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 ...

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

King George VI - womb twin survivor?

Everyone is talking about the King's stammer, and the fact that he was once left handed but was retrained.

Does that mean he is a womb twin survivor?  There is a well-known connection between left-handedness and monozygotic ( identical)  twinning and is possible that all left-handed people are womb twin survivors.

As for his stammer, there was more to this, in that he also had a slight speech defect over the letter R. You can listen to the original speech that he made before his speech therapy in 1938 on Pathe News.

Watch movie and listen to the speech on the Pathe web site

Left handedness is said to be due to a later splitting of the original zygote, so that the split is into two mirrored halves rather than into two individuals. Conjoined twins often have mirrored organs, including having the heart on the wrong side.


There are many other left handers in the royal family today, including Prince Charles and Prince William.

My father Edmund Wigan worked with Dr Stephen Black, a neurologist, in the 1960s.  Dr Black used hypnotic regression with his patients, and one man had a stammer.  Dr Black regressed him to age 5 or so, when he began to speak normally. It was at this stage that he had been forced to write with his right hand rather than his left, which had been his preference until then. My father was most impressed by this and told us, - I have never forgotten.  I haven't been able to find a link to a published article on this, but there is some anecdotal evidence - strange, I would have thought that some research would be very easy to do.

All in all, being forced to turn yourself into your lost right-handed mirror twin would be enough to upset anyone. It has been called "child abuse" to force left handed children to write right-handed. 

A lot to think about here.  We need more research. We now know how to identify womb twin survivors and we should be looking everywhere for signs and signals, such as stammering or forced right-handedness, -  that may solve a lot of mysteries!







6 comments:

  1. The link between stuttering and switching hands is pretty interesting. It shows that there's really more going on in hemispherical dominance than simply which hand is preferred.

    I'm shocked to find some people are still switching kids' hands over. And as a southpaw myself, I'm surprised when people ask 'how can you write like that?'. As if I have a choice :)

    I learned that apparently left-handedness is as common in DZ twins as it is in MZ's. If true, then it makes me wonder how it occurs in DZ's, since splitting doesn't occur.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the comment. Left handedness does seem to be an MZ effect, to do with asymmetry. It looks like where DZ twins are left-handed they may be a reduced triplet set where the left-handed DZ twin was once MZ but their twin died early on. That is the major problem with using DZ twins in research, because there may have been vanishing embryos that no one knows anything about. Most people have no knowledge of vanishing twins, let alone triplets! There is a lot we don't know.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting. Is there evidence for cases where a DZ twin (ex triplet) results due to one of MZ twins dying? I guess doctors can tell by checking the placenta? You're right, more research should be done into this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The evidence these days would be the ultrasound scan. The idea that twins may not be twins after all but reduced triplet or even quadruplet sets hasn't penetrated the world of twin research yet - I tried telling them once but they didn't want to know! They'll learn......

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am left handed, was forced to write/draw right handed.
    Stuttered after the switch. I have been retraining my self to draw/write left handed for two years/ i am currently 61.
    I was researching King George Vi because i heard of the movie and some similarities to me. I found the link to this page yesterday. I have many of the physical and emotional signs.
    Curved spine/ early scoliosis/ i am male and have some female attributes/// have for 20 years not been able to get out of depression/ habitual sadness/ fear. My little sister had triplets, and a few nieces have had twins. I think i am a womb twin survivor, I named my twin sister(jackie) yesterday, spent some time morning,then asking how i could help her to fulfill her non lived life, depression has lifted in 1 day, amazing, Thanks for your help, i read the eBooks. jack and jackie

    ReplyDelete
  6. I am so glad that this knowledge has helped you to understand your feelings. There is still more to discover - if you go to this web page it will point you in all kinds of directions to learn more and heal further. http://altheahayton.com/wombtwin/new.html

    ReplyDelete