I could feel the fear in my body: There were terrible possibilities in the world that I had never imagined—and now one was happening to me. Not only was the loss of my brother unfathomably awful, I had no idea what the next unimaginable calamity might be. I felt my love for my big brother, the shock of having him just gone. I felt the extremity of my effort to make my mother happy, the exhausting, grinding, depleting work, the feeling that everything depended on my doing it right.
“Breathe that out!” Timmy said, as enthusiastically as a track coach. “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” He panted like a woman in childbirth, and I followed his example.
“And where was your father in all this?” Timmy asked. I suppressed the urge to give the answer I’d given as a child: “I don’t have one.” I’d always been irritated when people didn’t accept that answer, which had struck me as quite sufficient. Instead, I told Timmy the history: My parents had been married to other people when I’d been born; my mother left her husband but my father stayed with his wife, and I had never known him. “Hmm,” Timmy mused. “So you were all alone in dealing with your mother after that, with no one to protect you?” I nodded mutely.
We talked about how terrified I had been after my siblings left that I’d be sent away too. When I was 10, a few months after my mother rescued me when I’d walked out of class, I was sitting on her bed talking to her as I so often did, trying to figure out how to make her happy. And, as often was the case, she was mad at me for not doing it well enough. She repeated a common statement of hers: “You don’t have to do it”—where “it” was completely undefined and the object of my desperate efforts at ascertainment—“but if you don’t want to, you have to tell me. It’s only fair.” She paused, and then added, “Then I’ll know what I need to know about you.”
I was quite certain I knew what she’d do if she “knew what she needed to know about me.”
She sent me off to think about all this. My thoughts scrabbled: What do I need to do? What is going to make her happy?
Then something broke in me. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to work so hard to make her happy, only to be told I’m failing. This is wrong.
I imagined packing my stuff up and going off to Houston to live with my uncle Steve. I’d heard a bit about life there from Robin: The children’s schedules were very regimented, with school performance valued above all, and I got the sense that Robin felt like an eternal guest, obliged to be on her best behavior. Though I did very well in school, performing wasn’t on my agenda, and all the rest sounded bad too. Much more appealing to stay with my mother, who loved me and whom I loved.
But this wasn’t right.
I went back into my mother’s bedroom. “Send me away,” I said. “I don’t want to do it.”
As I told Timmy the story, I could feel the rigidity in my back, my muscles offering all their strength to support me. I described seeing the shock spread over my mother’s face. She was nowhere close to sending me away, I realized. I had called her bluff.
She never said anything like that again.
“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” Timmy panted. “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” I huffed in return.
Timmy asked what I would say to that little girl now, if I could, and I came up with this: “You are so radiant, and you do so much for your mother simply by being who you are. It’s not your job to make her happy or meet her needs, even if she thinks it is. Nor is it your job to save your brother. Your only job is to be your own beautiful little self, and in so doing, you are helping your mother and your brother, tremendously. And, my god, you are brave. You are so, so brave. It’s going to take a while, but someday, you won’t have to be quite so brave.”
I imagined me now, or my “higher self,” going back in time and holding the child me, dissolving time and telling her that whenever she needs me, she can call on me and I’ll be there for her. I could feel her wiry body melting in my lap, snuggling against me like Frances did. I told her that yes, there were terrible things that would inevitably happen, but even so, she was safe. She would hurt, but still, she’d be okay. Profoundly okay.
After a few more minutes of breathing, Timmy led me to another event that I had mentioned to him only briefly: When I was six, a stranger had picked me out from among my friends in a park and asked me if I’d like some honey. “I don’t like honey,” I’d said guilelessly. He offered me chocolate next, but I told him I didn’t like that either (I was a strawberry ice cream kind of girl). Then he’d said with some frustration that he had lots of candy, and I should come check it out. That got me: Lots of candy? I want to see that! Anyway, I don’t have to eat any.
The man led me to a protected portal around the side of the rec center, pulled his penis out of his pants, and forced me to put my mouth on it. I gagged, but he pushed my head down, over and over, as he stroked his penis and grunted. Then a vile taste filled my mouth. (Timmy suggested that this was the “wetness” I was afraid of, though I was doubtful.)
The man let me go afterward, and as I walked away, I threw up. He yelled something mean sounding at me, but I kept walking. When I came around the corner, my mother came toward me. I was convinced I was going to be in trouble and panicked, running crying to the car.
Although that strategy was spectacularly unsuccessful at hiding the situation from my mother, it was excellent for getting the help I needed: My mother quickly made the brilliant deduction that something was wrong and got me to tell her what happened.
Then she handled it beautifully. She not only reassured me that it wasn’t my fault, she called the police. Black-uniformed police officers drove up to our house in their white police cars, and then they gently asked me questions.
“That was a very bad man,” they told me. “If we find him, we’ll put him in jail.” I believed them, and I believed that it wasn’t my fault. I’d always thought that the quick intervention had spared me from most of the trauma, and I’d never felt like it had a major, lasting impact.
Timmy had me holler “No!” to the man over and over, encouraging me to say it deep from my belly. “No, you can’t touch me! No, you can’t hurt me!”
Then I thought about the poor guy who molested me, who had to have been a desperately tortured soul. I imagined my higher self in the park that day, talking to that sad, twisted man. In my mind, the two of us watched my child-self together, and I told him that he wasn’t allowed to touch her but he could draw strength and hope just by watching her. He could know that within him was a child as blameless and beautiful as the one he was watching, as deserving of protection and love. My child-self continued to play obliviously with her friends, swinging on the monkey bars, her luminousness undimmed, as if in a bubble of protection.
As we were ending the session, I wasn’t sure what had come from it. What does it mean to process trauma anyway? Was I in any way different after this than I was before—and what difference could I hope for? I didn’t feel any different.
But it also struck me as a reasonable-enough approach, and something that was generally useful, not so different from what a therapist might do. I’d talked about these events with therapists in the past, but it hadn’t included the breathing exercises or the visualizations about my “higher self.” I’d liked those aspects of the session, and maybe they’d been helpful.
Just before I left, Timmy said something that shocked me: “The association with mold is entirely broken.” I would never be bothered by mold again, he claimed.
I almost laughed. Yeah, right, I thought. Fat chance. But then I caught myself. Hey, I am not too proud to have the power of suggestion work on me! Let’s not channel too much energy into skepticism.
John and I met for dinner that night at a restaurant in a hotel, and I told him about the session. After John heard the story, he said, “Let’s test it!”
The restaurant was fine for me, but we knew from previous experience that the lobby of the hotel wasn’t. So after dinner, I walked into the lobby.
Instantly, I felt the mold hit me: My legs weakened, my conscio
usness dimmed. Ah, shit. Well, what did I really expect? One session doing woo-woo stuff with a psychic couldn’t possibly fix me.
I was going to turn around to leave, but then I realized I could cross the lobby and get to the outside nearly as fast as I could return to the restaurant. So I kept going, rushing to get out before I collapsed.
But when I reached the exit, I realized that I didn’t feel so bad. I stood with my hand on the handle, ready to flee, monitoring my body. I feel kind of okay. I decided to try walking around the lobby, returning to the spot that had felt so bad.
I was definitely aware of the mold—it felt a bit like a swarm of gnats inside my head, buzzing away—but the weakness and dimming-of-consciousness was gone. The mold wasn’t felling me. It was nothing more than an irritation.
Oh my god. I think it worked. I may have been healed by a psychic.
CHAPTER 23
PSYCHIC SCIENCE
Over the following weeks, I tested Timmy’s bewitchment further, going into places that were previously forbidden to me. I could go to Trader Joe’s! I could wait hours to take a shower after an exposure, letting laziness reign! I could venture down into the dank basement at John’s house in Boulder! John was even more pleased about the basement than I was—the washing machine was down there, so he had been forced to do the endless laundry himself.
I still felt mold very strongly, and I still got the hell out when I did. But I didn’t get paralyzed, didn’t collapse, didn’t go into screaming convulsions.
I also wouldn’t have said I felt cured. I woke up every morning feeling crappy, and getting functional required a couple of hours of detox (primarily saunas and coffee enemas, which continued to be amazingly effective). But I felt vastly safer in the world.
The whole thing was rather intellectually embarrassing. I forced myself to be open about it, even reporting the experience to my science-writer friends. After all, I figured, the first step in the scientific method is to gather data—even data that doesn’t fit your preferred theory, even data that seems kooky, even data that might make you look crazy. And certainly, my preferred theory was not that my illness was caused by psychological trauma or that the appropriate cure was a healing by a psychic.
When I thought about the situation carefully, I didn’t think those conclusions explained my experiences all that well. To say that psychological trauma was the sole cause, I would have had to know that without the trauma, I wouldn’t have gotten sick no matter what my mold exposures were. That was a huge leap beyond the evidence at hand.
Furthermore, my Berkeley washcloth experiment gave strong evidence that contamination was doing something directly to my body, independent of my awareness. So to explain the whole phenomenon on a psychological level, my brain would have to be reacting to a stimulus that I was unconscious of. That would be extraordinary—like a vet flying to the ground when a car silently backfired.
And finally, if psychology was the sole cause, then presumably addressing psychology would be the sole cure. But as big a difference as Timmy’s treatment made and as much as I hoped it would cure me, I couldn’t get that far. I still suffered if I spent too much time in a moldy building, or if I failed to decontaminate within a few hours. Moving into a moldy house would almost certainly send me back into terrible illness. Perhaps that meant I just needed to do more psychological work, but if so, I couldn’t figure out how.
Still, it was clear that somehow, Timmy had dramatically reduced my reactivity. But how? “Psychology,” after all, isn’t a magic wand that can accomplish anything, good or bad. Whatever Timmy had done for me, it had to have operated through some mechanism.
I developed a theory: In learning to avoid mold, I had focused on the tiniest indications that I was exposed, and then I’d made a very big deal out of them, getting the hell out of wherever I was and going through elaborate rituals to decontaminate myself. I was essentially teaching my brain that certain sensations were really alarming and important. And subsequently, those responses became stronger. I had trained my body to react.
That training was very useful: Without it, I couldn’t keep myself from getting poisoned. And I had little question that I had been poisoned—I couldn’t explain the whole thing as a trained response. After all, I was terribly ill long before I suspected that mold could be a cause, and avoiding mold had brought me a dramatic and lasting improvement (at the cost of some terrible reactions).
The problem was that I had gotten into an upward spiral, with each reaction digging a kind of groove into my brain that made the next reaction stronger. Somehow, I figured, Timmy had broken this spiral. That narrowed things down, but it still left the question: How?
I told the story to Thilo Deckersbach, a Harvard psychologist who both did research and treated patients, and he thought it made perfect sense. “His treatment was brilliant!” Deckersbach said. “State of the art.”
Anxiety, Deckersbach thought, was the key. He was quick to add that he was convinced that mold really did cause direct physiological problems—it wasn’t “all in my head.” But after so many experiences of mold sickening me, Deckersbach argued, I couldn’t help but be anxious when I felt exposed. The anxiety itself further drove the reaction, and Timmy’s treatment had helped with that component of the problem.
Deckersbach also thought he knew how Timmy did it: It was a variation of a treatment Deckersbach used with his anxiety patients called exposure and response prevention, which had strong scientific backing.
Suppose, Deckersbach explained, that a patient is terrified of flying. On a plane, he experiences extreme physical symptoms—heart palpitations, sweating, difficulty breathing. His fear feeds the symptoms, and the symptoms feed his fear. He avoids flying, and the few times he’s tried it, he’s fled the plane. Deckersbach would arrange for such a patient to sit on an airplane separate from a flight. The patient would feel his terror but not allow himself to flee, and eventually, the terror would begin to fade. He’d do it again and find himself not quite as frightened, with fewer physical symptoms. Eventually, he’d fly, and the experience of surviving it would further decrease the fear.
Deckersbach’s theory was that Timmy had given me the courage to stay in the moldy hotel lobby longer than I would have otherwise. I had discovered that the mold didn’t harm me as I expected, and that had decreased my anxiety and hence my future reactions.
In this understanding, most of what Timmy did was irrelevant. Timmy’s theory that my sensitivity to mold was rooted in childhood trauma was likely bunk, and neither the reading nor the energy work had made the difference directly. Instead, it had provided an elaborate illusion that had inspired me to break my own cycle of anxiety.
Much as I loved having my bizarre experience put into a scientifically respectable framework, an objection niggled at my mind: I didn’t decide to stay in the hotel lobby. I was fleeing, just as I would have if I’d wandered into that room unsuspecting. The only reason I didn’t turn around was that I thought I could get across the room about as quickly. And the only reason I didn’t continue to flee was because the reaction had already started to fade, before my behavior changed. Plus, I’d stayed in other moldy places for longer than that plenty of times before without the reaction abating—say, the time I collapsed paralyzed in a movie theater. Furthermore, my experience in the hotel lobby hadn’t changed my long-term response to exposures, since I still got the hell out of there. And yet the improvement from Timmy held up: I didn’t get paralyzed, my brain didn’t fuzz over, I didn’t lose the power to talk.
Still, I found Deckersbach’s idea useful, with some modification. It seemed to me Timmy had done something to reset me, putting me lower down on the reactivity spiral. I imagined this as a sort of psychic version of a beta-blocker, the drug that people with stage fright often use to prevent racing hearts and sweaty palms when performing.
But after Timmy had reduced my initial reaction, I could imagine that the analogy with the patient who’s afraid of flying might apply: Each time I reac
ted less than I expected, I grew more confident and less anxious, further reducing the component of the reaction due to anxiety. That got rid of the extreme reactions like getting crippled or going into convulsions. My assumption was that the milder responses, like the feeling of compression of my nervous system or my teeth chattering, were direct impacts of the mold on my neurological and immune systems. Since they weren’t mediated by anxiety (I presumed), Timmy’s “treatment” didn’t affect them.
Like Deckersbach, I had a hard time accepting Timmy’s view that my vulnerability to mold was directly caused by my early traumas. I couldn’t disprove it, but I didn’t feel like I had any strong evidence to support it either, despite the success of his treatment.
What made more sense to me is that mold attacked my body, and it would have even if I’d had the easiest of childhoods. But whatever our inner vulnerabilities, they may end up relevant in a situation like this. When my body was under attack, it felt like an even bigger attack because I felt unprotected and profoundly alone, based on my childhood experiences. And it seemed reasonable to me that internalizing a sense of protection and connection helped reset my body, reducing the physiological perception of threat. This reduction, I thought, was the essence of Timmy’s “psychic beta-blocker.”
I couldn’t prove all those connections scientifically, but they also didn’t require anything supernatural or woo-woo, despite Timmy’s credentials. Nor did that theory make the reactions my fault, or make my illness a psychological one, or put me in a different category from any other ill person. My feeling of unprotectedness would likely have exacerbated any illness I might have gotten, whether ME/CFS or multiple sclerosis or lupus. And we already had good evidence that psychology could impact many illnesses whose physiological basis was clearly understood: People are more likely to have heart attacks, for example, at moments of great anger. Furthermore, having a psychological treatment help didn’t make it a fundamentally psychological disease. If I’d had multiple sclerosis and a hormone treatment improved my symptoms, that wouldn’t make my disease fundamentally hormonal—the immune system dysregulation and breakdown of myelin sheaths would still be at the root of it.
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