Here is a short extract from Chapter 27 of my new book: which is called "Stuck in the Black Hole."
Resistance to healing
There are many ways to resist healing and we will explore just a few. The main point to notice is how they all require a great deal of energy to maintain. Each one is an excellent way to uphold your secret agenda, which is to stay just where you are, holding and protecting your little womb twin as if both your lives depended on it.
Avoidance: You may call this “being stuck” and take it to therapy and spend many expensive sessions getting nowhere. Even better, you may allow yourself to make some small progress to give everyone some hope for a while, only to go straight back to where you were some months ago.
Rationalisation: Notice how much energy goes into thinking of reasonable excuses for why you have not allowed yourself to heal. You may decide that chronic scepticism about the whole idea of womb twin survivors is the safest option.
Projection: With a certain amount of mental gymnastics you can turn the whole story round, so it can be your childhood, or your parents, or the uncle who touched you inappropriately, or that car crash, or the death of your dearest friend, etc., that made you this way. You may even pretend that anyone who is foolish enough to believe in the Womb Twin Hypothesis is to be despised.
Displacement: you may decide that not you, but the other, more vulnerable, womb twin survivors need healing. You may decide to become a healer yourself, so convinced are you that you do not need any healing at all.
Denial: you may deny your feelings about your womb twin so absolutely that you get taken in by your own story, and launch an attack on the whole process of womb twin survivor healing as spurious and potentially damaging.
Identification: you may have a friend or colleague who is resisting healing in the some way. Then you can do the same, knowing that you have an ally.
Procrastination: you may decide that healing has already happened, can’t ever happen at all or will only happen following some unlikely eventuality. This is an excellent way to put things off indefinitely.
Intellectualisation: this is a great favourite - you can turn up to therapy every week and at great expense, talk endlessly for months and get absolutely nowhere.
Comments welcomed!
How can you state that other tramatas in childhood have no meaning, only the lost twin has? Or do I get this wrong? Many other things can influence the human psyche - being abused in childhood cannot said as meaningless and that only the lost twin causes griev and trauma! People who suffered this have to work with it and get over it just as with the lost twin. As Austermann says "one should not look only to the lost twin when it comes to mind issues and regarding healing"!
ReplyDeleteI don't see anything, explicit or implicit, in this piece to describe childhood traumata as "meaningless" when compared to the loss of a womb twin. I am sorry that you have interpreted it in this way.
ReplyDeleteIt is addressed solely to womb twin survivors and is meant to illustrate the many ways in which they can resist healing. They all have very good reasons for their resistance of course, but sometimes one can be resistant to healing without ever realising it. It is meant to highlight some of the subtler ways to resist healing.
I don't talk about other childhood trauma in any of my work, not being an expert in that field. However it seems that a trauma in childhood can sometimes be an echo of a specific pre-birth loss, such as an adopted womb twin survivor being traumatized by being abandoned by their birth mother, having already experienced abandonment by their twin.
From the hundreds of stories I have received, I find it is invariably helpful to have accessed the earliest possible memories of trauma, which for the womb twin happened at birth or before. I often hear of people being in therapy for many years with only limited results, until their lost twin is revealed, and everything falls into place at last, which is greatly therapeutic and healing.
I hope that is clear now. Thanks for the comment!