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.

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 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.

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:

Healing (13) Your womb twin was real

It is very important that you recognise your womb twin as someone separate from you. He or she was a real little person - an individual. You will never be able to let go until you have grasped this. If you continue to insist that there is a “part of you” that some how controls how you feel and behave, then you haven't quite got it. You are not divided into “parts” at all. You are one complete person and your womb twin was also one complete person, albeit very tiny and perhaps not very well developed.

Their story
Your womb twin had a very brief life and an untimely death. The story of their life is tangled closely with yours. You have identified with it totally to the extent that you believe that your womb twin is “part of you” and their story is your story. Not so. Your story is that you developed from embryo into foetus and then into a born baby. You have known a born life whereas your womb twin's life was lived out in the womb. Your womb twin’s story is very different. You know a lot about it because you have been re-enacting it every day of your born life.

Healing (1) Understanding your Dream of the Womb

Womb twin survivors spend their lives re-enacting their personal Dream of the Womb, which is created out of the imprint of events that took place when the neural networks in their brain were being laid down. Nothing, not even life itself, is more important than the Dream. The word "Dream" is hardly sufficient to describe the way this imprint in our brain drives our choices and shapes our emotional reactions throughout life. The imprint is so profound it feels more real than a Dream, and yet it is obviously not a Dream but a real memory.

Autoimmune disease- is the body fighting with an absorbed twin?

Autoimmune diseases are the 3rd leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world, surpassed only by cancer and heart disease. Nearly 80% of those affected with an autoimmune disease are women, usually of childbearing age or women under age 65. The National Institute for Health estimates that there are now 23 million Americans with an autoimmune condition, and that number is on the rise. To put that into perspective, 9 million Americans are affected by cancer. 

This is a quote from an excellent web site explaining all kinds of autoimmune disease and suggesting ways to combat them.   But at no stage does Paula Owens mention the possibility that the cells in the body being attacked may in fact belong to an absorbed twin.  

My twin baby vanished

On this forum Mums discuss their pregnancies. This Mum  said "I had Vanishing Twin Syndrome at my 16 week ultrasound nothing was left at all.. mine happened at 8 weeks... I am now a proud momma to a baby girl.. I still think about the other one sometimes.. I will probably tell her someday that she had a twin..."

The bereavement of mothers who lose one twin is not often considered, as this article shows:-

How Mothers Cope with the Death of a Twin or Higher Multiple

How dizygotic twins develop in the womb : beautiful new artwork

On this page at the baby center, there is a series of pictures showing the development of dizygotic twins: This is the very start, at 3 weeks:

It is almost impossible to believe when you see these twins developing  that the twins do not have some kind of vague awareness of  each other.

I have found that dizygotic twins seem to recover and heal faster than monozygotic twins, but......

Twins get to know each other in the womb - developing a sense of self?

I  found this article today:

Twins are social, even in the womb.

The new book: "Womb twin survivors" out today!

The complimentary copies, that will be sent to my lovely writing mentors; the people who checked the words, gave feedback and support at every turn; not to mention the winner of the WOMBTWIN sentence competition, are to be posted shortly.

The advance orders will be fulfilled just as soon as I am able to get payment, parcel them up and get them to a post office.

There are a few last-minute revisions for Lightning Source to process, and once those are settled, in the next few days, the book will be available to order from:

Wren Publications  (Thats me: I'll send them out as soon as they are delivered to me, so feel free to place an order now, just don't hold your breath.....)

All Amazon online outlets including:

Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.de

Any street bookshop  (just quote ISBN 978-0-9557808-2-0)

I wonder what I used to do before I had a book to write? I suppose that, now its over, I am about the find out!!

Hoping to meet some of you in Nottingham on Saturday (see here)

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.

LAST DAY!!!!!  Order  your copy now and save

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.

Want to know more? order now [here]

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.

Order your copy now and save [here]

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.

Just 3 days to go to place an advance order and save: [click here]

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.

Order your copy now and save. [here]

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.


Only one week to go to make an advance order [here] save money, act NOW

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.

More about this book [here]