactly what it was conditioned to do.
More than 50% of siblings of people with disabilities in one study reported feelings of guilt, poor sibling relationship quality, elevated depressive symptoms, and low overall well-being. These aren’t small numbers. And they’re not character flaws.
The Difference Between Stress and Trauma
Stress is temporary. Your nervous system activates, the threat passes, and it comes back down. Trauma is what happens when the stress is chronic, unpredictable, or too much to process alone — and the nervous system never fully gets the signal that it’s safe to come down.
For sibs, that might have looked like a childhood shaped by a parent’s constant exhaustion, an emergency that could happen at any moment, the pressure to be the easy one, or grief for the sibling relationship you wanted but couldn’t quite have. None of that required a single catastrophic event. But all of it can leave a mark on your nervous system that follows you into adulthood.
That’s why I’ve been in and out of therapy. Not because something went wrong with me. Because something was hard — for a long time — and I needed help carrying it.
What Your Body Needs: Two Places to Start
Here’s what I know from both my personal experience and my work as an occupational therapist and yoga therapist: you can’t think your way out of a trauma response. The nervous system doesn’t respond to logic. It responds to safety signals — and you can learn to give those to yourself.
1. Find a therapist who gets it. Not every therapist understands the sibling experience. Look for someone trained in trauma-informed care — ideally with experience in family systems, chronic illness, or disability. EMDR, somatic therapy, and IFS (Internal Family Systems) are all approaches with strong evidence for complex, chronic trauma. Going to therapy doesn’t mean something is broken. It means you’re finally making room for yourself.
2. Start with your exhale. This is the simplest nervous system tool I know, and it’s backed by solid science. When you exhale, your heart rate slows — this is controlled by the vagus nerve, the main pathway of your parasympathetic nervous system. Longer exhales send a direct signal to your brain that you are safe.
No breath retention required. No complicated technique. Just this:
Inhale through your nose for 4 counts. Exhale slowly through your mouth for 6–8 counts. That’s it. Do it three times right now if you want.
Research shows that making the exhale longer than the inhale activates the parasympathetic response — your body’s built-in rest-and-digest mode — and can meaningfully reduce anxiety and lower stress hormones. For a nervous system that has spent years on alert, this is medicine. Simple, free, available anywhere.
You Are Allowed to Take Up Space
One of the hardest things about being a sib is that the message — spoken or unspoken — was often that your needs were secondary. That you were fine. That you could handle it. That someone else needed the attention more.
You were a kid. You handled what you had to handle. But you don’t have to keep doing that alone.
If anything in this post landed for you — if you read “hypervigilance” and recognized yourself, if you’ve been in and out of therapy trying to name something you couldn’t quite name — trust that feeling. It’s worth following.
You’ve spent a long time taking care of everyone else. Your nervous system is asking for the same.
Cheryl Albright, OTR/L
Cheryl is an occupational therapist, yoga therapist, and the founder of SpecialSib.com — a space dedicated to the siblings who often get forgotten in the conversation.
