Tales for the journey: Sam's Garden (Healing negativity)

Sam lived in a little house that was small, but all his own. Every day the sun shone in at the window, but the glass was so dusty he could hardly see out. He didn’t care, because as long as he had his fiddle he could play until his heart raced with pleasure and longing for something he couldn’t quite understand.

Sam woke up one day and saw that his garden was unkempt. “I have neglected my garden. I really should do something about it,” he said. He went out into the garden and he saw the bindweed and the lawn rough and un-mown.
He asked his father to help him. He said, "My son, when you were young I tried to tell you how to make your garden grow, but you did not listen. You must do this yourself. I can lend you some tools if you like.”

So Sam went home that day with a spade and hoe. Sam pulled at the bindweed until great swathes of it lay on the ground beside him. He cut and pruned and hacked until the garden was piled high with rubbish. “Now the place looks even worse!” he cried. “How can I get rid of this rubbish?”

His neighbour Dick called over the wall. “Let’s have a bonfire!” shouted Dick, and in a trice the weeds and twigs and brambles were burning and smoking and sparks were blowing high into the sky. Sam took out his fiddle and played until the mess in the garden was forgotten.
Weeks went by and the garden was just as he had left it. The spade and the hoe were left out in the rain. Already rusty, they rusted still more.

A certain tune began to hum inside his head. It lay at the side of his mind just out of reach. He paced the floor and wondered what the tune was, what it meant, but it would not come to him.

A healing path (2) Living the Dream: food

From the beginning of this work,  it became clear that womb twin survivors have a problem with food.

I certainly did, and to a certain extent I still do.  I have three of the eight signs of a food problem and many womb twin survivors seem to show these signs too:

1) overweight
2) eat too much
3) always trying to lose weight but not successful for very long
4) food intolerance

The others are:

1) anorexia
2) bulimia
3) morbid obesity
4) binge eating disorder

The root cause is ADDICTION to food. (See my blog about this)

And I have some answers here.....

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.

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.

Healing (15) Understanding addictions

An addict never keeps a promise. Womb twin survivors in particular choose something to do to excess, which causes a problem. They promise themselves they will solve this problem but somehow the promise is never fulfilled. In their Dream of the Womb there was a promise of new life, which was never fulfilled. This is why addicts, despite their best efforts, break their promises to reform, again and again.

Survivor guilt
Addiction is much more complicated than just a broken promise. They are wrapped up inside a whole complex ritual, which has important moral, social and legal dimensions. For example, ways to restrict drug taking, drinking alcohol and prostitution have for centuries been the subject of Acts of Parliament.

It is easy to get hung up in trying to control the excessive behavoiur of the addict. Attempts to “eat normally” or “just shop for what you really need” always meet with failure. There is a much deeper agenda that is being ignored, simply because it is not understood. For womb twin survivors, the deepest agenda is survivor guilt. Apart from being one big “shame trip”, addiction is the best way to throw a life away that we humans have ever managed to invent.

Emptiness inside (1) "Reward deficiency"

People have struggled  for a long time to discover what lies behind addictions of all kinds.  Learned journals and countless articles have attempted to clarify what lies behind  these extraordinary behaviors. One such, that captured my attention right at the start of my research in 2002, was written in 1996 and  is about a "Reward deficiency syndrome". 

That resonated with me, because its clear that addictions are an attempt to fill up the emptiness inside.  Womb twin survivors often mention emptiness, or feeling unsatisfied,  and many of these also say that are addicted to substances or behaviors that damage their health, wealth or well-being.  But these scientific research writers know nothing of the inner feelings of womb twin survivors, so the idea that emerges is some kind of "deficiency in the reward system of the brain". Like so many writers on the subject of addiction, they get so very close, but not close enough......

Womb twin survivors misdiagnosed: (3) "Obsessive-compulsive" disorder

On the womb twin forum recently there has been a thread about obsessive thoughts about a lost twin - was there a twin or not?   To obsess about anything - some small detail perhaps, or death, or  needing to feel safe or extremely clean - is probably best described as a preoccupation rather than as an obsession.
To obsess is to dominate or preoccupy the houghts, feelings, or desires of (a person); beset, trouble, or haunt persistently or abnormally.
Many years ago, when I began this project, I was accused by a dear friend of being in the grip of a "compulsion" to do this work.    I was hurt at the time by such a profound degree of misunderstanding of my own behaviour and motives, but after a while I began to understand that this said more about the person saying it than me.
A compulsion  is a strong, usually irresistible impulse to perform an act, especially one that is irrational or contrary to one's will.
Both concepts appear to concern the action of some external force upon the will of an individual. To believe that anything can act as some kind of external force  upon the will of an individual is to deny the possibility of choice.

A choice is an act of the will. It may be influenced by such things as coercion or threat, but ultimately is is a choice.  If you feel you have no choice, you are assuming you have no autonomy and possibly no brain of your own capable of independent action.

I believe that womb twin survivors fall into obsessions and compulsions as an expression of a deep sense of failure to have autonomy or control.  I believe that this is yet another example of keeping  alive ones lost beta twin, and in this case the beta twin had no autonomy, no capacity for independent action because he or she never developed a fully functioning brain.

Observe any compulsion on the TV: the shows about obesity (compulsive eating) hoarding, spending, gambling, alcholism,  drug addiction, compulsive caring, self harming, internet porn addiction,  etc etc. The story is always the same: an individual is out of control and heading for the 4D's - disaster, debt, divorce and death.
How to help?  To make progress, the obsessive-compulsive individual requires two opposing energies to be at work:

• Someone to give them intelligent advice (while inwardly they feel patronised and infantilised)
• Someone to take control (while inwardly they feel their personal privacy is being invaded)
• Someone to provide incentives, praise, encouragement (while inwardly they are resisting personal growth with every ounce of their extremely strong will - their Alpha energy.)

The truth of their Alpha energy is in their resistance to change. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour is a brilliant method of using the power of one's will to resist any attempt by another individual to bring about behavioral change in the longer term.  Its a neat way to stay in the Beta space - weak, helpless and beset by forces beyond one's control.  It is a choice.  A stupid, self-sabotaging choice, but a choice nonetheless.

I believe that the best way to help someone with the so called " obsessive-compulsive disorder"  is to discuss the possible reasons why someone would willingly make a series of stupid, self defeating choices.  One reason could be clarified very quickly with a single question :  "Is it possible that you are a womb twin survivor?" 

[Read my new book for more about this]
 

The paradox of selfishness

I asked some wombtwin survivors how it feels to be selfish. I asked this because being selfish is a self-defeating thing, and it tends to distance you from others and make then react negatively to you or even hate you. Sounds like wombtwin stuff!

I got two sets of answers:

1. "Selfishness is a kind of self - sustaining effort, as if NOT being selfish would put my whole self at risk of failure and annihilation. It's to do with taking special care of my personal welfare in order to be able to function at all in this difficult, often hostile, world."

2 "Selfishness is a guilt trip: having been selfish and left others at a disadvantage, I am left feeling extremely guilty that I have done this awful thing. The most important element is how incredibly hard (even impossible) it is for me to apologise, so the guilt remains and sometimes triggers depression."

It just doesnt wash with me that one has to take such "special care of oneself" or indeed "live a life of perpetual guilt": something else, something much deeper, is going on. What could that be?

The answer eventually came clear: it's a paradox. If you are an identical wombtwin survivor then you are two people at once: one way to live this out is to be a paradoxical person and express two things at the same time:- to be horrible to people and yet feel bad about doing that; to care for yourself at the expense of others, even when you KNOW this is selfish behaviour. This is an aspect of narcissism.

Notice the paradox of addiction: even while you are taking the drug, overeating, starving, hoarding, cutting or whatever, there is a part of you that knows this is harmful and wrong, yet the other half does it anyway. It all happens in the same moment of time.

If you are trying to be two people at once - yourself and your own beta twin - then this would be completely normal behavior. At least it sounds normal to me!

Feel free to comment!

Resistance

Well, I have had two very revealing adventures today with regard to resistance - the psychological kind. That is the kind of stuff therapists meet all the time: it's the unstinting loyalty to, and absolute cooperation with, maintaining the status quo - to continue wantonly along the road to self-destruct and refuse to let anyone even imply that this chosen road is anything other than totally intelligent and appropriate in the circumstances.

A dear friend from long ago, who was a wonderful wordsmith (no doubt still is; I don't hear from him any more, but I shall celebrate his talents here) once decribed his therapy to me:

One of the enlightening moments in my therapy was to understand and to embrace, personally and not just intellectually, the concept of responsibility - the pyschotherapeutic responsibility for oneself and one's condition. I may not have been responsible for the way I was, but I was responsible for dealing with that from now on. Sitting on the pity pot, being a victim, is not efficacious.

But to find the way, mired as one is in so much encrusted, unyielding, hardset, behavioral grime, is not easy. It generally needs a guide, a wise voice who can point out small-step stepping stones along a way. Therapy was of course a revelation. It was an archaeological exercise. Scrape away carborundum-hard crud here, chisel diamond-tough dross away there, get down to a shard of real value lying buried, embedded in the matrix of time; tease it out, or not; go somewhere else; chip away more; see if that loosens the grip here. Build up a detailed picture, replete with revelation and realisation. That stuff is hard. It requires work.

Yes it is hard. Diamond-hard.

So if the person concerned is absolutely determined to remain on the "pity pot"; utterly committed to the idea of being a "victim", that is resistance to owing one's personal power to choose.

If the person is absolutely determined to drink alcohol to excess so the liver fails, the heart begins to wear out and death is imminent, that is resistance to healing.

If a person is absolutely determined to die, that is resistance to living.

What if there was an intelligent rational reason for such a high level of resistance to change for the better? If the explanation for this is that the individual concerned is a wombtwin survivor, what then may we learn?

I suggest that we must look to survivor guilt; to loyalty to one's little lost twin who hever stood a chance; to a desire to be reunited in death to the other dead half of oneself.

So if I don't want to be here and never wanted to be born; if I feel I don't deserve to be here because my twin never made it into born life - why then, I may throw my life away and sit on a pity pot for years, wasting the best years of my lfe waiting to be rescued by a skilled therapist.

My friend made it through therapy and is happy at last with the woman of his dreams. Sadly it is not always so. Hospitals all over the world are filled with patients killing themselves slowly with drugs, alcohol, overeating and other methods of self destruction.

Are you resistant to living?

Try a little thankfulness. You have been given the great gift of life; dont waste it, not one minute.

Would you refuse your Christmas presents? Hand them back unopened?

Un-wrap the gift of your life today and allow yourself to receive this gift. Its free; its here and its all yours. If you don't use it, no one else will. Not even your lost twin.