Touching Base With Trauma

Reaching Across the Generations: A Three-Dimensional Homeopathic Perspective

Why do we express personal patterns that persist and characterise us throughout our lives? What impact do early influences have on the disease and suffering that we become susceptible to and seem unable to escape in our individual life journeys? How can homeopathy help to resolve cases that seem to be stuck in, or repeat, certain self-defeating patterns? Insights into these questions and many others are shared by the author; Elizabeth Adalian, in the recognition that the underpinning of a case is often not sufficiently understood to unlock the patient from the dominant patterns of disease. Therefore, the importance of early life occurrences in moulding the brain structures is extensively explored in this text as well as the traumatic experiences of previous generations that have been passed down through the ancestral line.

The author conveys this approach to healing to a wider audience in order to place homeopathic treatment on the map to address trauma, in addition to describing how it can be adapted retrospectively. This book will be of interest to complementary therapists and homeopaths alike as well as individuals interested in exploring and healing their own life trauma. Based on research in related fields such as anthropology, epigenetics, literature, neuroscience, philosophy and psychotherapy, the findings are substantiated way beyond the homeopathic lens. In this process, cutting-edge ideas are incorporated in line with current thinking to support healing at core level for the types of disease conditions presenting today in practice.

Elizabeth Adalian has been a practising homeopath for over thirty years. During the course of that time, she worked in the former Yugoslavia after the recent war. This experience demonstrated to her that it was not so much the exposure to war that affected individual members of the population but more what they brought to it from their early formative years. On returning to the United Kingdom, after extending her practice to countries including Cyprus, Ethiopia, the Middle East and North Africa, Elizabeth applied this concept to her patients' cases with notably transformative results in their health. She has established a reputation for a deep knowledge of Materia Medica with the lesser known remedies which she sets out to highlight in the context of this work. Numerous articles on homeopathy have been written by her - many in the field of trauma. Elizabeth has also taught extensively across the United Kingdom and abroad.

• Author: Elizabeth Adalian
• ISBN: 9780995574816
• 235 pages
• Paperback
• Printed in United Kingdom

Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths, (from 'The Homeopath' Journal, Autumn 2017 edition). Reviewed by Francis Treuherz.

Approaching a new book for review has a certain similarity with approaching a patient: the reviewer should be the unprejudiced observer. Reading this book through for the first time I failed. I have so much inherited trauma myself that I became quite entangled. The author writes that one of the threads leading her to write this book is her experience with traumatised patients in the wars of Bosnia and Croatia: "The vicarious effects of trauma can percolate through at least three generations. This is especially true where there has been a collective trauma (such as the Holocaust), which is often suppressed".

The media reports of world-wide traumas from war, terror and famine, endorse everything that Elizabeth Adalian has written, that homeopaths need to offer help to patients suffering from trauma. The first half of the book looks at the trajectory of trauma in 27 short chapters, covering a huge range including autism. This is complemented by the second half - a comprehensive materia medica focused on trauma. There is a conclusion, a list of references but no index.

The materia medica goes far beyond polychrests, it is erudite, innovative and includes rare material and experiences. There are many comparisons and relationships of remedies and references to rubrics. There are also references to sources beyond homeopathy from psychology and observations on our human condition from a range of observers and sources which enrich the remedy descriptions.

Examples include the description of Opium and the comparison with its alkaloid Morphinum: the subtleties of fear and fright, the opening out of buried childhood trauma from a war zone, the range from coma, torpor and weakness to telling lies is fully explored. Tarentula hispanica is compared with Stramonium and with the corrupted spider the cubensis. An original view of Carcinosin is cited in detail as a remedy for vulval vestibulitis which can arise as a consequence of trauma. Anacardium is detailed as needed after abuse, humiliation, domination, punishment, violence. These are not surprises but the context and descriptions are unlike any other less focussed materia medica.

I can truly say that I discovered so many new ways of looking at trauma. There are varied examples, from victimisation to bedwetting. Responses to trauma are related to miasms. This is the only context in which it may be legitimate to develop an enthusiasm for trauma.