Working with twins can be difficult and confusing if the therapist does not understand the profound nature of twin primary attachment. Actually, it can be shocking for a nontwin therapist to try and take seriously the commotion that is created when twins fight and then make up. Working with adult twins will always be easier …
Author Archives: Barbara Klein
How Can I Get Along with My Twin?
Twin relationships can be deeply conflicted and also seriously misunderstood by twins, their relatives, close friends and co-workers. Yes, twins often do not understand why they get so angry with each other. Twins do know that anger and fighting is real and intensely upsetting. Parents and close others often suffer confusion and frustration with twin …
Twin Estrangement – Connecting with Other Twins Helps
Popular culture most often portrays twins as having deep and loving relationships with one another. Secondarily, twinship is used to illustrate good and evil or opposite images. Only recently have novels and memoirs been written that explain the pain and animosity that twins can share and are forced to tolerate in each other. Twinship is …
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Teenage Twin Issues
All teenagers have difficulty separating from their families and finding and establishing a separate identity or sense of uniqueness, making adolescence a time that is very turbulent for all teens and their parents. But for twins and their families, the teenage years are truly double trouble. Teenage twins can be hypersensitive about everything that is …
Loneliness in Adult Twins
Last week my Twin Estrangement Group discussed the profound pain, depression, and emotional difficulties that loneliness brings to adult twins. Everyone in my group agreed that loneliness is an unwelcome side effect of estrangement. In my own life experiences I felt loneliness and loss even after I got over missing my twin sister. When I was …
How Parents Can Limit Twin Fighting
Twins bring joy and a sense of specialness to a family. Still – even with the special rewards that twins create – raising twins is hard and frustrating. Sometimes parents feel overwhelmed, hopeless and confused by twin fighting. Well-meaning and attuned parents wonder, “how can I help my children stop fighting with each other? When …
Advice for raising emotionally happy and healthy twins and triplets
With the increased use of fertility drugs, it is no longer uncommon to have twins and triplets. However, it can be stressful to raise multiples. As a parent of multiples, you have to be efficient and organized with your time in order to care for your children and save your sanity. What’s more, it is …
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Why Do Twins Decide to Live Very Separate Lives?
While images of harmony and closeness permeate our cultural and popular presentations and understanding of twins, the dark and disconnected feelings that twins share are very alive and real for countless twins. Indeed, twins who don’t get along or who are actually estranged from one another are burdened with feeling that they are “not normal” …
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