Monozygotic (MZ) womb twin survivors: the physical signs

After many years of  browsing journal articles and so forth, I have been able to compile a list of some of the physical signs that  are to be found in the survivor  when a monozygotic twin dies.  The zygote is the huge original cell that results from the merging of the mothers egg with the fathers sperm.  The zygote is the first form taken by the new individual, who is genetically unique and has never been seen before.

The zygote divides into 2, those 2 divide again to make 4 and so on, to create a mass of cells that eventually developes into a fetus, a baby and an adult. The process of cell division continues today and keeps you alive, because as some of your cells inevitably die there are plenty more new ones to keep you going.

Now it can happen that, at some time between the first and the fifteenth day, the developing zygote divides, but the two halves separate into two separate individuals - this is mono zygotic twinning.  The two individuals develop into two babies - we call them Identical twins but they are quite distinct from each other in various subtle ways, and however alike they may look they are two different people with different lives.

The womb twin kids project - You Might be a Womb Twin Survivor If.....

The final book in the Womb Twin Kids series will be for young teenagers, and is called:

"You might be a womb twin survivor if....... "

This books is a series of cartoons, based on the activities of Womb Twin, a small, androgynous character, depicted thus:

There will be about 15  cartoons, which illustrate some of the most common characteristics of womb twin survivors, such as

• It feels like something is missing
• I feel driven by musts and shoulds
• I think about death a lot
• I feel empty inside

There will also be some explanation of the processes of twinning, together with diagrams showing what can happen when one twin dies.

It is to be hoped that a lighthearted approach to this difficult subject will  make is accessible to younger readers, who may find the adult Womb Twin books a bit too long and complex.

Read more  on the Womb Twin Kids site and order your advance copy today.

The womb twin kids project - We Are Womb Twin Survivors

To produce a book for young womb twin survivors aged about 8-11 is difficult. At this age there is  great curiosity about the biology of the whole thing but not the emotional maturity to work though the feelings.

Still in its infancy and not yet completed, this book will be a collection of stories about young womb twin survivors for womb twin survivors. ( see here)

The womb twin kids project - Koko's Magical Gift

The children who can read, aged 5-8, are at a very different stage from the preschoolers so the Two little Birds may not be quite enough. They need a more complex story, with perhaps an interactive element.

On this page of the Womb Twin Kids web site  there are details of just such a workbook.

The womb twin kids project - Two Little Birds

The Womb Twin Kids project was launched in June 2011.  Once it is fully launched, we will have regular events for parents and children and there will be a full set of resources for them.

There is a special web site ( still under development but getting there)  with details of the available resources so far.

There will be four books in all, each for a different age group.  The first is called "Two little birds."

This book has taken two years to create.  I thought for a long time of some metaphor that would work for young children and provide a vehicle for that sense of  something missing that womb twin survivors feel.  Then I came up with the idea of two little birds who hatched out of the same egg, but only one of them was strong enough to fly.

Books for womb twin survivors: the final book about healing

So we come to the final book in the Womb Twin series. There will be more for children, as we shall see tomorrow, but this is the last one that I shall write for womb twin adults.  I hope to have it ready for editing in September 2012 and published in time for the 2012 Womb Twin conference in London.

This will be a book about the process of healing that womb twin survivors undergo, almost spontaneously, as they awaken from their Dream of the Womb. I touched on this in the final part of Womb Twin Survivors; the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb, simply for completeness, but there is much, much more to say about healing - another 15 chapters and 90000 words, in fact! 

Books for womb twin survivors: " Womb Twin Survivors - the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb"

The largest and most difficult of the womb twin books has now been written. I never thought it would happen. It took eight years, 500 completed questionnaires and many thousands of emails to hundred of womb twin survivors around the world.

I tried to write a book about womb twin survivors in 2003. I wanted to call it "Ending the cycle of self sabotage" and finished it in 12 chapters. With the help of Amanda Seyderhelm as literary agent, I submitted it to various publishers. The response was interesting:

This is fascinating, but how would anyone know they were a womb twin survivor?

A good question, to which I had to find the answer if I was ever to get this into print.

Books for womb twin survivors: A Silent Cry

In early 2008 I had such a wonderful collection of stories, written for me by womb twin survivors as part of the research questionnaire, that I thought it was time for another anthology, this time of stories written by womb twin survivors and published in their own words. .

The response took my breath away!  Womb twin survivors were so glad to know that at last they would be heard and taken seriously, that within  a month I had seventy stories! Every contributor was given a complimentary copy of the book.

The title was taken directly from an email I received from a director  of the Twinless Twins Support Group International...

Books for womb twin survivors: Untwinned

UNTWINNED - The first book in the Womb Twin series took two years to create. At that time I had  a whole lot of information about womb twin survivors, but most importantly,  I discovered many other people, better qualified than me, who were discovering the same things. They were qualified in their own fields and worth taking notice of, so I supposed that a housewife sitting at her computer in St Albans could not be the author of any kind of book at that stage, but an anthology of peices written by reputable people from around the world may help to put these ideas on to a sound footing.

On the same day in 2006 I came up with two ideas, both of which came to fruition in 2007: an anthology of articles about womb twin survivors and an organisation to support them, Womb Twin - but more of that later. 

Books for womb twin survivors: the healing path e-book

In 2005 I had more and more people coming to the web site and completing various versions of the questionnaire.   I was struggling to find the right statements that would describe how most womb twin survivors feel and I was making progress, having made several versions since 2003. But as the research continued and  people started to ask for help.

I had set out healing steps on the earlier versions of my web site,  and I began to wonder if I may attempt to write a book about healing.  It would not be definitive , as I was still in the early stages of research, but it would be the best I could do at the time.  In any case it would be the only book that I was able to find at the time that set out healing steps and self development exercises for a womb twin survivor.

It happened that over the winter of 2004/5 that I had a house guest who stayed for 4 months. I was able to bounce ideas off her and talk it all over, and with her help I finally created a PDF of the 30 healing steps.

Information for womb twin survivors: signs and symptoms

By the time I had entered the data and sent for analysis 500 questionnaires completed by womb twin survivors who visited the site, after years of research I had accumulated a comprehensive list of the sign  or symptoms that are associated with a twin pregnancy. The same list is the first part of the questionnaire.

I had used this same list in 2007 as a hand out at the ICTS conference in June 2007. It was greeted with mild surprise and lukewarm support, but it was very good to have been there!

[The list of indications is available as a free download here]

Information for womb twin survivors: an introduction

In 2003 after almost two years of research I decided I had enough to go on to put something into print. I made several failed attempts to create a book, but I still had some material that would be useful, and I had written a lot for the womb twin web site, which was developing rapidly as my research widened in scope. So I compiled an introduction to the whole idea: it was my first publication in this subject.

After  a year or two I made this a free download, so that anyone who is interested can read more.

Download your copy now

News Flash: Womb Twin Kids movie uploaded today

We now have a movie about the project for children who are womb twin survivors. This project is managed by me, but supported by Womb Twin, our parent organisation, and that is the important bit. It means that together we can apply for a grant to extend this work, first of all locally and later on nationally here in the UK.

This movie is part of that grant application. Please support us by viewing the movie, rating it and maybe also leaving a comment. Thanks!!!





The main Womb Twin Kids web site is here

If you are a parent of a womb twin survivor, contact me today  - you may be able to help.

Information for womb twin survivors - womb twin stories

It is very important  for womb twin survivors to feel able to tell their story and not feel strange or weird.  I started collecting stories in 2003 and I have  more than 200 now.  I have permission to use them anonymously and I do put little quotes here and there on various web sites. There are a couple of story pages on the womb twin organisation web site.  People are asked to tell their story ( or just part of it) in 250 words, and Ben, our volunteer web site developer, places the story anonymously on the site.   The stories make wonderful reading.  [Take a look here]

For longer stories, see this page on my womb twin survivors web site.  These stories are a real inspiration, particularly the one below, about an important misdiagnosis...

Information for womb twin survivors : a psychological profile

By 2009 I had more than 500 completed questionnaires, ready for analysis by the University of Hertfordshire Statistical department. Once I had collected that all-important list of physical signs and symptoms of a twin pregnancy, I could sort out those people who definitely are womb twin survivors and those who may indeed think they are, but they have no proof.

In the data set used for analysis, only people with some  proof of a twin pregnancy were included, and of this answers made by this group only the questions that received the strongest answers were counted.  This gave us 250 people.

The death of Freud - was he a womb twin survivor?

Today we come to the end of this brief discussion of Sigmund Freud  in his life and works, and the possibility that he was a womb twin survivor, with the story of his death.

It is documented in full here

Freud was very tired now, and it was hard to feed him. But while he suffered greatly and the nights especially were hard, he did not get, and did not want, any sedation. He could still read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin. When he had finished the book he told Schur, casually, that this had been the right book for him to read, dealing as it did with shrinking and starvation. It was the shrinking, Anna Freud thought, that seemed to speak particularly to his condition: his time was running out. He spent the last days in his study downstairs, looking out at the garden.

Ernest Jones, hastily summoned by Anna Freud, who thought her father was dying, stopped by on September 19. Freud, Jones remembered, was dozing, as he did so much these days, but when Jones called out "Herr Professor, "Freud opened an eye, recognized his visitor, "and waved his hand, then dropped it with a highly expressive gesture that conveyed a wealth of meaning: greetings, farewell, resignation." He then relapsed into his doze. Jones read Freud's gesture aright. Freud was saluting his old ally for the last time.

Born with a caul - is this significant?

A strange coincidence has been documented, that babies born with a caul ( the amniotic sac does not break but is delivered with the baby still contained within it)  are lucky, specially-gifted individuals.

Many belief systems hold that being born with a veil is a sign of special destiny and psychic abilities, or good luck. Through the years I have read people born with a veil. Most are female and believe themselves to be psychically gifted, while others show no advanced abilities nor interest. 

A caul or veil (Latin: Caput galeatum) is a thin, filmy membrane, the remnants of the amniotic sac, that covers or partly covers the newborn mammal immediately after birth. In childbirth it is seen as a shimmery coating of the head and face. The caul is harmless and it is easily removed by the doctor, midwife, or person(s) performing the childbirth. The appearance of a caul over a newborn baby's head is occasional; not all children have one, though they are not especially rare. A child born in this way is known as a caulbearer.

Alexander the Great was allegedly born with a caul and he certainly had an interesting and powerful life, though short lived.

Sigmund Freud, as we have seen here in the last week, was born with a caul, which convinced his mother that he would be her Golden Child.
Napolean also was born in a caul. Liberace was a womb twun survivor and was born in a caul.
 
And here another quote, from "The Social History of the Caul" by Thomas R. Forbes

 "Of the Helmets of Children newly born, or of the thin and soft caul, wherewith the face is covered as with a vizard, or covering, when they come first into the world." He quotes "old Wives . . . who do but dote, and know not what they say" to the effect that a black caul presages accidents, misfortunes, and haunting by evil spirits unless the caul "be broken and given in drink, which against my will many have done to the great hurt of the child." But if the caul is red or clings to the crown of the head, the child is expected later to achieve great success. 

Such interpretations were examples of amniomancy, the practice of foretelling the future by inspection of the caul.  If the caul were "white" (i.e., colorless) or red, it would bring good fortune; if black or lead-colored, the child would be unlucky.(57, 80, 88,) In Herzegovinia, a part of Jugoslavia, it was thought that a baby born with a black caul would grow up to become a witch or sorcerer unless, on the first night after the birth, a
woman carried the caul to the roof top and announced that "A child was born
at our house in a bloody shirt" Whether these procedures were regarded as charms or simply as attempts to prevent superstitious rumors among the neighbors is not reported.

It is suggested on this site that babies are not likely to be born  in a caul these days because of the habit of "breaking the waters" to assist labour, which means that the amniotic sac if then broken before birth.  In practices run by midwives there are more likely to be caul births and they are now advocated. Babies born in a caul  (with intact membranes) have a better time during delivery and start life with an advantage.  But is this a self fulfilling prophesy? Does Mum get excited by the sight of the caul and treat this kid differently or is there something more to this?

Many womb twin survivors ( mainly the multiples) show signs of being psychic, and they also have a great desire to reach out to others in need, to help them.  So do the caul bearers: they feel different and show signs of feeling a great sense of responsibility to help others - a sense of mission.

This was written in 2007 by a woman born in a caul. She has all the typical psychological characteristics of a womb twin survivor.

I would do anything for another not be in pain. At one point I realized that I was so familiar with pain that if it helped someone for me to take it on, then I could. Then I accepted the suggestion that pain helps someone know they are alive. It was shown to me that a woman who had a high pain threshold was unaware that she had a fracture until she could not walk some months later. Even with this information I continued to become anxious when I see suffering around me. The distress intensifies when I feel helpless to do anything about it.

Nearly 50% of the respondents to the womb twin research questionnaire gave the most positive  response to the statement:

"I have a deep desire to heal the world and everyone in it"

This sounds familiar: is it possible that babies born in a caul are womb twin survivors? I wonder....

Were YOU born in a caul? Do YOU want to heal the world and everyone in it?  Feel free to comment here or privately to me.

Freud, addiction and death

Freud was a cocaine addict.  He smoked tobacco all his life and contracted jaw cancer as a result.  He died at the hands of his own doctor and by his own consent.


See this book:  An Anatomy of addiction Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine

 An Anatomy of Addiction tells the tragic and heroic story of each man, accidentally struck down in his prime by an insidious malady: tragic because of the time, relationships, and health cocaine forced each to squander; heroic in the intense battle each man waged to overcome his affliction as he conquered his own world with his visionary healing gifts. Here is the full story, long overlooked, told in its rich historical context.

The full story of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and many say the father of modern psychology,  may have been told many times but it requires explanation. Womb twin theory supplies that explanation.

The two to one pregnancy

We interrupt this series on Freud with a news flash:  Multifetal pregnancy reduction has made it into the popular press in the USA.  There is an article in the New York times about it. " The two minus one pregnancy."    Lots about how much better it is to carry, deliver and care for one baby than two, but not a whisper about the survivors. The level of ignorance about this side of things is breathtaking.  Its all about Mum, not the remaining baby.

Freud and hysteria - a new interpretation

 Hysteria is a word that is mostly used to describe extreme emotional outbursts, but is also has a special meaning in psychiatry. (See here)

A mental disorder characterized by emotional outbursts, susceptibility to autosuggestion, and, often, symptoms such as paralysis that mimic the effects of physical disorders.

In the early days of his practice as a doctor, Sigmund Freud became convinced that  patients who were displaying strange psychological conditions, such as strange pains or paralysis, were suffering from some kind of trauma, so that had the physical symptoms had psychological causes.
This is from a book about Freud

A large proportion of the patients whom Freud treated during his early years in private practice had initially sought medical advice because they were suffering from physical symptoms; they had enlisted the help of a physician for no other reason than that they believed themselves to be ill. Among their symptoms were headaches, muscular pain, neuralgia, gastric pain, tics, vomiting, clonic spasms, petit mal, epileptoid convulsions, and a host of other physical reactions. [1] It was Freud who, by either making or confirming a diagnosis of hysteria, came to the conclusion that the origin of these symptoms was to be found in his patients’ emotional lives – and specifically in the traumatic events which had supposedly given rise to their illnesses.

He created an idea, that hysteria was sexual in origin  and was related to  child or infant seduction. That the physical symptoms were a defence mechanism against the repressed memory of the seduction.

This seduction theory got him into trouble, as the film "Freud" makes very clear in this clip:




Abuse recovery is still based in this idea.

Present research on the long term effects of child sexual abuse confirms Freud's seduction theory as presented in The Etiology of Hysteria. The theory accurately describes the effects of infantile seduction and the role of repression as a defense mechanism. This study compares the findings presented in Freud's theory to current research on child sexual abuse. Therapists can provide appropriate treatment to adult survivors of child sexual abuse if they recognize the symptoms and understand the role of defense mechanisms.

But the loss of a twin can also produce physical symptoms, such as a feeling of coldness and deadness in the place, or along the side where the twin once was. Birth trauma damage is held in the body as a muscular spasm that can cause muscular pain and skeletal deformity.  Only when the original reason for this muscular spasm is known and fully understood, can healing begin.

I know this from my own experience.  I went to a chiropractor aged 55 with pains in my body and a  30 year limp.  There, in the muscular spasms that lay down my right side, I  found both my birth trauma and my lost twin.   It was the start of this whole Womb Twin project.

(Here is my story to download and read, if you wish to learn more.)

Freud the narcissist - and his siblings

Now here things get intersting:

Here is an interesting article on siblings, with Freud as an example on unconscious feeling's towards one's siblings.

The role of siblings in mental life may have first been underemphasized by Freud, who may have had his own reasons for such downplaying. For example, Freud as a child had a private bedroom filled with books while all of his siblings lived together in one other, crowded room.

 And in another place:

As noted by the authors, the index of the complete standard edition of Freud's works has no reference to sibling (although Siberia is referenced).

A new view of Freudian Theory: the unconscious mind and "hysteria"

This is a nice accessible summary of Freudian theory:
 




This mentions the "unconscious mind" as driving all human actions and choices. It also puts sexuality and the drive towards pleasure as the main influence on our desires and choices, and introduces the idea of "forgotten memories". Is the unconscious mind in fact the Dream of the Womb? There are many people who think so. They are so sure that the unconscious mind is formed in the womb that they have made a whole industry out of prenatal education for fetuses.

Freudian theory and womb twin survivors - Oedipus, mothers and all that

Oedipus married his mother (unknowingly) and killed his father (unintentionally.) Freud invented it in 1896, and people still talk about it as if it was real.




Passionate feelings of love and hate for your parents? Sounds familiar, bearing in mind last week's blogs.

Sexual feelings for a parent? Hmm.

A new view of Freudian theory

When I trained as a social worker at Leicester University in 1969 I discovered for the first time the theories of Sigmund Freud.  He was an Austrian neurologist, and founded all kinds of theories about human psychology.  His work was utterly brilliant, bearing in mind the fact that it was taking place around the turn of the twentieth century. He died in 1926, and therefore knew nothing of the explosion in neuroscience that has taken place in the last hundred years.

Freud's work was based initially on his in depth study of just a few cases - no more than six- and a great deal of long hard thinking about what was going on in the mind of his patients.  Then he began to examine his own psychology. Unfortunately for his followers however, many of these ideas proved to be just to difficult to accept, so they broke away and formed their own theories. But Freudian theory remains as the foundation of psychological thinking, even today. 

But what if we introduced the womb twin survivor hypothesis  and prenatal psychology into the picture?    Would Freud have thought differently if he knew as we now do, that all pre-birth experiences remain in the mind as a template for all future life choices? What if he knew that he was living out his own Dream of the Womb as he sat for years, constantly smoking and giving himself terminal cancer, while thinking about what was going on in the minds of his patients?

Does parental rejection create insecure attachment?

 There is a strong lobby of opinion about "insecure attachment"  among  psychiatricts and psychologist who follow Freudian theory, that it is the relationship with the primary caregiver who sets the ton of relationship-forming and that pattern is set for life.  As this puts the burden of any relationship failure between parent ans child squarely on the parent, it would be nice for us parents to find a new way of seeing this where the blame does not lie totally on ourselves - and so we shall.

Here for example is an article, written by Erin J. Lee of Rochester Institute of Technology, available in full with peer discussions, here on the Net, that dares to question such luminaries of psychological thought about attachment as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.   Firstly, lets take a look at what John Bowlby has to say on attachment problems and their origins, that he assumes must lie in "maternal rejection".

Parents: do they really f**k you up?

"This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.


 BUT

Parent/child co-dependency

I have been discussing a difficult mother with a womb twin survivor.  This mother blames her daughter, who is a sole surviving twin, for the loss of the other. The second child, a girl, was stillborn.

In a co-dependent relationship there is a coalescence of  two  "Dreams of the womb."   In one individual, be it parent or child, there is a lost twin, which provided as a primary experience the closest bond in nature. In the parent/child relationship that lost bond can be restored. Meanwhile in the other there is another lost twin bond, also met in relationship to the other.


But here is the tragedy of parent/child co dependency, and it is three fold:

Can a parent replace a lost twin?

As we continue to explore parenting and womb twin survivors, we uncover a kind of  co-dependency between parent and child. This can be very painful and damaging for both parties and can take a womb twin survivor into therapy, faced with complex relationship difficulties that will persist as long as the issue of being a womb twin survivor remains unaddressed.  I'll try to clarify a few of these difficulties today: the question is, can a parent replace a lost twin?

The effects of a bad parent on the child - an argument

I was intrigued to  read about the speakers at the upcoming APPPAH conference this year.

First Bruce Lipton sets out a neat argument about how our prebirth script becomes a life script, not only for individuals but for the whole of society.

Leading edge science is shattering old myths and rewriting the fundamental beliefs of human civilization. Cell biologist and bestselling author, Bruce H. Lipton, PhD, offers a “new” biology that takes us beyond economic collapse and religious extremes to reveal that such chaos is a natural step in an unfolding process, rather than the tragic end to a broken planet.

The Biology of Belief is a journey that takes you into the world under a microscope, through the history of evolution and into the subtle realms of your own consciousness. Infusing his pioneering stem cell research with insights from frontier cell biology, quantum physics, and fractal mathematics, Bruce unveils a revolutionary vision of life science that illuminates the hidden connections among biology, psychology, spirituality and our imminent evolutionary upheaval. This dynamic presentation reviews how our prenatal and perinatal programming shapes our genetics, behavior and thoughts, elements that create the conditions of our body and our place in the world. 

Bruce Lipton says “I like to ask an audience, ‘Go back to when you fell head over heels in love with someone,’ and I ask them, ‘‘Was life so beautiful that you couldn’t wait for the next day?’ ‘Yes!’ That’s the equivalent of living heaven on earth. The only reason we don’t all have this honeymoon experience as a way of life is because it was programmed out of us. 

Do parents make their children?

I am a member of APPPAH ( the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health.) I am a member because they are one of the very few major organisations in the world who are at all interested in womb twin survivors.

"APPPAH illuminates the life-long impact of conception, pregnancy and birth on babies, families and society."


Their thesis is much the same as mine - that what happens to you before birth becomes a "script" by which you live your life.  But there are problems: implicit in the APPPAH idea is that the mother is responsible for the effect on  her child of all her decisions during pregnancy and birth and parenting - for example what she eats herself; what she feeds her child. What kind of birth she chooses - if that choice is possible, of course.  That is a heavy burden to carry.  There seems to be no area of pregnancy and birth where the mother is not held responsible for that "lifelong impact".


But children are conceived as a distinct package, as genetically distinct individuals. They are not formed or even scarred in the womb by the mother's decisions or attitudes. I am convinced of that. They are who they are and there is not a lot one can do to change the character of  one's own child - one has to adapt parenting methods to each child.  There is no "one size fits all."

No healing for Amy Winehouse

We have come to the end of a tough but glorious healing journey together,  fuelled by that vital understanding that we are womb twin survivors and that is the reason for the pain of simply being alive.

There will be no healing journey for Amy Winehouse, who died last week from a drug overdose.

According to her friend Russel Brand, her addictions defined her and then killed her.

When healing is complete: your mission

What am I here for?
This is the age-old question. It may surprise you to learn that your mission in life has always been clear to you but you have resisted it in order to keep the dream alive. In other words, you have created an artificial mission, which has been to keep the Dream alive.

Now you have awakened, your mission will become clear. This clarity will emerge by means of a special process which is in three stages:

• Surrender: Let go of all previous ideas about mission
• Recognition: Recognise what your mission truly is
• Purposeful activity: Fulfill your mission.