Addiction is a case in point Working with addictive tendencies emphasises that talk and comprehension are not enough. E-motions that literally move us to tears, shake us with fear or curl us up in mortification are required. We are looking for the movement. Feelings are not enough.
Addiction is a case in point
Working with addictive tendencies emphasises that talk and comprehension are not enough. E-motions that literally move us to tears, shake us with fear or curl us up in mortification are required. We are looking for the movement. Feelings are not enough.
When Phil is suffering from withdrawal from addiction, his felt-sense of being precarious, needing to hold on, to do anything, drink himself to death rather than fall, took us to the movement of the remedy most homeopathic to him at that time, or so it seemed to me: Descent into self loathing, disgust and absolute contempt: Falling and fear of falling.
Lac Caninum has a sense of floating in air. The body is a loathsome, dirty thing to inhabit.
The journey of twelve steps
The ’12 steps programme’ for recovery from addiction, can be seen in the light of heroic tasks needing to be undertaken before a cycle of an inner transforming journey is completed. The programme involves being sponsored by a guide or mentor who, as in archetypal stories, has gone before on the journey, and can therefore now offer protection along the way. To change the fixed pattern of addiction we get alongside the other, walk the way with them. We do something; go out on a limb. It is easy to lose our way without a guide; to be waylaid, like Manawee, by oral satisfactions that distract us from our task; both filling us up and leaving us empty.
Phil is a good patient at this point and a good twelve stepper. He stays with the programme. He stays with the remedy. Like a tame dog, he doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him. He walks along the ledge, holding on by his finger tips at times, not looking down into the abyss. What is down there Phil?
In order to follow patients recovering from addiction, I need my guides; both the civilising maps and wild instinctual nature expressed in dreams and images. The dog expresses for me both wild nature and the way back home. Dogs are loyal pet animals as well as their wolvish selves. They guard the door between the known and risky, unknown, shadow worlds. I am stepping into the scary world of the recovering addict. In getting alongside my patient I am very glad to have the dog alongside me. These connections are made, ‘the dream of practice is woken up to’ in my regular conversations with my peer supervisor and in my own self supervisions walking my own companion dog along the cliff paths near my home. Phil’s case and the dog’s story echoes through the landscape. And in my wanderings I wonder where in Phil’s case is the wild nature, the dog as wild wolf?
Hands
Another patient, a young teenager born to a woman using heroin, had the peculiar symptom of not being able to stand her fingers to touch each other. She had very low self esteem, anorexia and a ‘hang dog’ expression. She recovered her spirits with Lac Canium and went on to express herself as a white faced, black clothed gothic beauty. She was ‘wolf whistled’ wherever she went.
Rajan Sankaran (2002) in referring to ‘Non Human Specific’ signs and symptoms, says these always involve movement. He focuses on the hand gesture in homeopathic consultation. The hands have a special importance in world mythology:
(Hands are) “those parts of our bodies that are like two small human beings in and of themselves. In olden times, the fingers were likened to legs and arms and the wrist joint to the head. Those beings can dance, they can sing.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes p 408
And from the same book, discussing the meanings of the myth of the Handless Maiden
(The devil has ordered the father to cut off the hands of his daughter.) …
“We can understand the removal of psychic hands in much the same way the symbol was understood by the ancients. In Asia, the celestial axe was used to cut one away from the unillumined self……(By) cutting off her hands, the father deepens the descent, hastens the ‘disolutio’, the difficult loss of all one’s dearest values, which means everything, the loss of vantage point, the loss of horizon lines, the loss of one’s bearings about what one believes and for what reason….When we say a woman’s hands are cut off, we mean she is bound away from self-comfort, from immediate self-healing, so very helpless to do anything except follow the age-old path.”
The hands express the elemental story, the one telling what it is drives us. Phil in recovery clings onto the path with his hands to prevent the fall. In the case of the young Goth girl, Lac Canium cannot bear the fingers of the hands to touch each other. They are the ‘little body’ she cannot bear to inhabit.
Dis-easing is pointed up to us in signs, symptoms and body language, gesture and posture. It is also pointed up in dreams, fantasies and illusions, cravings and aversions. Fine feeling helps us differentiate, characterise, get alongside, empathise. To play on this surface though is not enough. We have to get on down into the depths, go fishing for pearls.
Phil is an ‘expert’ in addiction. He knows all the wily ways of it. He’s no-body’s fool when it comes to that. He knows what to do to beat it. To be good. To be recovered. To be a model ex-addict. Only a fool would look down into the abyss. Yet what is this? Phil is so angry. Punches the wall. Doesn’t dare have a relationship. Yearns for family life, to belong. Cowers from it as from poisoned wine.
The Wolf and the Mad dog
The image that arose for me in relationship to Phil, was a landscape in which the wolf would have been very much at home. A bleak and snowy terrain hiding warm earth, fireside and friendship. The wolf’s story is quite different from the dog’s. The dog knows there is something wrong with him. He has lost his way. The focus is on the body. The dog is not aware of his ‘psychic captivity’ in the way the wolf is. The wolf however knows there is something wrong with the world – it has lost its way. (Assilem – Lac Lupinum)
Phil continued to recover from his addiction to alcohol, uncovering as he did a terrible rage. This both relieved and terrified him. The remedy Lyssin (saliva of rabid dog ) came in here as he railed against those he fancied himself dependent upon – including me. Missed appointments, turning up late, catatonic silences all characterised this period. It would be so easy to lose the way at this point. Holding the dog before us kept us on track. We literally nosed along.
I needed to bring Phil’s case to supervision regularly so that I wasn’t tempted to persecute him for his ‘bad behaviour’ and could see that this was his healing aggravation and not to take it on personally, however tempting it was at times to react against him.
No longer the beaten and tame dog but the mad and maddened creature, caught by the tail and spun by the devil. Wild nature through a toxic screen. Not for Phil the lone grandeur of the howling wolf. His wildness when it first came was expressed as mad dog. He did however stay the course. He did come to remember his name. He did look down into the abyss, he fell into his pain and not into alcohol, and he did return to tell his tale. In homeopathic terms, he aggravated after decades of suppression, and was all the better for it.
He went on to tell his tale to young addicted men in prison. He turned it around he told them: Turn yourself as Victim into vulnerable. Turn yourself as Persecutor into potent. Turn your need to be Rescued into being reflective and into taking responsibility. He mentored them. Phil turned from patient to mentor and later on to supervisor of other AA mentors. And throughout this journey he became more of Phil the wild and the civilised and less and less Phil the tamed and shamed. Hats off to Phil. A dogged traveller if ever there was one.
Inquiring within – self supervision
To work at the level of what I am calling here e-motion, requires of us a willingness to get interested. To get really interested, in ourselves as well as the other. To ‘wake up’ to our wild and instinctual, artistic and poetic, risk taking and courageous selves as well as to our more rational-technical knowings. Because we can only know others at the level we know ourselves.
Vital practice
We know what the matter is really, but sometimes it is very hard to witness. We prefer to tell all sorts of stories instead -
“It’s because of this and that.”
“It happened so long ago and can’t be changed now.”
” I can’t change it without them doing something first”
” I don’t remember.”
” It isn’t me it’s this wretched illness…..”
We come to the healing arts for witness; to stay on track, to retrace our steps, to re-connect with our e-motions, to hear our elemental stories in the echo between story teller and active listener….
I am a beaten dog
Who has forgotten the wolf
Who has lost his way
Who is holding on
Who is falling away
What is my name?
The three questions
We came in with three questions. They have weaved their way through our stories.
1. Are some people healers and others not?
There are no healers only healing relationship our stories have replied. There is only the way we relate to the healing archetype; to the dissolving of separation through compassionate inquiry -
“How is it for you?”
There is only the moment.
What is the quality of my presence in this moment?
How does my presence contribute to healing or not?
2. Do we think we can heal anyone but ourselves?
Healing is a self healing project comes the reply.
How do I move in relationship to myself?
To you?
To the world around me?
With self knowledge comes knowledge of the other,
Comes union with the other,
Comes Healing.
3. What is the difference between healing and curing diseases?
Diseases are their own story we are told.
They come with their own life force.
We are asked to listen and to respond not to interrupt and to fix or suppress.
We listen to the story of disease written in signs, symptoms, sensation and motion.
We listen with respect, with unconditional acceptance.
Where are we at ease? Where do we feel the separation between ‘I’ and ‘my?’
What is the nature of the dis-ease?
What is it like?
What in the world is it like?
A barking dog?
A mad dog?
A howling wolf?
Disease is its own healing we are told.
Sheila Ryan 2009. Adapted from Vital Practice stories from the healing arts: The homeopathic and supervisory way (2004) Sea Change
ISBN 0-9547867-0-X
References
Assilem M 1997 Lac Lupinum presentation Society of Homeopaths Annual Conference
Balint M 1959 Thrills and Regressions. London Hogarth Press
Carroll M 2001 description of the ‘supervisory life’ p78. ‘The Spirituality of Supervision’ in Integretative Approaches to Supervision JKP
Da Masio A 2003 Looking For Spinoza Heinemann
Graves R 1955 The Greek Myths Penguin
Hahnemann S 1842 Organon of Medicine 6th edition Homeopathic Publications New Delhi.
Norland M 1998 ‘ A few thoughts about receiving the case.’ The Homeopath No.69 Spring p.10
Pinkhola Estes C 1992 Women Who Run With The Wolves Rider
Ryan S 2002 ‘What’s in a Case?’ in The Homeopath No.85 Spring.pp13 – 17.
Sankaran R 2002 An Insight into Plants Vol 1. Homeopathic Medical Publishers Mumbai
Sher J 2002 Dynamic Materia Medica: Syphilis Dynamis Books
Tyler M 1952 2nd ed. Homeopathic Drug Pictures C.W.Daniel
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Sheila Ryan
