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Vanishing Twin Syndrome - One Example
For the other six articles: Medical - Symptoms - Who remembers? - True stories - Therapy - Bibiography
A Working Case
A woman in her 40s came because she seemed to have no purpose in life, and often needed others to make decisions for her. She controlled her feelings to make things peaceful. She would often panic in large spaces like railway stations, when she felt she did not know where she was going yet she was unable to retrace her steps in order to find out where she was. In relationships she desired to be enfolded by the other, yet found again and again that they would let her down, or simply would not be there for her. Her deepest belief was that she had to make life work on her own, but found that hard to do. She boosted her courage to take over when support was lacking.
Session 1.
She began with a sandplay that had only a few pieces. The first was a seal facing into the corner, and three others were rocks with holes in them. I asked How would you feel if the seal were to turn, and face away from the corner? She immediately became uncomfortable and said she could not do that. I felt that her panic attacks were related to this, and intuitively asked whether the seal was male or female, "Male".
Is it OK to explore this to see if we can understand why you feel so uncomfortable? With her approval I stood in front of her with arms outstretched, as the corner. "I like it here" she said, "It is comfortable, even pleasurable" and her body began to lean towards me. Are you aware of what your body is doing? Surprised, she said "Yes".
Which part of your body is moving you towards me? and she felt into her body, saying "My shoulders". I was now aware that she was moving more deeply into her feelings, and her stance was more concentrated showing that body sensations were becoming more intense. To heighten the emerging body-feeling level I sought a way to create more tension, and asked What if I were to push your shoulders back very slightly?
"O no, I don't know why, but I feel I would not like that." Do you want to find out? "Yes, do it".
When, still standing as the corner, I put a very light pressure on her shoulders she said "This feels like the panic at the railway station." I moved very slightly to one side, intimating that the corner was about to move away. "Yes, that's the feeling, if you were not there I would not know where to go."
Thinking of the three pieces with holes in them, and aware that they suggested a birthing issue, I asked her how she would visualise the corner, what shape it might have. At once she replied "It's a circle, a round opening". Pause of perhaps a minute "Yes, I want to be in there." Sense of deep longing.
By now I intuitively had the very strong impression that she was seeking a lost companion, wanting to return to the enfoldment of the womb where she would find him. If this was correct, then all her memories and feelings around such an early trauma would be held in the cells of the body, not in the memory of the mind. It was time to encourage the body to act out this scene, to find a way for it to speak.
I asked her to sit on the carpet and placed three huge pillows in the shape of a tunnel. Is this like the opening in the corner? At first she just sat and looked at it, unable to speak. I encouraged her to let her body lead, and to discover what her hands and arms and legs required at this moment. Gradually she was able to do so, and she stretched her arms and torso forward towards the opening. Then with a rush she grabbed the top pillow and hugged it to her. She held it very still, not squeezing, but as if this were the most natural relationship in the world.
We waited. Her feelings deepened, and finally she said "I am warm, very protected". Wanting to be sure that this was a womb memory I placed my hand along her spine to mimic a body memory of being in the placenta, asking how that felt. "Natural, at home". I then asked if this was how she lay in bed with a partner, and she said "All curled up into him"
Here was the fœtal memory of being one with the twin that was being acted out in four aspects of her life: wanting to get back into the safe space, panic-stricken when the space was too open and she was alone, merging into her partner yet 'setting him up' to abandon her and having little sense of purpose. Also, I felt that her need for peacefulness and the suppression of anger and grief were her 'decisions for survival' made after her twin had died.
The first step in resolving all these ongoing issues was to bring her to the point where she would have a totally felt inner realisation of the physicality of the event in the womb. To do this I put on a tape of the heart-beat a foetus would hear in the womb. She began to tell me what it was like to be in the womb "with someone". There was a moment when the tape stopped, and she asked that I repeat it so she could explore further.
One knows as a therapist when someone's personal truth is coming through. There is such a level of attunement and intimacy at that time that one simply flows from one thought and understanding to the next, testing words for their accuracy until, together, we gradually brought the truth into focus.
After a while I felt it was appropriate to move into the moment of the trauma, so I very gently pulled on the pillow as if taking it away, just enough to bring an outward pressure onto her arms. Immediately she dropped into the sense of loss and abandonment. In that space we could talk about what the events in the session meant to her, and she was so in contact with her body feelings that she knew that what she was saying was the absolute truth of her experience.
Session 2.
Two weeks later we explored the changes in her life. She had been pretty unsettled for the first three days, but afterwards she identified many changes, often quite subtle. For example she was no longer entangled with her boyfriend, and was setting stronger boundaries than before. She was still strongly in control, and was a little unhappy that her sang froid had been disturbed in the first session.
She did a sandplay in which all the pieces were in pairs, but with a considerable difference to the previous time. Now one piece was in some way superior to the other. A brick standing on end next to one lying down, a boat next to a wharf and so on. We experimented with a couple of bricks (they are only an inch or so across). If both stood up she became uncomfortable, also if both were lying down. She identified with the taller and then recognised that the other was her twin. It was a long fairly quiet session in which she recognised that she had to be the nurturer of the twin.
"I have to support others on my own … I can't ask others to support me …and if there were support, I would not want it around for long as this is my happiest moment". It would seem that the twin died slowly in the womb, energetically fading, so that she enfolded the twin to try to save it. "I love looking after people" she said. I suspected that this dying may have lasted quite a while. This left her wanting to look after others in life, needing to be superior to them, and in charge.
She said "I have always had this sense of emptiness in life, and now I can see what it comes from". It is a sort of double whammy, with the twin making stronger connection with you as he needs your support, and then when you gave it abandoning you. "It feels like that." (pause …) "How do I deal with the emptiness?"
We finished the session with an exercise of descending into the emptiness, exploring it, and finding that it was in fact full of feeling and warmth. This is the no-space or the void, the ultimate truth in many religious traditions. She realised that she could become conscious of transforming the emptiness into spaciousness rather then fearing it as a lack.
We hoped that the clear understanding of the very deep origins of all these issues in her life along with the substantial changes already made would enable her, on a day to day basis, to transform a fearful event into something positive.
At the end of the session we had agreed that she had dealt with the issues she came for, and would only come back if she needed to make further investigations. I telephoned her a week later to be told "I didn't dance like a puppet this time. I told him to forget it!" I was feeling proud of her when she then said "There are times when I still don't understand, don't know why it plagued me for so long, unbalancing my life."
Find a way to remind yourself of the origins, to be conscious. One way to do this if for the mind – the part that remembers on each day – to connect the feelings which will then remind the body.
In a call a week later she related that slowly, day by day as she kept focussed, the urge to simultaneously seek and repel lessened, and as her reactions became less intense she quite quickly found life more interesting and less of a minefield.
From experience one does not look for a total cure in these cases. The formation is too deep and too early. The best is a loosening of the intensity of her reactions, a permanent consciousness of how it drives her, with a lessening of the impact of the subsequent traumas in life that had been 'created' by the imprinting in the womb. We could in any later sessions work on the manifestation of this imprinting in relationship with men, at work and with her children, and etc.
The experience then becomes a gift in life, rather than a burden. With true understanding the things we have learned while trying to cope usually turn out to contain the most wonderful skills for the rest of life.
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The Crucible Centre Pty Ltd
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