“I fell in love with my half sister. What do i do?”

“Perhaps you are looking for a safe space”

Ekaterina Mikhailova, psychotherapist:

You write that you and your sister have different parents and you are not blood relatives, but in your family roles you are still brother and sister. Feeling the sexual attraction build up, you are confused, scared and embarrassed that you are in such an incomprehensible situation. If it were not for this clarification – “sister”, what would bother you then?

But I think this story is more complicated. I would very much like to ask this question during a face-to-face consultation: how do you develop relationships with strangers? With the outside world in general? Because, directing attraction or falling in love with a loved one: a neighbor, classmate, someone we know almost life, with whom we grew up together, we turn from the outside world to the familiar, chamber. This often means looking for a safe space, a need for shelter.

In addition, canonical love implies a certain distance, which allows you to idealize the object of love, fantasize about it. Then, of course, the gilding subsides, but that’s another question.

The described situation can be represented as follows. A person who does not feel very confident in the outside world, is afraid of rejection or ridicule, at some point convinces himself: no one really interests me there, I like a neighbor or a girl with whom I have been sitting at a desk for ten years. Why worries and unexpected adventures, when you can fall in love like this – calmly and without any surprises?

Of course, I do not rule out a really great love between people who grew up together. And if, for genetic reasons, it is not contraindicated for them to turn into a couple, I see no reason to avoid such relationships. But the main question is different: is it really your conscious choice, your real feelings, or are you trying to hide behind these relationships? But how can you know at 19 when you haven’t tried anything else?

Take a break: do not rush to act, do not make hasty decisions. There is a great chance that after a while the situation will resolve itself. In the meantime Please try to answer these three questions honestly:

1. Are you trying to replace adventure, going out into the world with something familiar and safe? Are there fears of being rejected by this world behind this choice?
2. What accompanies those erotic experiences that you experience? Do you feel anxiety, shame, fear? How important is this topic of breaking the taboo of intra-family relationships, “symbolic incest”, to you, and how do you deal with it?
3. All of us can experience a variety of feelings, including forbidden ones: aggression towards a small child, gloating about the fact that something did not work out for our parents in life. I’m not talking about sexual feelings in relation to a completely inappropriate object. That is, we can experience anything in the depths of our souls. Our emotions are very often inconsistent with our upbringing. The question is: what is between what you experience and how you act?

I think your doubts indicate that you have a chance to learn something new about yourself. Turning feelings into material for self-observation and introspection is perhaps the main work that needs to be done in this situation. And what decision you then make is not so important. In the end, every choice we make has its price.