Chapter 24: Being a twin

I have always had a great interest in twins

A lifelong interest in twins was predictably very common among the respondents and was the second most popular statement among the respondents who were able to provide evidence of their twin.  An interest in twins can be expressed in all kinds of ways.  It may be simply a tendency to scan faces when among people, always noticing twins or people who look similar.  It may mean reading books about twins in general and focussing on lost twins in particular.  Womb twin survivors seem to take particular interest in anything to do with twinning and published in any medium.    

The fact that many hundreds of people carefully searched the Internet and found the Womb Twin web site, which was little-known at the time, suggests that they were very interested in twins and the death of a twin in particular.  Their emotional reaction to the material on the web site was sometimes overwhelming.  For these people, their reaction was proof enough that their feelings were related to the prenatal loss of their twin.

All my life I have had the feeling that I may have once been a twin
The use of ultrasound has revealed that in many “vanishing” twin pregnancies there are no symptoms at all.  If you were conceived before the 1980s when ultrasound scans were more regularly used, and if your mother had no symptoms during her pregnancy with you, then there would be no available evidence of your twin.  Until the mid 1990s, the incidence of “vanishing” pregnancies was either unknown or grossly underestimated, so there was nowhere for womb twin survivors to find confirmation of their deep conviction that they once had a twin.

In the absence of any physical evidence, there is no expert, however experienced and highly qualified, who can confirm that you are a womb twin survivor.  You will have to rely on your “gut instinct” and your intuition to work out whether or not there was a lost twin in your Dream of the Womb.

It may be that you have been given the idea of being a womb twin survivor recently by a therapist or friend.  If you are reading this book to find out whether or not you are a womb twin survivor, there is nothing here that will prove it to you, one way or the other.  After all, you are the world’s greatest expert on your experience of being yourself.  Never let anyone influence you, however persuasive their arguments may be.

Order your copy now and save. [here]

Three groups of womb twin survivors

There are, I have found, various sub-groups of womb twin survivors. Right at the start, I found three distinct groups,  (I called them M type, C type and D type for want of a better term)  and despite all kinds of analysis, six different lists of questions and examining over a thousand stories, those three groups are persistent, so there must be something in this, mainly because I did not expect it, so I know Im not making it up.

I have reached a tentative conclusion about this, and  so I have made up some user-friendly names for these groups (No one likes to be categorised as a "type" that is so impersonal!)

GEMMY - they were once a fraternal (dizygotic) twin   (After Castor and Pollux, Gemini twins)

CHIRO - sole survivors of a triplet set where two of the triplets were monozygotic twins  (After Chiron, or Kyron or Cheiron, depending on where you look)

MIMI - they were once  a monozygotic (identical) twin  (Two individuals in one, each of them a ME.)

At the very start of this in 2003 I quickly found GEMMY and CHIRO, but MIMI took a while longer and is only coming clear this year.

Now Charles Boklage suggests in his work ( he did some statistical work on the incidence of vanishing twin syndrome in 1990) that most of the twins lost before birth are probably monozygotic (and male, which is interesting: most womb twin survivors who come to me are female.)  That means therefore that there are far more MIMI survivors than there are GEMMY or CHIRO survivors. But my research has not uncovered them yet, for they have not come forward. I wonder why not?

Are the "indigo" people wombtwin survivors?

A new kind of person is beginning to be identified in the population. They are known as "Indigo" people. I have studied what they say about themselves for several years now, and I have come to the astonishing conclusion that they are probably multiple wombtwin survivors: that is, they had at least two other embryos with them in the womb as they were developing. By means of my questionnaire in 2002 I quickly discovered there there were three groups of wombtwin survivors. At first I called them M types (mourning) C types (captive) and D types who were a kind of mixture of the two - I guessed then that these may be the survivors of a multiple pregnancy, but there was of course no proof and I knew so little then. I just held this in mind. Now I know that these groups represent the fraternal, identical and multiple wombtwin survivors, respectively.

If it is true that at least 10 % of pregnancies are twin or multiple pregnancies producing one child, then there are more than 600 million wombtwin survivors in the world. 10% of the population is a huge group and I have wondered how they may be identified. Some of them have identified themselves as "twinless twins" and of course many others have come to this site and identified themselves as "wombtwin survivors." There is however a much more homogeneous group who can identify themselves as "indigo people."

An indigo person is gifted in extraordinary ways.
If you are an indigo, your mind constantly races, filled with a constant tumbling stream of fresh ideas. You are highly creative and imaginative and easily use and understand metaphor. You are hyper-sensitive, hyper-intuitive and hyper-aware, to the extent of being psychic. When with other people you readily become attuned to their feelings and you have accurate empathy with them. You have a sense of the pain in others and in a desire to heal their pain you may carry it away from that encounter as if it were your own. Your hypersensitivity and imagination can undermine your ability to trust in others as you constantly scan their body language, or can enable to you to pick out a soul mate at one glance. You can sense changes in atmosphere and often answer unspoken questions or carry out unspoken requests.

Some issues are particularly difficult - disappointed expectations and unfairness in particular. Rather than disappoint someone else you will walk that extra mile for them but then be disappointed when they wont do the same for you. If people are not treated equally then this enrages you - you deeply resent labels, rules and any constraints unequally applied to you or to others.

Indigos are often preoccupied with certain social or environmental problems. Their lives are characterised by a prevailing sense of unease, a sense of "knowing", but not knowing what they do know.

Above all the indigo feels alone, different, abandoned and far from home. Life is a painful struggle to find the lost world of the past, where everything was once whole and good. Driven by a deep sense of mission to heal the world and everyone in it, the indigo seeks to heal pain wherever it can be found, on a rescue mission through which the indigo can also be saved. For them, the woundedness becomes the gift, and that is the healing.

This kind of person is not new
There are echoes in the most ancient myths about wounded healers people possessing extraordinary gifts and hyper-awareness.

Here is the story of Cheiron, the wounded healer, as described in the Greek myths. We find him today in the Indigo, and with the help of wombtwin survivor theory, we can see how that lifelong wound may be healed.

The fraternal twin pair: is it what it seems?

There is a golden rule in determining zygosity; that if there is one placenta and two babies, then we have identical twins. If the babies grow up to look a bit different from each other, the idea of their being identical still seems to remain.

On the other hand, if we have two placentas, do we have fraternal twins? A percentage of identical twins do develop separate placentas, so we cannot use the number of placentas as a certain guide. At an individual level, pairs of twins can seek out an expert to prove their zygosity by looking directly at their genes.

A further complication is the “vanishing twin” pregnancy. A pair of fraternal twins may be a triplet set, reduced to twins in the earliest stages of pregnancy and not picked up by ultrasound. If the lost triplet was of the opposite sex and an identical pair survived, then the transfer of gender-related hormones, which is known to occur between fraternal twins, may obscure the results if this twin pair takes part in research. Equally, if the lost triplet was one of an identical pair, then the surviving fraternal twins will not simply be the result of a double ovulation but instead will be a reduced triplet pregnancy, resulting in one surviving identical twin and another who is genetically unrelated. When one considers the complexities of naturally reduced triplet sets, then the placenta rule, which is after all no more than a rule of thumb, becomes far too unreliable.