Three cases of experiencing the world as a dangerous or unfulfilling place.
If one can find a common word for the three cases presented below, then it is “inadaptation”. Adjusting to the world, going with the flow is not at hand for anyone. Sometimes, inadaptation can express as soon as right after birth or later on in life, as a response to inherent challenges, such as the separation of parents or the quest for one’s individuality during teenage years. And even later, as an adult, a more or less common event can reveal an inherent inability to face life and trigger an apparently “absurd” suite of panic attacks.
In a psychiatry ward, all three cases would have “normally” been dealt with using antidepressants, sedatives, anxiolytics or other chemical ways of influencing the functioning of the brain, leading to adverse effects or dependence. This is a demonstration of how you can help someone to regain his lost balance without such costs on health and how homeopathy acts.
Emma, 20 months
When Emma’s mother contacted me she said she needs to consult because the child was having “inconsolable weeping” and inconsolable weeping indeed is what I met since she ( mother and child altogether as if still forming one body) entered my room. In fact, it was rather a shrieking, with the child clinging to her mother in a way that made it clear one shouldn’t even consider separating them. I didn’t even get to see her face, as it was deeply burrowed into her mother’s shoulder. Her mother was miserable. She told me the situation started immediately after birth so that the parents could from afar identify their daughter’s cry in the maternity ward among other newborns’s and the only thing that calmed her was breastfeeding. At 6 weeks she started to have gastrointestinal reflux and this affected her weight gain. Along with that, a stubborn constipation developed. Later on, this shrieking didn’t subside, the girl reacting in this manner to all people approaching her, including her grandparents. It looked as if her only haven was the mother. Sometimes, the mother said, the child was crying until becoming cyanotic.
I asked the mother what had been her state of mind during pregnancy and she told me she felt as if under a negative energy from her boss, yet I could not gather some other valuable information. I have to admit at the end of this consultation I was having a difficult time deciding on a remedy: was that a refusal to enter the world, a case of Hydrogenium? Was that Lachesis, carrying the delusion of the mother of being under a superhuman control? Was that Pulsatilla, with her clinging to the mother and forsakenness attitude? Or was that Cuprum, with its cramping all over attitude?
In the din created by her shrieking I decided to give Cuprum: her forceful clinging, to the mother as well as the fixed attitude to the world, not letting it go, her stubborn constipation, blueness , her altogether defensiveness towards anyone coming from outside ( the mother being still considered as oneself), all these symptoms made sense under the picture of Cuprum metallicum. I decided for one dose of 200 CH.
Follow up at 2 weeks: A neat change is to be seen. She enters the room holding her mother’s hand and wanders around. I can now see her face, as she is observing me and accepting me and my environment. The mother says she is starting to communicate with others at home as well, accepting their presence. I advise her to repeat the dose.
Follow up after another 2 weeks: The child is totally changed and she happily enters my room pointing towards the toys corner. Her mother tells me how she now accepts others and is even able to go to kindergarten. Parents are happy and relieved, no more noise in their tired years, and finally a normal family with a normal social life!
Adrian, 23 years
The appointment was taken by his mother, along with a long email in which she complained about her son, basically about his idleness and his addiction to alcohol. She told me she divorced when the boy was 8 and she felt this changed him making him not confident about himself. Despite trying to overcome the father’s absence, she feels she cannot have a quality relation with the boy; after finishing college, he had entered several faculties but never finished any study and doesn’t express a particular interest; he spends his days at the computer, doesn’t have a girlfriend and never succeeded in finding one, gained weight and drinks alcohol.
The day he came in I met a nicely looking young man, with beautiful blue eyes, a little overweight, trying to find a middle way attitude between boldness and submissiveness. Discontented with his life, his mother and himself. Asked about what fields appeal to him he mentioned “personal development” (one of the most mineral statements). Indeed, he further mentioned a feeling of inadequacy, he suffers that “girls don’t like me”, yet he thinks his problems come from his mother, too anxious for his taste, that had shaped him in a form not liked by his peers, especially girls. All these point to the third row of the table of elements, where one has to confront his peers and needs to be accepted, to be part of the community. The mother had written me beforehand that entering the teen years had been the turning point to him, and this also fits the third row. His reaction to this perception was retiring into non-activity, idleness, laziness; yet he goes even further, into alcohol, because the drug gives him what he finds real life does not: confidence, a sense of acceptance, an alternative.
Drug remedies offer an escape, as Peter Fraser beautifully expresses in his book. They (the patients) usually enter the world of drugs trying to escape a reality where they feel unhappy for various reasons. Adrian is retiring into alcohol and also smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, while wandering into the virtual world of the internet.
This was one of the cases where I decided to give two remedies: one dose of Alcoholum 1M followed by 3 weekly doses of Sulphuric acid 200 CH. Not only because I couldn’t decide which to give but because I saw both pictures superimposed in the same person. I called him a month later. He never came back (the Sulphur component!). Yet his mother kept in touch with me giving me the feedbacks: Three weeks after he started the treatment he went into a series of states in which he said “he felt unwell” so he decided not to go further with the treatment and not to come back to me ( the Sulphur element again), yet he went out from the idleness, was hired and did such a good job that people at work decided to keep him, which made him feel good and appreciated – the wheel of accomplishment went off. He still drank when on a night out with friends, but managed to get off to work in the morning.
Months later a common acquaintance gave me a happy feedback from him even if I wasn’t able to go further into his treatment and look for further details about his inner sense of wellbeing. Yet sometimes, we as homeopaths find ourselves only as the impulse someone needs at a certain point in his life to go on his path and we should be very content with that.
Liana, 38 years
Liana is a tastefully fit, colourfully dressed and accessorised young woman coming from a small province (the detail is to be taken into account as people in small towns here are far less well outfitted but not her). She was full of life and had already taken homeopathic remedies for a year, in high dilutions, bringing her some relief, yet since a month ago, her initial state had come back. She is having panic attacks “feeling she is about to die”, mostly in the evening when she goes to bed. Going out, in the open air ameliorates the state. She is afraid her child is going to die. This all started a year and a half ago when the child of a friend died all of a sudden at the age of 6. She rationally can’t grasp how this can happen and feels as if an impending ill fate would be able to strike at any moment her life too, and take her child. Asked further she tries to describe that panic state “as if I would have to take a life and death decision , as if I am in a no-way-out situation”.
A reputable homeopath I highly appreciate had given her Argentum nitricum 200CH (she also has fear of heights) yet the relief had been inconstant. I also felt that the remedy didn’t fit yet and I was trying to get a satisfactory picture of her estate while also having a feeling of deja-vu. But where had I met such a picture?! Giving the patient enough time to expose her feelings, to make her dig deeply into herself, to make her gain confidence in the homeopath, all this is vital. Letting her speak, listening to her carefully and unbiased, after almost an hour it suddenly (!) struck me: I took the third volume of Rajan Sankaran’s Reptiles and got the confirmatory picture – the lady in front of me was almost word by word expressing the feelings in Maiasaura lapidea one of the two dinosaurs proved ( the other one is Tyrannosaurus Rex) : the feeling of an impending terrible event that is going to take your life or what is the most precious to you, and you don’t know what to do: should you run, or hide or fight and where is that danger?
I gave her one dose of 200 CH and recommended she come back in a month.
The following is no homeopathic fairy tale, but real life practice: we do not have this remedy in Romania, so I recommended her to buy it from a pharmacy abroad online. She conformed, only she also started to do her own research “on the internet” . So when she found out I had given her …what? a dinosaur?! she found it strange and inacceptable and she didn’t take the dose. Now, this happened to me before with, for instance, Carcinosinum and is simply a confirmatory sign for the remedy because if a patient has such strong prejudices or repulsion against a substance it’s because it has something that relates to it and it’s simply the other face of the same coin (attractions have the same value as aversions).
On the other hand, it is a strong evidence that we, as homeopaths, should not expose information about the remedies on the internet, where the access is not filtered by the competence and ability of a thorough understanding. This at least gets lay to people refuse to take a treatment that would highly benefit them and at the most turn up against the homeopath according to their understanding of the remedies.
Anyway, after half a year I asked my secretary to call her and see how she is doing and she said she is now fine, not having those panic attacks any more. If this is placebo, transfer, autosuggestion or simply that manipulating the remedy had already benefitted her (I had had two such cases before), I do not know. The story that she related to me during the consultation remains as a beautiful and very rare embodiment of a proving that has to be kept in mind. Also as an impressive proof that we, as humans, are not disconnected from this Universe but on the contrary intimately linked to everything that happens or happened before us, resonating, living and transmitting pieces of “vécu” as part of our lineage.
