There is a specific shame in being related to someone who has abandoned social contracts. You become an extension of them. At school, whispers followed me: Isn’t that Elena’s sister? I heard she’s crazy. I stopped correcting people. I started believing that her depravity was contagious, that I carried it in my blood like a recessive gene.
In enmeshed sibling relationships, the depravity of one becomes the trauma of the other. I developed symptoms that mirrored hers, just in different forms. She used substances; I used perfectionism. She disappeared into nights; I disappeared into hours of studying until my vision blurred. We were both trying to escape the same childhood, just through different doors.
When an older sister falls, the younger sibling is often conscripted into a role they never auditioned for: the parent, the therapist, the warden. By the time I was fifteen, I was the one driving her home from police stations. I was the one hiding the car keys. I was the one lying to teachers about why I couldn’t finish my homework (“family emergency” became my permanent excuse).
The link between an older sister’s depravity and a younger sibling’s soul is real. It is painful. It is formative. But it is not fatal.
Depravity, seen from the outside, can sometimes look like liberation. That is the trap. Psychological literature has a term for the “link” I felt: enmeshment . Enmeshment is when family boundaries dissolve. You stop knowing where you end and the other person begins.