Twinning in Limerence

I'm going to talk about limerence today, specifically about twinning in limerence. So I had a question after one of my groups this week. Someone said to me, "Is there any chance that you could talk about twinning in more detail?" I do go into it in the groups, um, and also in the classes. So if any of you have come through those groups and come through those classes, I hope that what I have today will be useful for you and for anybody else who wants to watch this as well.

Um, so I'm really going to focus on twinning. And what I want to do is talk about where twinning comes from in limerence, what to do about it. And I also want to talk about lone twins, which is something that's quite uncommon, but if you have that experience, I want to be able to resource you because actually not everybody connects this to limerence. It feels like kind of quite a separate issue. And really, it's it's not a separate issue. It's very, very connected.

So, very quickly, I'm Christine. I am a registered member of the BACP. So that's the British Association of Counselors and Psychotherapists. I'm in private practice in the UK. And I also work internationally. I I teach groups and I teach teach classes. And the reason that I'm starting this channel is really if there are kind of interesting questions that come through the groups or classes, anything that we haven't had time to kind of really flesh out, I'd like to kind of share things in more depth here. So please, please ask anything you know. And as as I said, if anyone's just kind of watching this and hasn't been to the classes, um, and you want some information on limerence or attachment theory, really happy to kind of help if I can. If I know the answers or if I have some information I can share, I would love to be able to do that.

Okay. So, twinning. Now, when people usually think about twinning in terms of limerence, they're often describing twin flames. Now, I'll be completely honest. I I take issue with that phrase. I really, really don't like that phrase. Okay? I don't want to offend anybody who's here who's kind of really thinking about their twin flame. But the the the issue is not with the concept as such, but it's the phrase. And the reason that I have an issue with the phrase is because in limerence recovery, we have to de-romanticize our language. So when, for example, you're talking about the twin flame, and it happens as well when you're talking about the one, you are romanticizing this idea. And actually, limerence is all about kind of grounding yourself in reality, coming out of fantasy, coming out of the sense of kind of the excitement and the intrigue and the kind of the seductiveness that can happen when you're using language like the twin flame or the one.

I mean, that's a whole other video, really, actually, when I think about it in terms of the seductiveness of language because when you think about it, many of the love songs that we have, many of the wonderful pieces of art that we have that are to do with love, they've been written by people or created by people when they're in limerence. So it's not that limerence is bad per se for art. Often, it's, you know, it's the muse. And and that is absolutely. I'm kind of talking about something else here, but, you know, there is that kind of sense of limerence being the muse. And that's one of the reasons that lots of artists kind of don't particularly want to give up limerence. But in my work, what I'm doing is I'm trying to kind of ground people as much as possible in reality. So when it comes to a phrase like, you know, the twin flame, that sense of it being special, unique, precious, amazing, this perfect, perfect connection with another person, what's important to realize is that this is coming from a trauma pattern. Twinning comes from a trauma pattern. And I'm going to describe what that pattern is to kind of make sense of it because you're talking about hyper-attunement when you're talking about twinning. The love bombing that you have at the beginning of a relationship, that kind of excitement that, you know, that intensity, when it's kind of to do with limerence, what you're really doing is you're trying to activate something that was lost in early childhood when you're really kind of longing for hyper-attunement.

So what what I'm going to talk about is parentification first of all. Now, parentification, obviously, I've spoken about it in the other two um videos that I've done. It is a huge part of dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attachment. It is the kind of the core experience that you have if you have avoidant attachment. And it is what creates hyper-attunement. And it is what creates twinning. So if I can give you the example that I usually give for parentification, what you're looking at in childhood is that the the roles are reversed in childhood. So say imagine you have a child and you have a parent. In a kind of traditional family, in a kind of family where you have a secure attachment, the parent takes care of the child's feelings, and the child doesn't have to take care of the parent's feelings. They learn how to manage their own feelings. When you have an avoidant attachment, what's happened unfortunately is the roles have been reversed, and the child has had to learn to take care of the parent's feelings. They are looking after the parent. They have learned to co-regulate the parent. And out of necessity, they are self-regulating. And this is a pattern I'll describe again and again and again because it's it's it's really, really important what kind of comes out of that pattern. And the big thing that comes out of it is hyper-attunement. This is a trauma response. You are hyper-attuning to your parent out of necessity. If you have a parent who's very disregulated, and this is really common for avoidant children, say, excuse me, there's alcoholism or drug addiction, the the parent is very, very stressed, they might be unwell, and the child is kind of taking care of the parent out of necessity. You are learning hyper-attunement. This is exactly the skill set that you need in that kind of environment. And what that means for you in terms of um how you're developing your understanding of being with another person is that really, you are being like an adult when you're a child. You're you're fundamentally, you're there is there's no longer that kind of parent-child dynamic. You are really in a position of power here. So fundamentally, you're twinning with your parent. In many ways, you are becoming the parent. Like I said, you're parentified, but you are really, you are twinning. Okay. That sense of the power dynamic that is supportive in in childhood is no longer there. So the the way that you're kind of navigating relationships with this hyper-attunement, it really means that you're kind of losing a sense of yourself in a way, and you're doing what the parent needs you to do. You're helping and supporting the parent. You are meeting their needs. And that's fundamentally what twinning is.

Now, imagine if you are an adult and you have this particular kind of background where you are used to hyper-attuning towards another person. You are used to kind of twinning with them. You are used to kind of reading their needs. And when you're doing that, you're not in any way in touch with your own needs. This is not something that you can be in touch with. You have to, out of necessity in the kind of family that you've been in, manage your own needs. So you're doing this, you're offering hyper-attunement. Okay? So that's what I'm like. Now, imagine if someone who has an anxious attachment meets me as this avoidant. Okay? And what I'm doing as an avoidant is that I am offering co-regulation. I am offering hyper-attunement. I am twinning, potentially twinning with the person that I'm in in in a relationship with or in connection with. Sorry, I don't know why I finished there. Um, and if I'm anxious and I meet someone like that, how do you think I'm going to feel? Because for me, as someone who's anxious, I have an incredible longing from childhood for reassurance. You know, you'll be so aware of needing reassurance or wanting reassurance if you're anxious. So, you're really, really searching for reassurance when you meet someone. And so what happens to you when you meet this dismissive avoidant who is hyper-attuning to you, who is really, really showing you all of this attention, and they are replaying the pattern from childhood where they reassured a parent? How do you feel? Well, you tend to feel absolutely swept away by this person. It feels incredible to be with this person who is offering you so much reassurance, who is twinning with you. And this is what you need to be very, very careful about if you're resonating with this particular pattern that I'm describing because what happens to you if you're anxious, it's so seductive. It's so exciting to kind of be with this person who's just absolutely showing you everything, you know, like just being completely present with you, being completely like cocooning you in reassurance. And they don't seem to need anything. And of course, they don't seem to need anything because they're self-regulating. Very often, when you meet someone like this, you think, "Oh, they must be secure. They're so stable. They're so strong. They're so confident." But actually, that what you're seeing is the necessity for the dismissive avoidant to self-regulate. So if you're resonating with this pattern in your anxious, you're highly, highly likely to be vulnerable to twinning. You're highly likely to be vulnerable to charm because what happens to you is that it just feels so good. It feels absolutely wonderful to be soothed and to be and to be regulated by this other person. So when I'm working with my anxious clients and I describe this pattern and I say, you know, is this resonating? Does this feel like it kind of is something that happens to you? And sometimes people say, yes, you know, that is that's exactly what happened. I get kind of swept away in the charm.

So, okay, so this is this is what it is. You are being twinned with. And in a way, the dismissive avoidant, also the fearful avoidant, they're not always aware that they're doing this. It's just, as I said, it's kind of like an automatic pattern that gets reactivated when they get into relationship. It's the replay of the childhood pattern. And the reason that they were twinning as children, obviously, is to stay alive, you know, to kind of stay safe, to make sure that they could navigate a tricky situation as best they could. I mean, not every single child, obviously, is going to have been terrified of staying alive. But that can happen with the dismissive avoidant, particularly if there if there's drug addiction or alcoholism in a family. So, they're really used to doing this. This is their kind of calling card in a way when we get when they get into relationship.

So with my anxious clients, I am saying, okay, so we absolutely have to keep you safe around charm because it's highly likely that you will just go into this incredible reverie about this person if you're experiencing what I described. You can feel very, very vulnerable to this. Um, and charm, charm, you know, it's it's not actually personally for you. Now, this is going to seem strange if you're anxious when I describe this, but it's not actually for you. The dismissive avoidant is using charm to kind of navigate relationships because they've had to develop that skill set as children. And that can be different for you if you're anxious, preoccupied. You know, um, what happens to you in childhood? You have a form of hyper-attunement. But what you're really doing is you're terribly anxious. So you're checking the parent and checking the caregiver for any signs of rejection or abandonment. And as soon as you see that, you you will move towards them. You're kind of seeking that. So you can be charming in terms of that particular pattern. What's happening for the dismissive avoidant when they're attuning to their parent or their caregiver is they are doing it so that they can reassure their parent. They are not looking for co-regulation from the parent. They've given up on that. So they're soothing the parent, they're soothing the caregiver. So it's very, very different. So when you're anxious, you're not doing that sort of same thing that the dismissive avoidant or the fearful avoidant is doing of kind of the, you know, they're offering regulation. You're doing something else. You are offering agitation. You are adoring the dismissive avoidant. You know, looking up to them, thinking they're amazing. You've got them on the pedestal. Wow. Wow. Wow. You know, you're you're doing all of that. So these two people, you can see in a way, it's like kind of having a shared fantasy, a shared twin fantasy.

Now, the problem with the dismissive avoidant and the fearful avoidant pattern in terms of twinning is that they have this kind of real longing for a twin. You know, and and sometimes, um, if you've been to my class on um the limerent patterns, I talk specifically about twinning. And that's really, it comes from this feeling of being worthless and incompetent. There's a real sense of kind of I have to create value in my life by looking at other people and looking at how they are excellent, how how they're doing really, really well in life, and I copy them. So there's already this sense for a lot of avoidants of kind of copying another person in order to kind of have value. So they're really, they're really, really trying to do this. The the problem with it is that what happens for the avoidant after they've twinned with someone is they start to feel disappointment. You know, as I've I've spoken before about the idealized, devalue, discard cycle that happens for the avoidant. Now, as you will well know if you've studied NPD, this is the narcissistic cycle. And you absolutely have the cycle too if you are avoidant. It's not to the same degree as NPD, but you do have it. So in that first stage, that twinning stage, you're idealizing your partner. You know, you're thinking that they're the most gorgeous, most incredible, most wonderful person that you've ever met. It's like, wow, wow, wow. You know, and then what happens to the avoidant is that they start to devalue their partner. And the reason for this is there's this intense disappointment about the partner not being their twin. It's really, really painful. You start to kind of relive the childhood pattern, which is the intense disappointment of a child that a parent cannot meet meet their needs. Their parents or parents could not meet their needs, and there's in deep, deep sadness about that. So that is then projected onto the present-day relationship, and the avoidant starts to feel really disappointed. And that's also when they start to feel overwhelmed by their partner's need for reassurance. It feels too much for them to kind of manage the the kind of the partner's needs for reassurance. So that disappointment that kicks in for them, it is the engulfment surfacing because that's their core fear. And it's eventually the disappointment and all the pain and all the frustration and all the rage and all of the intense feelings that the avoidant feels. Eventually, they discard the partner and what they tend to do is then go out looking for another twin.

Now, if you're recognizing this pattern that I'm describing, if you're avoidant, this is something to really, really be aware of yourself in yourself. And also, it's really important that you become aware that this pattern has to change, you know, if you want to move towards a secure attachment, if you want to have really lovely relationships. That idealized devalue discard pattern, it has to stop. It really does. Um, and the main thing to kind of look at to really start shifting this in terms of the limerence pattern pattern is to work on your disappointment. When the disappointment comes up, and you can do this in therapy with your therapist, or you can do it in counseling, that disappointment, that's the work to really focus on. So feel the disappointment. It is the deep, deep pain from childhood of not being attuned to in the way that you wanted to be attuned to. So you, as a child, had to absolutely develop hyper-attunement because there was just no attunement for you, or not enough attunement for you. And the sadness around that is so intense. It's so profound. And there there's often a great deal of deal of it. For the dismissive avoidant, it's usually quite hard to get to it because you're often kind of covering up the disappointment with contempt. So I know I'm going to do a piece on um contempt. That's the next thing that I want to do, actually. Um, I'm going to be talking about how to kind of work with contempt. I did um a little bit of that in the first video, "Why Therapy Doesn't Work for Dismissive Avoidance." I I spoke a little bit about that. So, you can look at that video if you're kind of thinking, "How do I work with contempt?" But I will do a longer one in terms of really how to kind of work through it because it's tough, you know, it really, really is tough to kind of get to the vulnerable feelings. And it's grief, which is usually under the contempt for you. So, it's working working on the on the grief, really allowing yourself to grieve because the twinning absolutely is all about, I I long, I long for attunement. I long for the sense of another person understanding me as well as I understand them. If you imagine a child who's an avoidant child with a parent who isn't attuning to them, and the child is working incredibly hard to attune to the parent, doing absolutely everything they possibly can to attune to the parent, and the parent isn't able to do it. The sadness in that, the deep, deep sadness that you are trying everything you can to get this other person to be present for you, but it's always, always a disappointment. So that's where the idealized devalue discard pattern is often kind of coming from um for for the avoidant. Okay, I hope that makes sense.

Now, the other thing that I want to talk about, just checking the time. The other thing that I want to um to talk about is something that comes up with some of my clients. So when you're working through this kind of twin longing, sometimes it's really hard to place it in childhood. And you might be thinking to yourself, "I I don't understand where this is from. I just don't understand where it's from." You know, you might have a childhood. I mean, I I don't know if anybody's childhood is perfect, but you might have a childhood that's there was a good enough childhood, and yet you still have this absolutely extraordinary need for for a twin, a real deep, deep elemental longing for a twin. And one of the things that I've seen with clients when they have this is that they were a twin. Now, obviously, this is not the case for everybody, okay? Um, but if you know that you were a twin, if perhaps your mother had a miscarriage when she was pregnant with you, but that you survived, or if there was a twin born and the twin didn't survive, this longing for a twin can be coming from that. Now, attachment is formed in the first three years of life. And we know that you are very sensitive to ruptures in attachment during those first three years. And it's often very difficult to kind of figure out what happened in those three years because we don't really have memories of those years. You know, sometimes people have memory around three, but it's very, very unusual. It's very vague. Most people don't remember things until later. So, it can be hard to kind of track back what exactly happened to you in those first three years. But there's lots of very interesting research now about lone twins. So, if you're kind of resonating with what I'm saying and you haven't kind of come across this, I really recommend looking at a website called, what's it called? It's not um Lone Twin, it's Womb Twin. Womb Twin, sorry, I always forget the names of things. Um, and the um the therapist who kind of started that project because it's a whole project, it's not just a um um it's not just a website, was called Althia Hatton, a really extraordinary, very interesting therapist. And she discovered that she had been a lone twin. So she'd lost her twin in utero. And so she created this extraordinary project. She asked thousands of people who had lost a twin in utero or who had had a twin who was born and didn't survive. She asked them about their experiences in life. And that that research, it's available on her website, was really, really fascinating because out of that research, she developed a list of twin characteristics, lone twin characteristics. And I find this work really, really helpful with a subset of my clients. Like I said, it's not all of my clients, but I just want to mention it in case anyone is relating to what I'm saying here. Um, so if you have lost a twin in utero, fundamentally, you were you were kind of created with another person. So you were kind of created in relationship. And that's very different from most people. You know, you are in relationship with your mother in terms of her body, but you're not in relationship with somebody else. And the memory of that, even though we cannot really fully remember that, you know, I don't know anyone who can fully remember that, that's there. That's part of your imprint. That's part of the way that you attach. And to lose that, to have attachment and then to lose it, is devastating at any age. And now because um technology is really improved, lots of people are having IVF. You know, we have ultrasounds in pregnancy. We know that one in pregnancies began as a twin pregnancy. So there are people who have this extraordinary longing for a twin and they can't place it. They don't kind of fully know where it is. And again, if you don't have this, then you're probably just kind of not relating to it. You know, it's not something that would come up for you. You might have the twin pattern in limerence and just have the longing for somebody else who's like you. And that's that's much, much more common. But this pattern that I'm describing, sometimes people really have it and it feels, as I said, that you have this kind of existential grief and sadness, and you just can't place it. And and, you know, if if you ask sometimes clients who might have asked their mother and then they've discovered something about their birth that they didn't know. They've discovered something about when they were in utero and they didn't know. Often people don't talk about these things unless asked. Um, and then it kind of makes sense and that opens up a different kind of experience in therapy because you can't, you know, you can't really always get back to the feelings. Um, there is a really fantastic therapist called Matthew Appleton who works in this field. I really recommend his work as well if anybody anyone was was looking um to kind of read about this particular process, what happens in the womb, um, and also his um his client work is really fantastic. So there are a few people who are working in this area and who understand the impact that a kind of early twin loss can have on a person. Certainly from my own work, when clients have this, then what we're working on is grief. And again, it's just it's it's grief that kind of feels bottomless in a way. You know, people just really, really deeply, deeply cry. But what I have seen with clients is that if they experience this, and what I see with clients who have this particular pattern is the limerence feels like it just it can't shift. You know, it just it's it's so difficult for it to shift and they're doing all the tools. You know, they're working incredibly hard and yet there's still this feeling of like, it's just it's not it's not going away, you know. Um, and and this this understanding, it can be the key that unlocks the the kind of the deeper grief. And the deeper grief, then, is the thing that kind of seems to really kind of let go of the limerence. You have that kind of sense of, "Oh, I really don't need limerence anymore. Not in fantasy. I'm not kind of seeking it because of this deep pain that I can't place."

So I just wanted to mention that in case anyone is is resonating with that. I think that's everything. Um, thank you so much for watching this if you have watched this. As you can see, I'm not yet very experienced at editing. So I'm just doing a kind of ramble as I go through. Um, and if I think about anything else, um, I I will make another video. Thank you very much.