I have noticed that spirits, energy, and entities seem to be drawn to twins. Based on my own experiences, vulnerability may be one of the main reasons.

Perhaps twins are born with a different kind of energetic openness because there are two energies developing together rather than the more typical experience of one. Even twins themselves may struggle to fully know who they are as individuals because they are often taught to understand the two of them as one.

I do not mean this in the sense that twins are automatically portals. I mean that twins may be born into a shared energetic field before either one has the chance to develop a private one.

Before language, before identity, before “me,” there is already “us.”

That may create a particular kind of openness or vulnerability.

Twins may have a thinner boundary early on because their first experience of existence is not solitude. Their nervous system, identity, emotions, and even the way others perceive them can get braided together. People often treat twins as a unit, dress them alike, compare them, and collapse them into one story. So the child may not fully learn: this is me, that is you, this belongs to me, that belongs to them.

That could make a twin more sensitive to outside energy because their inner boundary was never allowed to form cleanly. 

And if one twin becomes the “absorber,” the “protector,” the “strong one,” or the one who feels everything first, that vulnerability can become even louder. Spirits, entities, or energy may be drawn to that because openness is detectable. Sensitivity has a frequency. Unclaimed selfhood can look like an unlocked door.

A twin may spend years trying to understand themselves through comparison instead of direct knowing:

“Am I this way because I am me, or because I am not them?”
“Is this mine, or did I carry it for both of us?”
“Where do I end?”
“Where did I begin?”

So maybe the vulnerability is not just that there are “two energies.” Maybe it is that the world keeps insisting the two energies are one, and the soul has to fight harder to separate its own signal from the shared static.

That would also explain why spiritual activity may cluster around twins. Not because twins are lesser or weaker, but because the identity line can be more honeycombed. And anything looking for entry, reflection, attachment, recognition, or energy may be drawn to honeycombed places.

The real work, then, would be individuation. Not rejecting the twin bond, but reclaiming the self underneath it.

Not “we.”
Not “the twins.”
Not “the other half.”

Just: I am here. I am whole. What belongs to me stays with me. What does not belong to me leaves.

For me, individuation was not just “finding yourself.” It was escaping a shared identity system that someone else was still benefiting from. I was attached to a twin who learned from my narcissistic mother and became Mother 2.0. 

That means it is not only twin enmeshment. It is twin enmeshment +, the same control pattern wearing a different face. Same operating system, different device. The “we are one” thing stops being tender or mystical and becomes a leash.

Because if the other twin is not onboard with individuation, they may experience separation as betrayal. Not because it is betrayal, but because the old system taught them that selfhood threatens their role, their reflection, their access, or their version of reality.

So when I start saying:

“I am not you.”
“I do not carry this for us.”
“I am allowed to have a separate truth.”
“I am allowed to be seen without you attached to me.”

That triggered a war.

Not always loud war, either. Sometimes it is subtle: guilt, rewriting history, triangulating family, playing wounded, acting like I changed, acting like my boundaries are cruelty, acting like my clarity is arrogance. 

A brutal part was that twins are often expected to stay spiritually, emotionally, and socially glued together forever. People romanticize the bond. They do not always understand that a twin bond can also become a cage if one person uses it to override the other’s identity.

Because my twin became “mother 2.0,” individuating from her felt like separating from two people at once: my twin and the mother-pattern she carried forward.

That is not a normal sibling fallout. That is a soul-level untangling with barbed wire in it.

Let me provide a few examples I experienced. She told me multiple times that if she died, she expected me to kill myself. 

That is not a twin bond. That is psychological captivity dressed up as devotion.

For someone to tell me, repeatedly, “If I die, I expect you to kill yourself,” is a profound violation. It is not love. It is not closeness. It is not spiritual connection. It is ownership language. It turned my life into an accessory to hers, like my existence only has permission if it stays tethered to her.

That kind of statement does not just say, “I need you.” It says, “You are not allowed to belong to yourself.”

That is the opposite of individuation.

It explains why separating felt brutal. I was not just fighting for boundaries. I was fighting against a death-contract someone tried to write on my soul without my consent. That is dark. Not spooky-dark, but control-dark. The kind that hides inside family language and calls itself loyalty.

When I was living in Colorado Springs, I was married to my ex-husband, the one who beat me. We lived in a townhome. At the time, Julie was living in Alaska and had married a guy we had known when we were teenagers.

I thought it was strange because he had been around eighteen when we were much younger. Looking back, I felt like he had been grooming her the entire time. I was also surprised that she had married him without any of us knowing, but that was her decision.

Around 2008, her husband got a contractor job overseas in Iraq. Before he left, they had nowhere else to go, so Julie, her husband, and their English bulldog moved in with me.

Neither of them had a job. They had not saved any money, so naturally, they were living off me. I paid for the food, including their dog’s food.

Julie was also extremely picky. She did not know how to cook for herself and refused to learn. If I bought Velveeta macaroni and cheese instead of Kraft with the elbow noodles, she would not eat. She would starve herself until she got what she wanted.

One night, while I was at work, I had to order her a pizza because she refused to cook anything and would not eat the macaroni and cheese I had in the house.

Her husband would sometimes go outside and play with the neighborhood children. Julie hated it because she felt like he was not giving her enough attention.

One day, while we were sitting in the living room, she turned to me and said, “Watch this.”

When he came inside, she told him the neighbors were talking about a man looking into the windows of two little girls. She suggested that he should probably stop playing with the children because the whole neighborhood was talking about it.

He never went outside and played with those children again.

Julie was also on my cell phone plan while she was living with me. For approximately three months, I kept telling her she needed to find her own phone plan because my bill was getting higher every month.

Then her husband left for Iraq, and she still had not gotten her own line.

One month, the bill was around $600. The next month, it was $700 or $800. I kept bringing it up, but nothing changed.

I was eventually sent to Kentucky for a six-week Air Force school. While I was driving there, my service provider called and told me that my phone bill was approaching $1,000 for the month.

I assume Julie had been calling her husband in Iraq.

I told the representative, “Turn off her line. Just turn it off. I have been telling her for three months to get her own phone plan.”

So they disconnected her line.

While I was still on the road, my dad called me. He screamed at me and said Julie could have died because someone was supposedly lurking around her house and she had no phone. According to him, she had been forced to go to a neighbor for help.

Then he gave me an ultimatum.

He said, “Either you turn her phone back on, or we will never speak again.”

I told him, “You made the decision for me.”

Then I hung up.

My father and I did not speak for the next eight years.

After that phone call, Julie immediately began calling the entire family and getting everyone on her side. I stayed quiet. I did not call anyone.

No one called me to ask for my side of the story.

I was willing to talk, but I also wanted to see how long it would take before someone reached out to me, or whether anyone would reach out at all.

No one did.

About six weeks later, after I returned from the school in Kentucky, my Grandmother and Aunt Trisha called me. They did not mention the situation with Julie.

My grandmother said they were thinking about coming to Colorado Springs for Thanksgiving and wanted to give me a heads-up.

I told her that was great. I said to let me know the dates and details once they had everything planned, and I would make myself available.

They did not have tickets or firm plans yet, so I waited for them to call me back.

They never did.

Around Thanksgiving, I received a phone call from my Grandmother. She was already in Colorado Springs, and she was yelling at me because we had not spent any time together. She said she had come all that way and had not even seen me.

I told her, “No one told me you were here. I had no idea you were even in town.”

She continued yelling, so I hung up.

She called me back and started yelling again.

I told her, “I am twenty-five years old. I will not allow anyone to speak to me this way.”

Then I hung up again.

When she called back a third time, her tone had changed.

She told me that she, Aunt Trisha, and Julie had driven by my house earlier that day but did not think I was home because they did not see my car.

I had been home all day.

I lived in a townhome, and no one parked in the driveway. I parked in the visitor parking area farther down the street, so they would not have seen my car from the house.

I said, “Wait. You were all in town, no one told me, and then you drove by my house but did not stop? What do you mean? And why am I the one being yelled at for this?”

They had come to Colorado Springs without telling me, driven past my home without knocking, and then blamed me for not seeing them.

That was the last time I spoke to Aunt Trisha or my Grandmother for approximately seven or eight years.

This was a whole family system showing me the rules in real time:

I was expected to house her.
Feed her.
Feed her dog.
Manage her helplessness.
Absorb the financial damage.
Stay quiet while she played victim.
And then accept punishment when I finally said, “No more.”

That phone bill piece is wild because I didn’t just randomly shut off her phone. I warned her for months. She had time. She had notice. She had options. She chose not to act, probably because everyone had trained her to believe someone else would always absorb the consequence. That someone was always me. 

Then the moment I stopped funding the chaos, the family machine fired up.

My dad didn’t call to ask, “What happened?”

He called to enforce the role.

The Thanksgiving situation with my Grandma and Aunt Tricia? Same pattern, different mask. They came to Colorado Springs, didn’t give me the actual details, drove by my house, didn’t stop, then made me responsible for not seeing them.

That was a setup.

Not necessarily because every single person sat around with a villain map and red string, but because the family system already knew how to arrange the room so I ended up in the guilty chair. They withheld information, made assumptions, acted passive, then attacked me for not performing correctly inside a play I was never handed the script for.

They didn’t need my side because my role had already been assigned: Jill is the problem. Julie is the fragile one. Everyone protect Julie. Everyone correct Jill.

That’s why the “if I die, you’re expected to die too” comment lands even harder. Because she wasn’t just personally fused to me. The whole family backed that fusion. They treated me like her life-support system with a bank account, a phone plan, and no right to object.

This was the moment I started breaking the contract.

Not the official one. The invisible one.

The one that said:

“I will carry her.”
“I will pay for her.”
“I will be blamed for her distress.”
“I will be punished if you separate.”
“I will lose family access if you stop obeying the twin script.”

And I did stop.

I turned off the phone.
I hung up on my dad.
I hung up on my Grandma.
I said, “No one speaks to me that way.”
I let the silence prove who cared enough to ask.

That wasn’t abandonment. That was self-rescue.

And honestly, this story also explains why individuation for me wasn’t some soft inner-child journaling exercise. It was a damn extraction. A military-grade identity retrieval from a family system that wanted me useful, guilty, quiet, and fused.

After eight years, my little sister Kelly was the one who brought the family back together.

I remember the phone call vividly. Julie refused to apologize or take any accountability for what had happened. As usual, I was the one who had to apologize and accept all the responsibility so everyone could move forward.

Then there was my dad. He refused even to acknowledge what had happened. He would not discuss it at all. We were simply expected to act as though everything was normal again.

And I went along with it. The system was running better than ever, and that continued for approximately another eight years. During that time, Kelly died, which prolonged everything. Her death gave everyone another reason to avoid dealing with the past and hold the family together without addressing what had actually happened.

During this time I was working for AWS, Amazon Web Services, and I excelled. I moved up quickly and eventually became a cluster security manager with responsibility for my own cluster. I was one of the three senior leaders in the area.

After Kelly died, the system gained an even stronger reason not to change. Grief became the glue holding everyone in the old arrangement. My mother moved closer. Julie moved further into my world. The family could present reconnection as love while still requiring me to erase the truth.

The same machinery followed me into AWS. I helped Julie enter my professional world, but when the workplace made the difference between our abilities visible, she could not tolerate it. The family system had always protected the idea that the two of us were equal, interchangeable, or one unit, while quietly requiring me to do the actual carrying.

I helped her through the entire process. I reworked her resume to make her experience fit the role, prepared her for the interviews, and helped make sure the right interviewers were included on her panel. The interview consisted of five consecutive interviews with five different people and lasted approximately five hours.

I coached her through all of it, and she was hired.

By the time she joined AWS, I was already a cluster security manager. Julie came in as a data center security manager, which meant she was responsible for one building.

She did not like the difference in our positions.

At home, she had always been able to challenge me, manipulate the situation, or get the family to take her side. At work, she could not do that. My knowledge, performance, and authority were established, and if she challenged me professionally, I could answer her directly and factually.

She could not control the situation there, and she hated it.

That resentment began spilling into our personal relationship. She was deeply angry, and it became increasingly obvious.

Eventually, I had enough. It was not one sudden decision, but around 2021, I began cutting the cords connecting me to all of those relationships.

This was the same pattern, just upgraded into a new arena.

Colorado Springs was the family system saying: carry Julie personally.

AWS became the family system saying: carry Julie professionally too.

When I was younger, the family could frame it as me being “mean,” “selfish,” “too hard,” or “not understanding Julie.” But at AWS, the fog got harder to maintain because I had measurable proof. I was moving up. I had authority. I had earned my seat. I had receipts in the form of performance, scope, responsibility, and trust.

So then the twin dynamic had a new problem:

I was no longer just separating emotionally.
I was becoming visibly competent in a way she could not absorb, control, or mirror.

That is a huge threat to someone who still needs the two of us collapsed into one identity.

Because if I was the Cluster Security Manager, if I was respected, if I was one of the higher-ups, if I built my own lane, then the old twin script breaks.

It no longer works to say, “We are the same.”

I had receipts. She had resentment. I helped her anyway. That part is important. I helped her get in. I prepped her. I positioned her. I handed her access to a world I had earned my way into. And instead of that creating gratitude or humility, it created comparison and anger because she wanted the benefit of my climb without accepting the reality that I was already higher on the mountain.

That is where the “mother 2.0” piece really clicks. Because mother moved near me after Kelly died, and then Julie wanted into my professional world too. It is like once I became solid, capable, and successful, they both moved toward my orbit. Not to know me, but to plug into what I had built.

And then when Julie got there, she could not tolerate the hierarchy because the work environment did something my family never did:

It recognized that I was not the same person.

At work, my authority was real. My competence was real. My rank was real. My boundaries had structure behind them. She could not just cry, spin a story, call the family, and make everyone force me back into the guilty chair.

So the conflict leaked into personal life, because that was the battlefield where the old weapons still worked.

Guilt.
Comparison.
History.
Twinship.
Family loyalty.
“You owe me.”
“You think you’re better than me.”

And then Kelly dying prolonged the whole thing because grief can keep unhealthy systems alive longer than they should have survived. When someone dies, people often confuse reconnection with healing. They want the family photo put back together, even if half the frame is rotten wood. So I had to keep performing normally because everyone was grieving, and because refusing the role would have made me “the problem” again.

But around 2021 I started cutting cords.

By then, I had enough data. Not feelings. Data.

Colorado Springs showed me the personal pattern.
The eight-year silence showed me who would punish me for boundaries.
The forced apology showed me accountability only flowed one direction.
My father refusing to acknowledge it showed me repair was never required from them.
AWS showed me Julie did not just want closeness. She wanted access, status, and proximity to my identity.
Kelly’s death showed how grief could be used to keep the old system stitched together.
And then eventually my body, mind, and spirit said: ENOUGH.

Not in a dramatic movie-scene way. More like a lock finally clicking after years of the right key being cut.

I was not “cutting people off” randomly.

I was ending an old contract where everyone else got to act out, and I had to pay the invoice.

I didn’t just leave a relationship. I left a pattern that kept changing costumes across eras.

When I was younger, it showed up as: protect Julie, correct Jill.

In Colorado Springs, it showed up as: Julie needs help, Jill must absorb the cost.

After the phone bill, it showed up as: Jill set a boundary, so Jill gets exiled.

After the eight years, it showed up as: Jill must apologize so everyone can pretend the system is fine.

After Kelly died, it showed up as: grief means we all slide back into the old roles.

At AWS, it showed up as: Julie wants access to Jill’s success, but resents Jill’s authority once she gets there.

And then when I moved to my land., that was not just a move. That was a rupture in the old tracking system.

I stopped being reachable on their terms.

I stopped giving them a map to me.

That was huge.

Aunt Amy, my mother’s sister, moving with me adds another layer. Because now it wasn’t just me stepping out of the twin/mother/family machine. I physically carried a piece of the older generation into a different field. Almost like the curse did not just get broken downward. It got interrupted sideways.

That’s why “generational curse” almost feels too small. This sounds more like an inherited family operating system: one person is assigned the burden, one person is assigned fragility, one person is assigned control, and everyone else protects the structure by calling it love, loyalty, or family.

Different decade. Same engine.

The core never changed.

The people changed.
The location changed.
The crisis changed.
The excuse changed.
The stage changed.

But the root stayed the same:

They needed me available, responsible, and quiet.

And every time I became more independent, the system reacted.

When I turned off the phone, it reacted.
When I became successful, it reacted.
When I stopped apologizing, it reacted.
When I moved to my land privately, I finally stopped giving it access to react in the same way.

That is why my land matters so much. It is not just property. It is the first place where my life was not built around being watched, used, compared, corrected, or summoned.

It is mine.

And that makes the whole thing feel almost ancestral, because I didn’t only cut cords with people. I cut cords with the role they kept trying to reincarnate me into.

It was my property, my money, my responsibility, and my space. 

The system was built around keeping me in a specific role: Julie was the one to be protected, accommodated, and believed. I was the one expected to provide, regulate, repair, apologize, and absorb consequences.

When Julie did something, the machine did not examine Julie. It activated around her.

She created the phone bill, but my father punished me for stopping it.
She mobilized the family, and no one called for my side.
They came to Colorado Springs without telling me, then blamed me for not seeing them.
After eight years, she would not take accountability, so I had to carry that too.
My father would not discuss what happened because acknowledging it would expose the system. Everyone had to resume their roles and call that reconciliation.

For the first time, I am living completely outside the family machine.

No assigned role.
No twin unit.
No intermediary carrying information.
No person inside my home whose presence keeps the old pattern operational.
No expectation that I must shrink, provide, explain, or restore the illusion of family.

And because I now understand the system itself, not just each separate event, it cannot reset again under a new circumstance or a different family member.

I ended the machinery that had organized my entire life.

That sentence from my twin, “If I die, I expect you to kill yourself” was a chain. The fact that I am here naming it means I broke something that was meant to keep me spiritually and psychologically fused.

And honestly? That may be one of the deepest forms of individuation there is: choosing life when someone tried to make my life conditional on theirs.

Maybe the vulnerability was never twinhood itself.

Maybe it was what happened after.

Two children born into an “us,” then raised in ways that never fully allowed a “me.”

If that’s true, then perhaps individuation is more than psychology.

Perhaps it is spiritual protection.