Womb Twin survivors in dance: vanishing twin

The story of the lost twin and the haunting memory of Someone very near, can be expressed in dance.



The whole womb twin story is non-verbal,  the passions are deep and subtle. The bodily movements  can reveal that your prenatal memory is locked into your body, more clearly than into your brain and your memory.

Here is an idea: make your own womb twin dance.  See if you can find a way to express your feelings about your twin with your body, not using any words at all.

I did that once: I bought myself a long turquoise chiffon scarf to represent my twin brother.  I had already a large beige cotton stole, that my son brought back from India.

In my own dance I gently swirled the scarves around me,  the two colours intertwined.  It felt good.  It was part of my own funeral ritual for my twin.  Later, I did a ritual burning of the turquoise scarf, and kept the other.  I still have it, and often think of that day.

Do twins remember the womb? Yes they do, says John James

John James

 In this article , John James, who created the Crucible Centre in Australia, writes how during a sand play session a womb twin survivor found his womb twin in the sand:

How do we identify that someone has lost a twin in the womb? One of our modalities is Sandplay, in which you place small objects into a tray filled with sand. The objects chosen and their symbolic significance usually make the meaning pretty clear.
 
Fred has little sense of achievement, and cannot form intimate or lasting bonds. In the tray he marked an almond-like shape in the sand. In the middle he placed a glass ball enclosing a skull; a fossil on the right, and between them clasped hands. A little goanna was placed on the fossil, which he said had feelings of “soft and uncertain longing.” He then remembered being told he had had a girl-twin that had died well before his birth. He then identified with the goanna and the fossil, and with the hand helplessly holding onto the departed sister. He felt he was the "dead fossil" without her. His inner ‘centre’ lay in the white hands, clasping onto the female who had gone.
 
Where are these memories held? Who remembers these feelings? In the early months the foetus does not have the physical capacity to hear or see, let alone sense or remember experiences beyond the placenta.

He concludes: 

The souls of twins in the womb form a relationship from the moment of conception, if not before. It is our souls who remember when a companion leaves, and later when we connect with our souls from the heart, the memories come flooding back, and all is forgiven.

In his article in the anthology -  Untwinned: perspectives on the death of a twin before birth,  John James writes

We have been finding through them that the ‘disappearance’ of a pre-natal twin was often having a profound impact on the whole of later life of the living twin. This was not in a few isolated cases, but in hundreds of clients. It was a possibility my teacher Elia Carisbrook had mentioned almost twenty years ago and that I discussed in my 1994 book, Notes to Transformation. It was not until the issue kept on turning up that we realised how enormous it was – both in numbers and impact.

With my wife Hilary and our partner Marg Garvan we gradually became more open to the possibility that such a death could affect the deepest psychic structures of our clients. We have now worked with more than fifty Vts situations and, based on its occurrence among our clients, we estimate it affects more than 25 percent of all conceptions. However, this proportion of one-in-four may not be reflected in the general population. It may be that the buried grief from the loss of a twin companion may induce more people to seek therapy than others. This would reduce the apparent proportion.

There is a lot of it about..... spread the world!  It's one in ten of the population, and one of them could be you....

A healing path (1) my story

My story is well-known now.  It's one of the free downloads on my web site and is also the epilogue of A Silent Cry, an anthology of stories written by womb twin survivors and published in their own words.:

Find out more about this book

But there is a little bit more to say about how the healing went for me.

1. Discovery. The first step has to be that moment of realisation. For me it was after some chiropractic treatment that revealed  the bodily memory of  birth trauma.   I once wrote:

Rubber doll

My story begins with a rubber doll I played with constantly as a child.  “Rubber doll” was a naked, sexless baby doll with removable head and limbs. Every day, several times a day, I removed the head and one arm, and then pushed it all back together again. This doll was my  friend and constant companion. I had no idea then that this constant breaking and mending was my way of trying to heal myself of birth trauma. There truly was, as a large breech-born baby, a moment when they pulled at my flailing limbs to remove me and I thought my head was coming off.

Once that trauma was healed (in 2002 it consisted mostly of muscular spasm in various parts of my body and could be relieved by chiropractic treatment) then a quieter message, to do with terror and death, became perceptible.  I realised that I was conceived as a twin.

2. Making the twin real.   I had to put the story together and make sure I was not creating a fantasy. I spent many hours exploring the internet and gleaned scraps of information here and there, but the real direction for my healing was, I realised, coming from within. I  came to the conclusion that my twin was a brother and that he had been aborted, for no better reason than it fitted perfectly with what I seemed to feel deep inside.  I took a course of dramatherapy in London with Claire Schrader and that enabled me to clarify the non-verbal signals that were within me into a real story.

3 Letting go.   I held a funeral ritual for my twin, Ben, in that drama therapy room.  It was one of the most significant experiences of my life. 

4 Allowing.   The next step was once of a kind of wait and see, being open kind of stage. I had never spoken to anyone about how womb twin survivors heal so I had to observe the process inside of me and see it as it developed.  The next stage saw a breathtaking surge of energy and creativity, and all I had to do was to stop blocking it.  Amazing!

5. Delivery.  The result is the womb twin project, three books and more to come a web site and this blog.   I now know that healing can happen and that pre-birth memories can be processed successfully.

Over the next 5 days I will provide some details and stories to illustrate these stages as they happen to womb twin survivors everywhere.

The lost twin in the Dream of the Womb

The title of the new book is "Womb twin surviviors, the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb. " Now some experts in prebirth psychology have complained about that, saying: "Well if this is supposed to be only a "dream", are you saying it's all a fantasy, that we made this up? Are you with Sigmund Freud then, who  talked about fantasies all the time? Like we dont remember being born, that we don't remember the womb? We have been working hard for decades to convince the world that we DO remember the womb, are you promoting the idea that its not real, all just a dream?"

My answer is that it's all a matter of words and definitions. The words "remember" or "memory"  got the sceptics screaming at me that we don't  remember the womb and telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for even suggesting the idea. ( See some of these extraordinary exchanges here if the psychology of scepticism interests you at all..)

Assuming  (with good reason, based on my experiences so far)  that scepticism on the subject of pre-birth memory is widespread, I have been very careful with my terminology. The word "dream" works psychologically because in post-traumatic stress the trauma is often re-experienced as a nightmare: the loss of a twin before birth can be traumatic. Dream also suggests a longing or hope, and any womb twin survivors who experience that the nameless painful yearning for Something that refuses to be named until a way to name it is found, will  agree. Subjectively, the lost memories of a womb twin have a dream-like quality - they are vague, nameless, haunting and often appear, truly and  symbolically, in dreams while  asleep.

Finally, its a matter of how we are learning to heal womb twin survivors, and we have come a long way in the last seven years. The womb twin work takes the Dream of the Womb; names it; validates it; puts strong biological evidence behind it, thereby makes sense of it; then peice by peice the Dream becomes a reality.  With the help of that reality the constant search for the lost twin eases, for in a sense the original reality of the twin has been found.  In time, the day of true awakening comes and the healing is complete - it took me five years, but I had to do it alone.

I look forward to the day when we have many womb twin survivors who have awoken from their Dream of the Womb and will be ready to reach out to others and enable them to experience the joy of living free of the Dream.

This how the Dream has been described:

Just behind my eyes, my Dream of the Womb 
is like a matrix through which I see the world. 
Like a dark, mysterious cloud whirling through the primal places 
of my unconscious mind, this Dream is my way of being. 
In the light of day, however hard I try, 
I cannot see through the cloud obscuring the meaning of this Dream. 
It is with me always; I cannot remember a time without this Dream. 
In the dark hours of solitude when there is no one there 
and all there is is emptiness and stillness, 
out of the corner of my eye, I catch the faintest glimmer of gold. 
It is elusive but it is always there, and it gives me hope. 
It is like a light to show me what came before the Dream. 
But I am convinced nothing existed before the Dream. 
The Dream is all I have.

Prebirth experiences and mental illness

Stress in early pregnancy linked to schizophrenia.

Yes here we go again; I missed this one, as it was in February and I was busy collecting stories, but today a quick browse found this link to some research connecting difficult intrauterine experiences for a foetus and the eventual psychology of the born child.

Of course these scientists missed an important element: one in 8 pregnancies are multiple at first.

Stress in pregnancy compromises the pregnancy and can cause the loss of the entire pregnancy. How obvious that stress in early pregnancy would have an effect on the born child! The survivor of such an experience (stress hormones from Mum passing via the placenta through the blood supply of the foetus,) would most probably be a wombtwin survivor. Hence etc....

What a different result we would see if such research factored in the vanished twin! Then we would see that the symptoms we call " schizophrenia" are a completely normal reaction to an intense and very difficult prebirth experience.

There are a couple of stories in A Silent Cry of the mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia, and I have spoken of this before on this blog, in connection with the eight years that Janet Frame spent in mental hospital hell. Maybe things will change when these stories are made available. I do hope so!