Case study for the feeling of oppression
This case study is an excerpt from Pierre Fontaine’s book ” Homeopathy, Sweet Homeopathy: Coming Home to Perfect Health“. Find out more information including how to purchase a copy.
JAMES
(Late 50’s)
MC: FEELINGS OF OPPRESSION
Pierre: What brings you here, please?
“I am a thinker and a head job. I think my problem has to do with emotions. I’ve been seeing a shrink for many years to get at my emotions through my intellect. The basic problem I have is that I feel I can’t care for somebody because I feel like I am going to lose myself. I should say that that’s the fairy tale I have constructed.”
Please tell me about the feeling of “losing yourself.”
“I have problems breathing and I am painfully worried about it at times. I have resisted medications for my problem for years. I want to fight the good fight. I do affirmations and I get through it when it happens, but it is such a burden. At night I feel so oppressed my head closes in.”
Tell me more about the fighting the good fight, please.
“I want to win but I’m not beating it. I can’t sit still but if I get this thing over with I will find something else to fight for. I saw my dad waste away from lung disease so it has been quite a search to find a solution to this respiratory problem. I wonder, why should I outlive this wonderful guy? I fall asleep and wake up startled after a few hours. I don’t have enough air, I feel closed in, I feel oppressed and I am suffocating. It is really terrible. I have to get up and I go watch TV, to distract myself for a while and then it gets better. I feel quite distraught over it all, it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt well.”
Please describe the feeling when you wake up distraught like that. (I make the same gesture he makes.)
“My wife is a cold potato. She’ll let me suffer while I am having problem. Instead of taking my hand and patting my head, she turns around. I feel she is cold and cruel. When I feel like my body is in a dead trap, I try to fight the good fight. I don’t like to accept a loss. I don’t want to have the feeling that I’m losing ground I have to fight on.”
REMEDY:
Caesium metallicum
FOLLOW UP: ( 2 months later)
Pierre: How are you feeling, please.
“I was having a lot of trouble with anxiety and breathing. The remedy did not act right away, it took about one week but since then I have not been waking up with anxiety anymore. The breathing and the oppression do not plague me anymore. It is much less prominent and frequent than before. It is a shadow of what it was a month ago. My breathing problem seems to have left. I don’t feel in the battle mode anymore. I used to want to control so much. I feel like I am not in the place where I should be though where I am now is a far more comfortable place than where I used to be. I always look at the next bright spot. Even with my wife things have improved: I don’t instigate as much and I am less combative. She seems more loving toward me.”
SEVERAL FOLLOW-UPS LATER
“I would like to know that I could clearly isolate what it is that made me better.”
DISCUSSION
The shortness of this case does not reflect the amount of time it took to take. Most cases take a couple of hours for the initial visit, this one took 5 hours broken up into several visits. The follow-ups generally take about 30 minutes if everything is going well.
The difficulty in this case was that he could not describe his feeling very well. Rather than spontaneously describing his feelings most of what he said was very rationalized.
I present this case because I gave the same remedy to Jollie (see case). The complaints are widely different yet the root sensation regarding their particular conditions is the same. In Jollie’s case she fought everybody valiantly, in this case he “fights the good fight” for his health, for his survival. In both cases it was fighting the good fight with noble reasons but with a complete inability to come to a resolution. I mentioned in Jollie’s case it was like Don Quixote idealism. Indeed, this case is the same.
There is so much emotional pain here. Emotional pain is often brushed over by people as I mentioned in Edith’s case of post partum depression (see case). It is quite possible that his wife can’t or doesn’t want to do what he is asking her to do every night. It would be comforting of course to pat his back but we know that it would not help in the long run.
He is feeling better. He should still see a therapist to help him walk through the emotional disturbances he went through for most of his life. The beauty here is that therapy will be far more effective now. He can see more clearly and he will be able to make much greater progress in a lesser amount of time.
What James was asking from his wife was really a little idealistic and it is understandable that she couldn’t comfort him every night.
I explained the remedy is a bio-dynamic substance acting in total harmony and conjunction with his Vital Force. Naturally, he was interested, yet he was rather emotional about the fact that it took such a short time to achieve what he had been working on for years. Perhaps without all these years of work he would not have been able to explain it to me, who knows? In the end, getting better without harm is really what counts.
