A Confusion of Identity

By Wiet van Helmond

We all go through certain developmental stages through which we develop ourselves and our connection to the world around us. Historically, there probably has never been a moment in time where this was easy, but in the last few decades the development of personal and gender identity has become more complex than it has ever been before. This presents us with new challenges in our daily practice. I would like to present a case to illustrate this issue and also show that our Materia Medica is well equipped to deal with many of these ces.

About seven years ago I got a phone call from a colleague with the question of if she could refer someone to me. A patient of hers was sliding off and was in urgent need for a remedy to change her course.

So far nothing unusual. Referrals take place all the time and as she wanted me to go into the case from a tabula rasa perspective, I didn’t ask about any background information and just waited for her (gender was all I knew) to contact me. In my mind I was more or less expecting a traumatized middle-aged story, as these are somehow often referred to me.

The consultation took place a week later and the patient was an 11-year-old girl. It took at least half an hour to get any verbal communication set up between her and I. She was very shy and whatever I asked, she became panic-stricken and looked to her mother for the answer.

We’ve all seen these children; nervous, shy, sensitive and yet there is something inside them that is strong, it just hasn’t found its way to the outside yet. If I ask about hobbies she cannot answer out of timidity, but she will look annoyed at her mother when she gives the wrong answer or too much sensitive information on the subject.

She has several complaints, the most important one being depressed and anxious and fantasizing about suicide as she feels she’s done something terribly wrong. Her mother says that it is as if she’s not fully here anymore. She’s sunken in depression and forgets things. She’s no longer the happy child she once was.

Now, although she’s smart for her age, she’s unable to verbalize where this is coming from. She just feels this guilt gnawing at her. So, I decide to take the conversation in a wide circle around the subject to see what comes up. 

Most of the information is coming from mother and it all comes down to the fact that she is very sensitive to what people think, say and feel about her. The slightest criticism or reprimand will strike her like lightning. 

She likes school but feels no need to be the best. It’s more important to be somewhere in the comfort zone between the best and the worst, the silently present student. She likes learning, reading, and looking things up. But she will not brag about her knowledge. Any item of wisdom is for herself, not for an external purpose. But although she likes school in general, she hasn’t been to school for almost two months now.

So how long has she been like this, has she been this sad? 

Her mother tells me she’s always been quiet, sensitive but this sadness is something that came in the past 12 months. Nobody knows why.

It has gotten to the point that she’s so tormented by it she’s losing hair. She always had thin, blonde hair but now about 40-50% of her hair has fallen out and her hair and scalp are very sensitive. Even the softest brush seems painful. And the hair loss is of course not helping in her pre-pubescent self-confidence. 

When I ask her about her hair you can see it’s a sensitive subject but she’s fighting off all emotion. As if it would be a sign of weakness to cry about it. 

Sitting across from her I get the impression it would help her to shed some tears about this whole situation because she seems so stuck within herself.

To further aggravate the situation her mother takes her hands and places them on my desk so I can notice the fungus infected nails. Not the hands of a child. 

But with all her weaknesses on the table I decide this is not the way to go as you can see her suffering, speechless.

So, I ask what she’s passionate about. At the moment this is very little. Occasionally she will meet with a friend and they play with dolls but often only after a slight nudge from mother. She seems stuck in her state and is not reaching out. A year earlier she was passionate about soccer and was even a member of the local soccer club.

This seems like a safe subject so I ask “what position were you in”, “are you fanatic or more passionate about the social part?”, “can you stand to lose a match?”

Innocent questions she can even answer herself, but I see emotion, even here. So, I circle about the subject of soccer.

She lives in a small village and there were not enough girls to form a girl’s team so the boy’s team had an extra mixed-team. And according to her mother she was a fanatic about soccer. She could stand to lose but would give it her all under any circumstance, a friendly match or competition. And she was tough, not ‘a girlie’ on a boy’s team. She was one of them, a full member of the team. And then at the end of the school year she quit the team.

“Was she depressed in the period where she was playing soccer?”

No, definitely not! This was all before it changed.

“So what changed? Where do you feel this guilt most?”

And then it finally comes out. In the final month of the previous school year there was a test. Sort of a group discussion. Innocent questions about how you feel about life, if you knew someone who was bullied, if you knew someone who was homosexual, if you knew if you were gay or straight yourself. And then they held a poll in the class. If you were gay hold up your hand. If you’re straight, hold up your hand. If you don’t know, hold up your hand. She’d never really thought about it. What am I? So, she had to analyze herself quickly to come up with the right answer. She thought “I like boys, I like soccer” I must be heterosexual. So, she held up her hand on this group. 

But during the summer they went on a camping holiday where she met another girl with whom she played with all summer and this girl liked Barbie dolls. So now she was hooked on this trend and everything had to be Barbie doll related. So soccer was out, Barbie’s were in.

And back in school she started wondering “I like girls, I like Barbies. I must be lesbian. Which means I lied last year. On an official school test where the whole school observed my answer, I lied about myself!” and now she’s afraid she’s going to fall in love with a girl… 

As she tells me all this you can see the panic in her eyes. Not about sexual orientation, but about not knowing what you are and having possibly told a lie about it in public.

The remedy is clear so I prescribe Silicea 200 C, dry dose for two days.

A week later her mother tells me “My daughter is back!”

At some point in life we are all confronted by the question of “who am I?” This question is usually the result of the realization that “I am not you”. In the beginning of life there is not a lot of unique individuality. We are like our parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. And in our early childhood, in our ‘psychotic’ perception of the world we are all one. “I scream and mother moves, therefore her body also belongs to me.” “See that bottle? I scream and it comes to me. So I am that bottle as well. My body and mind are without limit.”

But as we develop ourselves and learn the strengths and weaknesses of our body we discover we are unique and separate human beings as well. “If mother wants me to go right, I have a body of my own, I have a will of my own. I could go left! And whether I want to go to the left or not I will go there just to emphasize the fact that I have a will and body of my own and the world should take this into consideration.” And so, a door of possibilities opens up. “I will hold my own spoon! No! I don’t want to sit in the chair! I will eat when I am hungry!” 

In this stage we develop the “I” and who is this person in relation to others? Who are the people that belong to me as a unique person? With whom should I be in relation of sorts?

The rubrics we should think of is ‘confusion of identity’, ‘defiant’, ‘contrary’, ‘disobedience’ but also the rubrics belonging to the fear of this separation going too far: ‘forsaken feeling’, ‘delusion has done wrong’ and ‘oversensitive to what others say about her’.

Before this stage we can be placed next to any other child and parallel play will take place. We do not play together but we each have our own game. We are just not alone. Starting from the Silicea phase we will decide leader/follower, friend or foe. Do we have matching interests? Do our personalities match? 

And this is only the beginning. At age 3 you like dolls, the person next to you likes dolls, you’re best friends. At age 40 the list of friendship-requirements is much longer.

If we look at Jan Scholten’s index of the periodic table we see it is almost in the middle. A very nice symbolic point as from here you have to decide how you relate to the people around you. 

I often tell my patients that a great deal of mental health can be acquired by knowing the mental, emotional and physical/geographical distance we need towards the people in our lives. We can have challenging, motivating relations with some of the people at work as long as we leave emotions out of it. We can feel intimately connected to someone with whom we can share our emotional life. We could be close friends to someone living on the opposite side of the planet. And all in an endless variety. 

In the Silicea phase we change our perspective from inward to outward and start to discover our social position. We can have friends, family, acquaintances, neighbors and simply sideline people in our lives that do not interfere, they simply exist.

This is the natural Silicea phase we all go through. But unfortunately we live in confusing times and as I write this article there have been 72 gender/sexual orientation identities that have been defined. These identities often start before this energy has come out of its natural dormancy thus social/gender choices are made at an increasing young age.

Which leads us to the different states in which we need to prescribe Silicea. 

First we need to realize the origin of the remedy which is not sand as many of us seem to think. The first proving of Silica was done by Hahnemann himself and he used Rock Quartz. To me this is important because we now not only need to look at it from a periodic table point of view, but also from the perspective of ‘a stone remedy’. Which brings us to another element of this remedy. People often carry this stone for clarity of mind and easy decision making. Themes that come up very strongly in the Materia Medica of Silicea. Like the current “If that than that” way of thinking is very loved by Silicea patients. But it has a pitfall because it places emphasis on the mental part of decision making. Our brain is an analytical organ looking for solutions. And as such it can come up with hundreds of solutions for the smallest problems. In repertory talk we see trifles seem important, thoughts that intrude and crowd around each other, rush of thoughts, brooding, theorizing and irresolution. It’s easy for them to become lost in the endless stream of mental options. While if we leave to our heart to decide things usually don’t have a hundred options, only one or two feel right. But people needing Silicea seem to have lost contact with this part of decision-making or heart and mind are not optimally communicating and we see a sense of duality or delusion the body is made of two halves. We then give Silicea to connect heart and mind.

Which brings us to where we are now in this age and time. Imagine being in the Silicea-phase trying to find out who you are and suddenly the options are no longer boy-girl but there are 72 genders/orientations to pick from plus social pressures to pick a choice. It is like asking a 5-year-old to choose his future education. 

Which brings us to another symptom we often see in patients in need of Silicea: precocity. As their mental capabilities tend to develop faster than their emotional or motoric developments, they tend to be precocious and in my experience they often have a certain pride in their intellectual capabilities. They like flaunting their knowledge of often little things (computers, historic data, statistics, etc.) and can show what I call “Silicea-competitiveness”. I’ll give you an example I often see in adult Silicea patients. Somewhere in conversation a certain subject pops up (a city, a historical figure, a scientist, etc). The Silicea patient will immediately jump to the occasion to tell you he’s been there, read about it, knows trivia, etc. In the repertory we see all kinds of motoric awkwardness and the development of muscles is slow. ‘All brain, no body’ is a phrase that frequently comes up in the Silicea Materia Medica. They are generally thin and don’t like sports. Exercise for them is opening and closing books, clicking Wikipedia pages and jumping to conclusions.

Which brings finishes to the circle: because who would love it more to mentally create the 73rd gender than the Silicea patient? 

We live in a time where computers can present us with limitless information on any given subject so our Silicea phases can become endless and heavily confusing.

And there is a polarity in the field of precocity. In the case of Silicea it can be a mental ability that is there before children of the same age come to this point of development. Or they are ahead in their development because their surroundings have intentionally/unintentionally pushed them. Like the child that is allowed to skip a grade, the child that is surrounded by adults or elderly children and is approached too much as an adult. Which is what we currently see happening worldwide. Forty years ago we pestered children with the question “what do you want to be when you grow up” and now we’ve placed consequences on their answer. Children under 17 years of age can get hormonal replacement therapy with their parents’ consent. This means that it is possible for children of 9 or 10 to go into transition.

There is a beautiful artwork, ‘Love Poem of the Dolphins’ by Sandro del Prete that illustrates the problem here. For a person who’s sexually not awake yet, they will see only dolphins in this artwork. A person whose sexual energy has woken will see something else and often has to focus to see any dolphin at all.

So at a moment when we are sniffing at the limits of our mental capacities, learning who we are as authentic human beings, we are traumatized by life changing decisions forced upon by a society we haven’t found our place in yet.

To me it’s plenty of reasons to occasionally think of this remedy.

In the case of my patient I followed her progress for another year directly and another two years from a distance (while I was treating siblings and parents) and she continues to develop herself in a healthy way into puberty. Issues of gender identity never surfaced again.

About the Author:

Wiet van Helmond is a Dutch homeopath practicing since 1998. Besides his practice he is a frequently requested lecturer on national and international seminars. Since 1999 he has been studying C4 homeopathy and has participated in many triturations and provings. In the last decades he has been deepening the homeopathic treatment of trauma and the use of gemstone remedies.