Act first, then explain

AV: What I have noticed in practice in the countless stories of the patients is that we all first act from an unconscious impulse and then give an explanation why we do so. That argument becomes an unshakable truth, with which we identify. For example, someone feels uncomfortable at a party and says: I don’t like superficiality, or the noise, or the crowds. Someone likes to go for a walk in the forest ‘because’ it is so quiet, cool, peaceful, healthy and whatnot. We don’t know where our feelings, tendencies, and preferences come from. When we suffer from it, we go to a therapist and there we learn that our parents’ shortcomings are at the root of it.

G: Rather funny, isn’t it?

AV: So-so. The whole quest to understand what we are doing with homeopathy is actually a vain pursuit.

G: Dead-end-streets also help find the main road.

AV: I get it: crossing out what something isn’t, is just as effective as determining what-it-is.

G: I just wanted to point out that every interaction between people is an extremely complex matter. A book could be written about what takes place in five minutes: an immense amount of impressions that are received and processed through all the senses, the exchange of language, i.e. symbolic messages, the lightning-fast reactions to each other that go back and forth, the dazzling number of feelings that arise in those few minutes, all together it could fill a hundred pages. This is no different in the healing setting. In contrast to an average chat with a stranger,  in a consultation there are a few extra programs running in the background: the expectations of the patient and the full commitment of the homeopath to achieve a good result.
The anamnesis does not take five minutes but one and a half to two hours. Maintaining concentration for so long is the equivalent of a marathon.

AV: I was always drained and exhausted after consultations.

H: It’s not necessary but inevitable if you don’t have a container. Then the life-energy runs out from all sides.

AV: Actually, people like me shouldn’t practice homeopathy or therapy.

G: Right. Not only does everything run out, but everything also runs into it: knowledge, intuition, knowing, impressions, abundance. It’s a matter of dosing: you can’t afford to let your life energy drain for hours at a time. Therefore, after all, to protect you, you have prior knowledge of the remedies. You don’t have to do all those cases anymore. Not for 12 years.

AV: I do these cases to learn, to understand the remedies that I don’t know and to share that knowledge with the homeopathic community.

G: I know.

AV: But I don’t have to.

G: That’s what I just said.

AV: Except to create the healing setting and to make the follow-up meaningfully possible, what I call the management, just as important as prescribing the similimum.

G: True, but that mainly comes down to psychological counseling and education and many homeopaths can do that.

 
Conclusion

AV: So homeopathy is an energy healing method, but it’s actually too complex. Is it therefore doomed to perish?

G: Homeopathy is individualized prescription, and therefore complex. Would you call psychotherapy too complex? Do you think it’s normal that a therapy can last for months, sometimes years, often in weekly sessions? Is psychotherapy therefore doomed to perish? Isn’t the problem rather that homeopathy compares itself to regular medicine that claims to make a diagnosis and be able to prescribe a medicine in ten minutes? And then still expect healing? What exactly do you mean by ‘complex’? Medicine is a seven-year study, and the results are often unsatisfactory. A person who has studied homeopathy for seven years is able to make solid and effective prescriptions. What’s the problem?

AV: If you put it that way….

G: What’s more, even with a minimal manual, a layman can achieve results that medicine can’t achieve, faster and without toxic influences or side effects. I don’t really understand your complaints.

AV: I am particularly bothered by the infinite number of possible remedies that the extensive individualization leads to. The fact that one must know ‘all remedies’, which is not possible, in order to be ‘close enough’ without knowing what is close enough and how ‘far’ is ‘too far’. And what about slow healings while others are lightning fast or healings that do not occur while the remedy seems to be so appropriate. All that unpredictability! All those inconsistency results!

G: I know, I just wanted to provoke you a bit. It is the frustration of every therapist who is not blind to his ‘failures’. No single therapy cures everything for everyone. We’ve already talked about that. A number of conditions must be met. It should also be the right time for the patient to consult the right therapist who will then prescribe the right remedy. For another patient, you may not be the right therapist or it may not be the right time. You see, those conditions are separate from what the therapist has to offer. Nothing is good or healing in itself. Just as nothing is poison but depends on the dose as Paracelsus said. No food, herb, supplement is good or healing in itself, but only has an effect on the person who needs it at that moment, while it ‘does nothing’ for another.

AV: That puts things into perspective.

G: And put them in a more correct perspective: there is no ‘absolute therapy’ that always works for everyone for everything, there is no perfect similimum that heals always and everything in someone. There are relationships, interactions and connections at work that have not been recognized. You’ve read about healers who healed people just by being in their presence, there are faith healers who cure incurable illnesses or disabilities, there are psychotherapies that can help rewrite your basic beliefs or your script with miraculous healings, there are diets that promise miracles and sometimes deliver. As we discussed earlier: often largely based on the patient’s beliefs and expectations. So stop wondering in frustration why homeopathy doesn’t cure everything in everyone, but know, and I mean know, that you can cure everything in everyone by believing this. If you are convinced that the remedy should match  as well as possible, then that is also the case. Because that’s how you want it.

AV: That means…. that homeopathy is as complex as I make it…

G: Draw your conclusions.

AV: Then the simplification is also in my hands!

G: Draw your conclusions.

AV: I’m perplexed.

G: May I subtly remark that you’ve been shouting “simplifying homeopathy” for over a decade?

AV: That’s true and that’s my frustration: that I don’t seem to be succeeding in that. I’m trying, I’m doing my best, but we’re not there yet, hence all my unresolved questions.

G: Is there a question left that we haven’t answered?

AV: Actually, there’s only one question: how to simplify?

G: You have to see your desire for simplification in the context of the complexity of the human being, the variety of the types of homeopathy that are practiced, the factors that influence the cure that have nothing to do with the therapy itself and a number of things that seem mysterious for the time being.

AV: (sighs) You’re right.

G:… (smiles)

AV: The basic question is to be able to prescribe a miracle pill in a simple way for anyone who asks for it. It’s starting to sound not just overconfident, but unrealistic and haughty.

G: But understandably, the healer wants to heal.

AV: There’s nothing wrong with that, I hope?

G: Wrong is not in my vocabulary. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help people. A painter wants to paint, write a writing, a violinist wants to make music and a healer wants to heal. It’s what people do, through me, with me and in me.

AV: And you through them, with them, and in them.

G: That’s right.

AV: Amen.