Defining the parameters of a healthy twin relationship is challenging because each person’s life experience is unique and complicated. The majority of the clientele who seek out my services are grappling with how to reorganize and redefine the boundaries of their adult twin connection. They have outgrown their accommodating childhood roles and are challenged by new intimate relationships and evolving life circumstances. Let me quote a portion of an e-mail I received from a twin struggling to cope with her […]
Tag Archives: siblings
Adult Twins: Identity, Rivalry, and Intimacy
Some twin pairs, not all, become disillusioned about their twinship because they struggle to be “known,” not just “noticed.” Since outsiders habitually relate to them as a unit or a fixed dyad, they expectedly have conflicts with their twin in an attempt to define or declare their individual selves. While twins fight just like different-aged siblings, their tensions have much more to do with establishing separateness and uniqueness, traits afforded naturally to siblings born at different times. Twins, especially identical […]
All Parents Make Mistakes
Christina Baglivi Tinglof is a mother of fraternal twin sons and an accomplished author of two books on the subject—Double Duty and Parenting School-Age Twins and Multiples. She wrote a terrific blog on June 3, 2016, that she is permitting me to share with my readers. It touches upon the parenting mishaps that we all make because we are unaware and unsure about what to do in certain circumstances. Young Twins Who Hit and Bite: Are We To Blame? […]
One Twin’s Opinion
The following provocative essay was written by Maranda Elizabeth, who is an identical twin. It was originally published on a site called The Establishment on January 19, 2016. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission. The Complexities of Being a Twin Maranda Elizabeth What is it like to be a twin? When, shortly before dying, Elspeth is asked this in the book Her Fearful Symmetry, she responds, “All I can say is, you haven’t got a twin, […]
Empathy or Enmeshment?
A friend of mine who is the mother of six-year-old twins shared a lovely story about one of her daughters. Her daughter’s first-grade class had a lesson about pollution, and her daughter wrote a few sentences about how she felt so sorry that fish have to swim in dirty water. Her daughter’s teacher told my friend that she has never encountered such an empathic response from such a young child. Having been raised in such close proximity—emotionally and physically—to their […]