Since many twins consider their sibling their other half, I enjoyed a recent Huffington Post article entitled “How Relationship Experts Define the Word ‘Soulmate’” that explores this concept in a nontwin context. I appreciate how many of the quoted experts emphasize that a soulmate is someone who challenges you to grow, who does not take away your sense of self, who expects you to be imperfectly perfect, and who requires ongoing authenticity and transparency. Image courtesy of Tagard via Pixabay

Twins are constantly compared. This dynamic is an integral part of the twin landscape. If the dyadic pair has not yet learned how to manage the expectable vicissitudes of a twin connection, and one of the twins has not yet attained a well-functioning sense of a separate self, he or she may feel that his or her mood is always up or down. An older twin in his sixties tells me that he is always up. This delusional upbeat mood […]

I have been thinking about two sessions I had recently with two different twin clients—both struggling with twin loss, physically and emotionally. One woman has been attempting to work through her grief about the death of her twin sister, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack a few months ago. My client and her sister were incredibly close. Although they were both married with careers and children, they spoke every day and saw one another frequently. They shared an inexplicable […]

The majority of my identical twin patients struggle with the lifelong consequences of having been the caretaking twin in their relationship. This dynamic occurs in different familial situations for different reasons—some inexplicable and unconscious and some in response to traumatic childhood experiences in which a relationship with a parent was unavailable or unreliable. Generally speaking, the twin who assumes the caretaking role has a specific developmental trajectory. This dynamic is most pernicious when one twin unilaterally and purposefully takes on […]