What is Your Illness Keeping You From?
How do I make sure to fully diagnosis every aspect of the patient’s health issues? As I’ve written about previously, there are many dimensions of things which can be blockages to our health, including diseases and imbalances. Looking into one aspect of this does not mean that the other dimensions of disease or imbalance will automatically reveal themselves. The process of diagnosis, then, is multi-dimensional, with each dimension being unique and distinct.
The third jurisdiction of Heilkunst (do you remember the difference between therapeutic regimen, therapeutic medicine, and therapeutic education?) is the most multi-faceted, and therefore takes the most diverse approaches to fully diagnose and treat. One aspect of this jurisdiction is in identifying and unravelling a patient’s conflicts which exist between their conscious and subconscious minds. One way in which I begin to open up this area, is by asking the patient how their health condition has changed their life — what has changed and what are they not able to engage with that they wish they could? Or to flip the question around, I could simply ask them what they would do with their life if they had their health back?
I may explicitly ask these questions directly of the patient, of if they don’t yet seem ready to engage in questions at this level, then I’ll seek the answer myself by imagining it based on what I already know about their life, and how they already express themselves about more factual aspects of their health condition. There can even be subtle clues in the language which they use to describe their symptoms, and the feeling which they describe it with. One patient may have a very sad tone when describing their condition, while another may be much more irritable.
The reason for looking at illness in this light, is that our subconscious mind can’t generally speak directly to us using everyday language, but uses the more symbolic language of symptoms. While someone may desire to be living in a situation that their illness currently makes impossible, the answer at least partially lies in the content of their subconscious mind which may have fears or other emotions keeping them at a distance from it.
A very overt example is one where someone subconsciously makes and keeps themselves sick in order to receive the benefit of the love and care they receive from their family. Or the similar situation described by Münschausen Syndrome, where a parent subconsciously perpetuates the illness of their child in order to keep themselves in the important role of caretaker (ie martyr).
Once this image of resistance starts to be sketched from such questions or imaginings about the patient, a more concrete approach to treatment can be applied, whether through specific homeopathic remedies for releasing this subconscious content, or a more direct confrontation with the patient if their ontic organization is strong enough to handle the charge at their current stage of treatment.