The Conscious Parent

another town when he was ten years old. He recalls, “They just sent me.
One day I was going to school, and the next day my mom was packing my
bags. She said I had a negative effect on my twin brother. Because I was
too strong for him, he was developing a complex.”
Tony’s mother assured him he was only going to be away for a few
months while his twin found himself again. “You are the strong one,” she
told him. “You always have been. You will be fine.” A few months
turned out to be a year and a half.
“I saw my parents once a month,” Tony remembers, “and they always
told me, ‘Your twin is coming out of his shell. He’s doing better now
that he’s on his own.’ Then they were gone until the next visit. Although
they said I was strong and would be fine, I never was. Why was I the one
who had to go away? From that time on, I decided that I would no longer
be this ‘strong, okay’ person.”
Tony began acting out, indulging in negative behavior to attract
attention, imagining this would cause his parents to notice him in the
same way they did his twin. Instead, his behavior angered them, which
led to attempts to control him with threats that they would never take
him back. “I just became worse,” he laments. “I got into drugs and
alcohol, and dropped out of school. All of this, and they still kept
protecting my twin, never coming to my rescue. So from being the
‘okay’ one, I became the ‘bad’ kid, a label I still wear. To this day, if I
explain to them that I didn’t become a rebel just because it was in my
blood, but because it was the only way I could get their attention, they
laugh at me.
They tell me they sent me away because I was always the bad one.