This May Be Holding You Back From Repairing A Broken Relationship

Spiritual author Elizabeth Lesser wasn’t always close with her younger sister, Maggie. Like all relationships, sibling dynamics can get complicated. Brothers and sisters can be the best of friends or the biggest of rivals. In this case, old childhood wounds kept Elizabeth and Maggie apart.

Everything changed when Maggie was diagnosed with lymphoma and Elizabeth was confirmed to be the best match for the bone marrow transplant Maggie needed to survive. In hopes of healing their relationship, the two sisters began intense therapy sessions. In the process, which she details in her new book, Marrow: A Love Story, Elizabeth says she learned something about her authentic self.

“In those therapy sessions with Maggie, I began to see how so much of what I thought she thought about me ― and that I had internalized as what she thought ― she didn’t even think that about me,” Elizabeth says. “We had these misconceptions about what the other thought about the other and we turned them into these big storylines that affected how we felt about ourself.”

The key to moving forward, Elizabeth found, was letting go of those old narratives. “Both of us kind of rose out of the childhood stories,” she says. “We put those stories down, and in putting my childhood stories down … What bubbled up to the surface was just me. I’m enough, just who I am.”

This newfound self-acceptance created something amazing between the sisters. “She stepped into her enough-ness,” Elizabeth says. “I stepped into my enough-ness. And you know what happens when two enough-nesses meet? Love.”