On the pain of empathetic failure - mainly for therapists

Empathy

Many womb twin survivors have a problem with empathy - too much or too little.  I came across this material today among my computer files on healing,  and I think I may include it in the new book, but here is a taster:

Definitions of empathy

Empathy is bothering to guess the inner experience of another with the help of intuitively obtained information. Empathy is trying to see into the mind of the other. Empathy is the desire to know and understand the nature of the interior world of the other person.

There can be no empathy if there is no desire to reach out to the other. There can be no empathy if there is no wish to create emotional intimacy with the other. There cannot be empathy without love. There cannot be love without empathy.

Prenatal trauma - an imprint for life

In the Primal Pages web site, which is about primal psychotherapy, Leah McGoy wrote an article called "An imprint for life", which is all about prenatal trauma. The example she used was a little womb twin survivor who came to her for therapy  - but no one had realised until then what the problem was with him:

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....

The vanishing twin syndrome "appears" in a counselling session

The twin who vanished is not gone: the vague memory of  Someone Else There remains in the mind of the survivor.  A trained and aware therapist can identify a womb twin survivor by their character traits and by the way they behave and what they say in the session. A sensitive therapist who can recognise the energy in the room can see changes in the energy as the subject is aired and worked through. This movie reveals a good example of this.



Five ways to "spot" a womb twin survivor in the therapy room:

The womb twin work

I spend a lot of time explaining my way of working - its been a problem for some time.

The secret purpose of the womb twin survivors is to remain in the black hole - ie not develop, never get off the ground, remain in a state of arrested development etc.

There would be loving and logical reasons for this: " I must stay here with my lost twin and not develop either".

If someone I am working with draws out of me a series of explanations, directions and suggestions by their own resistance, then they stay helplessly stuck, in the black hole with their lost twin.

In other words the process for the womb twin survivor is to hand over autonomy to the therapist and let them take control - but this seems illogical. However if the secret purpose is to remain the beta self, then that makes perfect logical sense.

I work in a directive way because this isn't therapy. I don't play the total empathy game (that keeps me helpless in someone elses Black Hole - no thanks.) But I do use empathy informed with understanding on my part so there's a lot of dialogue as I check things out as we go.

I decided it wasnt therapy a long time ago. Its more like teaching but it has a therapeutic aim.

A teacher doesn't wait till everyone is ready to learn but rather assumes that the person is there to learn. There is no point in coming to a teacher and then resisting the very process of learning. But that's not quite it for me, when it comes to the womb twin work.

A therapist stays with the client in their inner world and accepts as truth everything going on there. In absolute empathy and kindness, working with the resistance. But always aware of unconscious process and transference. But that's not quite it either.

What I do is first to inform with empathy, then listen with open-mindedness, then guide as seems appropriate , then fearlessly negotiate a way forward that suits the individual, all the time emphasising the fact that the individual is in charge of their own healing.

We found a name for it this morning : therapeutic guidance for wombtwin survivors.

I wonder: is this what womb twin survivors experience? Is this what they need? This is what I have learned to do over the last five years or so. It is what I intend to do, but intention may not be enough. I am self taught and have no teachers, other then the womb twin survivors I work with.

I would welcome comments and suggestions.

Article about therapy with womb twin survivors

Portugal April 24th-26th

There are to be a series of three talks about Wombtwin Survivors in Portugal, over the weekend 24-26th April 2009. I will show my powerpoint presentation, which will convince you that wombtwin survivors are far more common than anyone ever realised, and I will explain what the characteristic psychological profile is of a wombtwin survivor. Lots of time for questions and stories, sharing and fun. I will speak in English because I am stupid at other languages. Claudia, who is arranging this and is of course extremely clever, will translate as we go.

It will be great fun. E-mail Claudia in English or Portuguese and she will send you the details of what is happening where. claudia.pinheiro@wombtwin.com.

If you can get there, do come - this is a unique opportunity to hear the story at first hand, told by myself. I won't be back for at least a year, so seize the opportunity now!

Other workshops: get your brochures here!

New York City 16/5 click here

Gent 2/5 click here

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.

Now this is interesting...

I have discovered that doing "the wombtwin work" with a wombtwin survivor is not therapy, in the usual sense that we have been accustomed to use this term.

As a counsellor, I was trained in the 1990s to reach out in empathy to my client, expect to unconsciously pick up in empathy some of my clients emotional baggage and take that to supervision to be unravelled and better understood. Gradually, I would come to recognise fully what it was to be my client and to stand in his/her shoes. Then by, as it were, feeding back to my client what I had seen while being in my fantasy "in my clients inner world", I was able to help him/her to accept that their inner world was real and true and it made some kind of sense.

Now that's not at all the whole story of therapy, but if we think about the dream of the Womb, this interpretation helps.

I have had, for 5 years now, some experience of being with wombtwin survivors in their Dream of the Womb. I have done the wombtwin work face to face, in a group, by email and indirectly through my publications. It seems that the best way to help is not to help. The best way to help is not to reach out so far in empathy that you end up caught in the Dream of the other. This is the separateness that I had such a struggle with when I was training : I reached out, got caught up in my clients feelings and fantasies, because they resembled my own to such an extent, and then my Dream and my clients Dream became conflated. The result was a complete muddle of codependency and we got stuck.

Without doing much more than work on my own Dream, I can now recognise when I am slipping away into someone else's Dream. I have learned to stand by and observe this happening rather then plunge in myself. As I observe the work dispassionately, I learn about the survivors world, which can never be my own.

I know this today of all days, because yesterday I began as part of the research work on how to do the wombtwin work, a series of exactly 30 individual session with a wombtwin survivor. There I was, sitting with an individual by invitation, but Oh! I am so aware that this is not therapy!

How is it set up? well its carefully bounded in that we are contracted to walk the 30 steps of the healing path exactly as they occur in the healing e-book. When the 30 steps are done that will be it. It is less carefully bounded in terms of session length, because its hard to get into prebirth experience in these sessions, and if the sessions are too short then the work leaks out into other forms of contact, like making or cancelling appointments, which are less bounded. I left it up to my survivor to decide when we should stop, and after about one and a half hours we reached a point where that seemed to be enough, so we ended the session. Its hard to tell after one session, but I guess that one and a half hours will be the length of every session. I will hold an open mind about the possibility of one or two sessions being much longer. All the ethical considerations such as confidentiality, privacy issues etc are in place, as they must be.

The greatest difference is in the relationship. Right at the start of this research in 2002, it became clear to me that twins would want a twin to walk with them. Than means a 50:50 relationship, shared as equally as possisble. This is a constructive and creative conversation, where each party speaks as much as the other, and only where that is appropriate. There is full disclosure about my own life, without me taking up more than half the available space, and, because part of my role is to provide information about the possible biology behind the Dream (ie.the variouus twinning events that can occur in the womb) I often speak at length. We briefly discussed hypnosis, and I offered it, but expressed my concern that this could possibly skew the power balance. There was no problem to the survivor in not having hypnosis from me after all. Clearly, the need to preserve that equal relationship was as great to the survivor as to myself.

Everything that is going on in the room is made as conscious as possible, to highlight any womblike situations or statements, including how the survivors was relating to me. I do not let the survivor look after me in any way (compulsive caring is very common) but also I do not do any looking after either, but concentrate on a robust attitude to facing the truth of what is going on, in a gentle and kindly atmosphere of mutual respect. That fearlessness in the face of this survivor's worst feelings (a big thing for Carl Rogers the counselling guru, and something I try to emulate) is intended to provide a stable platform for the details of the Black Hole to be examined and to some extent re-experienced.

Now this work I began yesterday is with a survivor of a fraternal pair and I am being a fraternal twin here: each of us alone in our separate bubble but walking along in close companionship.

I want to work with an identical survivor face to face, because it's my belief that identical survivors want you in their most intimate space, to be there in the Black Hole together and this may be what may is needed in order for there to be healing. On the other hand, my refusal to come in may help the survivor to recognise that their twin is irreplaceable, so the wombtwbn work as described above may be equally effective. We will wait and see.

If you are a counsellor or therapist reading this, I would be delighted to hear your responses: either post them here as a comment or email me on althea@altheahayton.com.