Healing (13) Your womb twin was real

It is very important that you recognise your womb twin as someone separate from you. He or she was a real little person - an individual. You will never be able to let go until you have grasped this. If you continue to insist that there is a “part of you” that some how controls how you feel and behave, then you haven't quite got it. You are not divided into “parts” at all. You are one complete person and your womb twin was also one complete person, albeit very tiny and perhaps not very well developed.

Their story
Your womb twin had a very brief life and an untimely death. The story of their life is tangled closely with yours. You have identified with it totally to the extent that you believe that your womb twin is “part of you” and their story is your story. Not so. Your story is that you developed from embryo into foetus and then into a born baby. You have known a born life whereas your womb twin's life was lived out in the womb. Your womb twin’s story is very different. You know a lot about it because you have been re-enacting it every day of your born life.

When they find a "vanishing twin" on ultrasound...

Every day, in clinics around the world, pregnant women are being told by radiologists that one of their twins is "vanishing".  The idea of "vanishing" twins hardly describes what is really going on - a tiny twin  has died, will gradually disintegrate and in time no longer be visible.  They are not spirited away and do not suddenly disappear.




It is a pity that such a term was ever invented. It encourages all kinds of false beliefs.

What is a womb twin? (4) a miscarried fetus

When a twin is miscarried, there  are two eventualities:

1)  If the twins are dichorionic, that is they do not share a sac or a placenta, when one twin dies the whole conceptus may pass out of the womb via the vagina.

 2) If the twins are monochorionic, or if the placentas have fused,  the body of the dead twin does not leave the womb but remains as a small reminder of what once was, visible after birth, embedded in the placenta of the survivor.

The death of one twin does not usually cause a problem for the sole survivor unless the twins share a chorion, in which case there maybe some problems related to twin-twin transfusion.   In the questionnaire analysis,  it was clear that the miscarriage of one twin was the commonest situation that lead to being the sole survivor, and presumably these pregnancies were dichorionic, as here:

Womb twin survivors can arise out of a variety of prebirth situations, and each situation has a different psychological effect on the survivor.  When one twin dies and passes out of the womb, there is a sense of abandonment;when one twin dies and remains, the survivor is left with  a sense of being only half alive. The Dream of the Womb is based in real events, and is a real memory, only so vague and inchoate it needs a new vocabulary to access.

My new book "Womb twin survivors: the lost in the Dream of the Womb" is my attempt to put words to deep feeling and try to decode the strange  and seemingly irrational messages that arise out of prebirth memory.

NO - you are not crazy, as perhaps you once thought: you are a womb twin survivor!  

For lots more, full references more diagrams and explanations see my latest book.