Mirror twin?

A most beautiful image of a nuthatch gazing at its mirror image that you have to see!

Click here

I wish I had a licence to reproduce it here, but no matter - take a look!

This work needs translators!

Today I received an email from a German speaker who did not have English.  She asked: "Can you translate the questionnaire into German?"

This tells me many things:

1.  The questionnaire is as useful to the person completing it as it is to me, for my research.  It is not diagnostic, but it is at least a reflection of how many hundreds of womb twin survivors feel, and its wonderful to find your own character reflected on the page  - suddenly you know you are not weird, neurotic,  strange or crazy - you are just a womb twin survivor.

2. Although English is spoken by many millions of people in the world there are of course many more millions who don't speak English and are therefore not able to access this material.  At some point, we will need to call in the translators.  Major problems with agreements etc with the anthologies, but perhaps the new book could be translated.  Any opinions about that?

3. This work here on the net is being accessed by people from all over the world, and that is a result.  In 2002 I created the first wombtwin web site so I could find womb twin survivors, and one by one they  slowly started coming to me.  By now thousands of them have made their way to our little corner of the Net and many of them, (including you perhaps) are my friends.  Last week, for example, this blog got 433 visits from 34 different countries or territories, according to google analytics.  Not a huge number, but last week more than half of the visitors had found the site for the first time.

So volunteers to translate are needed, firstly, this basic document. We already have a German volunteer at work on this document - any others?

Thank you!!

FREE place at our conference this year 1-3rd October!

There is a FREE place available at our conference this year. (Residential, Friday 1st October 5pm to Sunday 3rd October 4 pm, all meals provided.) Someone has backed out but has gifted her place to another - what a generous gesture! First come, first served, so book asap! You will be informed IMMEDIATELY by email if you have been successful.


[POSTSCRIPT:] 

I have found a womb twin survivor who, just a few weeks ago would not have been able to handle travelling to the conference. However in the last couple of weeks great strides have been made and she is coming, taking advantage of this generous gift. 


For her, life has become a place of gift and opportunity.  She is moving into her Alpha space, where the world will look quite different!  That will be her healing. 


Thanks to the generosity of a certain womb twin survivor in Ireland, who was unable to come but wanted someone else to have that chance, someone's life has been changed.   That is how we will heal the world, one person at a time, by working together in understanding, kindness and generosity.]

New competition - win a free copy of "Womb twin survivors" Last chance!

Win a free copy of my new book "Womb twin survivors", to be published 1st March 2011. All you have to do is make a sentence of eight words using the letters in the word WOMBTWIN, in the correct order. The best sentence will make sense and have some connection to being a womb twin survivor. A panel of 4 judges will decide the result.

Thus:

We

Only

Make

Black

Teapots

When

Its

November

 (Actually, I cheated with "Its" because that is two words, but you get the idea I hope! 

The 10 best sentences, including the winner and two runners-up, will be posted on the wombtwin survivors web site next year.

THIS ENDS ON JANUARY 31st at 12 noon GMT.

Have a go!!

Womb twin loss: a new specialism for psychotherapists?

There are many hundreds of millions of womb twin survivors in the world and many of these are in therapy, trying to find out what is wrong.   Yet there are very few therapists specialising in providing help specially for them. As knowledge increases of the existence of so many womb twin survivors in the population, more and more will seek help with their healing, and counsellors and psychotherapists will begin to specialise in this area.  But that happy day is not yet with us: at the moment womb twin survivors search endlessly and in vain for someone who truly understands.  Many of them come to me and tell me a story of decades of wasted money and time spent with therapists who did not understand.

We need to put that right:  so for a start, let's find the people who are already working with womb twin survivors as a specialism and create an online directory here, connected to this blog and my web site.

Here is  a start:

Gisela Murrel   She is to be found in Rhode island in the USA.

I operate in St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK   The support I offer,  plus workshops anywhere.

The Crucible Centre in  Hartley Valley, NSW  Australia  offers Sandplay Therapy

It seems that family constellation therapy, transpersonal psychotherapy and pre- and perinatal psychotherapy come the closest. However, even among therapists using these schemes and methods, there is a lot of ignorance about the specific needs of womb twin survivors.

Obviously, the best therapists for womb twin survivors are people who are womb twin survivors themselves and have achieved their own healing and know what it is like to struggle with this difficult psychological material.

Please add a comment with a link and a description if you offer specialist therapeutic help of any kind to womb twin survivors, or if you know of anyone who specialises in this work.

Thanks!

A fresh look at twinning from Charles Boklage, geneticist

Charles Boklage, to whom we owe the dramatic discovery that for every pair of twins born there are 10 womb twin survivors, [ see link here] has at last, after many decades of research, compiled a book. I am glad about that. 


The book is called 

How New Humans Are Made: Cells and Embryos, Twins and Chimeras, Left and Right, Mind/Self/Soul, Sex, and Schizophrenia

Product Details

• Pub. Date: March 2010
• Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company, Incorporated
• Format: Paperback, 499pp
• Sales Rank: 168,122

• ISBN-13: 9789812835130
• ISBN: 981283513X

Synopsis

It is not okay to call something a miracle without even trying to understand it. This is human developmental biology (human embryology, in terms of cells and molecules) for everyone curious enough to see it through, from the perspective of the business of becoming human - as individuals and as species; making new humans; how it happens (cells do it, ALL of it); and common variations of the process.

It cannot be made quite simple and be kept quite true, but we will move as far toward simple as we can without losing touch with sound evidence. Variations from the "normal" version of the process, particularly malformations and twinning and chimerism, figure prominently in the story because there is no better way to learn about the usual than to study the unusual and see what differences in the endings these observable differences at the beginnings can make.

In this book, when technical terminology is the only way, or the best way, to say what needs to be said, it is defined and explained - making the words a worthwhile part of what is here to be learned.

This book defines its own new field. We cannot claim to understand how anything [human] works [as human], with no effort at understanding the emergence of its form and functions. Old and new unanswered questions are waiting to be dug out from under old unquestioned answers about how becoming human unfolds. We will also address some popular and weighty, but deeply empty assertions about the circumstances and mechanisms of our beginnings and our ceaseless becoming. We will find fundamental questions from "the humanities" unanswerable except from biology. Human developmental biology is a foundational discipline within the humanities.

Available from Amazon.com

Vanishing twins: Castor and Pollox revisited.

As the concept of "Vanishing" twins spreads around the world, gathering other ideas as it goes, here we have a new play called "Vanishing Twins" which played at the Halifax Fringe last week. [link]

Drawing on autobiography and classical mythology, Vanishing Twins is a new Greek tragedy about the unpredictability of life and the effects of terminal disease on a young family.

Castor and Pollux, the Gemini, are re-imagined as twin brothers born under mysterious circumstances, one of whom is blessed with immortality, while the other battles cancer. The play depicts the Gemini’s family through a series of confessionals as they attempt to understand the boys, their disease, and the constellation they left behind. Vanishing Twins is an exploration of silence, loss, and the aftermath of self-sacrifice.
 
Interesting....

A mother's poem about her vanished twin

Here is an unusual poem  by a mother, one of whose twins "vanished" in the womb.

“Vanishing Twin” by Catherine Tufariello

Read it here

An extract....


What will this nameless face
Blurred in her own, this other,
Seem to her? Will she dream it
Sister or shadow brother,

Rival or counterpart,
Half-heard, fugitive rhyme,
Child in a frozen wood
Lost on the way to time? 

We all know that these tiny twins don't "vanish", they die.  However this inaccurate term seems to persist.....

The vanishing twin in fashion!

The idea of the vanishing twin is beginning to permeate our culture in extraordinary ways.

Here we have a fashion designer, Eugene Lin, who is using the Foetus in Foetu as a motif in his work. Amazing.

Speaking of your future work, what do you have in store for the future of the 
Eugene Lin label? Can you divulge any information on future ventures, or even 
Spring/Summer 2011?

I will be exhibiting my third collection, S/S 2011 ‘The Vanishing Twin’, on-schedule at Somerset House this coming London Fashion Week, and for the first time taking the collection to Paris Fashion Week to an even bigger international audience. S/S 2011 was inspired by Stephen King’s novel ‘The Dark Half’ and based on the medical condition foetus in fetu (FIF), commonly known as Vanishing Twin Syndrome, whereby a foetus develops around its twin in the womb. The result, although rare, causes cases where a foot has been found growing in a boy’s brain, and limbs growing in stomachs.  However, for me a concept is only as good as its translation, and I’d like to think I’ve translated all my themes successfully so far. The pieces for S/S 2011 feature tailored trousers with extra ‘grown in’ features like an extra waistband, mutated skirts and dresses and separates which have been draped to resemble muscle and tissue.  Bottom line, I am selling clothes, and even if the customer is not aware of the inspiration or does not buy into the concept, they can always walk away with an incredible designer piece.  The concept becomes a bonus for those interested in more than just a beautifully created garment. 
 


As for Stephen King's book: they made a movie of it in 1993


The book