Anger has been a bit of a theme in my practice recently. I find anger--or the lack of it--to be a major issue in the of treatment of depression. I had one patient tell me she had been depressed all her life, admitting to having suicidal thoughts around it. LIfe for her had been overwhelming, and sometimes her response was to say “it’s not worth it.”
I gave her a remedy and kept close watch on her. Her response about 3 days after her homeopathic prescription came via email:
My mood is different. Less hopeless. More pissed off. Definitely not wanting to die. More wanting to kill someone.
...Sometimes I patiently sort through things and get to what needs to be looked at and done, and other times I want to light it all on fire and have a bonfire. All over the map...
What does that tell you? Definitely something is shifting. Hang on and put on your seatbelt.
What does this tell me? It tells me that there has been a dramatic release of life energy, i.e. I made a good prescription; wait and watch.
Sometimes I become part of a patient’s inner drama, with the anger directed at me. The reason for the anger is not the main issue. Mistakes, delays, frustrations occasionally occur. What is important is the patient’s perception of what has occurred. Invariably, if there is a dramatic unleashing of anger towards me after taking a remedy, it is an important step in the treatment of the patient. I take a close look at the words the patient uses and the feelings they express. If they match the remedy I gave, and the person was previously in a place of inhibited life force, this is a beautiful sign.
What is depression? In my practice depression can lead to hundreds of different prescriptions. In this sense 'depression' is a vague term. Is it a mental or physical disease? Or is it both?
A patient once told me
It seems impossible to separate the fatigue and lack of interest and discouraging feeling.
Everything I have seen in my practice suggests that separating the emotional and the physical is a convenience rather than a truth. If there is a depression at the level of the mind; there is a depression at the level of the body. I feel it fair to say that the life force is inhibited in the depressed patient. Exactly what is inhibiting the life force is different in every case, but to treat depression deeply, this is essential for me to know. My task is to see exactly the state in which this suppression of the life force exists.
To take a closer look at this, let me explain the initial case--the patient ready to light a bonfire--in more depth. The remedy I gave her was Formica rufa, the ant. The words of the state of ant are “helpless,” “dependent,” “crushed,” “imprisoned,” “put down,” “humiliated,” and such. People who exist in the ant state might be described as feeling as if they are a prisoner of war, dependent on their captor for food, water, and shelter in enemy territory, and yet terrified of being crushed and annihilated by them at the same time. They feel like a slave, forced to work by the more powerful entity, who is ready to crush them at the first sign of rebellion or exhaustion. In this state, people naturally tend to suppress their anger. This suppression can manifest as a low-grade depression, or even turn into an all-out suicidal depression under certain conditions.
After I gave her the ant in homeopathic potency, there was a dramatic release of energy in the form of anger. This concept of “life force” is an extremely important idea. Hahnemann, the founder of classical homeopathy, felt that all disease was the result of a mistuned life force. In other words, all disease comes about because something is inhibiting or binding the life force, and one way the homeopath traces this is through the patient’s peculiar beliefs and notions, as they express themselves through both mind and body.
It was a bad day for medicine when science rejected “life force” as a false idea, replacing it instead with a mechanical understanding of the universe. The result is that, if your doctor adheres to strict biomedical technique, he diagnoses and treats you in a similar way to how a mechanic diagnoses and fixes a lawnmower. The idea of a "mechanical universe" is a prejudice that most scientific disciplines have doggedly held on to. Fortunately, we do not have to agree with science.
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