Many of the current attachment theories highlight the importance of self and interactive regulation between child and caregiver. In this mutual recognition regulatory sphere, the child feels mirrored, comforted, and validated. Over time this self and other regulatory system enables the child to feel confident about taking care of himself because he has internalized parental caretaking responses that give rise to his self-confidence and self-reliance.

Some twins, on the other hand, have not had this vital parental regulating experience. They have matured within the twin matrix and were thereby deprived of and unfamiliar with healthier behavioral expectations. This point was dramatically exemplified in a session that I had with a thirty-five-year-old identical twin man who has begun treatment for issues related to identity confusion and exaggerated codependence. He has tremendous difficulty staying focused on himself. When he begins to share some thought or experience he has had, almost inevitably the issue of his brother’s involvement in the incident takes center stage. When I gently bring this to his attention, he pauses, sighs, and reflects. He has had such limited life experience by himself that he cannot share a narrative without having it shift to his twin.

He can get in touch with some anger and frustration about his lack of agency.

He explains that he was much more attached to his brother than to his parents or other siblings. Thus, his emotional world centered on the twin attachment. He has shared that it is exceedingly difficult for him to be on his own, to make an independent decision, and to trust himself in social situations. In other words, the twin connection organized his regulatory needs. Growing up in this insular, private world made it improbable, if not impossible, for him to internalize these behaviors from an adult caretaking figure.

His inability to regulate himself without his twin further exaggerates and complicates tendencies to compare and compete with each other. My patient relates that he struggles mightily with appreciating and internalizing his happiness and success because these positive feelings hold no merit if compared to his brother’s accomplishments. While it is normal to feel jealous of another’s success, a twin in this predicament can feel devastated, drowning in envy and shame because he has dared to equal or surpass his twin’s achievements.

Although I have repeated this phrase many times, please indulge me once again:

the twinship is not a developmental bond. While undeniably comforting and special, it cannot create the mutual recognition that gives rise to individuality and separateness as twins mature.

Photo by Fars Media Corporation, CC BY 4.0