A healing path (6) Time to say goodbye

The day comes when it is clear that holding on to your twin doesn't help you or your twin. Now we come to the crucial part of the womb twin work.  After you have read this page you may decide you are not yet  ready: that would not be surprising if you have barely begun to consider the possibility that you ever had a womb twin!

This stage has two elements: one is to "find" your womb twin and the other is to "let go" of your womb twin.



FINDING
I have some small evidence that, along with some sense of the womb twin scenario, there is also some feeling about the nature of your womb twin.  The kind of clues you need may lie in the nature of the "false self" that  you have adopted.  Let yourself be guided in this by your intuition. Learn to trust the slightest hint, however bizarre it may seem at the time!

For example. T lived her life at  a very rapid rate, and often fell into exhaustion.  She ate very little and suffered with anorexia and malnutrition. She liked to dress in a boyish way and her thin body did not look womanly.  The story of her womb twin seems to be that she had a brother who did not get the nourishment he needed and faded away and was miscarried.

In another example K lived most of her life in a state of extreme emotional intensity and eventually  fell into a state of chronic fatigue and sickness that was diagnosed as ME.  She says she feels full of strength which she expresses in a very male way but she can only manage to feel strong for a short while. Then she feels ill, tired, despairing and in pain. She then becomes afraid that she  will never be able to live normally again. The story of her womb twin is that she lost a brother  who was not strong enough to survive. He faded away, died and was absorbed back into the placenta.

In my own case "my false self" has been as a large, "mannish woman" trying to live far above her abilities. I was haunted for over fifty years by the terror that someone was trying to kill me and I would die at any moment. With this, and a thousand other clues, I have the picture that my womb twin was a boy, the alpha of the pair.  I believe that he would have been extremely clever had he lived but he was killed by the insertion of a sharp object into the womb.  I am still surprised by the precise nature of the picture I have: it has been reached out of intuition and  a great deal of ruminating and self-questioning.  The whole story can be found in A Silent Cry. I have likened it to trying to put together a 5000 piece jigsaw: even if only  a few hundred pieces are in place, one can begin to guess what may be in the complete picture.

Building a relationship

Once the story of  your womb twin begins to form in your mind, you will discover that you are building a relationship with the recovered memory. You will begin to see that the relationship you have always been seeking with others is "agape" or brotherly love.  This style of loving is the intimacy that can be seen between living twin pairs, where everything is shared equally, where there is deep feeling, empathetic union and a constant negotiation back and forth between the pair.  Of course twins fall out as often as other siblings but, because your womb twin is an unknown quantity, you will probably idealise the relationship in your mind and make it into something quite perfect.

It is very important at this stage to get in touch with the love in the original relationship. The way to do this is to take your memory back to a time when you were both in the womb together.   For most of your life you have been stuck at a particular stage in your womb twin scenario - the way it felt when you were left alone, after the loss of your womb twin.  Now you are going to break out of that  despair and desolation by going back to the very start.  This is where suspending disbelief is vital.  For the moment, let your imagination go, and get involved in acting "as if".  See how it feels to imagine another little person there beside you from your very earliest beginnings.

If you just can't believe this is true, then it won't be that effective for you, but there is room for a little healthy doubt at all times. I am always the first to say that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, for those of you without ultrasound evidence of a womb twin.  If you can't believe it was true for you, then maybe you are right, for that intuitive sense you have now that there was NOT a womb twin there in the womb with you, is as strong as any sense that others may have, that for them there WAS!

Tomorrow we will look at rituals of letting go.......... meanwhile, take a look at this memorials page - it maybe the best way for you to remember and honour your twin!