Author:
Christina Ari
Book:
Journal
Type:
Case
Chapter:
2021.02.07
A Tortella remedy
Case by Cristina Ari
One does not function properly, one stands beside it!
In the following I will report about a woman who was severely neglected in her childhood. All her life she had a desire for a place in society. She felt not recognized and not taken seriously. Since no one had ever given her a feeling of security, she was quickly overwhelmed in stressful situations and in the process felt helpless and became angry because she could not express herself verbally.
In her medical history she repeatedly speaks of life-threatening situations. Already in her third month of life she barely survived a pneumonia and also the birth of her first child. She is the second of four children in a family where violence and panic were the order of the day. Worth mentioning is a car accident before the parents' wedding, in which the mother and the sister of the father died and he himself was seriously injured, but the mother remained unharmed. It was this mother who was so strict, unpredictable and brutal, beating everyone and leaving them alone. The father also beat, but he was gentler and she could trust him a little. When she was six, it came to a divorce and she lost contact with her father. Another marriage of the mother lasted only half a year, because her new husband died in an accident. As a result, the mother neglected her children more than ever. After the house was taken away from them, she even tried to take her own life several times, but soon found a husband again, with whom she found shelter. This man was an alcoholic and also unpredictable and frightening, he struck out of pure arbitrariness. At that time the girl was 10 years old and took the role of the scapegoat in the family. Loaded with guilt she felt more and more responsible for her little brothers and sisters. In the village there was much talk about the family and soon the children were taken away from her care. They were all sent to the home, but each one was sent to a different home. At that time she was twelve and hoped for better, but there she was beaten again, it was terrible, nothing but abuse. After her mother changed her place of residence, she was allowed to return to her after one year. When she went out into the streets, she had the feeling that the houses would fall down on her, so great was her inner shame and insecurity. In her youth it had been impossible, although she tried hard to establish lasting contacts and even her own mother broke off contact with her completely after she had completed her hairdressing apprenticeship. She experienced herself as compassionate, touched by the fates of others and was full of longing for her own intact family. She married early and had two children. The marriage was harmonious and she was able to live up to her role as a loving mother. She felt completely in her element when playing and doing handicrafts with the children. Soon, however, she felt like in prison, after twelve years in the household and constantly confronted with the problems of her in-laws. She felt handicapped in everything she wanted to do and was not able to develop her own creativity. Plagued by feelings of guilt, she tried to adapt for the sake of family peace. She had never developed a good self-esteem, felt unappreciated and taken seriously. Nevertheless, at her own request, she trained as a massage therapist and began to work in a thermal spa. There, however, she found it difficult to cope with the stress, felt exploited and insecure, and lived in constant fear of not being able to carry out her profession adequately. Praise was too much for her, because she could not keep up with her performance. Her dreams were always stressful, involving death and dying in all variations, and she had conversations with the deceased family members.
She came to my practice for the first time at the age of 34 because of chronic fatigue with existing hypothyroidism, stress-related cystitis, recurrent otitis media and chronic pain in the upper jaw area as well as in the extremities, which were of a pulling character. On the psychological level, she complained of a feeling of helplessness combined with suppressed anger.
Prescription: The struggle for stability and support, talking to the dead in a dream, as well as the modalities of specific body symptoms referred me at that time to a Calcium remedy. So I prescribed her a structure-strengthening medication in ascending Q-potencies, which she generally stabilized quite quickly. The pain disappeared for a long time and the susceptibility to infections could also be contained. For a short time she experienced herself as very angry and associated this condition with the loss of her father in childhood. Her fears receded into the background and her dreams had also become less stressful.
At the age of 53, she came to see me again because of an odour allergy she had been suffering from for 12 years and which was becoming increasingly unbearable. This resulted in a sudden swelling of the mucous membranes of the nose and also the eyelids fell shut involuntarily, accompanied by a pulling pain in the jaw area and again this familiar feeling of helplessness paired with anger developed.
Already six years before she had to give up her job as a masseuse because of the essential oils and afterwards it went steeply downhill with her. She was supposed to take over the care of her mother-in-law at home, who was not happy about it and never showed her gratitude. However, she recognized this task as her indispensable duty. At that time she was 48, the menopause began and she quickly lost a lot of weight despite her appetite and soon weighed only 40 kg. There was a rapid loss of muscle mass and her vision was also greatly reduced. It was a feeling as if she had to die. She felt so quickly aged and was afraid of not knowing what was required of her anymore. She also complained that all relationships in her family of origin were so severely broken and she observed that her children were also already affected by these issues. She felt guilty and obliged to pay attention to how others were doing, but she was unable to separate herself from them. She couldn't think of anything else, just wanted to resolve these entanglements, but couldn't talk to anyone about it, which only made her more angry. She felt exploited and overwhelmed.
Analysis
The weakness, the loss of substance, the sensitivity to odors, the many lost relationships, as well as the inability to switch off, first brought me to an Acidum . However, the drug was quickly discontinued, because after a few doses of LM6, her concentration capacity deteriorated and her self-doubt was only increased. I also prescribed her Pele's Hair, a volcanic medicine which I tested myself. This has proven to be extremely useful in the aftermath of severe traumatic disorders, by touching, bringing awareness and clarity to nebulised or buried objects. She then realizes that she is under pressure to do everything right and has refused to care for her mother-in-law ever since. She feels more longing for joy of life, but has too little drive and notices that she is blocking herself. Her dreams show pictures of her inner conflict, everything is grey and black. However, all her physical complaints remain unaffected by the medicine. I continue to search and think of Brassicaceae. She seems like someone who is condemned to carry his cross. She feels exploited, ignored and humiliated, someone who holds on bitterly to his grief and she feels guilty if she neglects her duty. She has lost the joy in life and laments not being able to develop creatively. She is bitter and full of suppressed anger, she feels restricted by her sense of duty and separated from the ease of life, therefore I think of stage 13 according to Scholten and prescribe a Cochlearia remedy in LM6.
Follow up
Already a few days after the beginning of the treatment she got a cystitis, as she knew it from before, which healed spontaneously. The nose began to flow, as it had done six years earlier when she lost her job, later on there was only rhinitis sicca. In general she was less sensitive to smell, her eyes were unchanged. She came to the realization that she was making too high demands on herself, perceived old patterns that she had to follow in relationships to get love. On a psychological level, a lot had been broken down, she now wavered between anger and sadness and said: "You make yourself small, don't want to be noticed that you are not seen. One is willing to do what the other person wants just to have peace of mind. One does not want to get caught in the crossfire, preferably closing the door behind him and going alone to a lonely island where there is no one to be considered, where there is no one to make you feel that you are not right. Although the Cochlearia remedy clearly pointed in the right direction, this statement made me think of mosses: making yourself small, not being noticed, being free of any responsibility. This patient had a hard time asserting herself in free society because of her lack of self-esteem, everything inevitably led quickly to exhaustion. Due to the traumatic experiences in her childhood she could not develop any roots, she was passed over, overrun and left alone. According to her olfactory sensitivity, it is noticeable that mosses have no smell and react strongly to external stimuli in nature. She can only express herself linguistically in a limited way when it comes to her problems and Jan Scholten writes in his book: "The more short-sighted someone is, the better he fits to the mosses". Her choice fell on a Tortella remedy with the code 3-332.14.17. The sensory test of this remedy describes a person who has totally shrunk after being humiliated, degraded and destroyed. On the one hand strong and robust, he is also weak and easily run over. The trauma makes one shrink, smaller and more compact. The patient had in fact lost an enormous amount of weight before she came to me, combined with the feeling that she had to die (stage 17). She had endured and endured everything in her life, endured everything until old age (sub stage 4). The sum of these findings confirmed this moss remedy and I prescribed a C30 weekly, but only three times in total. During the control ordination she told me about a spontaneous personality change. Old issues came back to consciousness, such as the loss of control, combined with the feeling of helplessness and fear in her childhood. She felt unable to react "normally" to something in context, which resulted in flighty overreactions. Her sense of smell had not been so overexcited since the ingestion, also the pain around the teeth had become much less and above all there was much less anger. She could now understand everything much more clearly. Only extreme scent clouds still had a lasting effect on her concentration. She had the feeling that she was literally on the line; suddenly there was no longer any understanding of concepts. That's not the way you work properly, it's like standing next to it. It was exactly this feeling that her mother triggered in her when she had to take over the responsibility for her younger sister, it was an excessive demand on her and also the constant moving, always new classmates (phase 1), everything an excessive demand and this also explains her problem of demarcation. Now it takes time for everything to calm down, she says confidently. The menopause complaints have returned, there are again increased sweating. She also says that she has started to be creative again, she likes to make pottery and has already booked a flight to China to visit her daughter. In any case, life has changed a lot for her, she feels safe. There has been no follow-up coordination for two years.
