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.....

Healing (14) A problem with food and eating

Something is missing: is it in the fridge? Wombtwin survivors have a vague but prevailing feeling that something is missing. The person has no idea what this is. It may seem to be lost, in which case one must search for it, it may seem to be simply lacking, in which case it must be compensated for.

The desire to compensate for this vague, missing presence becomes translated into a variety of irrational and unaccountable behaviours. A good example is addiction to food. A person experiences a sense of something missing which feels a bit like hunger or emptiness. In an attempt to heal this, they eat. Eating does not fill the emptiness, because it never had anything to do with food. Its just that the empty feeling is very similar to hunger and is easily confused with it.

Obesity and womb twin survivors

I have often thought that food addiction is linked to being a womb twin survivor.  In fact I found food addiction first,  in 1987, and when I began to explore the psychology behind my food addiction I found my own womb twin many years later in 2002.

I  watched the Tv show "Too fat for fifteen" and heard Georgia Davis describe herself as a food addict, and how her  addiction began with the death of her father when she was 5 - which she has never recovered from -.



She went to a US fat camp and lost half her body weight, and appeared on TV transformed and beautiful. She was absolutely determined to lose weight and stuck at it with enormous strength of character. A great girl!!



Now the weight is coming back, because this " treatment" didnt get to the root of the problem.


Georgia Davis weighs 28 stone
She left her home in Aberdare, south Wales, for North Carolina in the USA to attend the £3,600-a-month Wellspring Academy and managed to slim down to 18st.
But now she is back to 28st and has pleaded for help after claiming that her weight gain is “out of control”.
“Please help me, someone,” she told The Sun. “I know this is my fault but it’s out of control.
“It was my choice to return to my family and not continue my treatment in the US. But now I know it was like putting a heroin addict back in a chemist shop.”
Since returning to the UK in June last year she has been caring for her 55-year-old mother, Lesley, who suffers from a heart condition, and her 70-year-old father, Arthur, who has lung cancer.
“I knew it was going to be hard when I came back but it was a lot harder than I ever imagined.
“Eating in the US was in a controlled environment and everything was put on a plate for me.
“Around eight weeks after returning from camp I drifted off the plan. I felt really alone. My parents weren’t doing it with me at home and my friends weren’t doing it at college so there was no motivation to continue.”
The teenager said that her local health authority had not done enough to help her, adding: “I know I have no one to blame except myself but I don’t know how to change things. I would really like some help.
“My addiction to food is no different to drugs or alcohol. Those people get help from the NHS.”
John Gordon, a spokesman for Wellspring said the academy would welcome her back if she decided to return.

Addiction to food is being totally ignored by the health authorities because they dont understand it. I believe that by studying the psychological effects of losing your co twin before birth we may find some answers.

See my  food addiction blog for more.

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.