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Case of a Sexually Abused Woman Who Hates Herself (2): Homeopathic Analysis of Main Themes

Last week I presented the case of Janice, a sexually abused woman suffering from lifelong issues of sexuality, violence, and self-contempt.

Today we continue with the homeopathic analysis of Janice’s case, which centers around identifying the recurrent themes that run through her case. To fully benefit from the discussion make sure to review the case transcript first.

Janice’s main themes: sexual abuse, violence, duality

I would like to suggest the following themes as the most prominent in Janice’s case, and offer evidence for each:

Sexual abuse

Crazy separation anxiety… I need constant attention… Love is sex, it is 99% of your life, you see sexual creatures all around you, always feeling sexually aroused… A small child in a world of adults… I need touch all the time. I don’t exist unless I am touched…

An impossible situation: on the one hand you lust for your father, for this sort of love, and at the same time there is something crazy about it. Then there is abandonment by him, and then I feel empty, like something is torn out of my body, my breathing stops, horrid loneliness and disconnection, you get up in the morning not knowing who you are.

If only I could destroy my father before it all happened. A person comes to destroy you, penetrate you, and you do it first, disembowel him first, cut off his genitals.

I should be able to forgive myself, accept that I needed my father’s love because he did give me love, however perverted, whereas my mother didn’t.

Notice that we see a duality in Janice’s perception of her situation: a subtle hint of a split in her personality, or an indecisive thinking pattern where she is concurrently attracted to and repulsed by her father.

Violence

I am a warrior, fighting for my life rather than giving up on it. I am always on the defense. Fighting my constant desire to die.

Tempestuousness: an inner tempest that cannot be contained and has to come out.

I am a person of extremes, very aggressive yet very gentle.

I will fight. Revenge. Strike back. Destroy. Individualistic. Jealousy… Something rises in you, you swallow, it reaches the throat, held in the throat, then suddenly it goes to the brain, resulting in uncontrollable screaming in someone’s face. Like a dinosaur, not human. Monstrous. An animal that fights… I shoot from my mouth what I think… Like I have a weapon in my hands: beware of me, just dare come near me and you will be torn to pieces.

Desire to shoot people… like I am penetrating the other person: with a bullet, with nails. I sink my nails into flesh until I see blood, and I continue and continue until I tear up and twist the flesh. Satisfaction… this monster-girl energy… It exits me and destroys the other person. Vengeance, desire to terrorize someone else’s body.

Notice that Janice’s violent side is the “monster-girl” energy within her. In other words, what stands out in her description of her violence is that it is not she but some evil part of her that is the source of her violent emotions and behavior.

Duality

Duality is, in my analysis, the deepest and most persistent theme in Janice’s life story, as we see above and in the following:

I will fight for my life until I am able to cure myself of that girl, that monster within me that experienced that abuse, the one that has been kicked around and is homeless, without clothing, and hateful… she doesn’t want me to live, she would love for us to have committed suicide long ago… It’s a complicated relationships, love-hate; I imagine myself abusing her.

She can destroy the world, she has tons of power, so the medication allows me to drug her or put her in jail for a while.

I hate her, I don’t care what she feels. She is so bad and miserly: a monster. She has only destructiveness. She is disgusting, looks like a monster, has all sorts of growths, like an old grandmother: dirty, shrivelled, angry, and threatening.

I hate her, she is so disgusting. Her very existence. She is like a cancer within me.

I want to expel this thing from within me, this monster-girl energy: it can exit me and be released, through the contact with the other person.

I am all alone, no one will save me, so I have to act. I have to become a warrior, fight this creature and destroy it completely in order to save my own life. Then I would have a normal life. That’s why I cannot bear this girl who didn’t fight her father. I hate her and am unforgiving: How come she didn’t save my life?

Janice perceives the monster-child within her as thoroughly hateful: destructive and deserving of destruction, ugly, unbearable, like a cancerous tumor. The other side of Janice is soft. So we see that the two sides of Janice differ morally: the one is evil and the other is good (or, at the very least, harmless):

I am a person of extremes, very aggressive yet very gentle. A warrior that can collapse into bed trembling and unable to move: these two sides are living in me.

Finally, we can look back at the very beginning of the case — a moment where patients often provide deep clues about their state if the homeopath is astute enough to catch them — and notice that Janice begins her story as follows:

Something that separates me from my life… There are two things that motivate my personality…

These statements by themselves say very little, but in the context of the rest of the case they line up with the persistent theme of duality.

How do we translate themes into remedies?

To represent the themes in Janice’s case we will be using an important homeopathic resource known as the homeopathic repertory. Briefly, the repertory is a collection of rubrics, where every rubric indexes a physical symptom or psychological characteristic against the list of all homeopathic remedies known to address it. Through the repertory homeopaths can narrow down the field of possibilities from the thousands of available homeopathic remedies to a handful from which the appropriate remedy can later be picked.

1. The most obvious element of Janice’s case is the fact that her suffering is largely related to her history of sexual abuse. In the homeopathic repertory we find the rubric: Mind - ailments from sexual abuse, which lists several-dozen remedies known to be helpful in cases of sexual abuse.

2. The theme of violence can be represented by the rubric: Mind - violence. We choose this not because Janice is violent to the degree of a criminal, but because of her frequent violent thoughts and the fact that she is a woman in whom such thoughts are less typical and therefore more out-of-place.

3. Finally, we notice that Janice continually perceives herself as two people: her real self (the one which she speaks about in first person) and her abused-child self (which she addresses in third person). We should note also that the relationship between the two sides of her personality is not peaceful but is full of opposition. In homeopathic terms this is represented in the following related rubrics (which will be merged and treated as one rubric in the analysis below):

Mind - confusion of mind as to her identity - sense of duality,
Mind - sensation as if she had two wills,
Mind - antagonism with herself.

Further recurring themes in the case include:

• Feeling of having to face the world alone
• Disgust with herself
• Desire to die

I didn’t choose rubrics for these themes because skilful repertorization (the interpretation of a case in the language of repertory rubrics) requires focus on just the most strange, rare, or peculiar aspects of the case (as I explain in Basics of Homeopathic Case Analysis). This is because the homeopathic remedy has to be matched specifically to the part of the person that needs to be cured, rather than to that which would be typical for many people under a similar life situation.

To clarify this point: most abused women feel that they have no one to trust or to turn to for support and understanding; similarly, many sexually abused women end up hating themselves or their body, and those of them who suffer most sometimes wish they were not alive. So while these symptoms no less tragic or debilitating to the patient than the ones we listed, they are not as diagnostically valuable in the homeopathic sense, and are therefore set aside.

The repertorization: Which remedies make the final cut?

Repertorization is the process of listing the chosen rubrics in a case and seeing which remedies appear under all or most of them. Repertorization is not a mechanical process but one which requires great skill in focussing on just those characteristics of the patient that would be most out-of-place in a spiritually healthy person. If the general case analysis is done correctly then a small number (usually 2-4) of highly representative rubrics is chosen, and we expect the correct remedy to be listed prominently.

The following is a repertorization in the form of a table listing the rubrics chosen above against the remedies appearing under each rubric (a shaded box indicates that the remedy listed above it appears in the listed rubric):

Under each abbreviated remedy name there is a number which represents the number of rubrics (out of 3) in which the remedy appears. If we take only the remedies that appear in all 3 rubrics we get the following list (in alphabetical order):

• Anacardium
• Calcarea phosphorica
• Lycopodium
• Natrum muriaticum
• Sepia
• Stramonium
• Thuja
• Petroleum raffinatum

Janice’s remedy is very likely to be found among these eight remedies. But in order to choose from among them (or to conclude that we might have to expand our investigation beyond these remedies) we need a deeper understanding of the case. In other words, all of these 8 remedies are known to be effective in cases of sexual abuse, for those who experience a sense of duality, and for addressing violent behavior. But the remedies all differ in subtle ways, and only one of them will have a curative effect in Janice’s case.

In order to select the best-fitting remedy we need to perform the homeopathic equivalent of the differential diagnosis of conventional medicine, where competing diagnoses are compared before a final diagnosis is pronounced. This step requires knowledge of the homeopathic picture (a.k.a. ‘materia medica’) of each of the listed remedies, so that Janice’s picture is matched with a remedy picture following the the law of similars (like cures like).

Next week: Differential diagnosis and prescription

In next week’s article I will provide a brief synopsis of each of the above remedies. I will then reveal the identity of the remedy that I chose for Janice — a remedy that is frequently indicated in people who have suffered through childhood sexual, physical, or emotional abuse — and explain its characteristics in detail.

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