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.

The threat of the Womb Twin hypothesis

 The Womb Twin Hypothesis states:

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 being constantly re-enacted, is made clear, then the re-enactment tends to diminish or cease altogether, greatly to the benefit of the individual.  [more]

The main reason why no one wants to know about the Womb Twin project, or indeed any project involving fetal awareness and womb memories, is that it is far too threating to most mental health professionals.

( Thanks for your visit, by the way; there are few visitors to this blog and the associated blogs and sites, so you are especially welcome.... come back soon!)

The very idea that we may remember the womb is deeply unsettling to some people.  To believe it would be to "open Pandoras box", to quote Peter Hepper. 

Hepper is a psychology professor in Belfast who has worked with fetal awareness and learning for many years, has published extensively on the subject.

( Just one example : McCorry, N. K. and Hepper, P. G. (2007), Fetal habituation performance: Gestational age and sex effects. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 25: 277–292. )

Professor Hepper  knows only too well that his ideas are far too threatening to the received wisdom of most Freudian-trained psychologists, who claim that any memory or impression dating from before the age of three years or so, is a "false memory".  This was  because Freud put so much focus on incest or child sexual abuse,  and not on the nature of memory per se.

Meanwhile, report after report comes out to prove that fetal memory exists.

We remember the womb, and womb twin survivors remember their twin. It is as simple as that, but 90% of the population refuses to believe it - but then 90% of the population are not womb twin survivors, so perhaps it is not so surprising.

The lost twin in the Dream of the Womb

The title of the new book is "Womb twin surviviors, the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb. " Now some experts in prebirth psychology have complained about that, saying: "Well if this is supposed to be only a "dream", are you saying it's all a fantasy, that we made this up? Are you with Sigmund Freud then, who  talked about fantasies all the time? Like we dont remember being born, that we don't remember the womb? We have been working hard for decades to convince the world that we DO remember the womb, are you promoting the idea that its not real, all just a dream?"

My answer is that it's all a matter of words and definitions. The words "remember" or "memory"  got the sceptics screaming at me that we don't  remember the womb and telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for even suggesting the idea. ( See some of these extraordinary exchanges here if the psychology of scepticism interests you at all..)

Assuming  (with good reason, based on my experiences so far)  that scepticism on the subject of pre-birth memory is widespread, I have been very careful with my terminology. The word "dream" works psychologically because in post-traumatic stress the trauma is often re-experienced as a nightmare: the loss of a twin before birth can be traumatic. Dream also suggests a longing or hope, and any womb twin survivors who experience that the nameless painful yearning for Something that refuses to be named until a way to name it is found, will  agree. Subjectively, the lost memories of a womb twin have a dream-like quality - they are vague, nameless, haunting and often appear, truly and  symbolically, in dreams while  asleep.

Finally, its a matter of how we are learning to heal womb twin survivors, and we have come a long way in the last seven years. The womb twin work takes the Dream of the Womb; names it; validates it; puts strong biological evidence behind it, thereby makes sense of it; then peice by peice the Dream becomes a reality.  With the help of that reality the constant search for the lost twin eases, for in a sense the original reality of the twin has been found.  In time, the day of true awakening comes and the healing is complete - it took me five years, but I had to do it alone.

I look forward to the day when we have many womb twin survivors who have awoken from their Dream of the Womb and will be ready to reach out to others and enable them to experience the joy of living free of the Dream.

This how the Dream has been described:

Just behind my eyes, my Dream of the Womb 
is like a matrix through which I see the world. 
Like a dark, mysterious cloud whirling through the primal places 
of my unconscious mind, this Dream is my way of being. 
In the light of day, however hard I try, 
I cannot see through the cloud obscuring the meaning of this Dream. 
It is with me always; I cannot remember a time without this Dream. 
In the dark hours of solitude when there is no one there 
and all there is is emptiness and stillness, 
out of the corner of my eye, I catch the faintest glimmer of gold. 
It is elusive but it is always there, and it gives me hope. 
It is like a light to show me what came before the Dream. 
But I am convinced nothing existed before the Dream. 
The Dream is all I have.

Scrapbook remembrance

I was listening to an online radio show today about the death of a twin,

LISTEN NOW HERE

And on this programme is the idea of making memorial scrapbooks for a lost twin.

This is a simply wonderful idea.

Take a look for more here and here and memorial gardens here

Comments welcomed!

I have recently had some extraordinary examples of body memory, and how the body can tell a story of what is locked in there.

The first was a tall Canadian woman K who was wandering around at a conference looking lost, saying. "I don't know where I should be." I felt at once that this was as much a psychological statement as a physical one, and I suggested that K should be with me, and we could talk. We went to a private place and she told me how she felt cold down her left side and how she had consulted doctors and had tests but the coldness continued. When I asked her how it felt, K began to weep, and sobbed for some time with what seemed like real grief. The image of half of her being dead and the other half grieving for the dead half was so strong that I suggested that she may be a twin. This was one of the many "Ahaha!" moments that make my work with wombtwin survivors so extraordinary. Within a few more minutes we were both laughing and the atmosphere lifted. We parted then, after just half an hour. The next day I asked K how she felt: she said "joy" and she was "warm all over".

The next example was not so much coldness as facial numbness, and "pins and needles" all down the left side. I asked this person to question this body memory. She sat and stroked her left arm and wept. She spoke about competition, weakness and dying. She then stood and demonstrated this with her whole body, which leaned all to one side as she spoke about heaviness, weakness competition and death.

This was the clearest body memory of a dying identical twin that I had ever seen. Her doctors were baffled simply because they did not know what to see or how to look. A chiropractor would have reacted differently, I feel, but then it seems the entire medical profession has a lot to learn about the physical effects of being a wombtwin survivor and how the body of the survivor can carry a persistent memory of the dead twin.