Birth can be a Trauma
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 2002 Nov / Dec VOL 4 NO 6.
Extracted by
T K Kasiviswanathan
from the website www.peterchappell.net
'Acon / Ign / Stram / Stram / Nux-v / Anac

Case 1: Birth trauma
A case to illustrate simple birth trauma. A young woman 28 y - I say young since she was in essence child like. She has torticolis, i e neck is twisted with limited movement since a forceps birth and the back is rigid and she can’t bend beyond touching her knees.
She looks like a young teenager with a cramped torso, breasts yet to mature. In my mind she is not yet 12 years old. Actually part of her is frozen at Day 1, Year 1, birth.
Stands up for people’s rights, is passionate, very vocal and capable in this area.
She tends to be dominating and life revolves around her; she is, in essence, a bit of a princess. and, in her own words, a ‘high maintenance’ person. Intuitive and prophetic And Psychic. Very talkative, verbose to some, articulate to others.

Her mother describes her as a ‘what if?’ kid, incessantly asking questions.
A very independent dependant, her partner is her support system; he cooks and loves doing it.
A tomboy as a kid. A dark, introspective kid -and still is. Jealous and Possessive.
Lots of hate and repulsive feeling about others.
Gets lumps in the breast. Recently has a lot of ear problems. (Ear complaints are children’s symptoms and reinforce the idea of the child like state she is in).
Allergies to many outdoor things. Chocolate cysts in ovaries.
Dreams: her partner is leaving, the toilet bowl is overflowing, she is lost, being yelled at and told she is horrible, of flying, family is dying, about angels and going to the light.
Panic attacks when relaxed. In the middle of the night- palpitations, throat chokes, cold sweat, nausea, shaking hands, feels faint.
Recently wanted to kill herself by sitting on a high mountain where it’s very cold, in a bathing suit so can freeze to death.
Lot of self hatred. Can cry all day. Very chilly person
She says she attracts many good things in her life, good partner, deep profound thoughts, talks to her angels etc. Two extra terrestrial experiences that she describes in detail: 1. of Spaceships; and 2. She is from another planet and that she is here to aid the survival of another race, so that they access her eggs for procreating their race.
Is on three psychotropic drugs that together make her feel normal.
Abdominal cramps.
Fear dying (any minute), pain, insanity, diseases, that there is something wrong with me.
Biggest fear by far - PREGNANCY - it terrifies her.
Dreams of being pregnant ++++ and that she doesn’t know and that the baby is born dead.
Hates sports.

Analysis
She was delivered by forceps extraction that put enormous pressure on her neck and spine and has resulted in life long torticolis and back stiffness. She is in effect in birth trauma all her life. The fear of pregnancy is one removed fear of birth and the feeling of death when she was born.
The panic attacks, the fear of dying this minute, the suicide by freezing to death, the clairvoyance, the torticolis, chilliness, etc all point to Aconite, for the current picture and the birth trauma.
In my judgment I expect that a lot of the current symptoms not clearly in the Aconite picture, are just the consequences of the initial birth trauma; they will also disappear as this heals.
My understanding is that the psychotropic drugs are compensating for her birth trauma shock, and once this is dealt with, the process of recovery will be a lot easier and the drugs will not be needed. Sacral/cranial work would be beneficial after successful homoeopathy.

After Aconite she reported being calmer, more aware, getting to sleep a lot better. Her fear of pregnancy had dropped significantly; old fracture pain in her arm returned, as did her Epstein Barr virus symptoms, her old back and appendix pain, an old yeast infection, her breast lump surgery, as did a prior chronic eating problem , all within the first two weeks, i.e. she felt better and her old symptoms returned briefly, sure signs of a cure in action.
Resolving her birth trauma is then happening with Aconite, something her eight years of therapy, psychiatrist, chiropractic and God knows what else, had not touched upon.

This replay of old symptoms, remarkable as it may seem, is because every one of these events built upon the foundations of the birth trauma.
Research through regression has shown that there are four stages to the birth process:
1. In utero, initially a state of relative cosmic bliss. We are contained in a warm harmonious liquid, protected from the outside world yet aware of it. Initially we sense and later feel our surroundings. So a person stuck in a very sensing way of relating, might have a very early in-utero trauma. In later pregnancy we become increasingly aware of outside influences, knowing what is going on emotionally, in our mother, as well as being influenced by the effects of tobacco, alcohol etc. We begin to feel the effects of the imperfect reality outside.
2. When the uterine contractions start, we are violently compressed, under unbearable pressure and strain, and may experience suffocation and a sense of hopelessness.
3. The expulsion stage of the birth process seems cataclysmic, as if the world is being destroyed, or there is a fierce battle, a fight to the death, a death threat, often an experience of dying, of catastrophe.
4. In the final expulsion there is the feeling of liberation, freeing and rebirth, not birth.

In the early moments of life, the separation from the parent can be an overwhelmingly lonely experience. Studies have shown that babies separated even for a few minutes from their mothers directly after birth, are less likely to breastfeed successfully and prolonged separation can be the basis for many deep feelings of rejection later in life.
A colleague of mine is a practitioner of rebirthing. He tells me that it was originally a Yoga practice for releasing traumas in the body. When this technique was used in western societies it was found that it kept bringing up a wide variety of birth traumas, so it became known as ‘rebirthing’. Hundreds of people now practice it and it could be a good way to discover your own birth trauma if your parents will not tell you.

Case 2: A Boy Near To Death
A boy about nine years old was seriously ill with severe kidney problems. His case had been investigated by the best doctors, with no expense spared. Near to death, the boy was seen in hospital by a Homoeopath. It became clear that the parents were in the middle of a protracted and bitter separation and the only reason they were still talking was because their child was seriously ill.
It was perceived that the child was deeply upset over this separation.
Ignatia, a homeopathic remedy for disappointment/grief/ loss, was given and four days later, to the total amazement of everyone, the child walked into the consulting room, weak but definitely on the mend. The separation was an overwhelming trauma that had been overlooked by the doctors because they are trained to look at physical signs and symptoms of disease, especially when the condition is bad and even more so when death is at hand.

Case 3: Sexual abuse
A young woman student was attacked and raped and the attacker then decided to strangle her to avoid being identified. She lost consciousness but he panicked and ran off. Afterwards she could not sleep at all without the light full on and a friend in the room. She was full of terror, totally overwhelmed. There may have been rage and fury underneath but the first stage was terror, stark terror as she was expecting to be murdered on losing consciousness.
Stramonium acted immediately and she could sleep normally. In the next phase of recovery Staphysagria was needed for the rage as and when it surfaced, after the terror dissolved.

Case 4: Held At Gunpoint
A man was attacked and held alone at gunpoint in an isolated farmhouse. The attacker told him it was execution time. He loaded two bullets into the gun and pointed it at his head, as he lay tied up on the floor. The attacker pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The attacker was playing games; he had put the bullets in and secretly removed them again.

The man was terrified. He was a poet and had a stutter that was strongest on the first words, both classic indications for the homeopathic remedy Stramonium. I concluded that this was a replay event reflecting previous traumas in his life. Stramonium was extremely effective, as somewhere inside was a very deeply wounded child, terrorized by something I did not need to find out about then. I find it hard to believe that this was an ‘action replay’ of an actual event and not just a coincidence as logic would suggest. Yet Stramonium had been his remedy for most, if not all his life; the facts were clear, and this terrorizing incident clearly needed Stramonium too.
My experience of ‘action replays’ confounds this more universal interpretation of coincidence, because ‘action replays’ take place so often and fits so well with what goes on in so many lives.

Case 5: Irritable Bowel Syndrome
A detective came to see me with irritable bowel syndrome. After hearing his story, it became clear that his main life issue was that, at the age of twelve, on Christmas Day, he was told that he was adopted. That was all he was told. Nothing else was said. What a day to drop a bombshell like that and then pretend that everything was fine! He was very angry at being so deceived, and the trauma was deduced to be ‘betrayal causing grief and humiliation’.

That he was informed so inappropriately, without preparation or discussion was, it seemed to me, the cornerstone of the case, especially when I took into account his job-a detective, one who seeks out deception or betrayal. There were also other clear pieces of confirmatory information.

Putting betrayal, humiliation, a passion for work and a few other signs together made this a clear Nux-vomica case. That was the nature of the wound. Nux -vomicacan be cruel, hard and unfeeling, in  just the way the wound was inflicted. This is also how the victim of such behaviour can become. Nux-vomica is made from a nut rich in strychnine, itself a spasmodic drug, inducing spasmodic behaviour quite similar to the peculiarities of his symptoms - irritable bowel syndrome’

Case 6: Violence
An eight-year-old boy who comes to see me, is capable of extreme violence. He seems to attract it. He walks into a playground and other children, strangers to him, attack him.
At home he can beat down doors and terrify his mother, who is a single parent.. He likewise terrorizes teachers, social workers, workers in children’s’ homes and educational advisers, for when he lets rip, there is trouble. No one can contain him in his rages, when his strength is greatly increased.

When I am with this child he sometimes looks at me with a hard stare, eyeing me up with a streak of cold detachment, a hint of real cruelty. He keeps doodling wolves with sharks. His mother has a pathological lack of confidence (Lac-caninum). She originally came to see me for sinusitis, the after-effects of a broken nose from being beaten up.
The father was serving life imprisonment for deliberate cold-blooded murder. He was caught red-handed, having stabbed a stranger forty times or so and yet he never admitted it.

The trauma this boy suffered seemed to be inherited from both sides. On one side we have the mother with pathological inferiority based on violence experienced as a child; on the other, the murderous father and also the near certainty that he had a pathological inferiority with a murderous reflex based on experiencing extreme violence as a child. Both these fit the homeopathic remedy picture of Anacardium (Also Scorpion, Agaricus). Murderous rage, extreme cruelty, an evil intent and serious lack of confidence are its hallmarks.

I would imagine that this child found getting love from his mother difficult because of her own extremely wounded state. In fact, he must have felt that only violence really made him feel an alive, noticed, visible human. I would think his experiences at conception and in the womb left him little option but to feel separated and alone in the world, isolated from everyone, as if no one else existed, for this is the underlying feeling of the Anacardium picture.
As far as I could see and his mother confirmed, that the Anacardium outperformed the hospital specialists, the child’s psychologists, the teachers, the social workers and the special care units.