Lukas has destructive behaviour that he attempts to curb with meditation.
Yiota Papanikolaou takes us through this richly illustrated case.
(From the New Homeopath, the journal for Professional Homeopaths, Spring edition)
Lukas is a 10-year-old boy and attends his local primary school. I was contacted by Lukas’ mother in October 2022, to help with what she described as abnormal and destructive behaviour. He was throwing tantrums out of nowhere, had become super sensitive to criticism, especially from his sisters and his anger was out of control.
His mother could hardly recognise him and she felt she had to walk on eggshells around him. This was very new behaviour and had completely upset the family dynamics, making it impossible for the family to communicate, interact and exist together.
Lukas chose to become a vegetarian when he was 5: he saw a fish and realised it had eyes, which made him feel it was cruel to eat it. He is uncomfortable when the rest of the family eats meat and the mother prepares a separate dinner for him. I thought it is quite outstanding for a 5-year-old to have such insights and that became my first clue that this would be an extraordinary case.
Mother: He struggles a lot with his relationship with his older sister; she is hyperfunctioning and doesn’t realise how her words affect others. He feels dismissed by her and that his ideas are not validated. Whatever he proposes they play, is always dismissed.
Lukas: Me and my sister don’t talk anymore, we keep away from each other in the last two weeks: I need a break from her and her insults.
Mother: He doesn’t like arguments at school, he is not aggressive at all. He is sensitive, very creative with crafts and likes kung fu.
Yiota: Tell me about your anger?
Lukas: I get angry a lot; I don’t like it. I go to my room and scream.
Mother: He never hits or gets physically violent. He has been very unhappy; it is heart breaking to watch him like this.
Lukas: My sisters are always mean to me, my older sister is taller, faster and always beats me at games. They tell me to grow up and grow a backbone, it makes me really angry and I want to scream.
It all started during lockdown where they were being home-schooled and they didn’t have much personal space.
Lukas: I meditate to stay calm but they always tease me: meditation helps me a lot. Sleep is bad, I get nightmares, scary dreams. There is a monster that chases me and turns me into a big splodge.
Mother: Lukas is special, he is connected with something, there is something special about him, I feel drawn to him. He has a magnetic personality. But now he has become very sensitive, on the edge of frustration all the time, throwing tantrums, at the edge of being suicidal. He is radical, all or nothing. His depression was so bad, that one day he said, “I want to kill myself, I don’t deserve to be alive.” He actually hurt himself, he tried to break his bone in his arm. He is angry, sad, doesn’t want to be alive because he feels insulted all the time.
He has suffered from constipation and tummy aches at night time. We used laxatives to clear the bowels. There were hard crusty balls coming out.
Physically he has been quite healthy. And my pregnancy was good. I had a beautiful home birth, it was spiritual, he was born open, relaxed. He was breast fed for a year then stopped on his own.
No fears, just scared of dark and lightning in case it strikes the house.
He likes to draw comics, to make others happy, to make people laugh and perform magic tricks. He gets validation in making others laugh.
Analysis:
At this point I couldn’t see any aetiology; how this bright, sensitive, calm child became so depressed that he is self-harming. The family was loving and supportive. The only issue was the rivalry between him and his sisters. There was an essence I couldn’t quite grasp: the spirituality, being vegetarian from a young age, the spiritual birth, the self-loathing, the self-harming.
I prescribed Staphysagria 200C to take weekly, a remedy that repertorised well and would perhaps help ease up his suppressed anger or open up things. I asked for regular updates.
Rx: 1st Prescription: Staphysagria 200C weekly
1st update from mum: His behaviour was immediately more noticeably calm, and his tantrums were somehow lighter. However, on Tuesday 5th October he had the tantrum of tantrums, it lasted for almost four hours in and out, very erratic radical changes of mood. It was like a big explosion, and it started over nothing special. I couldn’t find any reason about such a big reaction for such an ordinary, daily thing.
Rx: I instructed to repeat the remedy.
Two weeks later came the second update from Lukas’ mum: this week we’ve gone back to square one. Same amount of tantrums as before, neither bigger nor smaller than before.
Rx: Sent Staphysagria 1M to give a split dose and told the mother to update me.
Update after Staphysagria 1M:
Lukas is screaming at the top of his lungs and wanting to hurt himself. There’s no way to reason with him or to balance him enough for some reasoning to be able to take place. Lukas told me that he exploded at school and told a boy to ‘f’ off. He was called into the teacher’s office. Apparently, there is a boy who has been calling him names.
At this point, I realised that the prescribed remedy was not doing much, so I asked for a proper follow up to explore things more.
Lukas: School was hard today. I got very annoyed, so asked the teacher if I could go outside and breathe. I still don’t talk to my sister; it is better this way she doesn’t try to annoy me.
I get really angry, I bottle up and explode!!
I can get very angry, say swear words. It is usually with other kids when they play a joke on me. I just stood there, they were taunting me, grouping up on me, and then I had enough and exploded! I used swear words. I wanted to hit the boys! The worse about it is taunting me and grouping on me, I feel small. I feel small, annoyed, angry, sad, confused, like an ant. I feel worthless, anger bursts out of nowhere.
Remedies helped, I felt more calm, not as angry: when someone annoyed me, I didn’t explode!
I am a bit better, don’t explode so much.
Dreams: blackness, dark, I struggle to fall asleep.
Being teased at school is the worst and people being loud.
Mother: He gets these unpredictable bursts of gigantic proportions! He feels he is worthless, he said he hated himself, hated everyone, he gets into this state and then he doesn’t remember any of that. Nothing can calm him down when he is like that, it is uncontrollable, these outbursts can last an hour or more! It is exhausting! He can’t cope with the stress; he’s screaming in the car, it is like being hit by a bus, a massive explosion, nothing can calm him down!
Yiota: Tell me about the cartoons you draw.
Lukas: The world explodes and the sun explodes, it is the war against the future. I have been studying about the big bang theory. I think the world will explode. The sun is old and will explode and destroy everything. Pollution is another strong subject; people littering, I am very sensitive about that.
His drawings are chaotic, explosions, technology, war, planes, tanks. Here is the case!
Yiota: Where are YOU in the drawing?
Lukas: I am in a big giant robot controlling it to fight people, I am fighting random violent people. The violent villains will win, and the robot explodes.
Yiota: Tell me about your favourite books: Wolf Brother, Mythos.
Lukas: In Mythos I liked Poseidon, God of the water. I like the Wolf Brother book: I love wolves they hunt; they don’t litter, they are spiritual creatures. I am still meditating but is not helping.
Looking for the Totality:
At this point I realised it was not just an issue of sibling rivalry but a deeper state, so I looked for a radioactive remedy to cover the themes of end of world, destruction, explosion of the sun, old age, meditation, spirituality, global extinction.
Main Themes of the case:
· Explosion
· Implosion
· War
· End of the world
· Profanities
· Extinction
· Spirituality
· Meditation
· Old age
· Magic
Despite the fact that I was talking to a 10-year-old boy his demeanour, and deep essence called for a remedy that corresponded to old inner age. There was none of the lightness or playfulness of a 10-year-old. He was made heavy by the world’s weight and was suffering deeply.
Prescription: Plutonium nitricum 1M split dose
Follow ups, given by Lukas’ mother:
April 2023: Seems to be ok. He’s been frustrated and angry at times, but he hasn’t thrown a massive tantrum or been non-responsive to words, or escalated to anything bigger. He seems in general a bit happier.
May 2023
Lukas says the remedy is helping but he still has explosions!
Prescription: Repeat Plutonium nitricum 1M split dose
January 2024
Lukas is doing much better at school he doesn’t get angry as much; the situations are the same nothing has changed, but he just doesn’t react the same as before. He doesn’t have those big explosions anymore.
Lukas: My head stays calm now; I ignore the teasing from my classmates.
Mother: I have noticed that his confidence is much better as well, he is more confident in general. In April last year he joined a drama club, and he is loving it, he really enjoys the drama group and he is really good at it, which was a revelation. He is also great at dancing ~ who would have thought! It seems like he has tapped into his real self again, he had lost his essence and now he’s found it!
With his sister they are able to communicate better, he doesn’t get as angry. They are all chatting at the dinner table, things are much calmer: we are all much happier!
With Lukas it was all about implosion and explosion.
No bad dreams. He wakes up fine, goes to school no issues, he plays the piano. He is doing lots of clubs. He has been performing to the adult drama club as well. He is very creative and can do lots of things with his hands; he creates weapons, swords, he goes to kung fu.
He is talkative, lighter, happy, chatty, laughing. Everyone is saying how lovely he is to be around! He is obsessed with the Netflix series “Stranger Things”. He is writing a book called “This is the real me”, about a boy being himself.
He sent Yiota the first few pages of his new book. And its cover photo.
Prescription: No remedy.
Further thoughts:
I searched the words mask and explosion/ implosion on Radar and these rubrics came up:
Mind - Delusions - mask - is behind a mask: (3) Plutonium nitricum
Mind - Masking Emotions: (34) Plutonium nitricum
Generals - Exploding - sensation as if exploding: (1) plut-n.
Implosion/explosion:
“The birth of plutonium - Plutonium’s coming of age in 1945 in the Santa Fe desert near the Jornada del Muerto was a spectacular implosion and explosion of such magnitude that the director of the atomic test, code-named ‘Trinity’, invoked the Hindu scripture, ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds’. The eruptive energy was momentous and transforming; the sound rumbled like a freight train across the desert. The light illuminated the bones of hands held protectively over the eyes of the observers. The smoky vapour billowed slowly into the sky, pulling away from the base of the cloud to form a mushroom-shaped head. Below, the intense heat fused the sand into trinitite, pieces of greenish-grey and reddish glass.”
Extracted from Jeremy Sherr’s The Homeopathic Proving of Plutonium nitricum.
Interestingly Lukas was trying to break the bone on his arm when trying to hurt himself and had broken both his arms when younger.
Since this hidden state was brought to light during the lockdowns, it makes me wonder what energies were released, circulated and picked up during those times. Maybe we are indeed going through a radioactive era and these remedies will be needed more and more in the future.
As a last thought, I can only be astonished and humbled by the power of our remedies, and forever be grateful to our teachers who have done such an incredible work studying, proving, mapping the groups of remedies, and sharing their knowledge so generously within the homeopathic community. One can only assume how different this boy’s and his family’s life would have been if it weren’t for the miraculous cure of homeopathy.
-Books Lukas mentioned: Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, and Mythos by Stephen Fry.
