The Special Two-Person Bonds Within Families

Team Players: Jack Mullen and his mother, Elizabeth Mullen-Eaves, agree he was “always on a different channel,” and, with her encouragement, was always “out”—unleashing a creative, high-energy self. Before he was age 2, he was naming the planets in order and showing his mother shapes he saw even within shadows. “I don’t see an octagon,” his mother might respond to an entreaty. But if she squinted into negative space, it was there. “He always perceived the world in an entirely different way,” she reports. Different from four older siblings, from peers, from other boys. And however he saw it, Mom and sibs embraced him. Soon he was putting on nightly shows for the family, lining them up on the sofa to watch him sing and dance his way through the characters springing from his brain. At 9, he was selected for Muny Kids, a troupe of youngsters performing in the professional productions at Muny, St. Louis’ renowned outdoor musical theater. This summer he’s headed to Broadway. “Everyone thinks differently,” says Jack, “but the world is still learning how to accept that. The strong environment inside the home has made me brave enough to fully express myself outside the home.”

Mothers and Gay Sons

With a special mix of attunement and mental flexibility, some mothers give their “different” sons the validation to develop a healthy identity.

By Rick Miller, LICSW

Boys grow up knowing what they “should” be like in the world. Most gay boys know early on that they’re “different” from other kids; they know they don’t meet the codes of masculinity—whether it is activities they don’t enjoy or a feeling of not being typical of other boys—and they fear criticism, bullying, or abuse from family and community members. They keep who they are secret and must constantly edit spontaneous expressions of self for fear that others will see how they are different. The price of maintaining balance can be high—a deep sense of shame.

Living a life in which you keep your true self hidden takes an extraordinary toll on anyone. But my ongoing research shows that a mother, while unable to change the environment her son must live in, has an unusual power to counteract the toll and even to help alleviate the psychologically warping shame a gay son typically experiences. Sons invariably describe it as life-saving, and their gratitude helps forge a unique bond between gay sons and their mothers.

Every mother has a significant impact on all her children, but a gay boy’s experience of childhood and adolescence can be so shadowed by secrecy and shame, his mother’s love and acceptance is transformational. She is frequently the one who perceives the “real” him, and such identification, along with support, adds an extra dimension to the relationship.

The mothers who can create that extra dimension are mentally flexible, able to empathize and to accept a life for their son different from what they likely first envisioned. They are willing to give up their expectations/dreams/fantasies of who and what their son should be and adapt to who he actually is. The mother of a gay son grieves the son of her dreams but finds a way to love the son she has, even in the face of pressure from family and community. In cultures where codes of masculinity are strict and homophobia is rampant, this quality is perceived by sons as even more meaningful.

Most people recognize the closeness between mothers and their gay sons as positive, but that has not always been the case. Historically the relationship has been defined as pathological by the psychiatric community—and sick by many others. Mothers were blamed for somehow “making” their sons gay by not pushing them to be more masculine, by “coddling” the expression of feminine traits. And while homosexuality is no longer defined as a mental illness, there remains some suspicion around this dyad’s bond.

Despite the life-affirming impact the bond has on gay sons, I discovered, much to my surprise, that no one had done any research on it. Yet I’d listened to scores of gay men in my psychotherapy practice describing their relationships with their mothers, relationships that enabled them to grow and thrive.

I set out to discover more and conducted 52 interviews with gay men of differing ages and ethnic backgrounds and their mothers. Twenty-six of the interviews were conducted with men alone, five with mothers alone, and 20 with mothers and sons together. Subjects were White, Black, Latinx, and Asian/South Asian. Men were between 14 and 72 years of age, mothers between 45 and 88. And while there was ample evidence that a mother’s rejection is crushing to her gay son, there’s plenty more that a mother’s acceptance enables her son to flourish, her love buffering him from the pain of rejection from others.

Her acceptance comes from an ability—both as a perceptive adult and as a loving parent— to recognize the nuances of the particular child’s personality and psyche. Preferences and attributes stand out to her despite many gay boys’ consciously—or, more often, unconsciously—concealing what is “wrong” with them and, consequently, feeling alienated in their day-to-day lives. Gay men invariably report that having a mother who doesn’t add to the alienation—who, in fact, makes it more bearable through her love and support—is fundamental to their sense of self-worth.

Many of the mothers I interviewed possessed an intrinsic sense of how to support their son. Two differing aspects of support stood out. One: The mother didn’t stop her child from doing the things he liked to do, whether he wanted to play with dolls or wear sparkly clothes; in fact, she sometimes encouraged him.

Two: She didn’t force her child to conform to the expectations of others in the family. If a mother knew that her husband might humiliate their son, make fun of him, or even be violent towards him, she kept the son’s secret to protect him. Many mothers acted as a go-between between a gay son and family/community members who didn’t understand or accept his differences.

The dynamics contribute to what might be called “a magic bubble” around a mother and her gay son. The son is extra-grateful to be the beneficiary of his mother’s understanding.

Sons who received such support from their mothers not only considered it essential for their well-being but reported significantly better outcomes than those who did not get it. Mothers expressed gratitude for the ways in which love for their gay child pushed them to grow. At its best, the mother-gay son relationship is not just life-changing for sons but life-affirming for all.

Rick Miller is a therapist in Truro, Massachusetts.

Speed Talkers: It wasn’t until they entered university that identical twins Oliver and Oskar Lovick, now 29, spent any time apart. “It felt weird,” says Oskar, a paramedic, “but also a bit exciting to go our own way.” The separation followed three months of travel together through India and Thailand. “I couldn’t have done it with anyone else,” says Oliver, a clinical psychologist, citing “the sense of safety and knowing the other always has your back.” And above all, the effortlessness. “You don’t have to monitor what you’re thinking and saying because you’re always on the same wavelength,” says Oskar. They jump from topic to topic at speeds dizzying even to partners: “We don’t have to discuss things in detail to know what we’re thinking.” Which is why, at 17, each realized he was gay and likely the other was as well. They live in London, in flats one above the other, and see each other often—for a nip of tea, a fast game of chess. Much as others view them as similar, they value personality differences that have them approaching problems from opposite directions—Oliver with empathy, Oskar with logic. They heartily agree on that.

Identical Twins

They not only look alike, they think alike, drawn to the same qualities in things. That’s how they know what their twin will do next, which only tightens their bond.

By Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D.

The matched faces and physiques of identical twins attract attention wherever they go. The way they complete each other’s sentences, achieve similar school grades, and often pursue the same career is endlessly fascinating.

The appeal of twins explains why we see so many featured in movies (Twinsters, The Dark Mirror), plays (Comedy of Errors, Blood Brothers), and television commercials. Twins are also increasingly the subject of scientific research on the nature and origin of mental abilities, personality traits, political interests, and medical conditions.

Less frequently examined but equally engaging: What, exactly, is the nature of the social bond they share? How is it that identical twins often choose the same outfit, buy each other the same gift, or read the same book without discussing their choices in advance? I also know identical twin athletes who love playing on the same team because they can anticipate the moves that their brother or sister are about to perform, a quality that makes them great players and fearsome teammates.

According to Lilli Welcke, whose twin, Luisa, is a teammate on Boston University’s women’s ice hockey team, “We just understand each other very well on the ice. We have a similar playing style.” In one game, Luisa drove hard to the net and Lilli flicked a perfect saucer pass to her twin sister, creating a scoring chance. This may sound like mind-reading, message transfer, or some form of extrasensory perception, but is it really?

My students and I set out to understand hidden features of the twin bond. We compared the responses of identical twins and fraternal twins on a test of tacit coordination (TC). TC is the ability to follow a plan that leads to a specific outcome that a person and their partner both want. Imagine two friends visiting their former university who become separated from one another. To reunite, it would make sense for each friend to go to a place they both enjoyed as students (e.g., the campus cafe), rather than a place that they each enjoyed individually. I think of this thought process as non-negotiated consensus—coming up with the same answer without communicating.

We asked adolescent and adult twins, responding independently, to “name a color,” “name a favorite film,” “name an ice cream flavor” and so on. After a diversionary interlude, they received the same list, but were asked to answer so that they and their twin would come up with the same response without communicating in any way. Because identical twins share all their genes while fraternal twins share only half theirs, and genes affect skills, temperaments, and tastes, we predicted that identical twins would have more matched answers than fraternal twins, who rarely report the incredible similarities for which identical twins are famous.

We studied not only identical and fraternal twins but also a group of curious twin-like pairs I call “virtual twins” (VT). These sibships are made up of unrelated individuals raised together from early infancy—two adoptees, say, or an adopted child and a biological child. We expected that the virtual twins would perform less well on the TC task than the identical twins and fraternal twins.

As we predicted, the identical twins showed a higher number of matched responses than the fraternal twins, and the virtual twins did less well than both twin groups. Even when the twins were not instructed to come up with the same answer, the identical twins still did so more often. What seems to be mind-reading is just identical twins doing what comes naturally—behaving alike and choosing the same thing.

Recently, a pair of identical twins arrived at my lab wearing nearly identical sweaters and slacks. “Did they decide this in advance?” I wondered. They insisted that they did not and that wearing the same outfits on the same day happens to them all the time. Think about why you choose a particular outfit for a certain occasion—perhaps you want to look casual, tailored, or trendy, and you know that certain styles, colors, and fabrics suit you. Identical twins—including those reared apart—go through this same process, but they do it the same way as their twin.

I believe there is a partial genetic basis for being attracted to some features of an object or situation that makes it likely for close relatives to favor one choice or strategy over another. Common, independently made choices may not only indicate similarity in abilities, interests, and values among identical twins, but mutual awareness of these spontaneous choices may help develop and tighten their bonds.

It is now a popular pastime to search for a doppelgänger over the internet or find a painting, print, or statue in a museum that looks like you. But such replicas are poor substitutes for an identical twin who can also provide the unique companionship, understanding, and acceptance we all crave.

Identical twins are not the only pairs of people who can coordinate their decisions and goals without communicating. It occurs among some romantic couples, best friends, and co-workers. In fact, making similar choices may be what draws these partners together and keeps them close. Identical twins, however, make similar choices so effortlessly and across nearly all types of behaviors. Watching them helps us understand the cues, signals, and signs that underlie social closeness in everyone else.

Nancy L. Segal is a professor of psychology and the director of the Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton.

Sisters In Spirit: They’re two generations apart but Houston-area Texans Crysta Veillon, 36, and her grandmother, Eleanor Wick, 86, take pleasure in the parallels they say drive their unusual closeness. Each was the baby of her family growing up, and birth order, both believe, accounts for the pluck each acquired from a doting father. Shared spunk makes them frequent shopping-and-eating companions, country music concert-goers, and especially travel buddies. Crysta, mother of three and finishing a master’s degree in school counseling, loves driving Eleanor, long divorced, to visit the many friends she made before retiring as a secretary in an oil-drilling company and considers them her friends as well. A trip to Savannah, Georgia, several years ago still has them chortling over a joint screw-up. “We missed the flight back,” Crysta reports, and while they rebooked a comically roundabout flight home, “the joke is, we’re never late. In our family, you’re either 15 to 30 minutes early or you’re late.” They call each other “Weirdo.” It encompasses their passion for hanging out together, “killing” each other at cards, Eleanor’s fist-pumping dancing style, Crysta’s admitted “bullheadedness.” Really, however, it’s just their code word for love.

Grandparents and Grandchildren

Call it inadvertent influence. Some traits of the elders are taking deep root in their grandkids precisely because a grandparent’s role—even their presence—is entirely optional.

By Hara Estroff Marano

If there were a shorter word for grandmother than “Oma,” I would have chosen that instead. So what if I’m neither Dutch nor German; Oma sprints off the tongue before you get anywhere close to conjuring knitting needles. I was at work in my office in New York City when, in Michigan, the first of the four offspring of my two sons (and the only girl) drew breath. Within minutes, technology had transformed her into wallpaper for my cubicle and me into the ultimate organic accessory, a genetically aligned adult with no prescribed family obligations, free to invent my own portfolio of purpose.

For nearly 20 years now, I’ve been a kind of long-distance corkboard to one brood in the Midwest and the other in Los Angeles. I get notice of important developments, and I absorb a lot of noise. I offer—usually only on request—the cushioning of perspective that comes from having outrun most of the problems of raising kids in hyperdynamic times. For everyone, but especially the grandkids, there’s also affection on tap, available whenever some extra is wanted or needed.

It’s possible the grandkids first took measure of my affection for them from the number of apps I downloaded onto my iPad just for them. They sketched; I titled and saved their oeuvre. I read sweet fables (sometimes, of course, over and over) and showed them classic illustrations. I held my device above their heads and we identified constellations when the sky got dark enough.

That and my capacity to laugh at fart jokes. When we met just north of San Francisco for a holiday trip several years ago, the plan was to take in the majesty of the redwoods and then the pleasures of Napa Valley. It’s a much longer ride in reality than on the map to the northern California forests, and I was in the car with two of the boys, the two who were then 8 and 7 years old. Prime age for bathroom humor, psychologists tell us. (So why was my son at the steering wheel so amused and egging them on?) I didn’t flat out encourage them—I swear, I often groaned—but I did my share of laughing. And on long side trips to lost coasts and back. At meals. In adjacent rooms. Ten days.

Yet another enduring bond springs from a shared affection for frogs, even a high tolerance for searching them out if we find ourselves in the right places. It’s entirely possible that that one is genetic, although the genetic part is more likely a shared curiosity. If I had to pick a defining trait of my kids and their kids, it would be irrepressible curiosity, about everything. It’s part of what makes them exciting to be around.

You probably guessed it already. I’m not a tightly coiffed matriarch dictating family decisions, regulating appearances, and enforcing stale values. After all, life gets a little messy when curiosity is given breathing room. Besides, my sons and their spouses (including an ex) do a fine job of running their own domains.

But in tough moments, when I know one of the kids is anxious or struggling with something, I might arrange a call to calmly listen and offer empathy. Or suggest a more expansive frame of reference than they might come to on their own. Or an angle they may not have considered.

For several months early in the pandemic, when I was staying in California after a flood rendered my New York home uninhabitable, I even got to host chatty little tea parties for two. The youngest of the four recalls the tete-a-tetes as fondly as I do for the “helpful advice, especially when my parents were mad at me for mischief.” Or as one of the little fart jokers, now more than six feet into adolescence, recently put it: “a strong voice of reason in times of tension or hard decisions, even if the situation doesn’t involve you.” Caring expressed from a position of neutrality has its impact.

According to the data, the ties between grandparents and grandkids begin loosening with adolescence. But that’s not how it’s working with us (and likely many other twenty-first-century families). Physical presence was never the linchpin of what is, remarkably, a growing psychological synchrony. Like most of their friends, I’m just a text message away.

“Watching and being present for those frequent five-minute chats over the years between you and my dad demonstrated to me that there is no endpoint to the line of communication,” one of them told me. And maybe because of the curiosity quotient and those very many short if long-distance catch-ups—another channel of inadvertent influence—we wind up being a lot alike. In our enthusiasms. In our values. In our thought processes. The less prescribed the relationship, it appears, the more powerful its effects.

The grandkids trust—and, more and more, carry forward—my perspective because, they tell me, they’re confident that I am living in the modern world, not dining on memories of the past. The influence turns out to be reciprocal.

Once, about two years ago, when we were all together and on our way back to my house from a delightful extended-family gathering, I disclosed some of my own family history to the eldest. “You explained this in the exact language that my own brain thinks about things,” she told me. “That was a moment even the lucky get very few of—the Oh! I am you! Just born a few decades later into a world we think looks so different than then.”

Telling an endless stream of fart jokes to a captive Oma turns out to have been character-building for the kiddos after all. And that’s just the kind of impishly subversive message we all love.

Hara Estroff Marano is Psychology Today’s editor at large.

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