3.3.2 Aluminium phosphoricum, Case 1
A 28 year old woman has many vague complaints, but she doesn’t know what has caused them. She has some spots, which started when she moved house 4 months ago and which are gradually getting worse. She is also putting on weight: she has gone from 62 to 68 kilos since she stopped smoking 6 months ago. It feels strange to her to weigh 68 kilos. She also has pains in her throat with a feeling of rawness.
She has been trying to decide what she wants to do, who she is and how she wants to spend her life. She is very creative: she is a fashion designer and she has her own shop, which she wants to build up into a top designers studio. She really wants to push her career, but she’s got stuck half way and has developed an aversion to all this trying to achieve. This is partly because of the pressure she has always felt from her parents, which has made her confused. When she wonders what her parents think of her and what they expect of her the answer is always: achieving the best. She feels at a loose end and she cries a lot. She thinks about her situation a lot and wonders who is to blame. She feels she can’t get on with her career until she has sorted out her emotions. She is not satisfied about her self or her work, although it looked very promising in the beginning. When she first opened her studio she was very active with the promotional aspects, very flash and glittery. But it hurts her every time a client walks out of the shop having bought one of her creations. Now she just makes beautiful clothes and waits until someone happens to buy something, she doesn’t push it anymore.
Her parents are quite superficial, her father having very few interests in life. Her mother is locked up in her own frustrations, she used to have difficulty accepting her own physical needs and desires, but she seems very pleasant. Her mother couldn’t accept that she had a daughter, she had only wanted to have sons. Her mother did not give her much warmth and did not teach her how to be a woman.
She was quite a happy child, and could have been even happier if it hadn’t been so tiring to be happy in a dull family. She acts as if she is very open, but she hasn’t expressed the sadness that she felt as a child. She learned to keep down part of her emotions because she couldn’t express them with parents who weren’t happy with her.
She doesn’t know who she is and she wants to find out. She sees everything as separate part of life: her work, her relationship, her friends, they are all loose bits instead of a whole.
She has had cystitis frequently since she was 4. It started with bedwetting. She then spent 5 weeks in hospital because her urethra was being widened. When she finally was allowed home her mother was out and hadn’t arranged any special homecoming celebration.
She always took into account what her 4 elder brothers thought of things. If one of them said: ‘You look strange’ she believed it. She not only measured her behaviour to what her parents and teachers expected of her, she also followed and got hurt by everything her brothers said. She learned to behave like a boy and denied her feminine side.
When she was 24 she had a hernia in her left groin.
Fears: spiders (3!) (in the past this was a way to vent all her tension); horror films, thunder.
Generals
Desires: pasta (3), tomato sauce (2), rice (2), fish, crab (2), game (2), spices (3), Indonesian (4), sour (3), sour fruit (3), savoury.
Aversion: fruit, potatoes (3), fat, heavy, mashed, sweet (3).
Food: < sweet, chocolate:cystitis.
Analysis
She has many vague complaints and feels strange. She doesn’t know very well who she is, which would point to Boron or Aluminium. She sees her relationship, her work and her friends as separate parts in her life, which means it is the relationship side of her life that makes her confused. This is more Aluminium. Further confirmation for Aluminium is the feeling of being lost through pressure by her parents to achieve. Once again it is the family who are playing a large role in her confused state. There is also confusion about her feminine side, because her parents did not want to have a daughter. Also typical is the fact that her mother wasn’t there to welcome her when she got home from hospital: there was no real feeling of home.
But which Aluminium should we choose? She was very much influenced by her parents, which might indicate Muriaticum or Silicatum. But she also allowed herself to be led by her brothers, adjusting her behaviour to what friends at school and brothers thought and did. This is more Phosphorus and so we get Aluminium phosphoricum.
Other Phosphoricum symptoms: fear of thunderstorms, -> fish, crab, spices, Indonesian.
Other Aluminium symptoms:-> pasta, rice, <- potatoes (3).
Reaction
After Alumina phosphoricum she developed a sore throat with swollen tonsils and a feeling as if her throat was being squeezed. She felt restless with palpitations. She held her fists clenched for several days, looking confused and angry, making violent punching movements. Her stomach felt tight and she held her breath. She felt bad whenever she had to express something, even if it was only a sigh.
She dreamed a lot; about sitting on a galloping horse, about being in a fast train, about her grandmother and her friends. They were merely fragments, not a whole story, more a feeling of ‘Yes, I remember that time’.
After that she starts to feel different, as if her position in the world is somehow different. She becomes more emotional and allows herself to cry from time to time. She thought a lot about all the unhappy events of the past, something she has never dared before. She likes the strong and sometimes violent reactions that are coming up from time to time, it is part of finding out who she really is and what suits her: a career or simply being creative?
She is more open to special requests from her clients. She takes more time to make decisions: in the past she always wanted everything to happen right now.
After two months she feels very good. Her head no longer feels like a grey woolly ball, the way it used to. She is going to close her shop and work from home, and be less professional in her aims.
Her body is changing too, becoming softer and rounder, more feminine. She wants to combine work with having children, something she never dared admit to before. She allows herself the time to feel what it is like to be pregnant and she is able to see her mother through different eyes.