I am trying to find some kind of clue to why so many (over half) of the womb twin survivors who complete the Womb Twin questionnaire say a strong "Agree" to the statement: " There is at least one room in my home, including a shed or garage, that is completely full of stuff."
We have the new hoarding questionnaire (see link at top of this page) and that is helping.
So far, the clues are:
SPACE: there are conflicted issues here, about clearing space but quickly filling it up again.
ENERGY: a lot of energy wasted in NOT clearing, and a lot of energy needed to clear.
WILLINGNESS: it seems like a fabulous thing to be clean clear and tidy but somehow there is sabotage, as if deep down the hoarder is not willing to clear it and let it go.
HOLDING ON: things with am emotional connection. An attachment to thungs as if they have feelings of their own.
Now I have to see what pre-birth experience may trigger this behaviour.
Comments welcomed
When a twin dies before birth, the sole survivor needs help and understanding. Womb twin survivors are the sole survivors of a twin or multiple pregnancy. This group, 1 in 10 of the population, includes survivors of a stillbirth, miscarriage, abortion and a "vanishing twin" pregnancy. It is a story of a twin bond broken by death, leaving a lonely survivor.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The lost twin in the Dream of the Womb
The title of the new book is "Womb twin surviviors, the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb. " Now some experts in prebirth psychology have complained about that, saying: "Well if this is supposed to be only a "dream", are you saying it's all a fantasy, that we made this up? Are you with Sigmund Freud then, who talked about fantasies all the time? Like we dont remember being born, that we don't remember the womb? We have been working hard for decades to convince the world that we DO remember the womb, are you promoting the idea that its not real, all just a dream?"
My answer is that it's all a matter of words and definitions. The words "remember" or "memory" got the sceptics screaming at me that we don't remember the womb and telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for even suggesting the idea. ( See some of these extraordinary exchanges here if the psychology of scepticism interests you at all..)
Assuming (with good reason, based on my experiences so far) that scepticism on the subject of pre-birth memory is widespread, I have been very careful with my terminology. The word "dream" works psychologically because in post-traumatic stress the trauma is often re-experienced as a nightmare: the loss of a twin before birth can be traumatic. Dream also suggests a longing or hope, and any womb twin survivors who experience that the nameless painful yearning for Something that refuses to be named until a way to name it is found, will agree. Subjectively, the lost memories of a womb twin have a dream-like quality - they are vague, nameless, haunting and often appear, truly and symbolically, in dreams while asleep.
Finally, its a matter of how we are learning to heal womb twin survivors, and we have come a long way in the last seven years. The womb twin work takes the Dream of the Womb; names it; validates it; puts strong biological evidence behind it, thereby makes sense of it; then peice by peice the Dream becomes a reality. With the help of that reality the constant search for the lost twin eases, for in a sense the original reality of the twin has been found. In time, the day of true awakening comes and the healing is complete - it took me five years, but I had to do it alone.
I look forward to the day when we have many womb twin survivors who have awoken from their Dream of the Womb and will be ready to reach out to others and enable them to experience the joy of living free of the Dream.
This how the Dream has been described:
Just behind my eyes, my Dream of the Womb
is like a matrix through which I see the world.
Like a dark, mysterious cloud whirling through the primal places
of my unconscious mind, this Dream is my way of being.
In the light of day, however hard I try,
I cannot see through the cloud obscuring the meaning of this Dream.
It is with me always; I cannot remember a time without this Dream.
In the dark hours of solitude when there is no one there
and all there is is emptiness and stillness,
out of the corner of my eye, I catch the faintest glimmer of gold.
It is elusive but it is always there, and it gives me hope.
It is like a light to show me what came before the Dream.
But I am convinced nothing existed before the Dream.
The Dream is all I have.
My answer is that it's all a matter of words and definitions. The words "remember" or "memory" got the sceptics screaming at me that we don't remember the womb and telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for even suggesting the idea. ( See some of these extraordinary exchanges here if the psychology of scepticism interests you at all..)
Assuming (with good reason, based on my experiences so far) that scepticism on the subject of pre-birth memory is widespread, I have been very careful with my terminology. The word "dream" works psychologically because in post-traumatic stress the trauma is often re-experienced as a nightmare: the loss of a twin before birth can be traumatic. Dream also suggests a longing or hope, and any womb twin survivors who experience that the nameless painful yearning for Something that refuses to be named until a way to name it is found, will agree. Subjectively, the lost memories of a womb twin have a dream-like quality - they are vague, nameless, haunting and often appear, truly and symbolically, in dreams while asleep.
Finally, its a matter of how we are learning to heal womb twin survivors, and we have come a long way in the last seven years. The womb twin work takes the Dream of the Womb; names it; validates it; puts strong biological evidence behind it, thereby makes sense of it; then peice by peice the Dream becomes a reality. With the help of that reality the constant search for the lost twin eases, for in a sense the original reality of the twin has been found. In time, the day of true awakening comes and the healing is complete - it took me five years, but I had to do it alone.
I look forward to the day when we have many womb twin survivors who have awoken from their Dream of the Womb and will be ready to reach out to others and enable them to experience the joy of living free of the Dream.
This how the Dream has been described:
Just behind my eyes, my Dream of the Womb
is like a matrix through which I see the world.
Like a dark, mysterious cloud whirling through the primal places
of my unconscious mind, this Dream is my way of being.
In the light of day, however hard I try,
I cannot see through the cloud obscuring the meaning of this Dream.
It is with me always; I cannot remember a time without this Dream.
In the dark hours of solitude when there is no one there
and all there is is emptiness and stillness,
out of the corner of my eye, I catch the faintest glimmer of gold.
It is elusive but it is always there, and it gives me hope.
It is like a light to show me what came before the Dream.
But I am convinced nothing existed before the Dream.
The Dream is all I have.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
A "Vanishing twin" pregnancy: should I tell my child?
Lucy and Jack, after several years of IVF treatment, were delighted to find they were expecting twins. A scan at eight weeks showed two sacs, each with a tiny fetus, but a few weeks later there was only one baby left alive: the other sac was empty. Lucy went onto the Internet to find out more about vanishing twins and found my site at wombtwin.com. She emailed me the next day, “It seems that the remaining twin may have some psychological problems: what do I tell my child?”
Then I heard from Margaret. Like Jane she had noticed a little spotting in the early weeks of her first pregnancy - which is a sign of a vanished twin. Her daughter Elinor, now aged six, was born at thirty-six weeks. She was small but very strong. She is left-handed.
“She has always been very mature for her age,” Margaret told me. “She has always been very nurturing with her two younger sisters. She gets very frightened when she hears loud noises. She tends to be reserved and somewhat clingy. Sometimes when she cries, she says that no one loves her and no one understands her. Since she started school I have noticed that she often talks to herself, as if she is in her own little world. Then today she asked me where her sister was! I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say.”
My research with hundreds of womb twin survivors from all around the world is beginning to show us that womb twin survivors are often sensitive, caring people. They are so sensitive to others that they feel as others do. This means they make wonderful therapists and nurses.
They can become distressed at some point about the loss of their twin but not all of them do. If they know for sure that they once had a twin, it simply becomes part of who they are. If they know they were once a twin then, when they feel sad or lonely they can know they are are responding perfectly normally. After all, they did lose their "other half." For this reason, if your child is a womb twin survivor, it is best to make this clear as soon as you can. Research has shown that it is helpful to tell your child, as soon as possible and in the calmest and most natural way, the truth of what happened to their twin.
It is important for both parents to be in agreement on this. Sadly, Alice, who is now 35 years old was pregnant with her son Jason when doctors detected two sacs in the eighth week and later on there was only one. “Jason has always been complaining about not being meant to live and missing his brother,” says Alice, “ but my husband thinks this can't be a suitable explanation. I feel there is no way I can talk about those things without being labelled crazy myself or hurting my child.” As a result, Jason, now aged ten, has not yet been told about his twin.
It is normal for a lone twin to have feelings of loneliness, emptiness and sorrow and that goes for womb twin survivors too. If you have had a twin pregnancy that ended up with one baby then you have a womb twin survivor in the family. Rather than leave your child with unexplained feelings, tell him or her about the lost twin - make it real.
Tell them early in life, and make sure you are well informed about the details of your pregnancy, because you may find that as they grow up they will want to know more and more about what happened.
It can help everyone if you find other parents of womb twin survivors and team up for mutual support. Not everyone will believe that the loss of a co-twin so early in life can leave an impression. Validate your own child's feelings in the face of public scepticism, and they will never complain that "no one understands how they feel."
Saturday, May 08, 2010
New vanishing twin images
Well after several months of experimenting with every conceivable way to make images for the new book (Which new book? See here) I had it done in a few hours yesterday and today to celebrate I made a tiny little movie of just under 2 minutes: here it is:
All comments welcomed!!!
All comments welcomed!!!
Friday, May 07, 2010
I now know what kind of research I am doing!
Reading a (very rare) study of bereavement reactions in twins for the forthcoming book, I found a description of the kind of research that lay behind this study, and in every respect it echoes the methods of my Womb Twin research project.
At last I have a name for the kind of research I am doing!
It's a new paradigm, in fact it's known as a "critical interpretive research" paradigm.
This is how I am working: I am doing "qualitative work in an interpretive paradigm. " And all the time those sceptics (and myself) thought I was going about it the wrong way!
Obviously, I can't quantify people's reactions, beyond their own subjective assessment of levels of severity of those statements. I can't find "representative samples" or a "control group" for a situation that is largely unknown - even to some of the people involved.
Instead, I am exploring personal meanings at an individual level, that may be especially valuable to other researchers in fields of human experience like personal development or bereavement.
Critical interpretive research applies particularly in areas where there has been limited empirical research, where the use of questionnaires with fixed responses may limit findings or where a particular theory (in this case psychoanalytic theory) has dominated thinking and new ideas are beginning to emerge.
A design involving open-ended interviews by email, enables new or revised conceptualisations. These play a crucial role in identifying the dimensions of interest for further research. The design of my research, using the questionnaire based on the statements made in the stories, and using the stories to create the questionnaire, is a perfect example of this kind of research - what a relief.
More from Martin packer's logic of enquiry:
Here is a quote: This framework distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative techniques of data-collection and analysis, on the one hand, and empirical-analytic and interpretive paradigms of inquiry, on the other.
Generally speaking, empirical-analytic inquiry seeks objective metric or categorical descriptions of phenomena, and aims to provide causal explanations of their interrelationship in the form of formal laws tested through statistical measures of association among variables.
Interpretive inquiry aims to characterize how people experience the world, the ways they interact together, and the settings in which these interactions take place.
By and large empirical-analytic inquiry employs quantitative techniques and interpretive inquiry employs qualitative techniques, but the exceptions to this rule of thumb are illuminating.
See also GROUNDED THEORY (that's almost exactly how I have been doing this! )
Quote: It is a research method that operates almost in a reverse fashion from traditional research and at first may appear to be in contradiction of the scientific method. Rather than beginning by researching and developing a hypothesis, the first step is data collection, through a variety of methods. From the data collected, the key points are marked with a series of codes, which are extracted from the text. The codes are grouped into similar concepts in order to make them more workable. From these concepts, categories are formed, which are the basis for the creation of a theory, or a reverse engineered hypothesis. This contradicts the traditional model of research, where the researcher chooses a theoretical framework, and only then applies this model to the studied phenomenon.
I dont do the coding thing, I'm too busy writing and developing the project, but I have always noticed when people say the same things again and again, often in almost exactly the same way. One day when I have time I will code the thousands of emails - then I may come up with something really excellent that the sceptics will actually believe!
So I have always been on the right track! Keep sending those emails and completing those questionnaires! Thanks!
At last I have a name for the kind of research I am doing!
It's a new paradigm, in fact it's known as a "critical interpretive research" paradigm.
This is how I am working: I am doing "qualitative work in an interpretive paradigm. " And all the time those sceptics (and myself) thought I was going about it the wrong way!
Obviously, I can't quantify people's reactions, beyond their own subjective assessment of levels of severity of those statements. I can't find "representative samples" or a "control group" for a situation that is largely unknown - even to some of the people involved.
Instead, I am exploring personal meanings at an individual level, that may be especially valuable to other researchers in fields of human experience like personal development or bereavement.
Critical interpretive research applies particularly in areas where there has been limited empirical research, where the use of questionnaires with fixed responses may limit findings or where a particular theory (in this case psychoanalytic theory) has dominated thinking and new ideas are beginning to emerge.
A design involving open-ended interviews by email, enables new or revised conceptualisations. These play a crucial role in identifying the dimensions of interest for further research. The design of my research, using the questionnaire based on the statements made in the stories, and using the stories to create the questionnaire, is a perfect example of this kind of research - what a relief.
More from Martin packer's logic of enquiry:
Here is a quote: This framework distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative techniques of data-collection and analysis, on the one hand, and empirical-analytic and interpretive paradigms of inquiry, on the other.
Generally speaking, empirical-analytic inquiry seeks objective metric or categorical descriptions of phenomena, and aims to provide causal explanations of their interrelationship in the form of formal laws tested through statistical measures of association among variables.
Interpretive inquiry aims to characterize how people experience the world, the ways they interact together, and the settings in which these interactions take place.
By and large empirical-analytic inquiry employs quantitative techniques and interpretive inquiry employs qualitative techniques, but the exceptions to this rule of thumb are illuminating.
See also GROUNDED THEORY (that's almost exactly how I have been doing this! )
Quote: It is a research method that operates almost in a reverse fashion from traditional research and at first may appear to be in contradiction of the scientific method. Rather than beginning by researching and developing a hypothesis, the first step is data collection, through a variety of methods. From the data collected, the key points are marked with a series of codes, which are extracted from the text. The codes are grouped into similar concepts in order to make them more workable. From these concepts, categories are formed, which are the basis for the creation of a theory, or a reverse engineered hypothesis. This contradicts the traditional model of research, where the researcher chooses a theoretical framework, and only then applies this model to the studied phenomenon.
I dont do the coding thing, I'm too busy writing and developing the project, but I have always noticed when people say the same things again and again, often in almost exactly the same way. One day when I have time I will code the thousands of emails - then I may come up with something really excellent that the sceptics will actually believe!
So I have always been on the right track! Keep sending those emails and completing those questionnaires! Thanks!
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
David Cameron: Another left-handed leader, perhaps?
If he is elected, this means we will have another left-handed prime minster, as we had with James Callaghan and Winston Churchill.
Barack Obama is also left-handed, along with several other US presidents. Left-handed people make good leaders, it seems.
See list here
Why bother to mention this? Well, to be left handed is a small clue to being a womb twin survivor, as is cerebral palsy. Cameron's son Ivan had cerebral palsy, so it may be in the family.........
Monday, May 03, 2010
Helping hoarders
I have been putting in a lot of time developing ways to help hoarders. This is because, when I made the sixth and latest version of the womb twin research questionnaire, I put in a question about hoarding and got a strong response that was quite unexpected. I wonder what the link is, - if there is any link at all. Maybe hoarding is simply more common than we think.
So now I have put the whole thing onto a more official footing and made a longer questionnaire, especially for people who are hoarders. At least one person has said that it helped simply to complete it.
So
Click here to complete hoarding questionnaire now.
So now I have put the whole thing onto a more official footing and made a longer questionnaire, especially for people who are hoarders. At least one person has said that it helped simply to complete it.
So
- If you have already completed the questionnaire, or not
- If you consider yourself a hoarder or not
- If you know you are a womb twin survivor or not
Click here to complete hoarding questionnaire now.
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