I continue to be awed by an acquaintance of mine who is a mom to eight-year-old identical twin girls. Some people comment that having twins is like having two singletons born close together, but without the experience of parenting identical twins, a person might never understand how difficult daily parenting decisions are with two same-age children. Let me give you an example. My friend decided to make a chart so that each of her daughters could work on behaviors that […]
Category Archives: Mental Health
Thoughts about Dr. Phil’s Program “Identical Twins Starving to Death: Who’s to Blame?”
Recently, Dr. Phil featured a program about sixteen-year-old twins, Taylor and Tricia, who both have an eating disorder. It was tragic to witness how these girls’ lives have been swallowed up in an anorexic bulimic vortex. The visual images of their binging and purging behavior were graphically stunning. While we certainly cannot know all of the circumstances that contributed to the girls’ eating disorder, the producers of this program focused on the parents’ divorce, the mother’s boyfriend, and the father’s […]
Constantly in Search of Acceptance
It stands to reason that many of us who enter the helping professions have a fundamental proclivity for being helpful, and we enjoy feeling needed and appreciated. In the case of psychotherapists, our professional training, our ongoing personal therapy, and our continuing education enable us to secure and maintain healthy boundaries with our patients. While we experience tremendous gratification and a sense of well-being when our clients are doing well, we are careful not to consciously or unconsciously demand that […]
The Risks of Twin Motivation
While twins can be excellent motivators for each other, sometimes risks are associated with the constant comparison and competition that underlie their attachment. This article discusses how these dynamics can contribute to eating disorders in some identical twin pairs. It was originally published on FoxNews.com on August 28, 2016, and I am sharing it here with the author’s permission. Twins at higher risk for eating disorders, experts say Julie Revelant Growing up, identical twins Jennifer* and Marie*, 34, were best […]
The Other Side of Fear Is Freedom
Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood touches upon the many stressors of present-day parenting. The fear about giving our children more freedom to be outside the home is high on the list of parental conundrums. She writes, “By the time children get big enough to venture out on their own—to the grocery store, to a friend’s house down the street—their parents feel strange about letting them go, believing the world to be a […]