Is there a true "Womb Twin Survivor Syndrome?

In the beginning, in 2003, there was the hypothesis. I discovered that I am a womb twin survivor in 2002 and I assumed that there would be others like me, who were also womb twin survivors, who felt like me.  As the number of stories I heard increased, and as the questionnaire statements were gradually refined, it seemed that we did all think and feel the same way. I was therefore able to come up with my first Womb Twin Theory in 2004:

Womb twin survivors spend their lives constantly re-enacting their Dream of the Womb.  Nothing is more important than that - even life itself.  They will go to extraordinary lengths and choose to create all kinds of fantasies, simply to keep that Dream alive, for in the Dream is the twin they yearn for and search for, their whole life long. 

Then came a couple of rather heated exchanges with sceptics on the James Randi Sceptics Forum, to whom I put my hypothesis and the problem I had with finding a control group who were certainly NOT womb twin survivors. They told me in no uncertain terms that I had nothing more than an hypothesis, if that, and to talk about a "theory" would be to make out that I had certain knowledge, which I clearly did not have.

IVF and multiples: the lifetime effects of "vanishing twins"

An Australian radio programme, broadcast in August but which I found today, includes a study of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women, tracing the events in pregnancy as related to health risks later.
The issues covered in this programme include obesity and how that is related to your mother's pregnancy, particularly in the early months.

Most importantly, the risk of birth defects in a single baby from an IVF cycle was found to be higher.  Womb twin survivors are three times more likely to have birth defects than babies who never had a twin. It is interesting that this is the last thing that advocates of multi-fetal pregnancy will mention, of course, let alone the psychological effects on the sole survivor, which we know so well......

Listen now

The message : (1) Womb twin blogs and bloggers

Here begins a short series of blogs about aspects of the Womb Twin message.  One part of the message is this:

There are millions of womb twin survivors in the world. Most of them are unaware that they are, and those who do know of their twin do not realise that the prenatal loss of their twin has had a profound psychological effect on them. 

One favourite way to get any message to the world is to blog it, which is why I made a resolution on January 1st of this year to make a post here every day of 2011.  After 5 weeks, the number of visitors to this blog had doubled and look ready to triple within the next two months! Thank you, every one of you.  You are very welcome here and I look forward to your comments.

This is not the only womb twin blog, but so far at least, there is just one Twitter account.

There is a blog in the USA which features stories of interest to people in that country.  Also blogs in other countries [ see the full list of blogs here]

Here is a quote from the US blog home page:

Awareness of this condition becomes a clear explanation to what didn't make sense before. The current state of little or no awareness, combined with massive disbelief, creates a situation that is extremely disproportionate to the pain suffered by those who lost someone with whom they once shared a womb. They need not suffer alone just because society hasn't yet established proper recognition and understanding of this syndrome. Battling such a vague condition all alone is especially difficult when being alone is the problem to begin with!

The Womb Twin world blog has a large group of authors from countries throughout the world,  and posts in various languages.  If you are a womb twin survivor you can become an author on the world blog - we cant have too many authors for this!

Why have all these blogs?  It is a way to spread the world, get the message out. People like blogs because they are active and there is always something new to see , and it feels more "cutting edge" than a web site.


Blogging the message


Comments to this blog (and about this blog made elsewhere) seem to indicate that:

1 There is widespread scepticism about this among the 90% of the population who are NOT womb twin survivors.

2 Womb twin survivors find it affirming to read about themselves here and find something of their story in every blog post


How do you respond to this daily blog? Is this a good way to get the message out? Let me know either here or contact me via my web site, thank you.


Tomorrow we will explore some of the various womb twin web sites. Do you know of one? Please let me know if you find one.

Chapter 16: The Womb Twin research project

The whole idea of the Womb Twin research project has been to find womb twin survivors and ask them how it feels to be a womb twin survivor.  This chapter will review some of the main developments since the project began in 2003.

Womb twin survivors revealed
In 1995,  Dr. Charles Boklage concluded from his research that for every twin pair born intact there are at least ten sole survivors. It took another ten years for the impact of this statistic to be fully realised, but gradually, the idea entered into the public consciousness. 
    Two years later, in 1997, a web site about “The vanishing twin phenomenon” was created by Caryl Dennis in the USA.  She writes that she began her work: “…after finding out not only that I am a surviving twin, but also that my fraternal twin siblings probably began as triplets, and that my youngest brother was a surviving ‘mirror’ identical twin.” 
    Four years later in 2001 the idea caught the attention of the popular scientific press.  By 2005, pre- and perinatal psychology was well-established as a science in California, USA.  One expert described the lost twin issue as  “..a little known but very commonplace phenomenon.” 

Finding womb twin survivors
Until the 1980s there was no way of identifying womb twin survivors, simply because no one had any idea they existed.  By 2003 modern technology had made it possible to find a sufficient number of womb twin survivors to carry out this research at minimal cost.  It was possible to recruit a large number of womb twin survivors via the Internet.  To that end, the first womb twin web site was created in 2003.  Until then, it had not been possible to go out and find womb twin survivors but now they came to the site.  One by one, they began to tell their stories.

The Womb Twin hypothesis
Within a few months of launching the web site it was clear that womb twin survivors do have a specific psychological make-up, which appears to be related to the loss of their twin.  On that basis, the Womb Twin hypothesis was formulated:

Womb twin survivors spend their lives re-enacting the life and death of their womb twin.  Nothing is more important than that, even life itself.  Once the real pre-birth scene, which is constantly being 
re-enacted, is made clear, then the re-enactment tends to diminish or cease altogether, greatly to the benefit of the individual.

It has not been necessary to amend the hypothesis in any way since it was formulated in 2003.  In fact, repeated analyses of various versions of the questionnaire have consistently supported it.  At first, it seemed an extraordinary idea that the loss of a twin at birth or before could be the cause of a variety of psychological problems.  As time passed however, more and more womb twin survivors came forward, each with a similar story of misery and loss, which was clearly explained by the womb twin hypothesis.  It now seems that the psychological effects on the sole survivor, when a twin is lost around birth or before, have been hidden in plain sight for generations.  At last, we have learned how to recognise these effects and describe them. 




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