Important post

Tributes to Althea Hayton

Althea Hayton, founder of Womb Twin, passed away peacefully on August 13 (sorry for the delay in posting this news on the blog). We are all ...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

OK. I dare to make a connection between this wombtwin project and the recent happenings in Virginia. I'll get a lot of flak, but here it is: I don't know how to make footnotes work in this blog, so its available as a web page on my site.

Here is the introduction:

Cho Seung-hui was a murderer and he committed suicide after he had committed murder. The characteristics he showed as an individual formed a pattern, a particular style of personality, which would be familiar to some psychologists working in pre- and peri-natal psychology. Suicidal thoughts have been related to pre-birth experiences , and it is possible, when a twin or triplet dies before birth, for a fetus to be familiar with death. This article has been written to try and explain the tragedy of Virginia Tech in terms of a lost memory from the womb; a nightmare of death and survivor guilt. more......

Comments welcomed! [NB: The intention here is to illuminate a very dark place indeed, not to exonerate those who live in such places.]

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Well I never. Earlier this year, I dared to send an abstract about my analysis of the first 100 questionnnaires to the International Twin Conference, to be held this year in Ghent in June. You could have knocked me down with a feather when they replied last week that I can come and provide them with 15 minutes of my illustrious prose, sprinkled liberally of course with statistics. Wow.

So I'm analysing these data again (now there are 250 forms to do, thanks to 20 secs on ITN) and I need a statistician's help... (anyone out there want to help me?)

Wrestling with Powerpoint, boiling 5 years of work into 1500 words: that's the kind of thing now.

Not only that, but Ive been to Ireland and delivered a training session about the lost twin to some trainee psychotherapists at the Amethyst training centre. As far as we can see at present, 10 out of the 12 trainees are wombtwin survivors. They grasped the idea at once, but that may have been sheer enthusiasm for the idea. We'll see. We do know that wombtwin survivors are drawn to the healing and caring professions, so maybe that's not so surprising. What is more surprising however is that the vanished twin is lost in another way: there is very little written about the lost twin in the pre and perinatal psychology literature. Shirley Ward (Amethyst) and I will soon put that right. We are going to do a joint article entitled: "The lost twin - the missing link?"

And just to get me thoughly excited, I heard from Unltd that I am to be given a grant to create wombtwin.com, set up some more healing groups and organise a study day.

After 5 years, two of them spent closeted for fifty hours a week with my computer, living almost as a hermit, I can come blinking into daylight and speak about the inner lives of wombtwin survivors to an astonished and unbelieving world: but then that will be another story........