Recently I have been troubled by the many calls I have received from twins having difficulty coping without their sibling. A while ago, a young man in his early thirties shared his twin dilemma. He poignantly related that he does not miss his brother in a physical sense because he lives just a few hours away; rather, he misses the way he feels about himself when his brother is around—calm, secure, and confident. This pair of identical twin men had […]
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Flying Solo
I have had the privilege of helping a middle-aged twin woman (whom I shall refer to as M) reclaim her self following the sudden loss of her twin brother. When her brother died unexpectedly, her world fell apart. Both twins had been heavily emotionally dependent upon one another in a myriad of complex and complicated ways. At two years of age, their father took M and her brother away from their biological mother because she was too mentally unstable to […]
Parents Know Best
Tania Zulkoskey first contacted me in July 2012, when her fraternal twins were three years old. She and her partner were having some challenges setting limits for the children, and we talked about possible solutions to the situation. We spoke again a few months later via Skype and were able to come up with strategies to help Tania and her partner manage the children’s behavior and limit setting. I was so excited to meet Tania in person at the Multiples […]
Heartbreak
If more people understood the complicated dynamics between identical twin girls, the public might be less inclined to treat them as a unit and lump them together. When I work with adult female MZ (monozygotic, or identical) twins, I am amazed and dismayed at their underdeveloped and unsophisticated knowledge of themselves and one another. Since they have had few opportunities to be separate and have primarily shared a peer group, they are shockingly unaware of their personality differences until an external event […]
An Embarrassment of Riches
In the last few weeks, countless media outlets have reported on the increase in twin births. The latest CDC 2014 data reveals that 33.9 out of every 1,000 births resulted in twins. While 135,336 twins were born in 2014 compared with 138,961 born in 2007, a record percentage of twin births occurred. This statistic is substantiated by the fact that in 2007 only 32.2 per 1,000 births were twin births that year, reflecting that rates for 2014 were actually higher. […]