For most of the 1990s and 2000s, the Gallagher brothers clashed on stage and traded high-profile insults in newspaper interviews and on social media. So rumours of an Oasis reunion tour in 2025 have prompted furious speculation about how the pair repaired a rift that for decades appeared intractable.
Family therapists told the Guardian that although sibling rifts are common and often reparable, reunions like the Gallaghers’ only succeed if both warring parties are ready to bury the hatchet.
Janet Reibstein, a family therapist, emeritus professor at Exeter University and author of Good Relations: Cracking the Code of How to Get On Better, said such reconciliation events could “become explosive” if both sides aren’t ready, and people must enter into them aiming for a collaborative peace-making process, not a battleground.
“It isn’t usually a one-step heal but gingerly going forward,” she said, adding that reunions “can often be healing episodes in themselves, because people can have the experience of having been in an anodyne situation where you can not have anger around and often you can see each other again anew”.
Reibstein said family rifts were common because family is the “cauldron of most intense emotions”, with sibling relationships particularly “intense and problematic and rewarding”.
“The sibling has at its heart a dilemma, a sort of bipolar bit to it: you feel loyal and identified with each other, you’ve been through the same things, but at the same time you’re competing for the limited resources any family has – physical space, food, but particularly for the attention, admiration, care of the most important people to you, which are your parents,” she said.
She said transition points such as such as marriage or career achievements could be “potentially fragile times”, highlighting “who was first, who gets what”.
Reibstein said conflicts often take time to resolve, and the first step is processing and validating feelings of anger, which are “always a kind of defence against some sense of hurt or injustice”.
“The rifts can’t be healed until the pain is addressed,” she said, adding that once hurt feelings are validated, anger often dissipates since there is a feeling that justice has been done.
Often it can take a third party to recognise the underlying issue, point out that there are other perspectives and encourage the person to reflect on the role they may have played in driving the conflict. “Anger is blinding, hurt is blinding, you can’t really see the other person’s side until you can get rid of those two things. That’s why it often takes somebody outside to go ‘how about this perspective?’ – take the blinders off and you can see,” Reibstein said.
This is usually a therapist but it can be a trusted friend or relative who can reflect on what may be happening on both sides while also acknowledging and validating the feelings.
Reibstein said one misconception that fuels much conflict is that people deliberately set out to hurt. “Often it doesn’t start out with malevolent intention, it’s misunderstandings,” she said.
Dr Anu Sayal-Bennett, a consultant clinical psychologist at the London Child and Family Therapy Centre, said siblings could be “competitive, jealous and angry”, and this was often linked to childhood where they are affected by parental preference, and their approval or disapproval.
“There may be transgenerational patterns of communication which are characterised by estrangement and distancing. Sometimes this is protective: a person may feel hurt and wounded and need to retreat. They may not have the words to express their emotional pain,” she said.
As a result, some individuals are able to reconnect after a long separation as though nothing happened in the interim. Other relationships may play out as a “continuous cycle of reconnection and separation”.
She said family therapy could often provide an important space to work through difficult feelings. “Separations and feeling stuck can be very painful. We need to be compassionate and nonjudgmental to all those who experience or have experienced family rifts.”
