Barbara Klein, Ed.D.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/twin-dilemmas/202009/how-approach-productive-school-year

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/twin-dilemmas/202008/adult-twin-fighting

New Understandings of Twin Relationships by Barbara Klein, Stephen Hart and Jacqueline Martinez takes an experienced-based approach to exploring how twin attachment and estrangement are critical to understanding the push and pull of closely entwined personal relationships.

Based on the research expertise of each of the authors (all identical twins in their own right), and vignettes from twins across the globe, this book describes the inner workings of the twin-world, showing how the twin-world creates experiences that are often more intense and intricately textured than those in the singleton-world. Chapters debunk myths surrounding twinship and analyze the developmental stages of the twin relationship as well as the effect of being a twin on one’s mental health from different perspectives. The authors articulate how attachment, separation anxiety, loneliness, estrangement and the subjective experience of the twin and non-twin “other” impact behavior, thinking, and feeling.

Through its careful study of the many psychological challenges that twins face throughout their lifetimes, this text will help psychologists, scholars, clinicians, and twins themselves attain a deeper understanding of all interpersonal relationships.

This book will be out in December 2020 and is being published by Routledge.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/twin-dilemmas

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/twin-dilemmas/202007/the-vanishing-half-twins-who-learn-live-their-own-lives

The Power of Attachment
 
    Twin attachment is strong and profound, and a determinant of how twins separate from one another. In general our culture sees twins as having an idealized closeness that is a perfect intimacy. I have heard so many times: “You are so lucky to be a twin. I always wanted a twin who would be my best friend.” I get a horrible look on my face and say: “You must be kidding. My sister and I cannot get along.”
     The lack of understanding related to the uniqueness of twin attachment is multifaceted. It is obvious that scientific researchers have a distorted sensibility about the lives of twins because of their hyperfocus upon unravelling the heredity versus environment debate. Mental health professionals simply do not have a deep understanding of the power of the twin bond and how struggles of twin relationships are intensely conflicted and painful. In general, therapists of twins see twins as having “boundary” issues that can be “fixed” by being firm with others, especially their twin. This very cold and uninformed approach can offer only superficial solutions to deep problems related to intimacy. In addition to all this, the study of psychology has ignored any insight into the dynamics of human relationships that twin relationships could provide.
    The findings of academic or clinical research are fostered by the longstanding cultural mythology and fantasy of twinship being an ideal relationship. The profound attentiveness and mirror-like closeness of twins has become a fascination for lonely individuals who long for such affirmation. Ironically, twins often suffer from a more profound loneliness than nontwins because of their entwined attachment to one another and the depth of “missing” that occurs when they are not together. The basic and profound truth is that the experiences of a twin being a twin is very different than the fantasy and mythology that our culture promotes and revels in. To illustrate this point, consider this language from a twin who shares her deep beliefs about the difficulties and aftereffects of idealization. “So no, don’t believe the mythology of the closeness of twins, their unique relationship, the special bond, and all the other populist ideas that nontwins hold in fascination. It is not true, it is fiction, and an unkind fiction at that. It is unfair that nontwins impose this expectation upon us in popular culture. What is true about twins is that we are individuals, unique within ourselves. We do not deserve unrealistic expectations; we do not deserve unfair comparisons. What we deserve is to be acknowledged as who we are. Ourselves.” --Ann

    The deep and profound idealization of twinship sends ripples of shame into the lives of twins who cannot get along with one another and feel criticized by other people’s intrusive beliefs that they should naturally be able to be attuned to their twin. The reality of developing a healthy adult relationship with one’s twin is very complicated and difficult. The fantasy that all twins can and do get along is nonsensical and prejudicial to twins. By prejudicial I mean that the belief that twins who can get along are normal, and those twins who do not get along are not normal but damaged and defective casts a deep prejudice against the reality of twins’ experiences in their twin relationships. Deeply held cultural beliefs like these create life-long struggles for twins encountering others who expect them to know everything about and be in total connection with their twin. In reality, as twins move through the life span and develop their own lives with spouses, children, professions, etc., they naturally come to know fewer details of each other’s lives. Yet, the idealizations held by society and twins themselves create an expectation that the childhood depth of the twin connection will remain the same throughout the lifespan. When distance and/or estrangement develops, twins are left feeling shame for not living up to cultural expectations. Countless times I have been asked about how my twin sister is doing. When I answer honestly that we are not able to get along, onlookers are shocked. Outsiders will probe for why I can’t get along with her for as long as I allow them to ask more questions. This unacceptable intrusiveness does not happen with siblings who are not close and cannot get along. In my life experience I have never been quizzed on why my older brother and I cannot get along. It seems as if twin intruders are just interested in affirming their vacuous fascination about what it means to be a twin.
    My lifelong interest in the unseen and underexplored lives of twins within their twin relationships and in the nontwin world has lead me to affirm to myself and others that being a twin is very special and very difficult. While twin attachment is powerfully compassionate and everlasting, it is also a source of deep pain and contains the potential for loneliness and depression. Separating in a healthy way from your twin is a struggle. Often I see twinship as a roller coaster ride. On a roller coaster you can always get off. Twins oftentimes feel obligated to get on the roller coaster even when they know that they will be frightened and insecure. The thrill of the ride of twinship can in the long run confuses and exhausts twins.
    Here is my advice:
    1.  Being a twin is hard because learning that it is OK to be different from your twin can be a form of emotional torture. Not being different from your twin will limit your life experiences and trap you into a smaller world.
    2.  Ignore people who try to understand your twin relationship, if those people are not twins.
    3.  Embrace your ability to be empathic with others and share your ability to be close and caring.
    4.  Fighting between twins is necessary but understanding the fighting is a must.
    5.  Continual fighting will erode the twin relationship and destroy closeness between twins.

Strategies to Move Beyond Family Frustrations

    Raising very bright children who are emotionally intense know-it-alls is a serious challenge for the most thoughtful and patient parents. Every week I spend many hours with different parents whose children argue, ignore, harass and frustrate them. I work with these caring parents to normalize and then problem-solve their struggles with their children. Here are some strategies that have been proven to be helpful by parents I work with.
    1.  Have family rules that reflect your values. Being sure of your rules will require you to be clear in your own mind about what is OK and what is not OK. Share these rules with your children. For example,
        a.  being rude to parents, siblings, teachers and friends is not acceptable.
        b.  hitting, screaming, biting and bullying are not tolerated.
        c.  refusing to go to school or not doing your homework is not an option.
    2.  Reduce stress in your house or make exceptions when the family experiences an extra-stressful event.
    3.  Find and pursue activities that your child loves to participate in, from sports, to music, art, acting, singing, cooking and technology. Try to understand and enjoy your child’s passions.
    4.  Understand how bright learners are different from more average learners. Use the many strategies available to help your advanced child to learn.
    5.  Frustration is common or normal for both child and parent. Try to use your frustration to come up with a plan to prevent frustration. This plan might include a schedule for work that needs to be done and regular reviews of work completed.
    6.  Don’t waste your time wishing your child was different.
    7.  Normalize mistakes by sharing your mistakes with your child. Show your son or daughter what you learned from your mistakes. When your child makes mistakes point out what they have learned.
    8.  When you and your son or daughter are at odds take a break before you escalate the argument. Remember, the winner is the calm one at the end of the argument.
    9.  Bright children learn more quickly if they have a perspective on what needs to be learned and why. Adding to tasks that need to be completed or surprise work will only frustrate your child and increase their resistance.
    10.  If a social problem or school problem persists get some help from professionals. Experts have a way of making your life easier and getting you and your family unstuck.
    11.  Read about the challenges your child is facing and apply them to your parent-child interactions.
    12.  When things go wrong do not blame yourself. Just look for a solution.
    In conclusion, the way your neighbor approaches parenting will be different from the way you approach your child’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It will really help you to find parents with very similar problems to your own and exchange some ideas.

Yes, We Are Different
    The difficulties that twins encounter as they separate from their twin and seek understanding and acceptance of their identity as unique individuals begins at birth and grows and evolves throughout twins’ lives. Feelings of freedom alongside guilt and shame are common as twins struggle to see themselves as individuals. Separation struggles emerge from the in utero attachment that establishes connections that precede any psychological individuation. In other words, twins know themselves first as a unit. The result is that even as twins begin developing an individual sense of self, their shared verbal and nonverbal communication makes it difficult to see or feel themselves as separate. Because young twins experience themselves as “one,” something as basic as not paying attention to each other is difficult to achieve. A hard-to-put-into-words special closeness develops. Playing together is almost automatic when twins are toddlers and young children.
     As twins learn more involved nonverbal and verbal communication, their basic level of profound attachment remains alive and crucial. Understandably, the separation process creates anxiety and fear for twins and can be manifested across a variety of emotional dimensions throughout the life span, including sadness, loneliness, crying, anger, rage, acceptance or estrangement. It is not uncommon, for example, for young twins to have strong reactions when reminded of the absence of their twin. Simply being reminded that their twin is not with them commonly triggers serious bouts of crying. As twins grow, the process of developing individual identities creates strong feelings of anger and resentment that conflict with childhood harmony.
     When feelings of wanting and aggressively seeking to be an individual motivate separation between the twins, anger, loss and estrangement is the result. Often twins have powerful and painful loneliness in adulthood because they see themselves as different from their twin. Intense and recurrent arguments over who is right and who is wrong are painful but common for adult twins.
    At birth, twins’ proximity to each other is crucial. Infant twins are inconsolable when thy are not placed next to one another. Separating twins because of illness or adoption can create traumatic experiences for both twins, which are manifested later in life. The effects of early separation are always traumatic. This trauma is well-described in the book Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited (Schein & Bernstein, 2007). From a perspective outside of the twin relationship, it is easy to see that young twins enjoy being together and that they like the attention they get for being twins. It is also easy to see the opposite side of the twin relationship, as when twins fight constantly over belongings, activities, friends, etc. And yet, I have found in my work with young twins that no matter what the daytime fighting is about, twins want to and seem to need to spend bedtime together. This observable reality makes me believe that the on-again off-again nature of twin relationships begins very early in life and is very hard to control. Changeable moods in relationship to your twin are much more intense than sibling alliances are. Maintaining a more consistent sense of your twin takes a very long time if you work at this.
    For parents, it is often difficult to contend with the nonstop twin inclination for “double trouble.” “Double trouble” is a shorthand way of describing how intertwin closeness provides a deep comfort and stability that often establishes an alliance through which twins can make life very difficult for parents and outsiders. As the creators of their very own specific and private world, twins can wreak havoc as they learn the how to break through the rules of the family and outside world. Twins using their close attachment can be the ultimate tricksters, playing games that confound family members and others who interact with them. The twin attachment gives the twins power to create a reality that is well liked by both.
    As twin pairs grow into adolescence, more dramatic identity struggles surface. Anger and resentment between twins often fester. Each twin begins to take their own direction more seriously. Harmony is harder to hold onto for adolescent twins. Serious differences can erupt. Eventually teenage twins feel seriously misunderstood by “onlookers,” who idealize and trivialize the twin relationship. Adult twins struggle to form nontwin relationships. Being a twin in the nontwin world can be a lifelong experience of fragmentation, regret, and possibly, renewal. For many twins, including virtually all of those who have shared their stories with me, renewal of the early twin relationship remains elusive. The anger, disappointment and often, estrangement, that are common for twins are, relatively speaking, unexplored or ignored by family and significant others outside of the twinship.
     The distorted belief that twins can naturally get always along easily is a destructive fantasy projected onto twins. For those of you who long for perfect closeness, let me tell you that twin conflicts create horrendous anger and animosity. Mature closeness in adulthood is most likely juxtaposed to the conflict of past misunderstandings. A healthy adult relationship is achieved through hard work in psychotherapy, maturity, and the ability to appreciate your twin’s separate identity.

Suggestions for Recreating Your Childhood Harmony with Your Twin
    1.  Accept that establishing harmony with your twin as an adult is arduous. You will need patience and outside support.
    2.  Appreciate the way you are different from your twin and try to understand and embrace differences as much as you can.
    3.  Do not fight about your differences of opinion. No twin is right. Having different points of view from your twin is important.
    4.  Learn as much as you can about twins.

Insight into extreme anger, loneliness and longing for twin closeness

I have devoted many hours, days, weeks and years trying to understand the love and loyalty, rage, guilt and humiliation that twins have for one another. Fighting and even estrangement can make a twin relationship unbearable. At the same time, twins want to agree and get along in order to work together.
    Twins want to recreate their childhood closeness, which in my personal experiences and my work with twins, seems to be impossible. Here are some facts that have helped me come to my conclusion that a mature adult closeness for twins is very very hard to achieve. Truly, insight and desire to resolve differences can be very helpful. Unfortunately, sometimes getting along for twins in a deep and meaningful way is nearly impossible.
    Here are some facts that I have learned in the span of my career.
    1.  There is 100% agreement among the twins I have spoken with that the experience of being a twin is misunderstood by the general public and our culture. This fact makes twin fighting and rage invisible, ignored or discounted.
    2.  Twin fascination based on idealization of perfect twin closeness is a fantasy. Although twins have become icons of ideal relationships, this iconic myth which is rabid among nontwins or onlookers, is not actually what is fascinating about twins. Rather, the twin capacity for empathy and nonverbal communication and the longing for closeness is what is most interesting about twin relationships.
    3.  Twins have a double identity: as a twin and as an individual. Based on deep developmental attachment, there is an ostensible conflict between both identities that makes separation and independence from the other twin (aka co-twin) frustrating and painful. There seems to be very little awareness of this developmental uniqueness and how it affects twin communication and fighting.
    4.  Social development in twins is very different than social development in nontwins. One hundred percent of the twins I have known agree that loneliness and feeling misunderstood by nontwins is a very serious developmental issue that is very hard to overcome even with the support of close others, including twins, and even with the support of psychotherapy.
    5.  Loneliness in twins is more intense than loneliness in singletons because of the in utero attachment that is the foundation of their identity and that grows as a part of their roots and structures of identity. In other words, being lonely is a frightening and dangerous state of mind for twins, which makes them to eager to get involved with others or to ignore others who easily disappoint them in comparison to their twin.
    6.  Twins do not know the psychological meaning of being a twin until they are interested in exploring this part of their identity. In exploring the affects of being a twin on their life choices, a sense of calm and peace helps the twin accept their struggles and joy more easily.
    7.  Separation from your twin is always difficult. Developmentally there are different challenges at different times of life that are related to separation. Twin loss is unbearable and can create a very serious depression.
    8.  Fighting and jealousy in childhood and adolescence continues on throughout the lives of twins.
    9.  Parents, through their interactions with their twin children, design the attachment that twins share as they grow older and have more experiences outside of the twinship.
    10.  Altering the dynamics of the twin interpersonal attachment can be done with great attention to detail, the positive help of the other twin, and successful psychotherapy.
    11.  Estrangement from your twin is more common than most twins and singletons would imagine and can be very difficult to resolve if anger and fighting get out of control.
    12.  Parenting is crucial to the development of individuality and a trusting twin bond.
    13.  Talking with other twins in a group setting helps put the twin experience into perspective.
    14.  Knowing what it means to you to be a twin creates calmness and focus for those who feel strong enough to try.

Healing from your rage and disappointments

    “Why are there so many emotional ups and down?” is the most asked about issue in my twin groups and from people calling for help with not seeing their twin and being unable to tolerate their loneliness. Healing from fighting and disappointment with your twin is unfortunately a difficult struggle, which is based on a development of unique individuality from your twin that is not focused on competition with your sister or brother or self righteous indignation.
    There are many many steps to climb as you deal with your distance and differences with your sister or brother. The following are useful steps that I and twins with whom I have worked have taken to heal the pain of guilt, loneliness and shame that are common aspects of adult twin relationships.
    1.  Acceptance that you and your twin are not able to get along comfortably or maybe not at all.
    2.  Taking a break from talking with or seeing your twin.
    3.  Communicating with your twin about what is going wrong with your communication and continuing to keep your distance.
    4.  Dealing with family issues of disbelief and anger that you cannot get along.
    5.  Finding close friends and relatives to support you and encourage you.
    6.  Developing your own distinctive identity and friendships.
    7.  Creating adult conversations with your twin that may lead to mature interactions.
    8.  Protecting yourself from falling into the negative embrace of your twin’s criticism of you.
 
    In conclusion, developing a calm and reliable relationship with your adult twin takes time, thoughtfulness and a great deal of humility. Arrogance, self righteousness, and endless fighting will create serious obstacles to creating a working relationship with your twin.

https://www.katemessner.com/read-wonder-and-learn-favorite-authors-illustrators-share-resources-for-learning-anywhere-spring-2020/