“What about affection?” John asked.
“No!” Timmy ruled instantly.
“But yesterday, I asked her to hold me, and she did,” John said. “It felt good. It didn’t feel sexual.”
“Did you feel like it was allowing you to move on?”
Long pause, and then a small voice: “No.”
My head rocked against John’s chest as we both guffawed.
At one point, Timmy’s voice shifted back to its deeper cadence: “This is Timmy now. I can totally relate to this. I’ve been there. This is for both of us together, because I can identify completely.”
By the end of the recording, I was impressed. It was like a really good therapy session, but without the extended getting-to-know-you. By the end of the session, John was able to discuss the possibility of dating, and he reported to me that it had indeed been very helpful, even a turning point. A few months after that psychic-therapy session, on the very night he finally fully accepted that Karla wasn’t the woman for him, he’d checked his OkCupid online dating account, seen my profile, and written to me.
Whether Timmy had any powers of clairvoyance or not, he had clearly done John a service. Maybe he was just a wise and perceptive fellow, with no supernatural powers—but hey, that sounds good. Maybe he could offer me insight about my life and my illness that would help me move forward too. My reactivity to moldy buildings was a big fucking drag and only seemed to be getting more extreme, and I had little idea what to do about that other than hope it would resolve over time. Maybe Timmy would stir up some idea for me. Plus, why not? I’ve got nothing to lose except a modest amount of money. It’ll be fun!
Timmy Wood welcomed me with a huge “Hey!” Beaming, he asked me to remove my shoes and then padded toward the back of his dimly lit house. His round belly, short legs, and curly hair made me think of a hobbit. Pointed ears would have suited his face perfectly. John and I later dubbed him “Timmy the Wood Elf.”
No bad reactions so far, I thought, though the cluttered, dusty house didn’t inspire confidence. We passed through his kitchen and sat in his office, at a card table covered with piles of bric-a-brac: gems, rocks, little carvings.
As I listened to him intone the same invocation he’d used with John, I reminded myself of a resolution I’d made before I came: My job, for the duration of the session, was to set my skeptical mind aside and just let the experience move me. I was not to let myself be an asshole, ripping everything he said to shreds as the words left his mouth—if I did that, what was the point in coming? Instead, I’d imagine, to the best of my ability, that all this was real, and I’d give Timmy the full chance to move me to a different place emotionally, just as he had with John. Later, I could analyze and dissect it all I wanted.
After the invocation, Timmy barreled off, painting a portrait of my character. Red was my soul’s color, he said, the color of passion and fire. I was very connected to the earth.
My sensitivity, including to mold, was a gift, and now I just needed to learn to master it. (I had mentioned mold when I first called him, and I now regretted that—would he have figured that out on his own?)
“Be careful that you’re not questioning yourself, that you’re refining your awareness of your own sensitivities,” he said. Hmm, well, that’s pretty astute, I thought. I certainly do question myself about mold more than I think is truly helpful.
He riffed a bit more and then invited my first question. I asked, “What does my body need from me?”
To listen to it, he said, and to learn its language. It’s when I failed to do so that my body got “a little off.” I guess that’s one way to describe it. He emphasized that the sensitivity was “an advancement of the soul,” not a brokenness. “As you refine this really well, you’re going to live a long time,” he said, explaining that being forced to avoid mold and pay attention to my body’s needs would keep me in good health.
Then he laid out his theory about any sensitivity or allergy. During childhood, he said, something traumatic happened to me while I was in the presence of mold, and my body had falsely associated the trauma with the mold. It was when I was between four and six, he felt. Had my family moved when I was that age, he asked, or had some other dysfunctionality?
Why yes—we moved from Houston to San Diego. Lots of families move with young children, I thought. Big whoop.
But there was a far bigger dysfunctionality around that time: When I was seven, my mother sent my brother and sister away. My sister, who was eight years older than me, went to boarding school and to my uncle’s for holidays; my brother, who was three years older than me and had been adopted, went to foster care and then eventually to his adoptive father (my mother’s ex-husband).
I told Timmy about this briefly, though I also thought, Gee, my siblings left when I was seven, not when I was between four and six. Yeah, it’s close, and my family wasn’t doing well leading up to that point, but isn’t this exactly the kind of wiggle room psychics rely on? Plus, how many people have had nothing at all traumatic happen when they were young, not even a move? Then I reminded myself, Don’t be an asshole. You can worry about that later.
“You haven’t dealt with all that,” he declared. “That was also associated with mold.”
I felt my body stiffen, thinking of PACE and all the ME/CFS patients who had been horribly mistreated because people believed their disease was psychological. It was one thing to consider myself that psychological trauma might be affecting my body, and quite another to have some know-nothing psychic push it on me. But again, I set aside those thoughts to consider later.
Then something else occurred to me: Hmm, my bedroom when I was that age was in the basement. It could easily have been moldy. Who knows?
He riffed on about this a bit, describing my wounded inner child who had been frightened and unable to understand what was going on. In passing, he commented, “Mom was off the charts a little bit.” I hadn’t told him anything about my mother. She was definitely “off the charts a little bit” in those days, just like my body could get “a little off.”
He pointed out that because I was dependent on my mother then, I had needed an explanation for the turmoil that allowed me to continue believing I was safe with her. I had unconsciously blamed mold, he said, and now, 30-some years later, exposure to mold reactivated that bodily sense of trauma, leading to my body’s freak-outs. “The mold is the symbol of your inner child not getting nurtured.”
The way to deal with this, he advised, was to go back and reexperience the trauma and bring my adult self to my frightened inner child. I needed to hold her, listen to her, comfort her—and then to break the association between the trauma and the mold. “Timmy will work with you,” he (or my guides, or whoever) said, by doing “energy work” (whatever that was). Or I could work with a therapist.
He asked what was happening in my life when I first got sick, and I quickly described building the house, Geoff’s dissolution from his bipolar disorder, the moldy trailers. Timmy was delighted by the grim tale: That experience of extreme stress and mold together had reactivated the childhood trauma, he declared. My response to the difficulty had been to become very strong and masculine, to hold everything together, and now I had to learn how to be soft.
“Once you release all that trauma and forgive your ex-husband,” he said, “then the presence of mold won’t affect you.”
But I forgave Geoff long ago! I thought. It’s not his fault that he got sick. Plus, that sounds like just the kind of ridiculous thing a psychic would say. Then I reminded myself, Later. Don’t be an asshole.
Timmy also said that I was feeling somewhat scared. That was certainly true: My relationship with John felt swooningly dreamy after so many years of aloneness and struggle, and while I felt myself coming to trust in the relationship, I was also frightened that it would all fall apart. And it wasn’t just John—for so long, things that had seemed like they should work just didn’t. I’d almost felt cursed, and suddenly, that curse had vaporized. B
ut I didn’t fully understand why life had been so hard in the first place, or why it had turned wonderful—or if it could start being that hard again.
I asked Timmy whether it was possible for me to have a baby, which would feel like a kind of ultimate lifting of the curse. He had me close my eyes and pick six objects from his pile of knickknacks. One of them was a skull, and Timmy told me that it showed that there was a block in my sexual energy that was impeding having a baby.
Initially, he suggested that this was a problem in my relationship with John. When I said I was having the best sex of my life, he looked for other explanations. He asked about my sexual relationship with my ex-husband, and I told him about how it had been powerfully sexual early on, but by the end, not at all. He said that I still carried wounds from that, and I should ask John for support, through “making love to God.” I tried to imagine what that meant, visualizing us in the lotus position, hands folded in prayer, looking upward as we thrusted. I suppressed a giggle and then remembered, Don’t be an asshole, Julie.
But he also told me it wasn’t too late to have a baby, and that there was the spirit of a boy waiting to come through. “As this gets corrected, you can bring a child forth. Do that work in the next several months, and by August you could be pregnant.” That’s way too soon, I thought, but I kept quiet.
He began to wrap the session up with another high-speed riff. He enthused about my relationship with John, calling it “good good good stuff.” He reassured me once more about my health: “It may be a little bit of an issue for you your whole life, but it doesn’t have to knock you down like you’re afraid it will.” He told me that I’d have a “spiritual awakening” the coming summer, that I’d express myself creatively through my writing, that my forties would be very active and successful and playful. I would “manifest my reality.”
“We love you and bless you. Amen.”
As I drove home afterward, I let my skepticism pour back in. Certainly, the idea that my extreme sensitivity to mold was purely psychological (if that’s what he was saying) was absurd. I thought of the fruit flies staggering about with Parkinson’s after their encounters with gases from mold—had they reexperienced some childhood insectile trauma while the mold gas had been pumped into their chamber?
Timmy also had claimed that this psychological explanation applied even to allergies. But the physiology of allergies was well understood, and I’d never heard any scientific support for the idea that it had a psychological basis. Science could, of course, have not caught up to the idea, but even so, the theory didn’t make much sense to me. I had never had any allergies as a kid, but a few years after I moved to Santa Fe, the springtime juniper pollen had me sneezing. That pattern was typical for transplants to Santa Fe. Was spring a particularly traumatic time of year for new Santa Fe residents?
Plus, I’d put so much effort into psychological explanations for my illness that hadn’t led to anything. Early on, psychology seemed so compelling: The problem was obviously just too much stress and overwork. Finish the house, get divorced, do some therapy, and I’ll be fine, I figured. I wasn’t. Then when I lost my job at St. John’s and was miserable even after I got my job back, I figured, Find a new career path, get my life growing in new directions, do some more therapy, and I’ll be fine. I got worse. Then my relationship with William wasn’t working and I was desperately missing my home in Santa Fe. Leave William, go home, keep working on my own psychology, and I’ll be fine. It didn’t help.
Of course, Death Valley had led to a profound psychological shift for me, and it’s true that I got dramatically better just after that. But what if I hadn’t had such a profound experience? Would mold avoidance alone have led to my improvement? I couldn’t know for sure, but I was inclined to give mold avoidance most of the credit. And the fact was, I was always focused on personal growth, so if I’d gotten better at a different moment, I could almost certainly have linked it to some other psychological shift.
But while I had grave doubts about drawing a simple causative line between psychological growth and physical improvement (or between psychological issues and illness), I certainly didn’t see the two as disconnected. It seemed obvious to me that anyone is likely to deal with any life circumstances better if they’re functioning well psychologically. And if someone happens to be sick, that better functioning will help them get better, in straightforward ways: They’ll be under less stress, they’ll think more clearly about their options, they’ll waste less energy on fruitless worrying and hence have more available for productive thinking, on and on and on. There’s nothing surprising or mysterious there.
At a deeper level, I saw our minds and bodies as so inextricably linked that there aren’t really even two things to connect. Something profound happened to me on all levels in Death Valley, and asking how much of the shift was physical and how much was psychological struck me as ultimately nonsensical. My being as a whole changed. The hidden threads that I had been following led me to that spot, alone in the desert, and they carried me out of it into a transformed life.
But Timmy was making a very specific claim far beyond these generalities that I strongly believed: He was connecting a specific traumatic event in my life to my illness and claiming that working on it would directly make me feel better. Figuring out whether that made sense to me was far more difficult.
There was no question that I’d experienced trauma and that it had affected me profoundly. In the period leading up to my family’s dissolution, my mother’s craziness had spun out of control. The worst of it was that she had beaten and humiliated my brother. I loved them both desperately and had tried, impossibly, to mediate between them.
Most of my memories of that time were hazy, filtered through stories I’d heard about it from my siblings, blanked out by my confusion and pain. My clearest memory was ironic for its seeming triviality: My mother cut up my brother’s Star Wars T-shirt and used the shreds as rags. That T-shirt was a talisman for my brother, perhaps the most sacred object in his young life, and defiling it struck me as an unambiguous and unforgivable offense. Spanking him with a belt and leaving welts on his butt, or hitting him on the head with a hairbrush until he got a black eye—maybe there was some explanation for those things that my six-year-old mind couldn’t grasp. But cutting up his Star Wars T-shirt—that’s wrong!
Still, I hadn’t simply condemned my mother. For one thing, I knew as a child that if I did, I’d lose whatever power I had. If my mother was hitting my brother and I told her to stop, she did—but I was sure it was a privilege that would vanish if I overused it. It was my connection to my mother that allowed me to influence her.
Plus, I simply couldn’t bear being disconnected from my mother. Occasionally, she would get so angry that she would simply drive away, leaving us three kids behind. I’d see her lime-green Cutlass Ciera convertible starting to pull away and I’d tear away from my siblings, running after her, crying for her to take me with her. I was the golden child, my mother’s unambiguous favorite, and she would stop the car and let me climb in. Then she’d take me to Toys “R” Us and let me pick out whatever toy I wanted. We’d go home, and I’d slink past my siblings with my Barbie doll, amazed that they didn’t seem to hate me when I was so obviously a traitor.
One day when I was seven, my mother called my 10-year-old brother into her room. I sat on the porch swing outside her bedroom window, trying to eavesdrop. Ominously, I didn’t hear the sounds I expected, of her spanking him and him crying.
Ty finally emerged, dry-eyed and quiet. He sat next to me on the porch swing.
“She said I have to leave,” he told me. “She’s sending me to foster care.”
I had no idea how to respond, what to say, what to feel. We sat together on the porch swing, holding hands in silence.
I didn’t see my brother again until I was 18.
Around the time Ty left, my mother sent my sister away too, to boarding school and to my uncle Steve’s for holidays.
After my siblings
left, my mother told me, “Now I have all my energy for you!” and I wriggled like a puppy, despite a frisson of guilt. A few months later, I looked back at my response with all the cynical disgust a seven-year-old can muster. I’d discovered that all my mother’s energy included all my mother’s negative energy too, which my siblings had previously taken the brunt of. Before, when my mother’s mood mysteriously shifted dark, she’d spank my brother or yell at my sister while I got off scot-free. Afterward, my own fanny was on the line, though I never got it nearly as bad as my brother had.
These experiences must have bathed my body and brain in stress hormones for years on end when I was a child, and that couldn’t have done good things to me. Although I hadn’t been through a war, it was easy to imagine that my brain and body had been affected by a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Mold might be a trigger, like a car backfire that sends a veteran flying to the ground.
That idea has some scientific backing too, given that research has linked adverse childhood experiences like mine to ailments including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and ischemic heart disease. Studies also claimed to link ME/CFS with childhood trauma, though they held little weight for me since such research rivaled the PACE trial’s psychotherapy and exercise advice for quality and scientific care. I had my scientific doubts about other similar studies as well—mind-body science seemed to be a field that attracted low-quality research. But still, maybe some of it was solid.
It was one thing, though, to consider such possibilities in my own mind and quite another to have some psychic assert it. It struck me as a cheap and easy explanation, so appealing that who could resist? All Timmy had to do was guess I’d had some childhood trauma, and then he had a tidy explanation to offer. And really, who hasn’t had some childhood trauma? Though, admittedly, mine was probably more extreme than most.
Through the Shadowlands Page 29
