Tales for the journey: Tiny's castle (lack of self confidence)

Once upon a time there was a king, who was very small. He was so small that other people called him Tiny, but he was king nonetheless. King Tiny lived in a palace that wasn’t so bad: there was a good view of the hills far away, and there was plenty of food and drink to be had.  He gathered some friends about him and they played games and laughed a lot.  Sometimes they went off and explored the surrounding area, but they always came back to the same place.

Then one day a war began.  There was noise and terror and nothing seemed certain any more.

Tiny summoned a band of men to build him a wall around the palace.  They stopped laughing and playing games and spent all their time building.  At first there was just a wooden palisade, but the noise went on, so they made bricks and dug up stones from the ground nearby.  Sometimes stones were thrown over the wall they were building, but they did not have to be afraid - they just used them to make the walls thicker and higher.

Tiny was proud of his wall.  He was sure it was the best wall in the world. “If we build it just a bit thicker and higher we won’t be able to hear any noise at all!” he cried.

But that didn’t work, so they decided to make their own noise.  They shouted and screamed and jumped until they couldn’t hear anything except their own noise.  This was good!  When there was lots of noise inside as well as out, they could feel safe, but at night there was no sound in the castle Tiny could hear the enemy moving around outside.  He imagined all the ways the enemy might get in, so he decided to make a castle keep, with a thick wall and tiny windows.

He worked so hard on building the castle keep that he sometimes forgot about the war raging outside, and he liked that. 

DZ womb twin survivors: Alpha into false Beta

Alpha into false Beta - the co-dependency game

When a person uses their Alpha quality of dominance and initiative to take over another Alpha person's problem, they allow the other person to act passively when this person is of course quite capable of taking control of the situation by themselves.Meanwhile, the person who is taken over is in fact not being "taken over" at all: they are choosing to give away their power to the other and volunteering a new role as a false Beta. This is co-dependency, because each denies their Alpha qualities by giving them to the other.

For example, here is a familiar tale: a heavy drinking Alpha male characteristically passes out at a party because of an excess of alcohol. His capable wife ( who usually plays the Beta role to keep him happy as leading Alpha ) takes charge as usual in these circumstances: she mops up the vomit, undresses him and puts him to bed. She also washes his clothes and makes apologies to the hostess. Thus she is the leading Alpha in this pair and he gives all his power to her and becomes the passive Beta.

The Alpha-Beta gap

After the in-depth consideration of MZ twins, I have adopted the concept of an "Alpha- Beta gap."
This is used to describe the difference between the person you know you could be and the person you are ; in other words, the difference between your authentic and your  in-authentic self.  The Womb twin hypothesis states that womb twin survivors constantly re-enact the life and death of their womb twins. To re-enact the life of your MZ womb twin, who is half of you and made of the same genetic material,  you also re-enact the difference between you. "The person you could be" is your whole Alpha self, but the "person you are" is someone diminished by the need to keep alive your Beta womb twin on your  life.  But that varies according to what actually happened.

MZ womb twin survivors - Alpha and Beta

Even when identical twins are so identical that you cant tell them apart, there is a follower and a leader. The follower is the Beta twin and the leader is the Alpha twin.

The curious thing is that womb twin survivors become identified with  their lost twin. They are the strong Alpha survivor, but they carry a little bit of Beta somewhere inside them, which holds them back and stops them from developing their potential.

When they act out the Beta side to themselves, they feel  as if they are invisible, of no account, powerless, helpless and weak.  All these feelings are difficult and painful. When they act out the Alpha side to themselves they feel strong, all powerful, dominant,  the No.1. Obviously the Alpha side is to be preferred, but even when the Alpha side is being acted out there are feelings of unease, guilt, even shame about acting in the way.

The only way to act out both sides is to create an amalgam of both, and live that way.  So one acts like an Alpha, but in a Beta kind of way. 

Healing (26) Coping with chaos

Womb twin survivors have a deep sense of things being “ not quite right”. This may be expressed in a bodily way as vague, minor physical ailments that resist all treatment. The sense of inner disturbance may find an outlet as erratic mood swings or irrational rage. An inner sense of being “ in a complete mess” may be expressed on the home environment, as a cluttered mess of things left undone or not cleared up.

The three steps towards healing chaos is first to understand it; second to realise it and third to sort it out.

UNDERSTANDING INNER CHAOS
A sense of inner chaos may be understood as a reflection of the Dream of the Womb. Somewhere in the Dream there is a sense of something properly constituted falling into disintegration. This may be a lost memory of a blighted ovum, that never really made it into any kind of ordered existence.

Perhaps there is a vague impression of a foetus papyraceous, that was developing quite normally but began to disintegrate, until it was just a bag of bones.

Healing (25) Towards more autonomy

Womb twin survivors are not very good at self sufficiency. They tend to be dependent on other people for various things, such as practical skills, encouragement or human company.

Now that you have sent your womb twin into the light and begun the process of waking from your Dream, one thing that you will notice at once is that you are now on your own, and your womb twin has gone. Yet this kind of “being alone” is not the same as being lonely or abandoned. This strange new sensation is in fact autonomy.

OUT OF THE SIDELINES
In your mind you have been sharing with your life with your womb twin and in a sense putting your life on hold for them. There is no need to do that now. You have been underplaying your talents and sitting in the sidelines, burdened with a sense of privilege at having so much. There is no need to sit on the sidelines now.

Being a womb twin survivor (4) The death of hope?

Yesterday I spoke to a friend with Bi Polar disorder. We have been discussing the possibility that she is a womb twin survivor and I am about to send her a copy of my new book "Womb Twin Survivors" to help her make up her mind about that.

But one thing she said has remained with me : "I sometimes wish I could just lie down and die." She was at pains to let me know that she had no intention of killing herself, she just wanted to see an end to the suffering she experiences, over and over again, each time she plunges into despair.