Healing through Homeopathy

_We already addressed two of the principles of successful, life-changing therapy: listening and conversation. To recap, listening addresses the importance of understanding just what is happening in your life: where you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed or hopeless. The therapeutic conversation – as the term implies – is a two-way dialog. What is unique in this dialog is that it involves clarifying which parts of your picture of your situation are accurate, and which parts involve limiting assumptions or generalizations that are unrealistic or unhelpful in solving the problem.

The third broad principle of successful therapy is teaching. Teaching involves actively imparting knowledge or skills from one person to another. For example, therapy involves teaching when the therapist offers specific tools to manage difficult emotions, such as anxiety or depression. Therapy also involves teaching when we go over new ways to talk to yourself – for example to challenge limiting assumptions. Finally, we are engaged in teaching when we review and rehearse better ways to set boundaries, to ask for what you need from other people, or to take emotional risks in getting closer to other people.

Teaching tools for managing emotions. One tool I often teach people is the process of becoming mindful of your own thoughts without judging them. Lisa, a 38-year-old mother of two, came in for anxiety. She was frequently worried that her kids would get sick, or that she and her husband wouldn’t be able to save up enough money for the future, or that she would lose her job.

I taught her a powerful method for challenging repeated upsetting, intrusive thoughts, that I first learned from Byron Katie’s work (see her book “Loving What Is”). As each worrying thought arises, take note of it (write it down in a notebook as that sometimes helps in not getting sucked into the worrying). Then simply ask yourself, “Is that true?”, and quietly wait for your own answer to that question. Often the answer is “I don’t know,” or “Probably not,” and the anxiety immediately begins to settle down. The issue here is not that fearful thoughts are popping into your head repeatedly. The issue is about automatically believing them each time. Asking “Is that true?” to each thought breaks the link and allows you to consider that the thoughts are, well, just thoughts. Not reality.

Teaching new ways to talk to yourself. Each of us has an ongoing inner conversation – a monologue, since there’s technically only one of you there. The quality or tone of that inner conversation varies dramatically from one person to another. It affects how you feel about yourself, and how you handle both setbacks and successes. It sets the stage for how you treat others and for how you allow them to treat you.

If the monologue you have is generally upbeat, encouraging and accepting, then you are going to be able to maneuver through life problems much more easily. If however, your inner conversation involves putting yourself down, predicting failure (as in “I’m not going to be able to deal with this!”), or expecting judgment (“I’m sure he’s mad at me now...”) – then strong emotions get stirred up, and handling life problems becomes much more challenging.

Having a gentle inner conversation is a skill that can be learned! A therapist can use several tools to help guide this process. Worksheets and affirmations can be useful tools. One I like, however, is much simpler. It involves comparing how you talk to yourself about a life situation, with how you would ideally want to talk to a best friend about the same thing.

Let’s say you are enrolled in a college class and get a low grade on the mid-term exam. The critical inner monologue kicks in and says, “You’re stupid... you’ll never graduate this program... what’s wrong with you anyway... the professor must think I’m an idiot...” and on and on. Well, ask yourself: would you talk this way with a friend who just told you he or she got a low exam grade? Hopefully, the answer is no! What sorts of messages would you want your friend to hear? Perhaps things like:

• It’s ok, you can do better on the other requirements.
• You knew this was a hard class, I bet there are other students who had low scores as well.
  
• You were sick with a fever the week before the exam. So this wasn’t your best performance. You still did your best given how much you were able to prepare for it.

Now, the task is to direct those comments back to yourself. In other words, practice speaking to yourself no harsher than you would want to towards a very good friend whose welfare you cared about.

Teaching new ways to relate to others. Life-changing therapy reaches out beyond how you think and feel, to how you engage with the world. Life is lived—and gains meaning and purpose—in the context of other people. Consider the following questions:

1. How do you want others to see you?
2. What do you want to accomplish in your life?
3. Do you hold back from getting close to others because of fears of how you might be treated?

Therapy can help a person gain clarity about what they want most in life, and that in turn shows the obstacles that keep that inaccessible. Clyde, a young man in his late 20s, had graduated with an accounting degree and become an accomplished financial analyst. He was good with numbers, but didn’t really enjoy the work or his fellow co-workers. On his own time, he played guitar and composed songs, and he kept thinking about going back to graduate school and becoming an art or music therapist. However, his father’s disapproval loomed large here. His father, also in the business world, looked down on anything that was not about making money.

Clyde was afraid of calling his father and explaining why he would leave a well-paying job to go back to school for something “soft and mushy”. We talked at length about the distinction between his goals for his life, and his father’s wishes. A person wishes for what they cannot control; but they make goals for what they can. Life energy focused on wishes goes nowhere; but when focused on goals, can move mountains. Clyde had a clear wish – but no direct control – over his father’s reactions.

Through therapy, he learned to let go of what he could not ultimately control. He began to look into graduate programs, applied – and got accepted for the following Fall semester. The therapist role-played different responses from the father, and gave Clyde a chance to figure out his clearest, calmest response. Eventually, Clyde did divulge his career change to his father, who was, as predicted, angry with Clyde. But Clyde held his ground, and said, “I’m sorry you’re disappointed in this, and I hope you will consider how important this feels to me. This feels so much more meaningful to me than working in finance, and I’m really excited about it.”

While Clyde was unable to control the outcome of his father’s response to him, he gained a sense of power and focus about the direction of his own life. Therapy taught him how to be clear about the difference between his goals and wishes, and how to communicate this with his father. That’s life-changing.

It is easy to start using homeopathy with only a little bit of basic knowledge. There are several excellent basic guides, that explain the principles of homeopathic treatment as well as remedies to help you recover from everyday ailments, such as bruises, injuries, stomach problems and seasonal sniffles.  I recommend The Complete Homeopathy Handbook by Miranda Castro.

One of the easiest and most helpful remedies to keep on hand is Arnica Montana, derived from a Swiss mountain flower. Arnica tincture has been in use for hundreds of years in Europe to help reduce swelling of bruises and inflammations. It is available homeopathically in both pellet form and as an external, topical ointment.

Here’s an example where Arnica helped virtually immediately. One day, a friend and her son were visiting our home. In the midst of playing, the boy got hit hard on the eye with a ball. He was in a great deal of pain, and the area around the eye began to swell and darken. We gave him one dose of an Arnica pellet, and the pain subsided almost immediately. Ten minutes later, there was virtually no visible swelling or darkening around the eye, and he had already returned to playing.

Think of Arnica whenever soft tissue gets bruised. It is useful to take a dose before dental work or the night before surgery, as well as immediately afterwards, to reduce the inflammation and pain that can result. Healers sometimes refer to Arnica as the “homeopathic aspirin”, and for good reason!

I wrote earlier about three interlinked components of life-changing therapy: listening, conversation and teaching. Through listening deeply, the therapist gains an understanding of your challenges and difficulties. If therapy just stopped there, you might feel you were “understood”, but nothing would necessarily change on its own.

This is where we move into the role of the therapeutic conversation. This conversation is designed to help you to challenge the assumptions and limiting beliefs that keep you stuck in your life. Of course, everyone holds different assumptions about themselves, the people around them, and the world at large. These assumptions are based on 1) your past experience; or 2) ideas you have picked up from others that you have come to believe. Added up, our assumptions create a “mental model” of life, and we inherently live within that model.

For example, Jesse (an amalgam of several people I know) came into treatment complaining of chronic boredom, depression, and a growing addiction to internet surfing while at work. Accompanying this was a gnawing anxiety that he would get caught at work while surfing the internet and lose his job.

In the first session, we identified that Jesse had grown up with the message, “you have to have a steady, paying job – that’s the most important thing in life.” As a young adult, he tried job after job in the corporate world, implicitly following that guiding assumption. But he was never satisfied, and the jobs never seemed to fit his interests.

In the therapeutic conversation, we talked about the importance of that assumption in the choices he made over and over again. Together, we explored whether the assumption is true through various questions:

• Is it true that you “have to” have a steady paying job in a business environment? - What would happen if you chose other ways of earning a living?
• Would it necessarily be a disaster?
• What would you want to do with your time if you weren’t afraid of not having a steady job?

Our conversation – over the next 5-6 sessions – helped Jesse to question the limiting beliefs he was holding onto for years. He realized that he was happiest when he was working with his hands, making things. He was very outgoing, and liked to banter with people, to joke back and forth – a way that was not considered appropriate in all the corporate jobs he had held.

He remembered that as a kid, he loved doing carpentry with his dad (hands-on work, again). He got back into making things in his workshop at home. He built a bookshelf for a friend. He has begun making serious plans to start his own business that involves carpentry and remodeling – a far cry from his previous day jobs. Although he is still at the same job, his depression and boredom have vanished, he is excited about his future plans, and he no longer has urges to surf the internet while at work.

So what exactly happens in the therapeutic conversation that is so transformative? I think that there are two forces at work here, that help nudge the person into a space of change. First, is the inner sense that life is not joyful, that it feels like a daily struggle, that your best efforts at holding things together are no longer working out. That creates the readiness – the openness to make a shift.

Second, the joint conversation in which assumptions and limiting beliefs are challenged is like water being sprinkled on a seeded garden. New ideas sprout forth, solutions emerge that had not seemed possible to imagine earlier.

And change begins.

FOLLOWUP: Read the third part of this series of essays.

As I have written elsewhere, psychotherapy is the art of helping you to find your way to being fully yourself and to support the people around you to do the same. We use listening, conversation and teaching to promote change. These are not three separate skills but rather aspects of one seamless and – sometimes – profoundly life-changing experience.

Listening, of course, involves taking in and understanding what the client expresses about his or her difficulties. How much do we really listen to others, or are listened to deeply ourselves? Have you ever had the experience of having a family member or friend talk about something, and noticing you were barely paying attention? Perhaps you were following the story a bit, but your mind was also going on in other directions at the same time. Unfortunately, for many of us, most listening encounters are just like this. Everyone is busy, distracted with their own concerns, multi-tasking.

So imagine taking the time today to completely stop and listen to someone in your life fully. I sometimes help my clients practice a method called “Active Listening”, which involves summarizing back to the other person what you think they were trying to say – without adding any of your own commentary, opinion or recommendations. It is surprisingly hard to do! Tips to help you listen actively to someone today:

1. Try to leave your judgments out of the conversation for a moment. Thoughts like “that’s a silly thing to worry about”, “I wouldn’t have done that”, “you shouldn’t have made that decision” – put them on the back burner of your mind while talking.
2. Summarize back especially the feelings – both stated and unstated – that you think the other person is experiencing. If you guess wrong, give him or her a chance to correct you.
3. At a good moment, if you are able to appreciate why the other person feels as they do, acknowledge it:

    - “I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time with this decision.”
    - “I can see why you’re so angry about what your boss did.”
    - “I’m really glad you had such a fun date – you sound excited!”

Listening is not just with the ears – as one sits with another person, one can notice his or her posture, facial expression, the tone of voice, how animated the hands become during a story – and all of these details are part of the process of listening fully.

In some ways, listening is about clearing enough inner space to make room for another person’s story and understand it as fully as possible. I cannot ever know what you are feeling, nor can you know what I am feeling, in the same way that we can each be aware of our own feelings and thoughts directly. We are, after all, different people. But by listening well, we can create a realistic understanding of another person’s situation, and that helps us respond with empathy and wisdom.

FOLLOWUP: Read the second part of this series of essays.

How much force do you need to apply to solve a problem? For example, if your cat has gotten spooked and is hiding under the bed, how would you get him out? There is the forceful, or “Yang” approach – crawl under the bed, grab the cat and drag him out with your hands. And there is the subtle, or “Yin” approach – talk gently to the cat, dangle a treat by the edge and let him find his own way out.

Yin and Yang, of course, are ancient concepts from Chinese philosophy referring to the universal, complementary forces of nature. Sometimes a subtle, Yin solution is needed, and sometimes the forceful, heavy-handed Yang solution is called for.

Similarly, we need both ways of dealing with imbalances in health. However, Western medicine typically leans heavily towards the forceful approach – forcing the body to change by directly suppressing symptoms. Homeopathy, on the other hand, guides the body to find its own way back to a state of health.

One of my favorite teachers, Dr. Robin Murphy, has said that in the homeopathic approach, “disease” is not an enemy one fights, but simply an expression of the individual attempting to heal. He says (paraphrasing from a lecture):

It’s the American mentality to “go get ’em”, to confront, to “fight the disease”. Why do we have to fight the disease? The disease process, according to homeopathic philosophy, is the person, attempting to heal themselves. We have to help it. And helping it is the opposite of fighting it. We can either shock the vital force back to health, or instead we can stimulate it to recover on its own.

This is the basis for one of the pillars of the homeopathic approach – treatment by similars. Simply put, you start by observing the totality of a person’s symptoms, and then you seek a remedy that – in a healthy person – would bring about many of those same symptoms. When this remedy is given, in diluted doses, to the sick individual, it offers a gentle guide to the body’s inner intelligence to return back to a state of balance.

Think of a house that is overheated in the middle of winter because the thermostat is set too high. The “Yang” or forceful approach to cooling down the house would be to open up the windows and let in a whole lot of cold air inside. While this will work quickly at first, what will be the long-term outcome? If the windows are later closed, the house will simply heat up again to too high a temperature, and the “cure” will have been temporary. If instead, the windows are left open to keep blowing cold air in, the house may remain cooler but the thermostat will also continue to activate the heater, which will work overtime and wastefully burn up a great deal of fuel.

Then comes a homeopath who applies the “law of similars” (treating heat with heat). How does she do this? She gets a cup of hot tea, and holds it under the thermostat. The thermostat is fooled into thinking the house has gotten up to the right temperature, sends a signal to the heater, which shuts off. By guiding the feedback loop of the heating system, one cup of hot tea can cool off the entire house.

Spring is here, and with it, hay fever and allergies!
    Spring-time allergy and hayfever reactions are due to a sensitivity to pollen, which is airborne once the trees and plants in your neighborhood begin to flower. Hay fever, also known as "allergic rhinitis", is the result of an oversensitive immune system, which reacts to inhaled pollen. The immune system makes antibodies that ultimately lead to the release of histamine. It is histamine that creates the classic hay fever symptoms: runny nose, mucus, tearing, itching and swelling. It can sometimes also, in strong reactions, produce rashes and hives on the body.
    Conventional medicines for hay fever and allergies are antihistamines – chemicals that inhibit the action of histamine on the tissues. However, the immune system continues to be oversensitive, so the medicine has to be taken as long as the irritants are present in the environment. For some people this can seem like a good portion of the year!
    Homeopathy can help. A carefully chosen remedy, over time, can help the body return to balance and reduce the long-term need for antihistamine use. In the meantime, choosing an over-the-counter homeopathic remedy can alleviate the most common symptoms of hay fever.

• Allium Cepa – for dripping nose with burning discharge, sneezing, and watery eyes (which do not generally burn).
• Arsenicum Album – sneezing from a tickling feeling in the nose, burning sensation in eyes, nose, throat; watery discharge from the nose; worse with cold (like to be indoors and wrapped up).
• Euphrasia – also known as "eyebright"; nasal discharge does not burn, but the eyes are red, swollen, itchy and burning; violent sneezing.
• Pulsatilla – thick, yellowish or greenish discharge from the nose; worse with heat and better with walking around or gentle motion.
• Sabadilla – for sinus congestion, frequent sneezing, and watery discharge from the nose.

    All of these remedies are safe to take in potencies from 6C up through 30C, and are commonly available at local health food stores. I generally suggest that clients start with the remedy whose profile best matches their symptoms, then to take ONE dose of the remedy one morning, and observing whether they feel better that day. It's a good idea to try one remedy for up to two days in a row to decide if it is helpful. If not, a different remedy may be better indicated.

It is easy to start using homeopathy with only a little bit of basic knowledge. There are several excellent basic guides, that explain the principles of homeopathic treatment as well as remedies to help you recover from everyday ailments, such as bruises, injuries, stomach problems and seasonal sniffles.  I recommend The Complete Homeopathy Handbook by Miranda Castro.

One of the easiest and most helpful remedies to keep on hand is Arnica Montana, derived from a Swiss mountain flower. Arnica tincture has been in use for hundreds of years in Europe to help reduce swelling of bruises and inflammations. It is available homeopathically in both pellet form and as an external, topical ointment.

Here’s an example where Arnica helped virtually immediately. One day, a friend and her son were visiting our home. In the midst of playing, the boy got hit hard on the eye with a ball. He was in a great deal of pain, and the area around the eye began to swell and darken. We gave him one dose of an Arnica pellet, and the pain subsided almost immediately. Ten minutes later, there was virtually no visible swelling or darkening around the eye, and he had already returned to playing.

Think of Arnica whenever soft tissue gets bruised. It is useful to take a dose before dental work or the night before surgery, as well as immediately afterwards, to reduce the inflammation and pain that can result. Healers sometimes refer to Arnica as the “homeopathic aspirin”, and for good reason!

Two hundred years of clinical practice around the world has documented numerous positive results with homeopathy for a wide range of health issues, including chronic problems that are hard to treat with conventional medicine:

• asthma
• autism
• developmental issue
• digestive disorders
• depression & anxiety
• attention deficit disorder
• repeated infections and illness

Scientific research over the past 10 years has shown clinical effectiveness in many studies for a wide range of homeopathic remedies.

To learn more, go to the National Center for Homeopathy website, at www.homeopathic.org.