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 […]
Tag Archives: identity
The Scrooge of Twindom
My short presentation at the Budapest conference for the International Twin Society for Twin Studies and the World Congress of Twin Pregnancies conveyed my habitual passionate views about what twins require to become healthy individuals. I talked a bit about how parents struggle to differentiate and bond with two babies. Despite our best efforts, we default to labeling rather than describing each child. I am as guilty as the next person of labeling as it provides a shorthand communication that […]
Starving to Be Separate
My friend Leora Eisen, a world-renowned Canadian documentary filmmaker and an identical twin, sent me a CBC article by Bridget Yard titled “As Identical Twins, We Shared Everything. Except My Eating Disorder.” While I found the article very interesting, I believe that some key issues were not explored. I imagine that certain factors could not be explicated due to the very public nature of the publication. Nonetheless, I am presenting a reasonable hypothesis to speculate about deeper issues. While Bridget […]
One Step at a Time
Many parents of twins confront the daunting challenge of helping their children develop individual friendships. This is not usually an issue with boy-girl twins, vut same-sex twin pairs frequently have difficulties in this arena. A mom of ten-year-old identical twin girls recently shared a story with me that illustrates this challenge. Both girls have been in separate classrooms since kindergarten. One of the girls, Kaye, has more self-confidence than her sister, Clarissa. She is outgoing, independent, and easygoing. She attends […]
The True Nature of Twinship
Vivienne Lewin is a colleague who has written extensively about twin relationships. She graciously allowed me to share an article about the multifaceted complications of a twin connection that she wrote for the Hippocratic Post on April 16, 2018. Twinship: A Subversive Relationship Vivienne Lewin Twins generate a great deal of excitement and curiosity, and with the increasing frequency of twin births as a result of IVF and later age of conception, amongst other factors, it is important to understand the […]