Spirit in Action
Healing From Twin Loss - Mary Rockefeller Morgan
Mary Rockefeller Morgan's book is Beginning With the End: A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing, where Mary traces the trauma and the route to healing which she experienced and now passes on to other "Twinless Twins", like the group created by the events of 9/11/2001.
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Oct 2012
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world alone ♪ The topic for today's spirit in action is healing, but a special type of healing, the healing of bereavement. And at that, a special type of bereavement, what a twin who has lost their twin experiences. Obviously, there are many factors and issues that overlap with anyone who has experienced the loss of a dear loved one. But there are additional special circumstances involved in twin loss. Our guest is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, and her book is Beginning with the End, a memoir of twin loss and healing. Mary speaks of this from the inside, having lost her twin brother in 1961. This tragedy was very much in the public eye because of the prominence of the Rockefeller family, her dad being the governor of New York and eventually vice president under Gerald Ford. Due to a combination of influences, Mary's grief and healing were arrested with painful consequences for her life, until spiritual and therapeutic tools came to hand to fill the unfinished hole in Mary's experience. With the appearance of so many twinless twins resulting from the attack on the twin towers in September of 2001, Mary Rockefeller Morgan's personal healing and training became a tool and helping hand for many more, sharing her unusual experience of connection to another individual. Again, the book is Beginning with the End, a memoir of twin loss and healing, and Mary Rockefeller Morgan joins us today by phone. Mary, I'm delighted to have you here today for Spirit in Action. Well, I'm very, very pleased to be with you, Mark. Your new book is Beginning with the End, a memoir of twin loss and healing. Why did you write this book? Well, I'm a psychotherapist to start with. I think that sort of had to go back to that. In 2001, when we had the terrible 9/11 trade tower disaster, while the whole disaster, but for me specifically the trade tower disaster here in New York City, I began to work with the twin who lost their twin in the trade towers. And I did a two-year bereavement group with some of the twins who were in the tri-state area. A number of them came together through various different means, which I talk about in my book. And we had this incredible group that lasted for two years. What happened was fascinating to me. I'll just never forget the first day that we all were together. And we sat around in a circle on the floor without the sort of separation of chairs and legs and feet and everything. These twins, they just touched me so deeply so quickly. First of all, I'm a twin who lost their twin also. So I felt an instant connection to them on that basis. But what I saw was that they felt instantly connected to each other and that they began to trust each other in a very, very short time. Usually if you do group work, it takes a while, sometimes a month or two, before the participants in a group really get to know and trust each other and can get to their issues. That just happened in the first day. So I was extremely moved by being present with them. As they shared their stories, I felt this deep desire to sit down with them and share mine. I knew that I was their therapist and that I was there to help them in their healing process and that this was not my role. It was many, many years, over 27, 30 years since my lost my twin. I'd never, never shared my complete story with anybody. I had this whole piece of myself and I had to really breathe in and let that piece go and realize what a gift it was for me to be there to be able to help them as somebody who understood what they were going through. So that was the first thing that happened. Then after a year, they asked me, they said to me, "Mary, please write something. Please write a book which will explain the issues of our loss so that people will understand what we're going through because nobody understands us. When we go into therapy, our therapists don't understand us. When we talk, nobody understands how long this grief is present for us. They don't understand the issues involved. Please write a book." So that was the next thing that happened. Then the third thing that happened was that I wanted to show people that you can heal, that you can integrate a terrible loss and you can move forward with your life after such a terrible blow. When did you actually become a psychotherapist? I became a psychotherapist in 1990. I had wanted to be a healer. I'd wanted to work to heal people. I was always drawn to the underdog in school. I just always have felt empathy for people who are suffering in one way or another. When I lost my twin brother, I knew that there was no way I could do any of that until I'd done my healing. I lost my twin brother. Maybe it's good to start with that. One thing is that I lost my twin brother when I was 23 years old. It's probably important to say that I was part of this huge and well-known family called the Rockefeller family. My father was governor of the state of New York at that time. After college, Michael and I had always talked about how we wanted to find ourselves as individuals. We wanted to know who we were outside of the whole issue of being a Rockefeller and having so many expectations placed on ourselves as a result of that. Michael, after he graduated from Harvard and did his army, then went to New Guinea with the Harvard PVD expedition into the Balim Valley, where he applied to be the sound recording man for the anthropological film called Dead Birds. After that, he went down to the Asmont coast, which is the southern coast of New Guinea, whereas there's a remarkable tribe of people who are extraordinary sculptors. Michael, all his life loved art as well as my father. My father had been very, very strongly interested in getting museums to become interested in collecting indigenous art and to recognizing indigenous art as one of the great traditions of art. He and Michael often had great discussions, and Michael became a board member of his little museum, which he started called the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, when Michael was only 18. So he and father talked this over, and he decided that he wanted to go to a culture that was completely different than his own. And it all worked out that he would go to the Asmont to collect the sculpture. So he did, after he finished his anthropological expedition, he went down there to the Balim Valley, and he went on two trips, extended trips, and in the second trip, he lost his life. He was on a boat, was made from two canoes with a platform and a little hot kind of roofed structure that they could get out of the sun under as they went up into these rivers. The Asmont is an incredible coastline with miles and miles and miles of jungle. It's a beautiful place with incredible exotic birds, but it's very remote and very forbidding. Michael was there, and he was trying to get to a remote village, and in order to get there on a schedule that he had made from himself, he decided to cross a huge delta of the London River, and it was in that delta where he encountered very choppy waters that his boat first submerged. The choppy waters filled the canoes with water pulling the boat down, and the outboard motor was swamped, and so then the boat couldn't move. There were two young boys who were acting as guides and interpreters, and then another young man who was an anthropologist and spoke the main dialect. So the boys decided to swim immediately and try to reach the shore, and Michael and Renee is the name of the man's date on board in order to protect Michael's journals, and the boat got into this tremendous outgoing current carrying the boat down to the south and out to sea. To make a long story short, Michael was way out to see probably 10 to 12 miles when he decided that he was going to try to swim. Renee didn't hardly know how to swim. There were no boats or the only one plane that goes every week in that area. At that time, a sea plane that would drop mail to certain missionaries had already gone the day before, so they knew there was no hope. They had no water, no food that had all gone when the boat capsized. The prevailing good judgment is that he never made it to shore, but there is still a lot of stories that go around because of the fact that our families well known and because people are always interested in shocking stories. So that was something I had to deal with also in my life. Well, it is a shocking event in your life. And in the nation's life, I guess, probably at the time, you describe in beginning with the end all of the press that followed you, and to some degree it felt like that they were hounding you, which I guess is so different from what we experienced today. Yeah, there was a real, I moved very quickly into a place of deep isolation within myself. And the thing that I feel so important, one of the goals that I have for this book is to break that sense of isolation, that people with deep personal loss go into, and also touch the place where people are disconnected not only from their lives, but where twins are disconnected from their very sense of who they are. So it's not just loss that we're talking about here, as your subtitle on your book goes, "Twin Loss and Healing." What is it about twin loss that is so different, so perhaps maybe incomprehensibly different for the rest of us from other kinds of connections? I think that there are two very important, unique and paired issues. And the first one is the issue of the twin bond, because twins grow in relationship from the moment of their conception. It doesn't matter, fraternal or identical. They are growing in relationship from the moment they are conceived and move into their mother's womb. They are doing now the most fascinating twin studies with phonograms. These phonograms are showing that twins at 14 weeks of age are reaching out to each other in primitive connection. So they are in relationship from a very, very tiny, tiny time of their development. This isn't really an extraordinary thing, so by the time they're born, they already have developed a sense of self in connection with another person. And that continues, obviously, after they are born, depending on how their parents or their loved ones treat them. Some twins are dressed alike. Their parents are fascinated with the idea of twins, and everything is twin, twin, twin. And they really exaggerate the twin bond. Twins, I mean, like all people, need to develop a sense of self, to develop a sense of individual identity. That is part of just the imperative of human development. Twins have more of a challenge to do this than singletons do. Often, their sense of identity develops. The little "I" develops within the framework of a "we." If they have not had enough experience being an individual and really listening to themselves as an individual and developing that individual identity, they have a terribly difficult time if one of them dies. Often, twins say they feel like half of themselves. And this sense of disconnection from the very sense of who they are has to be addressed in the grieving process. And twins really need to be sure that that sense of identity is consolidated before they can even feel safe enough to really face the loss and to begin the grieving process. That's a really unique issue. And therapists today really are still not aware of that. That's why the next book I hope to write is going to be a book on doing therapies with twinless twins. And also, I'm very, very interested in encouraging and trying to support more research into the psychology of twinship. All the research has been done into with the focus on nurture versus nature because of scientist interest in her entity. But the psychology of twinship has been left way behind. I have a kind of a personal connection to it, too. Even though I come from a large family of 12 kids, we didn't have any twins in that set. But I married my wife and by her ex-husband. Her first children were twins. And so I've got twins' step sons. And they're part of a continuing twin studies that's been going all the 38 years since their birth. One of the things that I was appalled at when I was reading, beginning with the end, at a certain point, I think maybe you're ready to give up the shell shock and start some healing. You go to, I think he was a psychologist, some kind of therapist, psychologist. And he tells you that you couldn't have that special twin bond because you weren't an identical twin because, obviously, your brother and you are not identical twins. So he told you that. Now, I'm surprised in the book you don't rave about this damn person who shut down your healing, your potential for healing because he said you couldn't have that kind of bond with your brother. Well, you know, don't forget that this is a long period since 1961. I went into therapy probably seven years after or five to seven years. I got married. I had children. I think the seminal thing that happened first was my mother when I came home said, "Mary, the one thing we can't do is cry." So that that put an enormous dampener on something which I believe deeply is something that belongs to all of us. And that is that we have a natural healing process that centers in the psyche just like we do have in our physical body when we cut ourselves. Well, I think our psyche mobilizes to heal the wound when we lose somebody. But that process has to be embraced, actively embraced. And in our culture, we don't embrace the whole idea of the process of breathing. We expect people in two weeks to get up and move on with their lives. And maybe there were other conditions in your case that made it even more severe. I think that being part of the Rockefeller family, maybe there was a certain appearance that you had to keep for the public that those of us who had lower economic stations in life probably didn't need to look as good for the public. We weren't in the public eye in the same way. So was that part of why your mother said, "You know, we have to buck up here. We've got to keep a stiff upper lip for the public." I don't think she thought of it like that quite. I mean, she never told me, but my sense is knowing my mom is that she was terribly in grief over the fact that my father had left her and had a deep relationship with another woman, which she then married. So that she was grieving from the loss of her husband. And right on top of that, within a month's period, she then is faced with the loss of her son. And I think that she was so briefed inside that she thought if she started to cry, maybe she wouldn't stop. You know, and she couldn't carry out her responsibilities as a mother, as a person. And I think the Rockefeller expectations of how one acts and how one is probably had something to do with it. But I also think we live in the 50s, 60s. People were shying away from expressing those kinds of feelings. I don't think it was so unusual in the time frame in which she had happened. But you're probably right. The Rockefeller situation certainly added an extra charge to the situation. I don't want to go too far down that line because we really want to concentrate on your experience with beginning with the end. But obviously in the book, you talk about your healing journey. Did your mother ever get a chance to do her healing? Did you get to see that happen? I didn't get to see it happen in a way that I could actually tell you she did this and that. My mother was an incredibly strong individual. I did not blame her for that. It's not that I wasn't angry at my mother and didn't have to go through the anger that all people have to do in relationship to finding out who they are and getting over the fact that your mother and father aren't perfect people, et cetera, et cetera. But my mom was very, very strong. She had a deep spiritual sense, I think, herself, as an Episcopalian. And I think that it was very private. And I think she made peace. And I never felt she was bitter. How she did it, Mark, I'm not really sure. Well, mainly what we want to probably cover in this interview is how you did it and then, of course, how you're able to share that with other people. One thing that I note right away, though, is that it was in the 90s that you became a therapist. You're in your 20s already in 1961. 23, I think, at that point, you did some parenting along the way, I think, staying at home parenting. Did you have another job or application or other things before you felt called in the direction of therapy? Yeah, I mean, I was a volunteer and I was an activist first. I volunteered, you know, in relation to the civil rights movement. I protested against the Vietnam War. And, you know, I worked as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I was the youngest trustee, I think, that they ever had at that time when I was probably in my very early 30s, I became a trustee. And I took care of my kids. And I began to volunteer at school and take courses. And I thought to myself that I probably wanted to go into early childhood education. That was the first sort of way I was going to go. My marriage fell apart. And I think I really had a nervous breakdown because I could not bring together the requisites of the 50s how to be a perfect housewife. And a perfect mother and a perfect wife. And all the social disruption and breaking out and freeing away from these strict 50s expectations that were happening in the 70s. I was very struck by that. So I was pulled in all these different directions. I had not done any healing in relation to Michael, my twin brother. I had really repressed all of that. And finally, I just couldn't cope. And I became paralyzed and couldn't function. And so that's when I went into therapy was at that time where I think that the healing process you see in me was trying to activate itself. But my mother saying you couldn't cry. And then my therapist saying, you know, you're not really a twin. And it's been all these years. You need to start getting over this thing and moving on with your life. I kept getting repressed. My feelings kept getting shoved down. And the authority symbols of the world were telling me that my feelings weren't correct. And this is one of the major things in grieving is that anybody who has deep personal loss needs to move into respecting their own feelings. I wasn't able to do that. I did have the sense in reading the book that the psychologist who you went to for therapy, he was helpful in a number of ways in terms of sorting things on your life. It was in this one particular area of healing where he shut down one of the vital processes. Well, you know, what he was really helpful with was helping me to begin to get a sense of myself as an individual, to really be able to take care of myself, to know that I was safe within myself as being an individual human person. A sense of real worth inside myself that was going to help me to bring myself through the world. And I needed to get a sense of that in order to then really begin to believe that Michael was dead so that I could start to grieve. So he was wonderful in that. He helped me in relationship to this huge family that I belonged to. He didn't help me in relationship to being a twin. And I found that out myself. And when you read the book, you will see how I was able to slowly get a sense of myself as a twin and how the understanding that I had this enormous grief that needed to be expressed came about. And that's when I finally knew that I had to go somewhere safe in order to really connect with that grief and be held in some place where I could express that. We're talking about the book, Beginning with the End, A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing. My guest is Mary Rockefeller Morgan. And it was about her experience of losing her brother at the age of 23, way back in 1961. You are listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit Radio Production, our website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. On the website, you'll find our archives for the last seven plus years. You'll be able to listen to or download them. You can subscribe to our RSS feed. You can do that on iTunes. You can find the stations where we're broadcast. And you can give us feedback. And one of the ways you can do that is by posting comments. We love to hear from you so that our conversation is two-way. And you can also make donations via the website without your help. This work can't go forward. Again, we're speaking with Mary Rockefeller Morgan. Beginning with the End is the book and it's her website, BeginningWithTheEnd.com, is where you can read more, find more of her work because she's got a vital role in our society in helping with the healing, particularly the healing that twins need when they lose their other half. I was kind of amazed, Mary, as I learned about you and about your brother Michael, how different you were. He was such an outgoing, adventuresome type person. You were much quieter. Have you felt like as you did your healing that you became more of the outgoing that you... I don't think I was a quiet person. I mean, I know I wasn't a quiet person. Michael was able to embrace change and move forward into new experience without worry, with a kind of beautiful enthusiasm. Without worry, I was the fearful one who was always holding back where Michael would move forward. And I think twins are often like that. One is the front man and the other is the one that follows. You know why it is that I think of you as the quiet one at that point is because as you went with your father, Nelson Rockefeller, as you went with him over there, as you describe it, it sounds like not hardly a word came out of your mouth in that entire trip. You were obviously shell-shocked by what had happened, the fear and the loss, combining to close you down. So I had this whole sense of you in those chapters where you talk about that experience of you having been totally the quiet one. Well, I think you're absolutely right, though, Mark, and I think in that experience, I was so in shock that I really was very quiet in that. Well, I'm glad you found your voice sense then. Oh, yeah, and I think that anybody who knows me knows that I've always been... I mean, Michael and I had a very teasing kind of relationship in many ways, and we had a lot of fun that way. In school, I was often the naughty one, and I was dyslexic, and so, I mean, I was often outgoing. It was within a context that I felt safe in. What Michael really showed me was that you can move out into new frontiers and do that with enthusiasm. And I think that since he's died and I have healed, that one of the gifts of him in my life and the gifts of healing is that one reframes the relationship. You have to do your grieving to get to the place where you can reframe the relationship and claim it in a way in which it doesn't bring pain, and that's what this healing journey in the book is about. And the thing that's fascinating is that you were saying, you know, I was about to begin this whole issue of realizing that I had to be in relationship to this grief. And so I chose to go on this experience, which was going to really afford me three things that I have learned that for me were really key to healing. And that's what I had in this experience was a safe place with three -- there were actually three therapists. We went up into the San Juan mountains or the foothills of the San Juan mountains for a week in a meditation lodge, and then we went up into the wilderness of the San Juan mountains where I actually did a solo experience of four days in the wilderness by myself. But the point was that I was healing in connection with myself, allowing those feelings to finally come forward, meeting those in a place of safety, and then I was being able to share my story, not so much my twin story, which I didn't share until much later. Really, I shared my story in my book. That was the first time I really thoroughly shared my story, but still to be able to talk about my feelings, and then for me it was being able to be in connection with the natural world. And I think we forget about that, Mark. We forget about the fact that all of us are connected to the four elements around us all the time, and this feeling of disconnection was kind of met for me in nature. I was able to see that I wasn't disconnected, and I was able to see that in a very beautiful way. I went on this experience with a lot of trepidation. I didn't understand what they were doing. But my sister had trained with these psychologists. They were three psychologists. She trained to do the outdoor work that they were doing. She wanted to be a guide for this. And I was, frankly, so in need of support that I took the leap of faith to just go with the experience, even though I had never understood anything about what they were doing. Certainly my spiritual background did not prepare me for this. I grew up as going to church every Sunday. I was in a non-denominational church that my grandfather actually built in the town of Pecanico Hills, New York, and it was a non-denominational church. There really weren't that many northern Baptists around, and so it became a non-denominational church, and there was a Baptist minister. But my experience with Christianity at that time was very difficult. The message I got was that we all were sinners, and that we constantly had to ask forgiveness, and that Jesus was there to forgive us. But I didn't have a sense of Jesus as the loving Christ. I didn't have a sense that there was an unconditional love that was present for me in my life. Except for your dog. Why close your place to complete acceptance is there than an animal like a dog? I think that's absolutely right. And I really left the church when my children were very young, because I did not want to feel that in taking communion I had to first ask forgiveness for being a human being. That's the way I felt. So I left. And I really never went back to church until way, way later when I finally married a man who was deeply religious and Episcopal and the man I've been married to for 22 years. And I went to a Catholic church that was totally holistic in loving with him, because he couldn't find a church he wanted, and he had been going to this Catholic church. But then when we actually got married, I went to a Episcopal church with him that had a very loving minister. And even though I have trouble with the liturgy and all of that, I feel the love in that church. And it was through the experience, Mark, that I had outdoors, and through this process that they taught me of deep personal imagery that I came into a sense of a spiritual connection that is really deeply profound for me today. Clearly, the vision quest is certainly borrowing heavily from native approaches who talk about your animal guides. But of course, there are animal guides at each of your chakras, so it's kind of a mishmash of... Yeah, it was really, if you study Jung, what he does with what he calls active imagination, that is basically what we were doing. But what Steve Gallagos, Dr. Gallagos, and our listeners may not have any idea what we're talking about, so I'm really talking about it was an experience that they introduced me to, which is really like a waking dream. You're lying on the floor and you're relaxed, and the psychologist who was Steve Gallagos, Dr. Gallagos, invited us to place our attention on different places in our body and to invite an animal or an image to come forward. When somebody says that to you, my sister told me about this, I just said, "Well, that's a wonderful thing that's probably great for somebody else, but not for me." I said, "I don't understand. I'm not going to be able to get anything, and it just doesn't make any sense to me at all." But when I actually lay on the floor, and I just connected, let's say, with my heart, and an enormous elephant just appeared in my imagination. This elephant picked me up and cradled me in her trunk and just said that she was going to be there for me for the whole experience of my healing. That was a very touching thing. I then met a rabbit that was very interesting, and this rabbit came out and started dancing under the moon. This is in my imagination, but it's a waking dream. It's extraordinary. It's like you have a story, an integrative process within you. Everybody has this that comes forward in a narrative that helps to integrate unintegrated experience. Well, a death is a hugely unintegrated experience until you do your grieving journey. This rabbit came forward, and he was dancing under the moon, and I said, "Aren't you scared?" You better be careful because an owl will come out and get you. He said, "No, no, no." He said, "I'm friends with the devil of peace." That rabbit came in other imagery journeys, Mark, for seven years after this experience. One day in a journey that I took, that rabbit turned into Jesus. It was just unbelievable. It was as if my inner spirit knew that I could not be in relationship to a loving Christ until I experienced an introduction, which couldn't be in the form of Jesus. I have in this extraordinary work that I have done, and I've become not only a violent trained as a psychotherapist from Columbia University, and then I studied for six years to work with this imagery technique. It's been an absolutely extraordinary tool to use, and some people can't work with imagery in the beginning. They have so many safety issues inside themselves. They're very afraid to listen inside. The twins I worked with, they were all very, what we call, left-brained, and they were very in their reasoning minds, and so they weren't ready at all to work with the imagery. I worked with them for a year before I even began to introduce them to the imagery. When I did, it was the most extraordinary healing thing for them. But for me, once I found that with people, and mainly for myself, that as I have become stronger as a person, as I have become more integrated as a person, as I've seen and been able to really accept people as who they are and not people of my expectations, the imagery work I do becomes more and more spiritual. That's been my path. I feel very, very blessed to have had that experience and to be able to offer it to other people. But again, you know, this is, I believe that there are so many paths to spirituality, and that there are so many of us in this world. And I've actually met, it's really fascinating Mark, I've met Mohammed, I've met Moses, I've met Buddha, they've come to me in journeys. They all have the most extraordinary wise things to say for me to work with. I don't know whether this is important, but for me, I feel really connected to a larger place from which I came forth into this world. And then when I die, I will go back to that large place. That place holds the love of Christ and the promise of Christ, who came, I feel, who came to show us that we belong in a larger concept. When we're separated from that, from the beauty of who we truly are, then that separation is what I call sin. You know, I want to ask you how this connection that you have to spirituality now, how that relates to your connection to therapy. Way back at the beginning, when you were talking about sitting on the floor, talking to the twins after the twin towers. When you're sitting and talking on the floor and you're talking about your personal connection to them, my antennas were going up. I have a wife who is also a psychotherapist, and there's very clear strictures. This is what you can or can't share as a therapist. You don't talk about your experience. You just say wise things to them, and you can guide them in imagery, but you certainly better not share your images. That kind of thing. I have a sense that even your initial experience with the psychologist who guided you rightly in some ways and wrongly in others, that he was acting from a patriarchal point of view, whereas I would suggest that perhaps your way of approaching it is more matriarchal, that you actually need to do grieving, that you actually need to open up and heal, whereas men suck it up and keep on marching. Well, I think that's absolutely true, and one of the most touching things for me possible. Maybe it's because I had a twin brother, but I get along very well with men in terms of being a friend. Do you know what I mean? I have some blessed thing that it's easy for me to become friends with men. But most touching thing of all for me is the letters I've gotten and the people who have spoken to me who have read the book who are men. And men grieve, and they need to grieve, and they have different ways of grieving, and we all have different ways of grieving. I'll never forget the man who told me that he grieved by running. Some people grieve by writing a journal. Lots of people grieve by crying. That's the way they express their emotions. It's the expression of your feelings that are important, but they have to take place in a very personalized way. And I think that as a therapist, it was interesting something you said because I believe that I am there more as a Sherpa to walk the path of that person's growing and healing. I have the tools I've been on a path myself so I can help to guide them. But what am I really trying to do? I'm helping them to come into their own power, their own sense of worth. It's not me being the powerful one. It's me introducing them into their own power. That's what I'm all about as a healer. I don't want to go all patriarchal on you, but one of the questions that I end up having and that I think needs to be answered is this healing work that you do with twins. How do you know it makes a difference? Typically, patriarchal point of view, I want the statistics on it, right? How many people you can heal or how do I know that they're actually better? That's a great question. This is another reason why I think research has to be done. I still meet with my twins. We have reunions, so I can kind of track what's happening with them. Also, I can watch as they progress within the journey of the therapy itself. I think there's no question that we're always going to run into problems and we're always going to have buttons pushed in us that are going to activate old maladaptive patterns of feeling from our childhood that we're going to have to be able to be so aware of and have had enough strength built into ourselves that we can really move and deal with that. There's another book that might be coming out about Michael. There was a horrible play in New York last year. I don't really even want to say the title of it because it was so shocking to me and very exploitative of Michael and of our family. There are reminders which hit me and then I have to sit with the fact that Michael is much bigger than his death and that I have met the circumstances of his death. I have met the places where I have had enormous sense of guilt in relationship to being the one that survived or that I wasn't able to be there with him when he died. As I felt I was meant to be as I was born in since conception next to him. I have to sit and breathe into that and to feel the fact that I am now able to take advantage of our whole relationship. Then I breathe into that and this old place where I start moving into that kind of cellular pain again begins to dissipate. Again, this is all in Mary Rockefeller Morgan's book beginning with the end, "A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing." She's here with us today for spirit and action to talk about her process of healing personally herself and how she's been able to pass that on to others. The number of twins including those who lost a twin in that calamity. She's been able to help the world heal through a specific bond that she has with a twin that she lost. I did have a couple other threads that I'd like to follow. One of them particularly is this whole emergence of yourself as a young woman 23 in 1961 and then the 60s hits. You're already in a family, the Rockefellers, which has a political connection. At that point I've heard it said recently that probably Richard Nixon was more liberal than Bill Clinton. The parties have drifted quite a ways from where they originally were. Women's roles have changed so much and the ability of women to have their voice. I specifically appreciate you finding your voice. I'm partly seeing a generational change that happened. Being part of a political family, part of coming out of the 60s. I just wondered if you have any insights about the change in the political times to activists. What's it like being an activist in a politically prominent Republican family? Well, don't forget my father was very moderate. There are very few Rockefeller "Republicans" and I asked him because I became a Democrat after Nixon and Kennedy arrived on the scene. I asked why he wasn't a Democrat and he told me that it was because he felt that Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party and held the values that he adhered to. This was his party and that he believed very deeply in being a Republican incorporating those values. He fought against this very, very conservative side of the party that was coming in starting in 1964 with Goldwater. That's why I think in a funny way it made it possible for a lot of us in our generation to become Democrats because the party started getting very, very conservative and the moderate Republicans that felt sympathetic to the things we were sympathetic to just weren't there anymore. So a great number of my generation have become Democrats. Our conversation isn't really about Republicans and Democrats because it's about healing and it's about loss and that just affects everybody. It doesn't matter what your politics are. We all have this in common and we all need to hold hands in relationship to our grieving. And I think that I wasn't really so interested in politics as I was interested in the social agenda and the women's movement had an enormous impact on me. Is it your sense that therapy from the 60s versus now has, I guess, maybe thrown off many of its patriarchal shackles and embraces both a male and female or maybe even more towards the female experience of openness healing as opposed to the stiff upper lip of the patriarchal society? Is it your sense that it's transitioned a lot in your life? I think it has. I think it's become much more eclectic. I think people are using the theoretical stances of different therapists, actually allowing that to integrate within themselves so that they can then become a therapist that utilizes a lot of these different thoughts and feelings, but they come upon their own healing technique. I think that's more possible to do now than it was before. There still are the traditions that one studies and some schools are much more psychodynamically oriented, let's say, much more geared to Freudian thinking. But you know, a lot of these being challenged and there's a lot that I don't know, especially seeing as I'm on sabbatical right now. There is one more question that I think our listeners will deserve an answer to. If they do know of someone or if they are someone who has experienced twin loss, what are the resources that they should be going to? Where should they be going to be guided through the kind of healing that will specifically address their special needs? One place that they could go right away is that the Twinless Twins Support Group International. They can go on my website, www.beginningwithann.com and see the section on resources and that will take them right to that organization. All they need to do is click on it. It's a wonderful organization that supports twins, has a huge conference. I work there every summer doing group therapy and crisis intervention and some individual therapy, but mostly group therapy and talks and there are lots of other people who come. It's just wonderful and the twins get to be together because they know each other and in knowing each other, they are able to share and begin their healing. So that's good. There's also regional groups that are part of this larger Twinless Twins Support Group International. I wish I could say that there are more therapists who understand about twins, but we're in that sort of groundbreaking place now. But the silence is gone because we have the wonderful Google that we can just Google, Twin Loss and lots of things will come up. And then I think it's important, as I said, one of the most important things you can do is to immediately believe in your feelings. As a twin, believe in who you are and what you feel. If you feel you need to go to a therapist, find a therapist who is willing to work with you around what you feel. If that therapist tries to talk you out of what you feel, don't go there anymore. Find a therapist who's interested in reading about twins. I have stuff that they can read that will help them to understand who they are and what's going to help them move forward. I would love to suggest that twins read my book to give them a sense of hope and a sense of what the issues are for them. But the most important thing is to be present for your feelings, to have faith in yourself and who you are, to know and believe that once you're a twin you're always twin and nobody's going to take that relationship away from you. And healing does not mean giving up your twin or giving up your loved one. It means letting go of the physical presence of them in your life. Then we can reframe what we have. And again, a good first step is to get Mary Rockefeller Morgan's book Beginning with the End, A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing. You can find it from her site, beginningwiththeend.com. Find links there, you'll find other resources. Mary, it's so wonderful that you shared this. Actually, it's inspirational that you went through the healing and then you found your application working for the healing of twins. This special gift that you have that comes out of your loss. Thank you so much for doing that work and for joining us for Spirit and Action. I feel privileged to have had this time to talk to you, Mark. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing also. It's really beautiful. Thanks again, Mary. Today's Spirit and Action guest was Mary Rockefeller Morgan. And I'll send you out with a song on pain and healing by one of my favorite musicians. Someone we've had with us for the song of the soul program, Bob Frankie. The song is healing in this night. See you next week for Spirit in Action. There are songs that never ask you anything. There are strings that beat against the wood. There are songs that ease the singer's heart to sing. And that's good. But there are words that change the way you look at things. There are sounds that silence I'll talk about. And there are songs that circle in your mind and seek your heart and find it and seize it like a hawk. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. There are trials that trick you into loneliness. There are tears that burn until they fall. There are knees that tear you when you turn away when they call. But there are hearts that hold you when you've done your best. For the love will leave within their life. And there are friends to hear if you should cry. To pray if you should die. And there are songs that sing us all. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. ♪ There have been times when working for my sanity. In my mind I've seen the only one. There have been days when no one seemed to understand what I'd done. But there are ears to hear me in my softest voice. There are hands to hold and point the way. And there are men and women on this path to laugh if I should laugh. To find me if I stray. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. There is a healing in this night. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)