My background in wombtwin work.
I have spent over thirty years as a group-worker and professional therapist with individuals, couples, families and groups. I thought I had seen most of everything in terms of therapy, from whole community real-time events to individual past life regressions. I climbed to the top of the psychotherapy professional tree as an institute director and then dropped off.
I wanted to prevent mental distress rather than waiting for it to happen. I formed a charity to educate people about birth psychology. But few people were interested.
I had long known I was a wombtwin survivor. But what made me think I was a wombtwin, with no records made or kept of my birth?
It first showed strongly in my obsession with a cartoon from Mad magazine I read as a child. In a single page of images two identical mouse-like cartoon characters struggled each month to outsmart each other. The cartoon would always end with one outmanoeuvring and destroying the other. We were living in a cold war world in the fifties, but this was a hot struggle. I would act out this fantasy play with myself frenetically in both roles till I became overexcited, and at the death I would have an asthma attack.
There was more to it than a survival struggle though. I felt absolutely unlovable as a teenager. I could love but not be loved, or so I thought. I did not realise that the death of my twin was the root of this feeling. I had terrible survivor guilt. At first my love that dared not speak its name was for my own gender. I loved but had no hope or expectation as murderer that I could be loved in return. Then at university I forced myself to switch it to women, if that makes sense.
It took ten years before I found the soul mate of my inner world in a woman called Angela, the angel, who was also a womb-twin survivor. I knew she was this "soul mate" within moments of seeing her. "Only you can save me", I told her, without really knowing what I could possibly be meaning. But she could not save me. The image she carried was of the dying twin. She had auto-immune disease. The image she carried was of my identical brother. So much about her was male, her figure, her attitudes, even her choice of car. She worked for an oil company.
On the other hand I was not her soul mate, she felt. She remained stuck in a dream of a lost love she would never meet again; a student days version of her wombtwin.
Yet we were locked into a mythic dance together as compellingly as the figures dancing on top of a clockwork jewellery box. The story was of love and struggle ending in death. She wrote a poem about our first meeting, with us dancing inside a bubble of air.
What I did not realise in those days was that my twin was identical, a male, and would always cause problems when enacted with a woman sexual partner without awareness. My recent research indicates that a vast amount of psychotherapy is a more or less unconscious attempt to recreate the twin bond between client and therapist. Someone called Alvin Mahrer has even built a theoretical model based on this.
After 30 years of therapy as client and practitioner, research and teaching I found myself still hurting badly, still deeply affected by an endless grief. The worst of it was the realisation that the dead twin goes on living in one way or another.
This only came home to me when studying the videotapes of a five day training workshop I ran on prenatal and perinatal psychology. I had missed the reality of the psychological survival of the twin after its death in the womb. Slowly it became clear that identical survivors are not singular but a kind of dual entity. A different approach to therapeutic work would be needed than anything I had considered before.
The struggle to survive goes on and on and continued to go on in me too. I began to write at length about this in a study called "The search for the beloved." and made a presentation about it at the 2002 European Congress on Embryology Psychology and Society in Holland. I returned to study the prose-poem, Gaudete, by Ted Hughes, which is an autobiographical but mythologised description of Hughes' own struggle with his twin.
As the new millennium dawned I became more depressed as I struggled unsuccessfully to help myself or persuade people of the validity of my research.
Then in 2003 Althea Hayton found my writing on the web and came to visit me. Since that first long meeting I have moved steadily forward. I have written elsewhere of my wombtwin work on the lines Althea and I worked out for me so I will not mention it here. I have been able to shed the depression of that period, find the love of my life, and begin a new career as a writer and photographer. The background hubbub of grief has faded into nothingness.
I am now at the point where it is possible to teach and guide others on the path to a creative adaptation to life after womb-twin loss. I do not need to be a professional therapist any more. Indeed, I think that would be unhealthy and unhelpful. But I want to help Althea with her mission to provide an alternative to professional therapy for those afflicted with this terrible early bereavement, which can do so much damage to people's lives.
more of my story on this site
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