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: twinship
Not Seeing Eye to Eye: The Eye of the Twinship Storm
Many of the adult twins that contact me are experiencing emotional pain due to a growing awareness that they are different from their twin. They struggle mightily with this dawning realization that they are not magically and nonverbally on the same page. Often, external circumstances trigger a series of events that make a twin pair’s differences obvious. For example, becoming a parent for the first time can be a tumultuous developmental adjustment for many people. When one twin discovers that […]
Soul Mates or Cell Mates?
Healthy adult twins do not feel imprisoned by their twinship. They have acknowledged each other’s right to be separate and unique while maintaining their special connection. They have worked through feelings of ambivalence, competition, and jealousy, and each has evolved into an individuated self. Healthy twins care deeply about one another and recognize and respect each other’s autonomy and choices. They enjoy being together but do not require exclusive possession of one other in order to cope with life or […]
Making and Keeping Friends Outside the Twinship
Christina Baglivi Tinglof is a mother of fraternal twin boys and the author of My Twin Pregnancy Week by Week, Double Duty, and Parenting School-Age Twins and Multiples. The following article, published on June 19, 2018, is reprinted with her permission from her blog, Talk About Twins. Why Is It So Hard for My Twins to Make Friends? Christina Baglivi Tinglof Question: My husband and I have 14-year-old fraternal twin boys. We meet regularly with other parents of twins to see if we are experiencing any […]
Heartbreak: Loving a Twin
My blog this week is an email that a gentleman wrote to his girlfriend after he reluctantly accepted that her relationship with her identical twin prevented her from making a commitment to him. This gentleman gave me permission to share this with my readers, and the names have been changed to protect the identities. He contacted me after having read The Same but Different. He thanked me profusely for the fact that the book validated his concerns and helped him […]