Attacked by doubt and vicious rage!

The vicious comment to the last post, (written, one imagines, by someone who suffers with anorexia, and is filled with hurt rage, as such people tend to be) is not the first. It is interesting that so many people wish to attack this project. Invariably, they are people who know little if anything about it and who don't want to know. In fact, I have found that there is a lot to learn about them. I have always subscribed to the idea of knowing one's enemy, and the emnity I have come across over the last six years suggests that I should do so now.

I had an email from a wombtwin survivor recently, who had a difficult and upsetting encounter with someone, who claimed that the whole wombtwin survivor project is "not backed by any recognized science". As far as we know this person has never read the website or the book.

An author, writing a book about twins, interviewed me. What do I do, she wondered, when people cast doubt upon my ideas? I answered in full and she just looked at me. "You are very articulate," she mused, "If you weren't, I would think you were a crazy woman." She seemed to have no idea of how insulting that was, even after she had told me that she is the mother of a wombtwin survivor.

On several occasions I have been accused of "preying on vulnerable people." I'm not quite sure how I am supposed to do that, for people come to me for help and I make no charge.

The project has been described by people (who think they are in the know) as " a fantasy", and "stretching the imagination too far." They haven't read the website either.

I had a bit of fun on the sceptics forum last year with a post about the book. They took me apart! But then they take everything and everyone apart, including each other, so that's normal enough for them. In the midst of the abuse however, there was just a hint of incredulity - which is quite understandable, and a genuine belief that they were protecting me from making a complete fool of myself by building a whole project on a piece of scientific baloney. Kindly, but misguided.

The conclusion is this: people who are not twins - and have never been - will never understand this. We have to stick together and help each other and let them be. If you come across someone who doubts and decries your feelings and your sense of being a wombtwin survivor, remember this: your inner truth and feelings are your own. The doubts of others who are just trying to be clever cannot take away from the fact that you are the world expert on the subject of yourself.

Vicious attack however is a bit different: here we have someone who cannot bear to face the fact that their pain could possibly be understood and healed. They are themselves wombtwn survivors and resistant to these ideas. They are locked in a cycle of pain and rage against the pain that they are deliberately perpetuating, for when they keep the pain alive they keep alive their Dream of the Womb and the Black Hole that lies within it. They just won't let go.

Don't be downhearted: we will one day be taken seriously - I promise.

So, here we are, back from Ghent, from an international conference. The organisation details here:

The conference venue was Ghent in Belgium: lovely place, here are the details of the conference.

I gave a talk about the results of my research, (delivered with several others under the general title of "controversies in obsterics") which went down like the proverbial lead balloon because I had not subjected my data to Multivariate Analysis of Covariance : silly me. I was told to find someone who would help me write the questionnaire questions and someone to help me create some kind of useful statistical analysis. The inference was that then and only then would anyone take me seriously......

The questionnaire is coming along nicely, it is now in its 6th generation and there are 30 already. As for the statistics, I found a psychologist with the necessary software who just happens to be an expert on vanishing twins and has undertaken the task and has all my research files which I just happened to have with me on my flash drive (hooray!) So watch this space for statistics to astonish the nation!

It makes me very sad that I have to spend so much time and energy convincing people of an obvious (and already statistically proven) fact, and that is that 10% of the population are the sole survivors of a twin or multiple pregnancy and the loss of their twin or multiple(s) DOES leave some kind of impression on the survivor.

I also learned that when you see a twin pair you may (or may not) be looking at a reduced triplet set, and there is no way of proving that either! In the light of this, the whole idea of using twins as research tools for testing genetic inheritance seems rather an uncertain science to me, against which my results are beginning to seem positively robust!