A tale for Christmas Day - a matter of choice

Sisyphus unbound

The hill was rugged and steep and the narrow path well worn, for the man with the stone had pushed his way uphill many times.  He was strong and muscular, with strong arms and legs, and he sweated as he pushed the stone higher and higher up the path towards the summit.  The days wore on as he struggled on alone, step by painful step, ever upwards, slowly but surely, inch by inch.  Within a few yards of the top he slipped, and his feet slithered on the wet ground.  The stone slipped from his grasp and it began a slow descent, gathering speed as it went.

This man Sisyphus had once been a king.  He was clever and used his wits to rule and he ruled well with an iron hand.  Yet when Death came to claim him he seemed to be powerless: what use his wits now?  However Sisyphus had already worked out a plan to cheat Death. Sisyphus left him chained to the wall at the gates of Hades in the chains that were designed for Sisyphus himself.

The price of this cunning was an endless, fruitless task, to try and push the stone uphill.  Sisyphus tried to move the stone alone for many years, but soon it was clear that without some help he would never do it.  He would never reach the top and never see the stone roll over the summit and down the other side, thus setting him free from the curse.  He knew he needed a friend, and the first friend he called upon was Hope.

“Just keep trying,” cried Hope, as Sisyphus strained to move the heavy stone.  “The summit is not far, and you are strong.  You can do this, never give up.  Keep hoping that tomorrow it will be better, that the stone will not seem to heavy and will move easily.  Soon your curse will be broken and you will be free.  Keep cheerful and keep believing that this can be done!”

With the help of Hope Sisyphus pushed to stone to the top with renewed strength, but again he slipped up and the stone rolled downwards into the valley with a great crash.  At the bottom Despair was waiting for him, as he always did, laughing.

Narcissus: bullying - a way of restoring the original twin bond

The monozygotic twin bond is closer, more enduring and more emotionally loaded than any other kind of relationship.  But when we think of Narcissus as a womb twin survivor,  we see someone who is bonded for life to his twin,  so he will seek his twin in others, and attempt to replicate the original bond.

But in the Dream is a weaker, more vulnerable version of himself. So in the reenactment of their dream, the Alpha womb twin survivor seeks out weaker and more vulnerable versions of himself.  This is how he may become a bully, for his need is paradoxical - he seeks out a vulnerable little person.  But he wishes that other person to be equally strong - as strong as he is.  Only then may the original twin bond be restored - the twin bond that was there long ago, before the Beta twin died.

Dizygotic (DZ) womb twin survivors - born grieving (and thoughts on 9/11)

Dizygotic (DZ) womb twin survivors are the children who suffer an unexplained melancholy; who find it hard to deal with the death of others, particularly family members or very dear friends.

Death and mourning
This womb twin type is characterised by emotional intensity and a concern with death. This is not at all surprising if we consider that the formative experience is of being in a very intense, intimate relationship and the first learned experience is of death of the Other. In later life DZ womb twin survivors
will inevitably be confronted with death or loss once more and at that point the hidden memory of loss will be triggered. The most traumatic bereavement for a DZ womb twin survivor is the death of a person or animal with which they have had a very close bond and intimate  relationship. Faced with this "Oh, no! Not again!" experience they may find it hard to cope without some emotional support and seek help. Bereavement counselling is of great value to  DZ womb twin survivors. In the private intimacy of the counselling relationship they are able to grieve intensely. It may not be death that does it: divorce, disability and redundancy are all losses that can trigger deep distress, despair and depression.

I was writing this blog when an email came in telling me about a new post written by Monica, who runs the US blog. This was timely, because it is about death. It uses the metaphor of the destruction of the twin towers in New York (where Monica lives - she saw the towers burn and fall...)  to describe the feelings of the womb twin survivor.

I have put it in the stories section of my web site, so it doesn't get lost among the hundreds of posts on this blog. But here is a taster:

The death of Freud - was he a womb twin survivor?

Today we come to the end of this brief discussion of Sigmund Freud  in his life and works, and the possibility that he was a womb twin survivor, with the story of his death.

It is documented in full here

Freud was very tired now, and it was hard to feed him. But while he suffered greatly and the nights especially were hard, he did not get, and did not want, any sedation. He could still read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin. When he had finished the book he told Schur, casually, that this had been the right book for him to read, dealing as it did with shrinking and starvation. It was the shrinking, Anna Freud thought, that seemed to speak particularly to his condition: his time was running out. He spent the last days in his study downstairs, looking out at the garden.

Ernest Jones, hastily summoned by Anna Freud, who thought her father was dying, stopped by on September 19. Freud, Jones remembered, was dozing, as he did so much these days, but when Jones called out "Herr Professor, "Freud opened an eye, recognized his visitor, "and waved his hand, then dropped it with a highly expressive gesture that conveyed a wealth of meaning: greetings, farewell, resignation." He then relapsed into his doze. Jones read Freud's gesture aright. Freud was saluting his old ally for the last time.

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.

Healing (9) death

As we explore, deeper and deeper, into the details of your Dream of the womb, we come across death. Like a partially completed jigsaw, a picture will gradually emerge of what happened in the womb all those years ago. A memory of exactly how your twin died is buried somewhere in your mind and in this session I hope you will be able to work out what happened.

Sudden death
If your mother underwent an abortion operation but remained pregnant afterwards, then your twin died during the operation but you survived. This was a sudden and violent death.

If your twin was miscarried, he or she was lost quickly and completely after a loss of blood and perhaps some mild contractions of the womb. This was probably because there were not enough hormones around to keep the placenta firmly planted in the wall of the womb. The placenta is vital to maintain life and your womb twin simply starved to death and asphyxiated. In this case, your placenta may have been inadequate for you. You may have been small for dates or born prematurely.

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.

The Black Hole (3) death, suicide and murder

There can be such a deep black hole for some womb twin survivors that they begin to think of death as a solution to life's problems:

• "There is nothing for me here: I would be better off dead."
• "If I have to do this alone I would rather not do it at all. I would rather die." 
• "I cannot live without the one I love and I would die if he /she left me." 
• "I cannot cope with the pain and destruction I see everywhere : I don't want to be in this world any more."

A good example of how death seems to be a solution is  to be found in Scotland, where a mother murdered her young children ( two of them were twins)  and threw herself from the top floor balcony of her flat.  She should have died, which would have made this yet another murder/suicide, but a neighbour caught her and broke her fall. That was August 2010 and she faced trial recently.




This was related to the fact that the Riggi couple had divorced, and that their father was claiming custody.

But what if this woman is a womb twin survivor? What if she was so attached to her children that she would sooner die than have them taken from her, and if they die too,  then her husband could not have them?

Is this a faint echo of the sense of entitlement that so many womb twin survivors feel,  which makes them hold on to possessions, painful relationships and above all endless, angry resentment, until they will do anything rather than let go?

The womb twin hypothesis says this:

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. 

If we could reach people before they become totally eclipsed by their Black Hole, we may be able to save their lives and the lives they destroy.  All it takes is the Womb Twin work:

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.

It is so very simple, and so very hard to believe, even by womb twin survivors themselves.  It is a sad business to hear about the brutal stabbing to death of young children by their seemingly devoted mother, and sadder still to think how easily this tragedy could have been prevented.

For me, this is very difficult knowledge to have: I get attacked and vilified by many people and told to mind my own business, yet I see so clearly how people may be helped by a single question:

"Are  you a womb twin survivor?"

If the answer is yes (or even seems possibly to be yes)  then the womb twin work can begin.

Chapter 18: Signs of psychological distress

Death and dying
Womb twin survivors spend their lives reenacting the life and death of their womb twin.  For some people, that means death feels as if it is very near.  They may have panic attacks, imagining they are About to die any moment.  Others may have times when they Feel neither alive nor dead.  In fact, you are not dying and neither are you are about to die: this is a foetal assumption based on a prenatal memory of death.  Your particular concept of death may reflect a real memory of an actual event, long lost in your Dream of the Womb.  You could not possibly have been able to understand death in the womb or near to birth but you would have probably noticed a change in your twin’s behaviour.  For example, your twin may have been lost in a complete miscarriage.  In that case, your foetal assumption would probably be, Death causes disappearance.The idea that Death takes people away may still be a major concern.  On the other hand, the death of your twin may have been slow but inevitable, so that you may be more concerned about the process of dying than about being dead.  If your twin existed only briefly, only to die and be totally resorbed, then your idea of death may be total annihilation of your self, as if you had never existed at all.

I have suffered for a long time from feeling vaguely unwell, as if I am slowly dying
If you are a womb twin survivor whose twin died slowly, you may have identified a bit too closely with your dying womb twin and your foetal assumption may be, I am slowly dying.  You may develop all kinds of strange symptoms and have a sense of Dying by inches.
A persistent feeling of being unwell, sometimes with alarming symptoms that come and go, may take you repeatedly to the doctor’s surgery.  As there is no physical disease, the symptoms may be described as “psychosomatic”  with the inference that you are “malingering” or “neurotic.”  In fact, you are expressing your Dream of the Womb in terms of bodily symptoms.

I think a lot about death and dying
In this case there are no physical symptoms, as in the previous section, but rather a preoccupation with death.  If this is how you feel, then death “walks beside you.”  You think constantly about your own death.  This preoccupation can also be about the death of other people and be expressed as a great interest in dead bodies, graveyards, funerals, gravestones or pathology. Alternatively, you may experience a form of “living death”, like a kind of spiritual inertia.  This is expressed as a resistance to change, growth or forward movement:  it can totally block your healing.  If you would rather settle for what is “good enough” rather than challenge your own abilities; if you decide to be content with your lot rather than reach for the stars; if you continue to live on the surface rather than explore your inner self, then your problem is spiritual inertia.       
If you have been in a state of inertia for some time, then the lifeless place in which you have chosen to live could be in your Dream: a re-enactment of the tiny spark of life that you were able to perceive in the womb, using your exquisite embryonic sensitivity.  Perhaps you feel that, if your womb twin never had a chance of life, how can if be fair if you have life to the fullest?  Rather than come to the feast of life, you just settle for a few crumbs every now and then - just enough to maintain your existence, no more.

I have wanted to commit suicide more than once in my life
The incidence of suicidal ideation varies greatly across the world. One study of 40,000 subjects, drawn from the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, France, West Germany, Lebanon, Taiwan, Korea and New Zealand found that the number of people who had thought of suicide at some stage in their life varied from 0.7% in Beirut to 18.51% in Christchurch, New Zealand. The Womb Twin research project found that 40% of the selected respondents agreed strongly with this statement, which is more than double the New Zealand rate.  It seems from this result that womb twin survivors think about suicide much more often than most people.

More about this book

A womb twin survivor obsesses about death

Take a look here at someone who talks like a womb twin survivor BUT who it seems has absolutely no idea why she feels this way.

If you have ever felt this way, then take another look : is it possible that you are a womb twin survivor? Is it possible that there is a very good reason why you feel like you should never have been born?

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