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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