Womb Twin Survivors

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.