Chapter 28: Letting go, letting be

This chapter will explore the many ways in which holding on to grief and impossible dreams are characteristic of womb twin survivors.  We will discover how a carefully-prepared farewell ritual, or some other form of letting go and letting be, could set you free from the painful feelings that lie in your personal Black Hole.

Holding on to grief
Holding on to grief means that it will remain unresolved.  Unresolved grief in the lives of womb twin survivors seems to underlie major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and generalized anxiety.  Holding on to grief for your lost womb twin can be resolved by fully expressing it.  

Create a focus
One way to let go of grief is to create a focus for it, for where there is no focus, grief cannot fully be expressed.  For example, when someone dies and no tangible remains are left, an alternative focus for grief can be created.  In the vault of Westminster Abbey in London, England for example, there is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  The large engraved stone slab, just inside the main doors, is a focus for the grief of millions of families and friends, who lost a soldier in war but no identifiable remains were ever found.  The Tomb of the Unknowns in the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, USA is there for the same reason.  Most of our lost womb twins have no grave, so there is no focus for grief.  This makes grieving very difficult. 

Becoming aware
Your grieving may have been blocked because you have been unaware until now that you are a womb twin survivor.  You may not have realized until now that the loss of a twin could generate such strong feelings.  If you have had many deaths in your family, particularly if there have been several deaths in a short time period, you may still be carrying intense grief for them all.  When at last you give yourself permission to grieve for your twin, the strength of feeling may take you by surprise.  The preoccupation with death, which is characteristic of many womb twin survivors, is expressed in many different ways.  Some womb twin survivors often think of death, repeatedly risk their lives, attempt to overcome death or work hard to preserve their youth.  Once blocked grief can be released by creating a focus and letting the feelings surface, the preoccupation with death diminishes or ceases completely.

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Chapter 27: Forgiveness

In this chapter we will explore the issue of forgiveness in the life of the womb twin survivor, with particular reference to survivor guilt, which surfaces again and again as a floating feeling of shame.

Pain
Feeling unable to forgive is very painful.  Forgiveness can heal that pain, but somehow you are still holding on to the resentment and bitterness that causes the pain.  You will soon discover how easy it is to forgive other people and yourself, once you understand fully why you are working so hard to keep pain alive in your life. 

People hurt one another because they are in some kind of self-inflicted pain themselves and do not understand why they are hurting.  Unless you are prepared to imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes you will never understand why the other person hurt you.  Clearly, forgiveness is not going to be possible without some understanding and empathy.  This chapter will help you to understand and forgive others and look upon yourself with a little more mercy.

It has been said that there are two levels of pain - the pain that you experience at this moment and the pain of the past that still lives on in your mind and body.  This accumulated pain creates a field of negative energy around you, which is greatly increased by a lack of forgiveness.

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Chapter 26: the Black hole

This chapter will explore what feelings are in your Black Hole, how you created it, why you remain in it and how you can begin to find your way out.

The feelings in your Black Hole
The feelings in your Black Hole will take various forms, according to the details of your personal womb story and whether or not your twin was capable of response.

The death of a responsive womb twin
If your womb twin was responsive and then was lost, the pain is in the loss.  If this is your story, you have something deep in your mind and soul that is about despair, shame, death, grief and pain.  This complex of painful feelings is an integral part of your inner self.  However hard you try, it does not heal. 

The death of an unresponsive womb twin
If your womb twin remained with you but was unresponsive, the pain in your Black Hole arises out of a frustrated desire for connection. This feels more like resentment than pain.  Beneath the resentment lies a terrible sadness, a sense of lack.  You have probably adapted to this feeling by deciding that you need nothing and no one.

How you created your own Black Hole
Healing will only begin when you are ready to stop rushing about, looking for different kinds of anaesthetic and using it to forget your inner pain.  Only then will you discover that it is self-inflicted and you are the author of your own misfortune.  You have built your own Black Hole out of these painful memories and only you can change them.

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Chapter 25: Tools for healing

Now that you are aware that you are, or may be, a womb twin survivor, it is time to begin the Womb Twin work.  The main task of the work is to gain a better understanding of how your own particular Dream of the Womb has been re-enacted in your life.  Every person is created as a self-healing organism but the natural course of healing can be deliberately blocked.  The Womb Twin work is about understanding and removing those blocks, using the available tools.  The main tools for healing are trust, truth and intuition.

Trust
To start the Womb Twin work, you will need determination.  The work is quite difficult in places and you will be fighting with yourself. It is possible to do this work on your own, but daring to trust one other person with this information may be healing in itself.  Perhaps you find it difficult to trust other people because of your experiences of being rejected and abandoned by your own womb twin.  When you were an embryo learning how to be a person, getting to know your womb twin was an important first lesson in trust. This lesson may have overridden your most basic instincts. It might be the cause of the ambivalence about relationships that lies behind your lack of trust. Ambivalence feels as if is there is one force propelling you forwards to a better life, while another, equal force is dragging you back. You are stuck and you need help.

We need other people.  Four hundred years ago, John Donne wrote: “No man is an Island, entire of itself.” This holds true today and will always hold true.  It would be good to have someone to walk with you as you begin the healing path.  If you have always felt that you must do everything by yourself, why not try asking for help?  You may be surprised by the results.

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Chapter 24: Being a twin

I have always had a great interest in twins

A lifelong interest in twins was predictably very common among the respondents and was the second most popular statement among the respondents who were able to provide evidence of their twin.  An interest in twins can be expressed in all kinds of ways.  It may be simply a tendency to scan faces when among people, always noticing twins or people who look similar.  It may mean reading books about twins in general and focussing on lost twins in particular.  Womb twin survivors seem to take particular interest in anything to do with twinning and published in any medium.    

The fact that many hundreds of people carefully searched the Internet and found the Womb Twin web site, which was little-known at the time, suggests that they were very interested in twins and the death of a twin in particular.  Their emotional reaction to the material on the web site was sometimes overwhelming.  For these people, their reaction was proof enough that their feelings were related to the prenatal loss of their twin.

All my life I have had the feeling that I may have once been a twin
The use of ultrasound has revealed that in many “vanishing” twin pregnancies there are no symptoms at all.  If you were conceived before the 1980s when ultrasound scans were more regularly used, and if your mother had no symptoms during her pregnancy with you, then there would be no available evidence of your twin.  Until the mid 1990s, the incidence of “vanishing” pregnancies was either unknown or grossly underestimated, so there was nowhere for womb twin survivors to find confirmation of their deep conviction that they once had a twin.

In the absence of any physical evidence, there is no expert, however experienced and highly qualified, who can confirm that you are a womb twin survivor.  You will have to rely on your “gut instinct” and your intuition to work out whether or not there was a lost twin in your Dream of the Womb.

It may be that you have been given the idea of being a womb twin survivor recently by a therapist or friend.  If you are reading this book to find out whether or not you are a womb twin survivor, there is nothing here that will prove it to you, one way or the other.  After all, you are the world’s greatest expert on your experience of being yourself.  Never let anyone influence you, however persuasive their arguments may be.

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Chapter 23: A fragile sense of self

Womb twin survivors can become so strongly identified with their womb twin that they cannot find their true selves.  They may not be sure if they are truly male or female, visible or invisible, of vital importance or of no account whatever.  This chapter will explore the various ways in which aspects of the Dream of the Womb can weaken your sense of self.

All my life I have been pretending to be someone else, and I know it’s not my authentic self

We are told that an authentic self is real and whole and carries no elements borrowed or assimilated from anyone else, which means acknowledging and representing one’s true self, values, beliefs and behaviours to oneself and others.  If you are a womb twin survivor and you are always putting on a false front to the world, then there may be a good reason why you are not acknowledging and living your life as your true self.

You may have created a false identity to cover up your inadequacies; you may be too much identified with your chosen profession so that the “real you” is hardly ever visible; you may like to please people so you are perpetually nice and never get angry: you may conceal your true feelings and always say “I don’t mind” when really you do.   To be “inauthentic” is to project a false self and keep your true self hidden from the world, as if you always wear some kind of mask. There is a natural process whereby one can become identified with a person or social group and even with an imagined concept of how the ideal individual should be.  When you identify yourself with a person or group, you are choosing to take on some characteristics of that person, in order to construct an identity for yourself.  In the same way, as a womb twin survivor you may have become completely identified with your own fragile, tiny womb twin.  This may be so long-established that it feels absolutely authentic for you to run the womb script of I feel fragile deep inside, for example, and therefore assume that you need constant emotional support.  You have probably felt this way for as long as you can remember and it seems to express your authentic self.  In fact, you have been living the life of your Beta womb twin as if it were your own. This is not your true identity: your assumption, I am fragile, is in your Dream. You are not fragile, you are the strong Alpha survivor.

All my life I have felt empty inside
If you are a womb twin survivor, you may have experienced a sense of inner emptiness.  This kind of emptiness inside has been variously described, as a sense of lack or a feeling of meaninglessness. Emptiness inside may be triggered by some external event, such as being left alone, or the death of someone near.  For most womb twin survivors it is mostly a sense of being lost, forsaken, yearning and confused. Inner emptiness has been beautifully described as “an ineluctable trace of nothingness in our being, of death in our life.” An inner void inside you may be a womb memory - a sense of having lost something infinitely precious.  You probably feel as if the loss of your twin reduced you to a fraction of what you might have become, had your twin  remained alive.  There are a hundred ways to fill inner emptiness. A common one is addiction.  Robert Lefever, director of the Promis Clinic in London, has focused his work on what he calls the “spiritual void” that is to be found in all addicts. The Womb Twin hypothesis has an alternative explanation for the spiritual void that drives addictive behaviour: it is the pre-birth loss of your twin who was too weak to be able to survive and remain with you.


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Chapter 22: Self defeating behaviour

For womb twin survivors there is a perfectly normal and reasonable explanation for self-defeating behaviour.  It can be seen as a specific re-enactment of a pre-birth tragedy, where a great deal of personal happiness and fulfilment is being deliberately sacrificed, in memory of a lost twin.  There are many ways to be self-defeating, each with its own meaning. 
If you are a womb twin survivor, it may help you to know that there are good reasons why you have chosen one particular kind of self-defeating behaviour over another.  A personal study of the particular way you have chosen to sabotage your life will take you straight back to the Dream and give you a clear rendition of what went on in the womb all those years ago.  You survived, but your twin did not. That seems to be the crucial issue but there is more to it than that.

Holding on, letting go
Womb twin survivors have a pre-birth experience of holding on and not wanting to let go, which is expressed in specific ways, including the accumulation of possessions and the inability to let go of unfinished projects.  These two behaviours go together.  The Womb Twin research project revealed that most of the people who strongly agreed to the statement about “stuff” also agreed strongly with the statement about unfinished projects. 

I find it hard to let go of unfinished projects, I am always going to finish them one day
This behaviour is concerned with holding on and letting go.  If your life and your home is cluttered with projects that have never come to fruition, each unfinished project might be a subtle re-enactment of your Dream of the Womb.  The frail body of your lost twin, who died unfinished and faded away, can be in a sense retained by you in each project, which starts with a Grand Plan but never comes to anything.   Some womb twin survivors are creative people who start several projects at once and this  contributes to the mess and clutter in their homes.  Unfinished projects are broken dreams and promises unfulfilled, all of which denies you the satisfaction of a job well done.  A constant, imagined reproach emanates from every project lying about in your home or garden waiting to be finished - an excellent resting place for floating feelings of guilt.

If you are a womb twin survivor you may hold on to every project you start but leave unfinished.  In that way, you are not breaking the promise you made to complete it.  If this is your life, then your  home is littered with unfinished projects, such as a pile of unread books or a shed filled with potentially useful pieces of wood.  Your mind may be filled with unfulfilled dreams such as a new garden design or a major creative project involving recycled waste, which of course must not be thrown away.  For you, the original unfulfilled dream is still there, in your Dream of the Womb. 


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Chapter 21: Self sabotage

 Self-sabotage is so widespread that one could consider it a general human failing or part of the human condition.  Viewed objectively however, in the process of self-sabotage foolish acts are willingly carried out that deliberately dismantle the very foundation of a successful project.
These acts are deliberate, conscious and inappropriate choices.  They are not instinctual or genetically imprinted.  The motive behind these choices is mysterious.  If you are a womb twin survivor you will already be aware of how you sabotage your life but you may not be clear about why you do it.  Once the idea that self-defeating behaviour is driven by survivor guilt is in place, then it makes perfect sense that you would not feel allowed to succeed, to have riches, good fortune or even personal happiness.


I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is

The search for the lost twin can take many forms.  It may be a desperate and lonely quest in search of some vague an ineffable Someone or Something.  There are womb twin survivors to be found in far-flung places of the world, a long way from home.  They only stay a while in any place and soon move on: they have not been home for years.  In the vast continent of North America, a certain proportion of people choose to take to the road.  They are always on the move while the rest are happy to stay at home.  Could this restless group be the womb twin survivors?  They may have been inspired by the ever-elusive American Dream but how much is this endless journey an echo of another Dream from long ago before birth?  It is a long journey to Somewhere, but it has within it a kind of circularity.  Wherever you are, you are still searching, stuck in your Dream of the Womb.  Perhaps you are a womb twin survivor who has travelled far from home for reasons you do not quite understand.  Perhaps your journeying provides a mode of expression for a deep and painful sense
of longing that is never satisfied.  You can make your home anywhere but you never belong.  You make sure of that by always moving on. It is a fruitless search, seeking Someone who can never be found.  The search may take you into a series of relationships, as you seek out that mysterious, pre-birth twin bond that feels so essential to your well-being.  In turn, even after many years, each relationship will prove a disappointment, for it can never replace the intimate bond that is your template for all relationships in your life.

Some people feel as if they are searching for themselves.  They imagine that they only partly exist in this world.  Perhaps you are a womb twin survivor and feel this way.  If so, you may be in search of a missing part of yourself, which is your lost twin.  If you do not understand that, you will continue to sabotage your life by never accepting the world and your life as it is.

All my life I have felt restless and unsettled
One way to cope with psychological distress is to avoid thinking about it by being busy.  Frenetic activity, constant changes of job, moving house every year and moving from one relationship to another are all signs of being restlessness and unsettled.

Constant, restless movement is like a journey that always turns in upon itself.  As much as you try to avoid the pain, it dogs your footsteps and you never seem to move forward.  If you are a womb twin survivor and you have always been restless, then staying in the same place or continuing to do the same thing for a long time may seem somehow wrong.  The desire to keep moving may arise out of a deep, inner doubt about your ability to take root and grow.

Never finding a place to settle may be in your Dream of the Womb.  You might carry a memory of one or more embryos that never managed to implant properly in the womb wall.  This could be why you cannot allow yourself to take root and grow.  You find it hard to slow down, remain in the same place and stay in the same job for a long time.  To be static may seem unthinkable to you at the moment, like a living death, but consider how little you allow yourself to develop.  A rolling stone may indeed gather no moss but it is the static stones that are strongest and are chosen to build our greatest monuments.  A restlessness of character may be related to trying hard to control events, stop bad things happening to people and keep people happy.  It can be related to a vague sense of dread that a Bad Thing is about to happen, which is straight out of your Dream of the Womb.  The Bad Thing is the death of your twin.  Your foetal assumption is, after a while, the Bad Thing will start to happen and you live that out as your womb script.  Naturally enough, after the initial joys of any new experience, your familiar sense of restlessness begins to increase, along with a vague sense of dread.  Yet again, your Dream is realized.  You move on, leaving behind an unfinished project, an unrealized dream and possibly also some very disappointed colleagues, who are sad to see you go.  Meanwhile, in the far distance is a mysterious, hidden place where everything is fresh and new:  that is what keeps you on the move.

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Chapter 20:A problem with relationships

Truly to understand what being a womb twin survivor can do to your relationships, you have to take a look at the very first relationship you ever had.  If you are a womb twin survivor, that first relationship was not with your parents, it was with your womb twin. ¹  You came to birth with a template, already hard-wired into your brain, about what happens when you reach out to another living being.  Depending on what that was like for you, your assumptions about every relationship since then have been based on your Dream of the Womb. All your life, you have re-enacted whatever style of relationship you had in the womb with your womb twin, in every close and intimate relationship. 

Loneliness and isolation

If you are a womb twin survivor, in your Dream of the Womb there is a feeling of aloneness that is vague and all-pervading.  It finds expression in all your relationships in born life. 

I fear rejection

This was the second most popular statement, according to the Womb Twin research analysis.  When compared with the fear of abandonment it was found that 168 respondents agreed strongly with both statements. 

The term “rejection” has two meanings, both of which are suggestive of the Dream of the Womb.  The medical term refers to an immune response to a tissue, so that the tissue fails to survive.  The social term is to dismiss someone as a failure.  Your womb twin was indeed unable to remain in the womb with you and failed to survive.  In the mysterious muddle of pre-birth memories that make up your Dream of the Womb, there is no time or place and certainly no sense of who you are.  It would be quite natural to assume that you are dismissed as a failure, for you carry a dim memory of your twin rejecting you - that is, ceasing to relate to you.  Perhaps the assumption and the memory have become conflated in your mind.  In born life, if a dear friend ceases to relate to you, that may trigger a memory of that original rejection.  There are many ways to prevent yourself from being rejected:  a common one is to work hard to create and carefully maintain close and intimate relationships with others.  Another strategy is simply to remain alone, for then one cannot be rejected.  The fear of rejection is so strong in some womb twin survivors that they readily feel unsafe in the company of other people.  They are so fearful and withdrawn that their parents and friends may experience a sense of helpless frustration in trying to reach them and simply give up.  From the womb twin survivor’s point of view, that would be rejection.  

Being different can create a sense of not being found acceptable, which is another word for rejected.  Some womb twin survivors find it very hard to be found acceptable to others and may try, a little bit too hard perhaps, to make people love them.  A fear of commitment can arise out of the dread of close, intimate  loving relationships coming to an end with subsequent feelings of rejection.  A fear of commitment brings loneliness, so the Dream of the Womb is realized once again.  Some womb twin survivors test close relationships because of their fear of rejection.  They insist upon being un-cooperative, unhelpful and inconsiderate toward others.  They badly need to discover just how much the other person is prepared to accept.  This tendency to test intimate relationships to destruction keeps the Dream alive. Having exhausted everyone’s patience, they will be left alone, rejected and friendless.

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Chapter 19: Difficult feelings

Free-floating feelings

If you are a womb twin survivor and have not yet been able fully to unravel your Dream of the Womb, then your feelings may not make much sense to you at the moment.  To make sense of them you will probably have created some seemingly irrational beliefs in order to find a place for these free-floating feelings to come to rest.  Free-floating feelings are very disturbing and unsettling to experience and can make you feel as if you are going crazy.  In this chapter we will see how they are in fact perfectly rational when considered in the context of the Dream of the Womb. 

I have a problem with expressing anger - either there is too much or too little

Anger is a strong and powerful emotion.  The appropriate expression of strength and personal power by means of anger is a problem for many womb twin survivors.  Finding it difficult to express your personal power is related to the two-fold character of the womb twin survivor.  If you are a womb twin survivor, you probably spend most of your life re-enacting the life of your weaker, Beta twin while knowing that you are the strong Alpha survivor.  This dual existence creates an inner conflict about who you are and how to express your personal power.  There is a variety of ways to resolve this split.  Some people adopt the public false face of their weaker Beta twin while keeping private their true Alpha feelings. 

Irene: I never get angry

Irene has claimed for years that she “never gets angry.”  She avoids confrontation wherever she can.  She just smiles and continues to “comply” in a false, exaggerated way.  She seems to be completely unaware that her behaviour is very provocative.  When other people are driven to anger by her false compliance, Irene is privately critical of their lack of control over their own anger.  She admits no anger or irritation, only to “feeling disappointed” that people do not behave as calmly as she would wish.

When you deny your normal, angry feelings in this way to keep your 

Beta twin alive in your life, your powerful Alpha feelings will need to find an outlet.  However, to preserve your adopted “Beta status” they must remain hidden.  Denied an outlet, angry feelings develop into a bitter indignation at having been “treated unfairly.”  If you can’t remember some unfair or cruel treatment you can always exaggerate a small slight into a major episode of “rejection.”  Alternatively, if there is no place for your floating anger to settle, you may simply look for reasons to be angry with yourself. 

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Chapter 18: Signs of psychological distress

Death and dying
Womb twin survivors spend their lives reenacting the life and death of their womb twin.  For some people, that means death feels as if it is very near.  They may have panic attacks, imagining they are About to die any moment.  Others may have times when they Feel neither alive nor dead.  In fact, you are not dying and neither are you are about to die: this is a foetal assumption based on a prenatal memory of death.  Your particular concept of death may reflect a real memory of an actual event, long lost in your Dream of the Womb.  You could not possibly have been able to understand death in the womb or near to birth but you would have probably noticed a change in your twin’s behaviour.  For example, your twin may have been lost in a complete miscarriage.  In that case, your foetal assumption would probably be, Death causes disappearance.The idea that Death takes people away may still be a major concern.  On the other hand, the death of your twin may have been slow but inevitable, so that you may be more concerned about the process of dying than about being dead.  If your twin existed only briefly, only to die and be totally resorbed, then your idea of death may be total annihilation of your self, as if you had never existed at all.

I have suffered for a long time from feeling vaguely unwell, as if I am slowly dying
If you are a womb twin survivor whose twin died slowly, you may have identified a bit too closely with your dying womb twin and your foetal assumption may be, I am slowly dying.  You may develop all kinds of strange symptoms and have a sense of Dying by inches.
A persistent feeling of being unwell, sometimes with alarming symptoms that come and go, may take you repeatedly to the doctor’s surgery.  As there is no physical disease, the symptoms may be described as “psychosomatic”  with the inference that you are “malingering” or “neurotic.”  In fact, you are expressing your Dream of the Womb in terms of bodily symptoms.

I think a lot about death and dying
In this case there are no physical symptoms, as in the previous section, but rather a preoccupation with death.  If this is how you feel, then death “walks beside you.”  You think constantly about your own death.  This preoccupation can also be about the death of other people and be expressed as a great interest in dead bodies, graveyards, funerals, gravestones or pathology. Alternatively, you may experience a form of “living death”, like a kind of spiritual inertia.  This is expressed as a resistance to change, growth or forward movement:  it can totally block your healing.  If you would rather settle for what is “good enough” rather than challenge your own abilities; if you decide to be content with your lot rather than reach for the stars; if you continue to live on the surface rather than explore your inner self, then your problem is spiritual inertia.       
If you have been in a state of inertia for some time, then the lifeless place in which you have chosen to live could be in your Dream: a re-enactment of the tiny spark of life that you were able to perceive in the womb, using your exquisite embryonic sensitivity.  Perhaps you feel that, if your womb twin never had a chance of life, how can if be fair if you have life to the fullest?  Rather than come to the feast of life, you just settle for a few crumbs every now and then - just enough to maintain your existence, no more.

I have wanted to commit suicide more than once in my life
The incidence of suicidal ideation varies greatly across the world. One study of 40,000 subjects, drawn from the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, France, West Germany, Lebanon, Taiwan, Korea and New Zealand found that the number of people who had thought of suicide at some stage in their life varied from 0.7% in Beirut to 18.51% in Christchurch, New Zealand. The Womb Twin research project found that 40% of the selected respondents agreed strongly with this statement, which is more than double the New Zealand rate.  It seems from this result that womb twin survivors think about suicide much more often than most people.

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Chapter 17: An unusual person

Out of the ordinary
Womb twin survivors comprise only about 10% of the population, so it stands to reason that they will appear to be out of the ordinary.

I feel different from other people
It is not easy feeling different. As a newly-aware womb twin survivor, you may have returned home from a workshop or therapy session, full of relief that at last your psychological problems have been explained, only to have this amazing new idea dismissed as “nonsense.”
Prenatal psychology is not yet widely accepted as a science.  Some therapists and mental health professionals may assume that the idea of being a womb twin survivor is at best another ingredient in a pre-existing weirdness of character.  At worst, they may call it a delusion.

Paula: always considered weird
All through her childhood, Paula was called “weird.”  The other children at school avoided her.  Her parents just looked baffled and didn’t seem to understand her at all.  She had few friends as a result. She felt guilty for being so different but wondered why she had to change for the sake of others. 

You may have close friends but it is necessary to put on a false face and keep private your strange, secret feelings.  You may have learned how to conform to every nuance of human behaviour in your peer group; always fitting in like a chameleon.  If that is how you live, then your idea of a successful day is one when you feel accepted.  Your strange, secret feelings may seem to defy explanation and grow out of all proportion into what seems to be a “Shadow.”  It may be possible to “drown” your feelings in constant activity.  However, as soon as there is some quiet space, the feelings immediately surface and the sense of “being different” is at its greatest.

Some womb twin survivors make a point of being different. They defiantly proclaim their individuality through dress, manner and beliefs.  They cultivate eccentricity.  If you are deliberately eccentric as a way to proclaiming to the world who you are, then this could be a reflection of your pre-birth story.  If your twin, the other half of you, was opposite to you in every way, then that mismatch may be reflected in every part of your life.  For example, your twin may have developed in some strange way, quite differently from yourself, and that difference was incompatible with life.  In that case, difference itself would be a major emotional issue.  It would be very important to be different and still be found acceptable.

I am paranoid
Paranoia is another side to hypersensitivity.  In this case it is an acute sensitivity to rebuff, a tendency to misconstrue the motives of others as hostile, to bear grudges, to be suspicious and assume that one is constantly “under threat.”  Paranoia is paradoxical.  It seems to be associated with a sense of utter vulnerability and helplessness, but paranoid behaviour is essentially defensive. It’s a powerful feeling, arising out of a sense of powerlessness.


Tony: Enraged by inconvenience
Tony feels inwardly so vulnerable that he is acutely concerned with his personal welfare.  He becomes enraged if he experiences the mildest form of inconvenience.  A delayed train is seen as a personal slight. 

Paranoia is essentially self-centred.  If you are paranoid yourself, it probably feels to you like a perfectly justifiable form of self-protective anxiety.  Even so, deep down, you are probably aware that it is self-inflicted.



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Chapter 16: The Womb Twin research project

The whole idea of the Womb Twin research project has been to find womb twin survivors and ask them how it feels to be a womb twin survivor.  This chapter will review some of the main developments since the project began in 2003.

Womb twin survivors revealed
In 1995,  Dr. Charles Boklage concluded from his research that for every twin pair born intact there are at least ten sole survivors. It took another ten years for the impact of this statistic to be fully realised, but gradually, the idea entered into the public consciousness. 
    Two years later, in 1997, a web site about “The vanishing twin phenomenon” was created by Caryl Dennis in the USA.  She writes that she began her work: “…after finding out not only that I am a surviving twin, but also that my fraternal twin siblings probably began as triplets, and that my youngest brother was a surviving ‘mirror’ identical twin.” 
    Four years later in 2001 the idea caught the attention of the popular scientific press.  By 2005, pre- and perinatal psychology was well-established as a science in California, USA.  One expert described the lost twin issue as  “..a little known but very commonplace phenomenon.” 

Finding womb twin survivors
Until the 1980s there was no way of identifying womb twin survivors, simply because no one had any idea they existed.  By 2003 modern technology had made it possible to find a sufficient number of womb twin survivors to carry out this research at minimal cost.  It was possible to recruit a large number of womb twin survivors via the Internet.  To that end, the first womb twin web site was created in 2003.  Until then, it had not been possible to go out and find womb twin survivors but now they came to the site.  One by one, they began to tell their stories.

The Womb Twin hypothesis
Within a few months of launching the web site it was clear that womb twin survivors do have a specific psychological make-up, which appears to be related to the loss of their twin.  On that basis, the Womb Twin hypothesis was formulated:

Womb twin survivors spend their lives re-enacting the life and death of their womb twin.  Nothing is more important than that, even life itself.  Once the real pre-birth scene, which is constantly being 
re-enacted, is made clear, then the re-enactment tends to diminish or cease altogether, greatly to the benefit of the individual.

It has not been necessary to amend the hypothesis in any way since it was formulated in 2003.  In fact, repeated analyses of various versions of the questionnaire have consistently supported it.  At first, it seemed an extraordinary idea that the loss of a twin at birth or before could be the cause of a variety of psychological problems.  As time passed however, more and more womb twin survivors came forward, each with a similar story of misery and loss, which was clearly explained by the womb twin hypothesis.  It now seems that the psychological effects on the sole survivor, when a twin is lost around birth or before, have been hidden in plain sight for generations.  At last, we have learned how to recognise these effects and describe them. 




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Chapter 15: The lost twin in the Dream of the Womb

Many decades of research and exploration have revealed that an imprint of your time in the womb still remains, deeply rooted in the most primitive part of your brain.  In this book, this vague and ineffable impression is known as “The Dream of the Womb” for it cannot be described as a “memory” exactly.  In this chapter we will explore how a hundred years of studying the Dream of the Womb did not reveal the lost womb twins until we developed the technology to see into the womb.  Only then did we fully recognize that womb twin survivors have always had a lost twin – or more – in their Dream of the Womb.
    Like everyone else on this planet, you have a Dream of the Womb, which is constantly being re-enacted in your life.  Nothing in the world is more important than that - but you may not realize it yet.  Your Dream drives your choices, fuels your desires and controls your fears.  It is a strange place but everyone has a Dream like this.  It seems to be at the very back of your mind as deep and primitive as can be; yet at the same time it is just behind your eyes and creates a kind of prism through which you see the world and everything in it.  It is a memory of long ago, yet it seems to be happening right now. 

Hard-wired
Your Dream was built as your brain was built.  The whole pre-birth experience is “hard-wired” into the neurones of your brain.  It is integral to your personality, written into your mind and seemingly inescapable. Your whole life so far has consisted of keeping your Dream alive.  If you are a womb twin survivor then the life and untimely death of your womb twin is in your Dream of the Womb and constantly re-enacted.  This imprint of Someone Else lies somewhere just below the lowest threshold of memory.  However, it has not passed out of sight and out of mind for all time.  There is evidence from womb twin survivors themselves that the imprint is always held in mind and expressed in the body, mind and spirit of the survivor as a kind of lifelong, coded message.  We now have the key to that code, thanks to ultrasound technology.

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Chapter 14: A womb twin discovered

If it is true that for every pair of twins born there are at least ten womb twin survivors, then there are 600 million womb twin survivors in the world.  About half of them are adults and one of them may be you.  If you were never told when you were a child that you once had a twin, there are still many ways in which you may discover your own womb twin for yourself.  In this chapter we will review some of the ways in which a womb twin may be discovered for the first time by the sole survivor.

When an infant is aware
We learned in the last chapter how some young womb twin survivors, almost as soon as they could talk, ask their mother for a twin. This can sometimes pre-empt the mother’s intention to tell their child.  For instance, Maxim, who is now twelve years old, has no recollection of the fact that at two years old he talked about his twin sister. “When I was in Mummy’s tummy there was a little girl there. We used to talk, then one day she disappeared.”  Similarly, Lisa, who was not told about her twin until she was fourteen, remembers sitting half-way up the stairs from the age of two or three, chatting to her twin.  Young womb twin survivors seem to have some uncanny knowledge about their twin.  For example Evelyn was a teenager when she wondered about her twin’s name and the name Meredith kept coming to her.  She asked her mother what she was going to call her and her mother said, “Meredith.”

The mark of a lost twin
There may be a physical scar as a reminder of your lost twin.  If you are a womb twin survivor and you had a dermoid cyst, a teratoma or a foetus in fetu (a twin-in-a-twin) there is probably a scar where your twin was taken away. If this happened when you were very young, the scar may be a disturbing mystery if it is not properly explained.  Every time the scar is noticed, it will be a perpetual reminder to all concerned.

A dawning awareness
Even after the parents have told their child, naturally and gently, leaving them to process the information in their own way, the fact of the lost twin can remain a mysterious secret for many years, giving the child’s rich imagination full play.  The fantasies that arise sometimes include a sense
of somehow “being responsible” for the death of their twin.  Such thoughts have been described as: “Confused delusions about their supposed murderous foetal life.” Where some reassurance is not provided, these thoughts be disturbing for the womb twin survivor.

Even when a child has been told, the original memories can be lost for many years, surfacing in a disguised form in writing, art, dance or other creative activities.  These vague impressions from the time before birth may not be recognized as being based in a real memory until some moment of realisation occurs some time later.

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Chapter 13: My child is a womb twin survivor

This chapter will explore how it feels to be the parent of a young womb twin survivor.  Some parents find it hard to cope with their own loss, some are not sure of the best way to tell their child about their twin and  some experience difficulties in parenting their child.

A research study, carried out in 2003 in the USA with a group of over fifty surviving twins, reached a similar conclusion: “…….. almost unanimously the cry was to have this issue be openly talked about, right from the beginning.  The survivors fervently gave suggestions and advice: Give information truthfully, and allow feelings to be expressed.  Encourage openness of communication.  Educate the medical profession.  Teach the parents how to deal with the survivor; educate the public that this lost twin is a real force.” 

The loss of one twin at birth is devastating for the parents. Furthermore, twin pregnancies are increasingly the result of lengthy, laborious and costly fertility treatments. Earlier on in the pregnancy, there is still a sense of loss.  Many parents discover early on that they are expecting twins or more.  They get to know each baby very well.
 After birth, because of the realities of caring for one or more survivors, parents are typically unable to grieve properly.  In the case of MZ (identical) twins, the memory of the lost twin is kept alive in the person of the survivor.

Support for grieving parents of twins
Parents badly need support in their grief but it is only in the last forty years or so that such support has been provided.  If you are a womb twin survivor born forty years ago or more, then your parents were probably left alone and unsupported after the loss of your twin.

The Center for Loss in Multiple Birth (CLIMB)
Jean Kollantai lost one of her twins at birth.  She resolved that thereafter no parent would ever have to survive such a tragedy unsupported.  She once said that her introduction to parenthood was holding two full-term babies where one was alive and one was dead. She created CLIMB in 1998 as a local support network with excellent information.  There are now branches all over the world. 

Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support (SANDS)  
In the UK in 1975 two parents with stillborn children decided to do something about the fact that most parents were not allowed to see or hold their babies and they were not told where their babies were buried.  If you are the parent of a stillborn twin, born in the UK before 1984 it was probably normal practice to whisk the baby away, sight unseen.  Today in the UK there is SANDS, founded in 1984 as a charity supporting parents bereaved by the loss of one or more babies, at any time from the second trimester until around birth.  They produce leaflets suggesting best practice for professionals involved with stillbirth.

Good information
The Twins and Multiple Births Association (TAMBA) was created in the UK in 1978. They supply information to parents with twins or multiples.  They have a bereavement support group for parents who had a twin or multiple pregnancy and one or more babies died. 
    There is an increasing amount of information now generally available for parents of stillborn babies, including parents of womb twin survivors.    One good example is the material written by Elizabeth Pector, a medical doctor and the parent of a sole surviving twin.  She has created a web site with resources for parents and has written extensively on the subject. 

Memorials   
Today after the stillbirth or neontal death of one twin, parents are offered the chance to hold their dead child, take a photograph and carefully keep some mementoes of the baby.  This can be helpful to the parents and the surviving twin. 
    There are now some printed resources to help chaplains and others to create Christian services of prayer and memorial for babies who have died during pregnancy or around birth. It is also considered suitable for the siblings of the baby to attend the funeral or memorial service. It is also their loss.  

Death in the womb - a real loss   
If it has been hard to obtain public recognition for a stillborn baby, it even harder for the public to recognize the death of a baby in the womb as a real loss for the parents.  The very idea of grieving for a tiny, miscarried baby has been considered unreasonable by some professionals, who have been concerned that parents and others may magnify miscarriage into a “tragedy.” Nonetheless, it is now clear how important it is for professionals to keep parents informed when a baby dies in the womb and take account of their feelings of loss.
    The same imperative applies to providing full information to the surviving twins.  They must and should be told, in the kindest way possible.  The knowledge that one was once a twin is a very important piece of personal information. Every womb twin survivor has a right to know their origins as one of a twin pair or multiple group but it is very hard to talk about.

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Chapter 12: A womb twin remembered

This book depends absolutely on a single assumption: that at a very early stage in your development you were capable of some kind of awareness of being in the womb, and that awareness still remains in your mind as a vague impression of your pre-born life.  This chapter will describe some of the research in this area and the astonishing conclusions that have been reached.  Despite widespread ignorance on this topic, it is widely believed that we do not remember life in the womb. 
    Many decades of research has revealed that you were capable of awareness and learning from your earliest beginnings.  Exactly how early in life this awareness begins has been the subject of debate for a long time, but  research studies are revealing more and more about your extraordinary abilities, even in the first few weeks of your life. 

The perceptions of the unborn child
It would be a mistake to imagine the womb as a kind of flotation tank in absolute darkness and silence.  You lived in a small bubble of fluid where the everyday noises of the world were audible.  In sunlight it was not altogether dark and in the night or the daytime it was never silent.  Thomas Verney, in his book The Secret Life of the Unborn Child wrote, “The foetus can see, hear, experience, taste and, on a primitive level, even learn in utero.   Most importantly, he can feel - not with an adult’s sophistication, but feel nonetheless.”

Touch
You had been alive in the womb for only about 29 days when your first skin was formed, served by neurones that could detect temperature and texture.  Anything that came into contact with your skin would have stimulated you.  It is known that, if anything enters the womb and touches the skin of an unborn child enough to wound, this causes pain.  It was established in 1980 that an unborn child can feel the prick of a needle and would require anaesthesia for intra-uterine surgery.  Researchers found that unborn babies pricked with a needle show changes in heart rate and an increase in movement. Until then, it had been assumed that unborn children did not feel pain.

Taste and Smell
Your sense of taste and smell was developed very early on, at about four weeks.  Just because you lived in a bubble of amniotic fluid does not mean to say there was nothing to taste or smell.  Various organic compounds crossed the placenta into your bubble of amniotic fluid.  It is reasonable to suppose that you were aware of them.  It is well known that smells evoke emotional memories and it is also known that emotional memories are the most enduring.  It follows then that the smells we each find most agreeable may in some way be related to the tastes and smells of those long-ago days in the womb.

Hearing
The womb was never silent.  The beating of your mother’s heart and the sound of her food and drink churning through her digestive system went on continuously.  Only a few membranes and muscle tissue lay between you and the outside world.  Sounds, voices and music could be heard without much distortion.  As you grew and your hearing developed you became aware of your mother’s voice.  It reverberated through her body. If there was a sudden loud sound, you literally leaped in the womb.  You were particularly sensitive to vibrations of various kinds.

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Chapter 11: The grief of a lone twin

This chapter will explore various aspects of the grief of the lone twin.  If your twin died, it will hopefully also reassure you that it is natural, in the circumstances, to have feelings of grief about your twin.  The grief of twin-loss is completely different from the grief engendered by other family bereavement experiences, such as a parent, sister or brother.  Few people understand this difference.  If you are the only womb twin survivor in the family, you may end up totally isolated in your grief.
The death of your own co-twin can be a catastrophe. Your entire inner world, constructed since conception around your personal role as a twin, is completely shattered. 

The twin bond
The grief that twins experience when their twin dies is without equal anywhere in the field of human relations, for nowhere else in human life is the love so deep.  We grieve as much as we love and we love as much as we are bonded to one another.  The grief feels as acute as the bond is deep.  The bond between twins is the closest bond in Nature, so is all the  more painful when the bond is broken.
    The twin bond differs from all other possible attachment bonds formed in the lifetime of a human being. Twins live entwined lives at every level imaginable.  For a twin, the twin bond is the primary and deepest attachment bond to which all other attachment bonds are subservient.   This unique bond begins at conception and lasts a lifetime; it truly is life-long and transcends even death.

A foetal assumption
The twin bond formed in the womb arises out of a “foetal assumption.”  The foetus, knowing no other situation since the beginning of life, can be said to take for granted that the co-twin has Always Been There and is simply part of The Way Things Are.  So the deepest attachment bond of all is not created in the same way as other attachment bonds formed in born life. The twin bond is formed out of the certain knowledge of a consistent Presence, somewhere close by.  It has been pointed out that this deep childhood attachment is not some kind of infantile dependency and is particularly string bwteen MZ twins. Like all other strong human attachments, the twin bond is necessary for the development of both twins, throughout their lives. 

A preoccupation with the co-twin
For twins, the whole idea of twinning itself is a major preoccupation, with particular emphasis on their own pair.  DZ  twins differ markedly from MZ twins in the way they relate to others, such as in the way they make and share their friends.  MZ twins may share as many as half of their friends, but then they share so much already and have always done so since their earliest days.  DZ twins share fewer - about 25% for same sex and only 5% for opposite sex. Opposite-sex twins may end up at different schools and spend much of their lives living separately.  The bond between opposite sex DZ twins is much less intimate than same-sex DZ twins and MZ twins.  MZ twins sometimes end up marrying another set of MZ twins and living very close to each other.  Clearly, only another MZ twin would understand and empathize with the need to speak to one’s co-twin several times a day.

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The new book Ch.10: Bodily evidence of a womb twin

Perhaps it is not possible for you to find out any information about your mother’s pregnancy.  Perhaps there was no sign, that she is aware of, that your mother was at some stage carrying twins when she was pregnant with you.  Yet this idea of womb twin survivors resonates strongly with you and you wish there was some clue, however vague and uncertain, that may substantiate your deep sense of truth about the idea.  This chapter will set out for consideration some of the more compelling associations with twinning, which by extension could concern the sole survivors of twin or multiple conceptions.  These clues are to be found in your body and in the way it is made. 

Gender
There appears to be a huge advantage in being a female foetus.  Most conjoined twins are females, which suggests that the conjoined males do not manage to survive. Of the people with evidence of their twin who completed the Womb Twin Research Project questionnaire, 80% are female.

The fragile male
We may assume that there is as much chance of a male being conceived as a female.  So, as we find an excess of females among womb twin survivors, it is probably the fact that male foetuses do not manage to survive that makes the difference.  Male babies are also more likely to be born prematurely, with all the concomitant risks, some of which are fatal. According to one report, the male embryo is more vulnerable than the female, even at conception.  From this point on, the prognosis is not good.  With gentle humour, one doctor has hinted that maleness itself could be considered a “genetic disorder.”  
The fragility of the male continues throughout life.  Men live less long than women and are more likely to die of a stroke.  The loss of male foetuses has been hard to understand.  Various studies and reports have been published to attempt to explain why the number of males being born varies so much over time and across continents.  The study of womb twin survivors suggests that, when it comes to sharing finite limited resources, the battle of the sexes can occur in the womb as much as in born life.

Women need less food
It is known that females manage on less food than males require.  If you are a woman who has ever tried a slimming diet, then you will know that men are allowed more calories, even if they weigh the same as you.  Even in times of famine and shortage of food, the women are able to carry babies to term and breast-feed them while maintaining their health and strength on a minimal diet.  Men do not seem to be made in quite the same way as women.  It has been so from the very beginning of life.

Male foetuses develop faster than female foetuses and this can be a major disadvantage in a marginal twin pregnancy.  If you are a female DZ womb twin survivor who once had a male twin, then it could be that you both shared a plentiful supply of nutrients at the start but your twin brother grew faster than you.  In those first critical weeks he took the lion’s share.  Meanwhile, you had to make do and adapt to getting less food.  It would not be long before your faster-growing, nutrient-needy twin would find available food supplies insufficient for survival.  Where the nutrient supply is marginal, it is the twin who can manage on less food who will survive and that might have been you.

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Chapter 9: Clues to a “vanishing” twin pregnancy

Even though a “vanishing” twin pregnancy can be symptom-free, there may be some other signs to indicate the existence of a lost twin and this chapter will explore what those may be.  Such associated factors as there are may be elusive and vague, none of them adding up to very much, so they cannot be described as “proof” of a lost twin.  The strange, deep feeling of “having once had a twin,” which is experienced by so many womb twin survivors, would seem at first to have no basis in fact.  It may be dismissed as a “mere fantasy” by those who do not understand.  Even so, do not despair if you have no proof, for there is still more to discover as we search for clues. 
    If you are a womb twin survivor and your mother is unwilling or unable to discuss this with you, the important details of her pregnancy with you may be lost to history.  Medical records may be sketchy or missing and family members may not remember anything.  If you were adopted, you have no chance of ever knowing what it was like for your birth mother during her pregnancy with you, unless of course you are able to meet her again.

Twins in the family
If there are twins among your blood relations, then perhaps you were once a twin also.  But were you a dizygotic (DZ) twin or a monozygotic (MZ) twin?

Dizygotic (DZ) twins
It has been assumed for a long time that DZ twins run in families, for there is a strong genetic basis to this kind of twinning.  The exact reason has never been clearly identified but it is probably an inherited tendency to hyper-ovulate (that is, to produce more than one egg per month.)  
    It is also possible that the environment, in particular the everyday diet, may have an effect.  As we have seen, the people of the Yoruba tribe of South Western Nigeria, for example, are the twinning champions of the world.  They eat white yams several times a day.  According to a student at Yale, the white yam is rich in a biochemical substance that seems to be linked to hyper-ovulation.  He fed white yams to rats in the laboratory and the size of their litters soon doubled.  Meanwhile, in Japan they eat no yams at all but rather eat soya beans in various forms, several times a day.  Many people believe that soya can adversely affect fertility.  Perhaps as a consequence, in Japan DZ twinning was extremely rare until the advent of ART.  
    ART has greatly increased the twinning rate. In 1998 the number of DZ twins being born, mainly as a result of ART, was considered to be at epidemic levels.  If you were conceived with the help of ART, or if there are fraternal twins in your family, this could be valuable evidence.

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Chapter 8: "Vanishing" twins revealed

"Vanishing" twins - A new term for the death of one twin in the womb

At the Third International Congress on Twin Studies, held in Jerusalem in 1980, this phenomenon was discussed and the term “vanishing twins” was coined to describe it.   A “vanishing twin” pregnancy quickly became the accepted medical term to describe a particular situation - that is, when a pregnant woman is scanned by ultrasound, two sacs are seen at the first scan but one sac has “vanished” from view by the next scan and in the end only one baby is born.

The mystery of the vanishing twin at once captured the imagination of research scientists.  In 1982, an article entitled “The Vanishing Twin” quoted nine research studies.  Another article followed shortly with the same title and quoting even more studies. In April 1986 a new term, “The Disappearing Twin” was coined by the translator of an article in Czech but it never caught on. 

The term “vanishing twin” was not considered sufficiently scientific for some scientists.  In 1992 an effort was made to translate the name into Latin,  probably in order to put the whole idea onto a more academic footing. One writer adopted the term foetus vanescens, which means “vanishing foetus”  but by then the term “vanishing twin” was too beguiling and familiar to replace with any other term.

In 1998 a comprehensive article reviewing the existing literature, was published under the title, “The Vanishing Twin.” There were over 50 references referring to various other studies.  The term was by then in common usage even though it was known that none of the twins “vanished,” in fact.  Their bodies were no longer visible on the ultrasound screen but they did not totally disappear.  In fact, in many cases there was visible evidence at birth that the twin had once existed, such as an extra placenta; a foetus papyraceous (“papery” foetus) or an empty amniotic sac attached to the placenta of the survivor. 

In the late 1990s some highly imaginative people took the word “vanished” a little too seriously. They decided that “vanished” twins had been abducted by aliens and had been literally taken from the womb.  That idea faded along with the century, as report after report on the subject of the intrauterine death of one twin was published in reputable journals.  The phenomenon of the “vanished twin” today is widely discussed by obstetricians, gynaecologists and experts in multiple pregnancy.  Among the general public some residual scepticism still remains, but not among the pregnant women who witness the disappearance of one of their twins from the ultrasound screen and ask, “Where did it go?”   

How many twins die?

Obstetricians and midwives had known for a very long time that more twins are conceived than are born.  However, no one knew until the ultrasound studies of the 1980s just how many twins were lost.

Once a sufficient number of pregnancies had been monitored to be able to produce some reliable statistics, people began to discuss the “vanishing twin rate” as related to the general twinning rate.  Various painstaking ultrasound studies of twin pregnancies have been carried out in the USA and England to try and find out how many twins die before birth.  The results in each case seem to be consistent.  In about a third of twin pregnancies, one embryo is seen to disappear at some stage in the first twelve weeks.  

Unfortunately for researchers,  most routine scans on normally-conceived pregnancies are carried out after twelve weeks of pregnancy 

have passed, by which time many twin embryos have died and disintegrated, leaving an apparently “singleton” pregnancy.  However, scans are made earlier when the various assisted reproduction technologies (ART) are used to create a pregnancy.  As a result, we now know much more about the early loss of a twin. 

Chapter 7: The objects in your mothers womb: how aware were you of them?

The umbilical cord

Your umbilical cord was the vital link between you and your placenta, but as it grew, it changed.  It began as a little stalk at about twenty days or so and contained your digestive tract, for at that time there was not enough room for it in your abdomen.  By the time you had been alive for 50 days or so, your digestive tract began to migrate into your abdomen.  After that, your cord grew thinner and longer until all that remained in the cord were three blood vessels: two arteries to bring blood in and one vein to send blood out. 
    By then, as a fully-functioning human being, growing very fast, you needed more and more room to grow and move about under your own volition.  The cord became progressively longer until about 28 weeks of pregnancy, reaching a length of about 22 inches (50cms.) It was not smooth like a water pipe: it was corded like the trunk of a tree.  As it grew, it twisted around itself and became coiled.  It pulsed with the flow of blood and it had knots on it at various points.  It floated about with you as you moved, moving with you and tethering you to the placenta.  The cord was as much a part of your life as the amniotic fluid you swam in.  If the cord was long enough, it may have coiled around you and been in your way as you swam about, exercising your developing muscles.
    The cord may have been be a source of danger: some foetuses dance about so violently that they tie their umbilical cord in knots, a practice that can be fatal because it interferes with the flow of blood along the cord.  The cord may grow so long and the foetus may move about so much that the cord may have become wrapped around the neck. That eventuality may have strangled your twin and nearly strangled you.
    A very important moment in the process of birth is the severing of the umbilical cord.  The small, knobbly scar that you now carry on your navel is all that remains of your cord and your life support system.

The placenta

Your placenta was joined to the womb wall in a convoluted series of minute projections, which provided a large surface area in direct contact with the minute blood capillaries of your mother’s blood supply. The surface area, including all the tiny projections, increased from about one and a half square metres at 100 days gestation to about fourteen square meters in the later months of pregnancy.    As the quality of ultrasound images improves, we can observe with increasing clarity the way that unborn babies use their own placenta like a trampoline as they dance and swim about.  After delivery, it can be seen that the placenta is red, thick and circular, the size of a large dinner plate and covered with a soft, smooth surface.
    By means of your placenta you had a direct link with your mother but you also had a relationship with your placenta as a separate object in your life.  It provided a good supply of nutrients and oxygen but was also a source of toxins if your mother smoked or took drugs.  In the last few weeks of pregnancy you were feeling very cramped, but to make matters worse you were beginning to outgrow the ability of your placenta to feed you, provide you with oxygen and clean your blood of carbon dioxide and waste.  The placenta not only stopped growing during this period but it became less efficient.  The increased toxicity of the womb would be an important factor in your being born: it was time to go, for the sake of your own health.
    After birth, your umbilical cord and placenta were discarded as waste.  The disposal of a placenta is a vexed question, for some people become very attached to the concept of their own placenta.  In some traditions the mother buries it under a fruit tree, so that it will feed the tree that feeds those who eat the fruit.  The most usual fate for a placenta is to be thrown into a bucket and incinerated.  Some people have a problem with that, for in the back of their mind is a nurturing companion who was always there from the beginning but is now gone.
    You never saw your placenta again, however hard you may have tried to get your mother to deputize for it since.  Your relationship with your mother or primary carer is in many ways a straight re-enactment of the relationship you had with your placenta.  Your placenta was an organ capable of multi-tasking, much like a busy working mother.  Like Mother making mushy meals for you as a baby, it broke down food for you into a form that you could digest.  Like Mother, your placenta kept you clean inside and out, removing waste from your body and breaking down any toxins into harmless substances that could be eliminated safely.  Like Mother giving you continuous liquid feeds, only to change your wet nappy six times a day, your placenta kept your fluid balance right by bringing fluids in and removing them in equal measure.
    To be fully born, you had to be separate from everything in the womb. That meant jettisoning your own, self-made, life-support system.  From then on, you had to hope that your carers would support you until you built another life support system of your own in born life.

And that is not all.... you were aware of your twin, moving somewhere nearby.

That is the end of part one, and now we go on to consider the grief of a lone twin.  Tomorrow we will look at the greif of the sole survivor when a twin dies close to birth.

Chapter 6: When twins unite: hermaphrodites and other stories

When twins merge you get a real two in one personality. It can be very hard to know who you are in this situation - male, or female for example.

Hermaphrodite: If you merged with your DZ twin and they were the same sex as you, then in the absence of any skin or eye colour anomalies, there would be little proof, unless you happened to take a DNA test.  However, if you merged with your DZ twin and they were the opposite sex to you, chimerism may be more easily identified because you would have both male and female DNA in your body. 

This is because the formation of each chromosome in pair number 23 varies according to whether the individual is male or female.  Once the chromosomes are visible under a microscope the different shapes can be clearly seen.  The male chromosome pairs look like the letters “XY” and the female chromosome pairs look like the letters “XX.”  Chimeras that have both male and female DNA are called “XX/XY.” 

Another word for people with mixed-sex DNA is “hermaphrodite.” They are genetically both male and female. If you are a hermaphrodite, you may have XX/XY chromosomes, but that doesn’t say you will also have physical characteristics of the opposite sex. Hermaphrodites can be grouped on a spectrum, depending on the degree to which the opposite sex DNA is expressed physically.  

At the “male” end of the spectrum we have hermaphrodites, who are normal, fertile males and have all their sexual equipment present and intact. At the opposite “female” end, we have hermaphrodites who look like normal, fertile females, also with their sexual organs present. 

In the middle of this spectrum there are people with the sexual characteristics of the opposite sex.  They are described as “inter-sex” if their bodies express both sexes, such as having both sets of genitalia.  They are “trans-sexual” if they begin life as one sex but have an overwhelming desire to change to the opposite sex.  In the medical literature there is so much emphasis on people with sexual ambiguity, that the “normal” male/female chimeras remain unnoticed, simply because they look and act normal.

And there is still more to learn about prental life - tomorrow we will look at how you related to the objects in the womb that were there all around you. 

5: The death of a twin in the first trimester

I had dozens of appropriate references for this chapter because I have spent years unearthing research studies about the death of a twin  in the first three months of pregnancy.  The most controversial idea in this book is that, even when your twin died in the first trimester, (the first 12 weeks) this can still leave some vague psychological impression, somewhere in the back of your mind.  So I made sure I got my facts right.  If I am to be taken to task on this, and if I can demonstrate a solid foundation for the physical aspects of this, then  it will be a good start.

So. Here is your snippet for today, about bleeding, which is one of the most widely recognised signs of a twin lost in the first trimester.

Chapter 5: the death of a twin in the first trimester

Vaginal bleeding
Various studies suggest that vaginal bleeding complicates a quarter of all pregnancies.  The nature of that bleeding has been subjected to careful analysis.  The term “light spotting” is used to describe the situation when a woman discovers bleeding by wiping but does not require use of sanitary protection.  “Heavy bleeding” soaks underwear or requires a pad.  In one study, three quarters of women who experienced bleeding reported “a single episode of light spotting” in the first trimester. 
Spotting or slight vaginal bleeding, at a stage when one is still unsure of a pregnancy, is a private matter.  For most women it is too embarrassing to discuss at all.  Furthermore, according to several studies, most women with vaginal bleeding in the early weeks of pregnancy go on to achieve a live birth, so an episode of light spotting could easily be overlooked or ignored.    Until the advent of ultrasound and its use in early pregnancy, vaginal bleeding was an unexplored area.  It is now generally assumed that significant vaginal bleeding in early pregnancy probably signals the foetal death of one twin. One study of first trimester bleeding revealed a “blighted” ovum in every case.     

When one MZ twin dies in a mono-chorionic twin pair (ie. sharing a chorion) the placental blood supply shifts and changes as a result of the changed demands made upon it.  There may be some leakage of blood from around the placenta.  Mother may notice this as a show of blood.
In a dichorionic twin pregnancy (i.e. with separate chorions) the twins may be DZ or MZ and the two placentas are implanted separately.  If the two separate placentas are fused together, then the placenta of the dead twin remains in the womb, attached to the surviving twin’s placenta.  Even so, the changes in the placenta when one twin dies may cause some bleeding.

Vaginal bleeding misinterpreted
When a mother notices some vaginal bleeding, depending on the stage of pregnancy that has been reached, she may assume that this is her menstrual flow back again and she is not pregnant after all.  If she knows she certainly is pregnant; if she has no idea she is carrying twins and no ultrasound scan is made to check, she may assume that the bleeding signals the end of her pregnancy and that her baby is lost.  Later on, experiencing all the symptoms of pregnancy, she may take a test and be surprised to find she is still pregnant.  After an “incomplete miscarriage” – i.e. where there has been bleeding but no sign of a foetus or placenta, a doctor may recommend a dilatation and curettage procedure (D&C) to clear all remaining detritus of the pregnancy out of the womb.  This is to prevent a major bleeding episode or an infection, which can happen if parts of the placenta are left behind. For many years it has been common practice to carry out a D&C after a miscarriage and it is probable that many sole surviving twins have been “surgically removed” in this way after the miscarriage of their co-twin.

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