Emotional Wound Thesaurus: Growing up with a Sibling’s Chronic or Complicated Illness

When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. Knowing her backstory is important to achieving this end, and one of the most impactful pieces of a character’s backstory is her emotional wound. This negative experience from the past is so intense that a character will go to great lengths to avoid experiencing that kind of pain and negative emotion again. As a result, certain behaviors, beliefs, and character traits will emerge.

Characters, like real people, are unique, and will respond to wounding events differently. The vast array of possible emotional wounds combined with each character’s personality gives you many options in terms of how your character will turn out. With the right amount of exploration, you should be able to come up with a character whose past appropriately affects her present, resulting in a realistic character that will ring true with readers. Understanding what wounds a protagonist bears will also help you plot out her arc, creating a compelling journey of change that will satisfy readers.

NOTE: We realize that sometimes a wound we profile may have personal meaning, stirring up the past for some of our readers. It is not our intent to create emotional turmoil. Please know that we research each wounding topic carefully to treat it with the utmost respect. 

We hope the sample list of ideas below will help you see how emotional trauma will influence your character’s behavior and mindset. For the full entry of this and over 100 other emotional wounds, check into our bestselling resource, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.

Growing up with a Sibling’s Chronic or Complicated Illness

Examples: Getting through childhood can be difficult enough when life isn’t overly complicated. But having a sibling with chronic, long-term, or complex medical or emotional issues that require a lot of financial and physical attention from caregivers can have an impact on other children in the family. Some examples of these issues include

• a traumatic brain injury
• an undiagnosed illness
• a failing organ in need of a transplant…

Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: safety and security, love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization

False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:

• Someone (oneself, the sick child, a parent) must have done something wrong and is being punished.
• It would have been better if he/she had never been born.
• My parents love him/her more than me…

Positive Attributes That May Result: adaptable, appreciative, calm, curious, diplomatic, easygoing, empathetic, generous, gentle, honorable, idealistic, independent…

Negative Traits That May Result: apathetic, callous, catty, childish, cynical, dishonest, disloyal, frivolous, grumpy, humorless, impatient, insecure, manipulative, martyr…

Resulting Fears:

• The same thing is going to happen to me.
• My sibling is going to die.
• My life is going to be like this forever…

Possible Habits That May Emerge: 

• Avoiding the sibling when in public
• Acting out as a way of getting a parent’s attention
• Overachieving as a means of earning a parent’s love
• Becoming independent out of necessity
• Maturing early emotionally…

TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. For our current list of Emotional Wound Entries, go here. And for a boatload of practical information on how to incorporate wounds into your story, see our collection of posts on this topic.

For other Descriptive Thesaurus Collections, go here.

Which emotional wounds are haunting your characters?

Emotional wounds are incredibly formative, changing how a character views the world, causing trust issues, damaging their self-worth, dictating how they will interact with other people, and making it harder for them to achieve their goals. As such, understanding your character’s wound is vitally important to your overall story.

To learn more, we recommend The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. This writing guide explores emotional trauma and what it will look like for your character and their journey in the story. It highlights 120+ possible wounding events and helps you brainstorm how each might play out in your story so you can write your character’s behaviors, attitudes, fears, and insecurities with authenticity.

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