Poverty is so much more than a lack of money. It is also about hopelessness. It is about living an empty and meaningless existence, knowing that this is how it always must be. If we are to help the poor financially, we must first eliminate those who are potentially able to support themselves. In my view, the most comprehensive and possibly the most accurate definition of poverty is spiritual rather than economic. We cannot sure spiritual poverty with money.

Spiritual poverty has nothing to do with material needs, but with a sense of existential emptiness. Surrounded by the trappings of a wealthy life, the poor rich people of this country wait for the happy life and the inner joy which the advertisements promise. This eludes them always and sends them in search of still more riches. As long as we believe that happiness is a cigar, we will never find true happiness.

Mable, now in her eighties, does not consider herself poor. She lived through poverty and privation in the war, and lost everything in the blitz. She now lives in a warm and comfortable retirement home with every comfort provided, but she misses still the closeness of a supportive group of friends, many of whom have now died. She tells me that happiness and richness are not about getting what you want, but wanting what you get. Her childhood was difficult, but she accepted her lot and did not waste energy in regrets and yearning for some golden age of the past. Instead, she coped with what was around her. She worked hard and looked after her friends, who in turn looked after her. She never married but is rarely, if ever, alone. In her new life in the retirement home she makes little trinkets and crochets woolen rugs to raise money for the home. She is dying of a heart condition but says she welcomes every morning “as a gift from God.”

Mary, now in her seventies, was fostered by her grandmother as a child but as a result had a better life than her three siblings who grew up in the difficult family home. She is well aware of this and claims that she was “spoiled”. She had a good job and a busy social life but ended up as a drug addict. She over came this habit and became an alcoholic for many years. She never married. She still suffers from depression and a feeling of being abandoned. She lives in a warm retirement home with every need provided but she and suffers from arthritis. As it is painful to walk, she stays alone in her room, mostly lying in bed. She wants to die because her life is not worth living, and she greets every morning with a sigh, as yet another empty day of a meaningless existence.

Now the question is: to what extent is Mable’s peace of mind and Mary’s depression a personal choice? In other words, to what extent was Mable’s poor childhood inflicted upon her and to what extent did she create it? There is no doubt that no individual can force a bomb to destroy a house. This is an unfortunate event. But to what extent is Mary’s sense of emptiness a personal choice? She isolates herself in her room and is brusque and rather unfriendly with her carers. She eats badly, never exercises and does little more than complain. However when she is in a good mood she is funny and highly intelligent: one gets the impression of unrealised potential, a wasted life.

There is a relatively new area of psychological research that concentrates on the pre-birth experience. This work is based on the idea that the human brain is active in the embryo and a 27-day embryo has a brain and a beating heart. This means that everything that ever happened to an individual is available at some level, somewhere within the central nervous system. Now the earliest parts of the brain respond at the most primitive level, and indeed prenatal psychotherapists do find that this pre-birth experience is very primitive and vague - often totally incoherent and confused.

An exception to this is when the individual is born as a sole surviving twin, whose twin died at birth or before. These people are known as “wombtwin survivors”. Recent research suggests that wombtwin survivors may experience, at a vague and primitive level, some sense of their missing twin. Furthermore, that sense of something missing is played out in adult life. The survivor lives out a mirror image of their twin’s short life. They do not develop to their full potential; they feel that somehow they are not really here or they do not exist. They do not embrace a full adult existence but remain child-like, immature and dependent.

They are in reality the stronger one of the twin pair, but they are far too closely identified with their poor little lost twin to recognise this. They remain only shadows of what they could be - poor little lost creatures, wandering friendless and alone in a hostile and unfriendly world.

They are today’s poor, living in a world of plenty. They choose to be blind to opportunities for growth and their own great potential, but at the deepest possible level they are following a high moral ideal.

Wombtwin survivors spend their lives re-enacting the life and death of their own wombtwin. Nothing - not riches, success or even life itself- is more important than that. This is the rational, intelligent and loving reason why some poor people insist on remaining poor, refusing or sabotaging all offers of help. They are not stupid or inadequate; they are deeply in love with Someone who was once there, in the closest possible human relationship, but has gone missing. If the surviving twin makes sure he lives half a life and dies prematurely, there seems to that person to be a kind of rough justice in doing that.

If we are to legislate ways to help the poor, we must first find ways to identify the willing poor, who are the wombtwin survivors. Research is continuing into ways to discover who are the wombtwin survivors in this country and abroad. To know that you are a surviving twin can be a huge relief; to know that because of this you are sabotaging your life is a great blessing and a trigger to new growth.

This simple piece of information could help to identify those poor people who need therapeutic help from those poor people who have been unfortunate and only need a bit of a helping hand to get on their feet again.

Althea

(Comments welcomed!)

I have recently had some extraordinary examples of body memory, and how the body can tell a story of what is locked in there.

The first was a tall Canadian woman K who was wandering around at a conference looking lost, saying. "I don't know where I should be." I felt at once that this was as much a psychological statement as a physical one, and I suggested that K should be with me, and we could talk. We went to a private place and she told me how she felt cold down her left side and how she had consulted doctors and had tests but the coldness continued. When I asked her how it felt, K began to weep, and sobbed for some time with what seemed like real grief. The image of half of her being dead and the other half grieving for the dead half was so strong that I suggested that she may be a twin. This was one of the many "Ahaha!" moments that make my work with wombtwin survivors so extraordinary. Within a few more minutes we were both laughing and the atmosphere lifted. We parted then, after just half an hour. The next day I asked K how she felt: she said "joy" and she was "warm all over".

The next example was not so much coldness as facial numbness, and "pins and needles" all down the left side. I asked this person to question this body memory. She sat and stroked her left arm and wept. She spoke about competition, weakness and dying. She then stood and demonstrated this with her whole body, which leaned all to one side as she spoke about heaviness, weakness competition and death.

This was the clearest body memory of a dying identical twin that I had ever seen. Her doctors were baffled simply because they did not know what to see or how to look. A chiropractor would have reacted differently, I feel, but then it seems the entire medical profession has a lot to learn about the physical effects of being a wombtwin survivor and how the body of the survivor can carry a persistent memory of the dead twin.

Yesterday I went to a meeting of the Lone Twin network in London. They are not really set up for wombtwin survivors, but they let me in as a one- off. I was surprised that about a third the 30 attendees were "Birth-loss twins" as they describe it. I consider that they are wombtwin survivors but they are on the margins, also they are on the margins of the Lone Twin Network.

For some the level of distress was very high. Others were more sanguine. The issue of whether their parents had told them or not was a problem. Some parents mention it right at the start and some don't, finding a moment to mention it. As I have found already by email, the news didn't come as a surprise.

A difficult meeting for me, to be in a room with so much hidden (and-not-so-hidden) distress and painful loneliness. These lone twins meet for a brief time of comradeship and sharing, knowing that a whole year will pass before they meet again.

But then this is their Dream of the Womb: a brief time of close company with someone who really understands, and then abandonment for a long, long time.

It is interesting that organisations take on the characteristics of the client group: I must make sure I don't allow Wombtwin.com to remain perpetually in embryo. NO: we will allow ourselves to implant in a good and nourishing place and then begin to grow!

Now this is interesting...

I have discovered that doing "the wombtwin work" with a wombtwin survivor is not therapy, in the usual sense that we have been accustomed to use this term.

As a counsellor, I was trained in the 1990s to reach out in empathy to my client, expect to unconsciously pick up in empathy some of my clients emotional baggage and take that to supervision to be unravelled and better understood. Gradually, I would come to recognise fully what it was to be my client and to stand in his/her shoes. Then by, as it were, feeding back to my client what I had seen while being in my fantasy "in my clients inner world", I was able to help him/her to accept that their inner world was real and true and it made some kind of sense.

Now that's not at all the whole story of therapy, but if we think about the dream of the Womb, this interpretation helps.

I have had, for 5 years now, some experience of being with wombtwin survivors in their Dream of the Womb. I have done the wombtwin work face to face, in a group, by email and indirectly through my publications. It seems that the best way to help is not to help. The best way to help is not to reach out so far in empathy that you end up caught in the Dream of the other. This is the separateness that I had such a struggle with when I was training : I reached out, got caught up in my clients feelings and fantasies, because they resembled my own to such an extent, and then my Dream and my clients Dream became conflated. The result was a complete muddle of codependency and we got stuck.

Without doing much more than work on my own Dream, I can now recognise when I am slipping away into someone else's Dream. I have learned to stand by and observe this happening rather then plunge in myself. As I observe the work dispassionately, I learn about the survivors world, which can never be my own.

I know this today of all days, because yesterday I began as part of the research work on how to do the wombtwin work, a series of exactly 30 individual session with a wombtwin survivor. There I was, sitting with an individual by invitation, but Oh! I am so aware that this is not therapy!

How is it set up? well its carefully bounded in that we are contracted to walk the 30 steps of the healing path exactly as they occur in the healing e-book. When the 30 steps are done that will be it. It is less carefully bounded in terms of session length, because its hard to get into prebirth experience in these sessions, and if the sessions are too short then the work leaks out into other forms of contact, like making or cancelling appointments, which are less bounded. I left it up to my survivor to decide when we should stop, and after about one and a half hours we reached a point where that seemed to be enough, so we ended the session. Its hard to tell after one session, but I guess that one and a half hours will be the length of every session. I will hold an open mind about the possibility of one or two sessions being much longer. All the ethical considerations such as confidentiality, privacy issues etc are in place, as they must be.

The greatest difference is in the relationship. Right at the start of this research in 2002, it became clear to me that twins would want a twin to walk with them. Than means a 50:50 relationship, shared as equally as possisble. This is a constructive and creative conversation, where each party speaks as much as the other, and only where that is appropriate. There is full disclosure about my own life, without me taking up more than half the available space, and, because part of my role is to provide information about the possible biology behind the Dream (ie.the variouus twinning events that can occur in the womb) I often speak at length. We briefly discussed hypnosis, and I offered it, but expressed my concern that this could possibly skew the power balance. There was no problem to the survivor in not having hypnosis from me after all. Clearly, the need to preserve that equal relationship was as great to the survivor as to myself.

Everything that is going on in the room is made as conscious as possible, to highlight any womblike situations or statements, including how the survivors was relating to me. I do not let the survivor look after me in any way (compulsive caring is very common) but also I do not do any looking after either, but concentrate on a robust attitude to facing the truth of what is going on, in a gentle and kindly atmosphere of mutual respect. That fearlessness in the face of this survivor's worst feelings (a big thing for Carl Rogers the counselling guru, and something I try to emulate) is intended to provide a stable platform for the details of the Black Hole to be examined and to some extent re-experienced.

Now this work I began yesterday is with a survivor of a fraternal pair and I am being a fraternal twin here: each of us alone in our separate bubble but walking along in close companionship.

I want to work with an identical survivor face to face, because it's my belief that identical survivors want you in their most intimate space, to be there in the Black Hole together and this may be what may is needed in order for there to be healing. On the other hand, my refusal to come in may help the survivor to recognise that their twin is irreplaceable, so the wombtwbn work as described above may be equally effective. We will wait and see.

If you are a counsellor or therapist reading this, I would be delighted to hear your responses: either post them here as a comment or email me on althea@altheahayton.com.