I enjoy treating adolescents, because to give them a deep-acting homeopathic remedy changes the rest of their life. They often come into my office dressed angrily, ill at ease in their own bodies and in the world. One of my more interesting cases recently came dressed entirely in black, with an occasional skull and cross bones. He stared at me sullenly, wondering why he was here. His mother, of course, dragged him in to see me. He had been suicidal.
I asked him what bothered him. He told me:
Memories that are plaguing me.
People know things about me that I don’t really want them to.
Things that I don’t really want to talk about.
Then he went immediately to his dreams:
My dreams, in most of them I die. I am hacked into little tiny pieces by pirates. I’m somewhere and being shot. Various ways of dying. Maybe falling off of a really tall building.
I asked him what happened in these dreams where he died.
I go through all the pain that would come with the dying. It goes black and I go into a different dream.
I asked him about the dream of the pirates.
I was in a pirate's ship. They found out that I was there and hung me up in the ropes on the deck. Cut me open. It happened a bunch of times. I bleed and fall down, go back to things as usual. Another time, they put me up and sliced open my throat. I was only hanging by a vertebra. The 'me' that was up in the ropes fell down and died. Then I was another person. I didn’t feel much. I didn’t really feel them slicing me open. After I fell down they hacked me into tiny pieces.
Is it surprising he is depressed? No. Most important, look at the form his depression is taking. Every depression is something exactly specific to itself.
Later in the case, I asked him directly about his nature. He told me,
I have a tendency to forget things that matter, like schoolwork.
Things that have been traumatizing in one shape or form
Notice this word traumatizing. It is the key to the entire case. I asked him to tell me more about trauma.
I guess it’s something that happens in a way that you can’t forget. To me it was just traumatizing the way it happened and why.
This brings us back to his chief complaint, about the memories that plagued him. These memories he directly related to trauma. It was a strange, illogical jump. How would we know this without sitting in front of him and seeking to understand his experience, carefully asking him what he felt? It was important to find out specifically what trauma meant to him. He said
The medical aspect of it is a big head injury. Emotional trauma, something that has happened in such away that it hurts.
How does it hurt?
Kind of that burning pain. It’s almost like I want to take a spoon and gouge out that part of my brain that makes me remember.
Not surprising that at the physical level he had a tendency to hurt himself. He would reach a point where the pain would be so much he would hit his head against the wall or even cut himself. When he felt hurt by other people, he wanted to punch them. This is simply the outer reflection of the inner sense of being injured.
His entire case was about injury and trying to manage the pain of a wound. It made no difference whether he was talking about emotional or physical. To him, trauma at the emotional level or physical level were essentially the same. Thus, the physical plane punching or bruising intersected his deep consciousness in the idea of “injury” or “trauma.”
Many people are familiar with the remedy Arnica, from the daisy family, which is used to treat bruises. Arnica is a remedy for trauma. If you fall and hit your knee on a rock, causing a big bruise, taking a dose of Arnica will likely cause the bruise to disappear quickly. Other remedies in the daisy family treat injury and trauma as well. The remedy I gave this young man was a plant from the daisy family, Echinacea prepared homeopathically in the 200th dilution. This is the purple coneflower. Echinaceae has been a hot topic around treatment and prevention of the common cold. The herbal use of Echinacea has never impressed me. However for a case like this one, in homeopathic form, it is a different story.
This patient came back a month later and his entire energy had changed. He was one of those cases that you could tell from the moment he entered the office that something deep had shifted. He had a new lightness and reported to me that he had been happy since taking the remedy. His speech and dreams notably contained much less much less violence. This is the wonder of homeopathy.
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