Petiveria alliacea

A girl of sixteen has had a lot of trouble with headache for a year now. A year earlier she responded well to Mygale; there was a lot of tension at home, quarrels and fights between father and brothers. Theme: threat, tension; the father has a blood disease, which gives a lot of tension and insecurity. The brothers are restless and aggressive, the father has many side effects from the heavy medication, which makes him very changeable.
The severe pain has now been there for four months, and increases every month.
Two weeks before menstruation the pain begins, and lasts until after the flow, a very heavy pressure on the forehead, sometimes on the vertex. It usually comes in the afternoon, together with abdominal pain and nausea. She is vague, answers with ‘I don’t really know’, evades, gigglingly, lets mother tell. She is expectant, receptive and soft.
At the weekend she goes out for the first time, occasionally uses alcohol, thinks it ‘normal’, and is astonishingly proud of it, as if she did not experience it herself, but as if it is a fantasy or a stray thought of someone else. In general she talks about facts as if it is more a proposal than a reality, partly because she wants to withdraw from any accountability and adulthood, partly because she is really not in reality. She does her best to live up to the image of a teenager, but regularly searches for what and how she will say and do something, so transparently that it is just as if she does not know her role. On two occasions she told her parents that she did not know what had happened, after she had stayed the night at a party, whereupon she was given a morning-after pill to be safe.
Her sleep is abnormal, she tells this as if it is an achievement, that for the last month she wakes every two hours, after which it takes a while before she falls asleep again. When I ask her to tell a dream, she lights up, is suddenly a child again, animated, and tells: ‘I had a shop and got a note, which said that I had to pay a fortune, otherwise I’ll kill you’. Her happy version of this story suggests that she likes to have something special to tell, in order to have an identity.
She saw a psychologist last year, to talk about the home situation. Looking for more self-confidence; she is still a plaything for the brothers. She always takes the bait, her father tells. She bites her nails. She thinks she is too fat, because she used to be bullied by her brothers. Last year a family friend died. She went to a new school; at the previous one a friend was bullied. Father, with great hesitation, calls her naive, unable to see connections; he is clearly protective and does not know whether she can place his remarks,
Analysis: She is clearly not ‘present’ in herself, lets herself be led by coincidences, a plaything of the brothers and the circumstances, looking on, without realizing that and what she is all going through. She experiences it all, without really being there, without really being a participant in the world. Naive, giggly, between child and teenager, not knowing how to live and not realizing that she does this.
The dream seems to tie in with that: her identity, the shop, the exchange with the world, is made impossible to maintain, because the price that is asked is too great, out of proportion, beyond her capacity.AnalysisThe home situation is still inaccessible, she is insecure, comes across as confused, identity is nowhere near there yet, the environment is not safe, the only anchorage is her mother, her greatest threat is her being a girl, but also her being a woman.
Against this perspective the rubrics were reviewed.
The headache comes on every afternoon, independent of school, tension, activities or physical disturbances. Taken as this specific point, the rubric scanned for usable remedies, would yield nothing here; then the rubric Head pain can be taken as a whole.
Head pain, afternoon: Piper methysticum, Lactuca, Petivera. This medicines rings bells.
Pipers fall outside the group, Composites have too little self-image and worth, Petivera falls under the Phytolaccaceae, a subdivision of the Caryophyllales. It thereby fits into the framework outlined above. The open, naive, innocent, almost trivial quality in her behaviour is known from the Caryophyllaceae, and thereby possibly characteristic of the Caryophyllidae.
Prescription: Petiveria alliacea D30.Follow upAfter six weeks she comes back, busier, thrusting, pushing with attentional energy, bracing herself. Lashing out and rebellious towards mother, as is usual at home; they can, in the middle of the conversation, break into bickering, as if I am not there at all.
Things are going well, she has to be ‘reminded’, for form’s sake, of what she came for. Her behaviour is just as if she is being tested at school; she even goes into a stall for form’s sake and the ‘not knowing’.
The abdominal pain is largely gone, the period was also no longer so bad. The headache was there sometimes, much less often, less severe and less long. In the afternoon, 2 pm, half an hour instead of the whole rest of the day.
After the remedy she became more cheerful at home, no longer the dead little bird, more joyful, she sings again.
What is still there, something that has been going on for years, the hands tremble, when moving or writing at school (this is not visible, she herself finds it very interesting). The tongue is red-discoloured with grooves.
She still falls asleep late, but no longer wakes in between. Has had no dreams. She slumps in her chair, leaning on her tailbone. Nail-biting had been gone for a while, that is now coming back.
Wait.
A year later there is a relapse, mood swings: laughing and singing alternate with crying, nightmares. The month before there were tensions at home again.
Petivera alliacea was repeated: after two days she is calm again.
This case predates Wonderful Plants; what I recognized as Stage 10 is the Phase 4 aspect. The situation at home has much of Stage 16, being worth nothing, no affection, sloppiness. Family orientedness is very strong, insecurity to the extreme, especially father, fitting with Phase 2. Mother is the stable factor, Phase 4.