Magnesium

         Recently, a guy I know was telling me he'd been suffering with RLS (Restless legs syndrome) and that his doctor had told him not to have any foods rich in calcium, such as milk or tuna, indefinitely. I didn't tell the guy, but I thought that his doctor's solution was pretty lame. So when I went home, I researched how calcium is absorbed by the body. I found that the body uses magnesium as a vehicle to transport calcium to the places where is needed. So if there is insufficient magnesium in the body, calcium piles up in all the wrong places, like people turning up at a bus stop and no bus ever showing up to take them to where they are meant to go. When I saw the guy again I told him about my findings and to try to take some magnesium and see if it made a difference, and what do you know? A short time later he came to me and said that the problem was solved and he was sleeping again. ( I seriously don't know how his doctor couldn't have told him this, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to find this information. You'd think doctors would have a basic knowledge of how minerals and vitamins are absorbed by the body, but there you are...)
         Anyway, I hadn't given this incident any more thought until I wrote the post on supplements and reviewed my original post on the connection between magnesium and maternal neglect. And here's the thing: this guy's mother left him and his father when he was young. I don't really know all the particulars, but I doubt very much this is just a coincidence. According to wikipedia, RLS is a neurological disorder for which the exact cause is not known. It seems to me that there's a strong connection between neurological disorders which have no known cause and dysfunctional upbringing. All the people I know who suffer with autoimmune disease have a similar background: physical or emotional abandonment by one or two of the parents. It's like a blueprint, and once you know about it, it's not hard to find the common thread. 
     The first time I came across this idea was when I was doing research to find how to calm tense muscles and unexpectedly bumped into this:

in The Soul of Remedies Rajan Sankaran writes, “The magnesium feeling is that the person doesn’t get the care, protection and nourishment that he needs. It is the state of an infant dependent on the mother for nourishment, care, security and support, but who has been abandoned by his parents. It is the feeling of an orphan...In most Magnesium carbonicum patients there is a total repression – they feel that they should not make any demands on anyone, should not ask anyone for help. In this way, they may seem to be independent...Another feature of the dreams of Magnesium is that in many of these, there is a feeling of being alone, of having to face a problem alone. Among those homeopathic remedies made from magnesium compounds such as magnesium carbonate and magnesium chloride, one of the central themes of magnesium is repressed internal anxiety and insecurity. A second main theme of magnesium is the emotional desire for strong parental nurturing and protection, especially from the mother, in order to survive. Homeopath Dr. Rajan Sankaran in The Substance Of Homeopathy writes regarding the magnesium type: “These feelings in the adult seem so out of place that they have to be repressed, but they continue to be active in the subconscious, producing tremendous internal anxiety, the cause of which the patient cannot exactly pinpoint…The feeling is of being forsaken and alone, and very needy of protection.” Magnesium individuals often have a history of being neglected or made to feel unwanted as children. They often have anxieties about being vulnerable, alone or abandoned although these emotions are frequently, but incompletely, repressed. The general link between blue chamomile and the central themes of internal anxiety and insecurity is the feeling of historically not receiving enough attention from those he is dependent upon. In the compensated state, the magnesium individual may so effective repress the artifacts of these issues that they appear unaffected and self-reliant and display a competence in caring for others in a maternal nurturing way. However, the repressed anxiety and other feelings readily diffuses into the person’s dream’s manifesting as dreams of such things as dangerous situations, falling, feeling of aloneness, feeling of having to face a challenging or dangerous situation alone, children, being with dead relatives and the death of relatives. Whenever using blue chamomile oil to help relieve anxiety, supplemental magnesium may prove to be a valuable synergist. In this reference, it is important to bear in mind that vitamin D is required for optimal assimilation of magnesium.

         I don't know why maternal neglect translates into magnesium deficiency, I wish there was more research into the physical effects of emotional neglect on the human body.

Red Herrings

    Dr. Wilson's book on Adrenal Fatigue tells the case of a woman who was finding it difficult to recover from it. This woman had "several energy suckers in her life, including her mother" and she felt guilty if she did not have regular contact with them. Sound familiar?  His prescription was to eliminate contact with these energy suckers and to absolutely minimise contact with the mother. She was not to speak to her mother for more than three minutes at a time and only twice per week. He then goes on to say: "Although these energy suckers were not the major factors causing her adrenal fatigue, until they were removed, she was not able to recover". 

I strongly disagree with his statement. I am convinced that "these energy suckers" WERE the MAJOR factors causing the AF. 

   A family I know have a son and a daughter in their late twenties, the son is an alcoholic and has been off work for depression for the last couple of years. The daughter is very overweight and is constantly yo-yo dieting, losing the weight and putting three times more on when she re-gains it. As far as the parents are concerned, the son's problems are his doing and the daughter has a weight problem because she has "celiac disease". I know three other people with celiac disease, and lo and behold, they all have emotionally unavailable fathers/husbands. The father in the family mentioned above is also emotionally unavailable. My father also was (and is) emotionally unavailable. My conclusion is that all these issues that are blamed as the problem, i.e. alcohol, obesity, depression, allergies, food intolerances, psoriasis, and constant fatigue, etc. are not the problem but a consequence of the root problem, which is: dealing with pathological people who either make your life misery or constantly withhold what they should be giving naturally. While I am willing to allow for the "correlation isn't always causation" principle and concede that maybe not all cases of those problems mentioned above are caused by difficult family relations, in all the cases I personally know of, I can find this common element. Maybe the issue is cloudy for the professionals because every person's body reacts differently, i.e. as in the case of the family mentioned above, perhaps if both children struggled with alcohol, the source of the problem would be more obvious. It is also a lot more work for a doctor to try to put all the factors together to get the real picture. In all the years since my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, not once has any doctor asked to see any of the other family members. I guess it's a lot easier for them to deal with the symptoms that to try to get to the root of the problem...

The Cracked Vessel

While checking the link on Adrenal Fatigue that CZBZ put in her comment to the post On Supplements I came across this:
"Exposure to other people’s pathology (and the corresponding emotional, physical/sexual abuse) can, and often does, give other people stress disorders, including PTSD.  Our psychological and emotional systems are simply not wired for long-term exposure to someone else’s abnormal psychology.  Often the result is a conglomeration of ‘aftermath’ symptoms that include PTSD, which is described as ‘a normal reaction to an abnormal life event.’

The profound and long-term effects of PTSD create what I refer to as a ‘cracked vessel.’  The fragmentation caused by the trauma creates a crack in the emotional defense system of the person.  While treatment can ‘glue the crack back together’, and the vessel can once again function as a vessel, if pressure is applied to the crack, the vase will split apart again."

It shed light on why as soon as life gets too hectic or I am dealing with too many "arrows" at once, I crash. Badly. I lose all the energy in my body. I am unable to move. It's as if the body has "yanked" me out of life into a "repair workshop" and I am not allowed to move until the work is done. DH said to me yesterday that my problem is that I don't stop when I'm tired, and I had to agree. It makes sense that the inner compass in my body just takes the reigns and makes me stop whether I want it or not. One of the articles in the website discussed the need for people who have been through trauma to "live a gentler live". Can I live a "gentler life"? Looks like I'm going to have to learn how to. No point being so busy and then crashing so badly that you can't do anything for days. 

On this last crash I was so drained I couldn't even write but I was able to sketch a little. I was going to attempt to do a sketch inspired by the painting in the post on The Cracked Vessel, and in Modigliani's style for CZBZ -whose profile is a painting of Modigliani- for sharing the link. So I had one go and it was ok, but I wasn't exactly what I wanted. Then I had another idea: to sketch Jeanne Hébuterne  with her dress as a cracked vessel, and this is what came out: