Our Healing Story

The story of my and my son’s recovery is powerful. I share it to encourage and inspire other parents and sensitive people to persevere in their own journeys toward well-being.

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​I have lived a lifetime with severe sensitivities and multi-system health symptoms that doctors struggled find ways to diagnose. Through the journey I took in working to help my son to heal and to thrive, I found ways to help myself and many other people.

My son is now nineteen years old. If you met him today, you would have no idea that he ever had any significant behavioral or health related issues. Due to my persistence in finding natural solutions for his health issues, he’s able to shine his natural potential that was always there, but was hidden away for many years.

Sam came into the world kicking and screaming. The nurses at the hospital told me that they didn’t know why he would not rest in the nursery while all of the other babies laid quietly. In the nursery, he flailed around and cried rather than sleeping peacefully, and he did the same once we brought him home. This continued for almost 6 years.

When he was born, I had a different life. I was a full-time professional musician and band director. I had some experience with alternative healing modalities, but I didn’t know how to do any of them myself. I had no information to explain why my son wouldn’t stop crying all of the time, wouldn’t sleep, and always seemed to have allergies and colds. I wanted to help him, and I had stopped working full-time in order to be home with him, so I had some time to start educating myself.

There is a lot more information available to lay people now than there was eighteen years ago. Thanks to many doctors, scientists, and parents whose passionate dedication to finding solutions for the health issues that children are commonly experiencing, helpful information is at our fingertips. One of the greatest pieces of knowledge that we have today is that these health problems are due to exposures to toxins, both in utero and after birth. The toxins affect their brains, other organs, and their microbiome. The resulting damage is a child who cannot function to their highest ability in the world. This was what my son was going through, only it took me many years to find this piece, and then more time to put it together with the other pieces, to be able to help him to recover.

We lived for the first 5 years with almost no sleep. Around age 15 months, he developed a severe allergy to eggs that became apparent when he almost asphyxiated. This led me to educate myself about food allergies and sensitivities, of which I had no previous knowledge. I had missed all of the signs, such as rashes, digestive issues, and of course, the crying and not sleeping. At 18 months, he had a severe (and terrifying) reaction to the DTaP vaccine, which resulted in me reading everything I could about vaccines, and subsequently ceasing to allow him to have any further vaccinations.

I was slowly but surely learning what I needed to know in order to help my son, but it was all happening in a very rough manner because I wasn’t aware of how to notice the subtle signs. By the time he was 3, I still hadn’t figured out much more than keeping eggs out of his diet and staying away from more vaccines, so another big whopper came our way in the form of a major car accident. Sam was in the backseat in his car seat and he was safe; I was t-boned on my side and I have no memory at all from the incident. Despite a difficult recovery for me, this was exactly what we needed to get us to the next pieces of information that would help him.

I had seen an energy healer and a physical therapist for my injuries, but it didn’t get me very far. They would do their treatments and then send me on my way. A friend recommended I see her chiropractor because I was still in a lot of pain six months after the accident. This doctor helped me with the physical injuries in very little time. However, the next steps she took with me opened the rest of the doors to the information I needed so that I could help both Sam and myself.

 

I will never forget the day I was in her office, and she said, "Let's try something new with you now." She showed me a tool, which as a musician, I knew was a tuning fork. Then, she struck it and moved it close to my body. As it passed by my ear, I immediately began to scream hysterically and fell onto the floor. I couldn't stop screaming and I couldn't stand up. I had no idea what was happening to me, and neither did she. My son and husband stood by, in shock. Eventually, I was able to calm down and regain my composure. However, for the several years, living in this world became a living nightmare for me.

 

Something had been activated and I was experiencing hyperaccusis, or hypersensitive hearing. But my hypersensitivities were more than that. I was extremely reactive to chemicals, light, smells, touch, food, and sounds. I had to wear earplugs just to function without crying and I had to wear sunglasses all day to avoid the pain I felt from seeing light. I couldn't stand to be touched, even gently, If I heard certain frequencies, usually either very low or high, I would collapse on the floor, screaming. If I heard a sound that was too loud for me to process, I would also start to cry hysterically, sometimes banging my head into a nearby wall. I didn't know why these behaviors were happening and they were out of my control. 

 

The only information I could find about people who experienced these types of sensory dysfunctions were connected to autism. So I began to learn as much as I could about the topic. I had a deep experiential knowledge of what children with sensory integration disorder were living with day to day, and I wanted to be able to help them. The extreme crying and screaming and lack of being able to process sensory information was horrifying to experience firsthand, but I understood it in ways that other adults simply couldn't. I knew that I had to heal myself first in order to further help Sam and be able to do anything helpful for anyone else.

Without going into the details about my personal awakening, my experiences with this doctor and subsequent healing practitioners taught me what I needed to know beyond the physical toxins that had impacted Sam’s well-being. I began to read voraciously and to learn about how the energy we can’t see functions and affects people. I wanted to understand the science of energy healing, not just blindly accepting the terms people were loosely using like frequencies and resonance. We both saw several alternative healers. However, we were both so hypersensitive that we could barely tolerate their sessions. Although Sam had some gains after each one, none was enough to maintain his well-being more than a few days after a session. However, finally, after almost 6 years, Sam began to sleep for longer periods of time. This was the most needed thing for our whole family. But, he had so much else to heal, and I had to make a decision to either develop my own intuitive skills and continue to educate myself or go broke paying other people to do the work for us every few days.

Once he was in school, his other issues became much more apparent. He couldn’t focus or hold still, couldn’t learn to read or to write, he was often ill, and if he heard loud sounds, he would become extremely overstimulated and have to go home. I would get a phone call every few days from his school telling me to come and pick him up. It would usually take a day or two for him to recover from sound sensitivity experiences. On days when he would make it through the entire day at school, he'd come home and scream and cry for 1 - 2 hours. I was determined to help him to thrive. We continued seeing alternative health practitioners, and by the time he was 8, I had gone through some training, read over one hundred books, learned how to use special diets for healing, taught him how to write using an OT program, and had accrued enough knowledge and experience to begin developing my own healing techniques.

We moved to Florida when Sam was in the second grade. He still had some issues, but was overall doing much better in school. His teacher told me that she couldn’t understand how a child so intelligent wasn't in the gifted program. That was something I hadn’t considered since we had spent so much time and energy on just getting him healthy and higher functioning. Eventually, we did have him tested and he qualified for gifted services. By the end of this school year, I had finished developing a new type of healing system for us - one that didn't cause us pain and included all the parts of nutrition, lifestyle, and energy work that we needed. When we implemented it for Sam, everything changed for him. My healing was slower because I had already built up 40 years of toxins in my body by this time.

In the spring semester of third grade, Sam earned a spot on a competitive reading team, which consisted of only three students (and one alternate) who had qualified from the entire school. Sam ended up leading his team to three victories, on the school, District, and Regional levels. No one had any idea that two years prior, this child couldn’t even identify his letters, much less read anything at all. Amazingly, by the time he reached middle school, Sam had become the best, deepest sleeper in the house. He has literally slept through several tropical storms and hurricanes! By this time, his hearing sensitivities were completely gone – he enjoyed playing laser tag and going to movies. He became a leader in school and a high-performing student. He regularly performed in drama and music performances. His teachers and the other students admired him because of his kindness, empathy, wisdom, and graciousness.

 

Sam has no hyperactivity, whatsoever, and rarely gets sick. The way he shows up in the world today is an authentic picture of who he really is. He graduated from high school with an AA degree and is now a senior at the University of South Florida at age 18. This child who couldn't read or write for so long is now in the Honors English program at USF.

What we learned about healthy eating, detoxification, energy healing, high sensitivity, and spirituality is what we use in our everyday lives now to keep us both functioning to our highest capacities. Sam’s intuitive gifts are strong, and I taught him from an early age how to use them with discernment to help him to make healthy, wise choices for himself. I knew that his light was so bright and I was determined to find a way for him to live a happy, healthy life without medications and inaccurate labels. I wish that he hadn’t had to go through all of those struggles at such a young age, but it’s because of them that the world has our healing system, so that other parents can learn how energy works and how to work with it to help their sensitive children to heal.

 

Eventually, my hypersensitivities also resolved. The last one to go was the first one I had noticed from the beginning - hyperaccusis. It was heartbreaking to experience it because I had spent my lifetime developing my skills as a professional musician and passionately loving music. Years before it finally healed, I made the decision to sell my instruments. Seeing them sitting there untouched just brought me sadness.

 

In the years after we moved to Florida, I had two severe toxic mold exposures - one in a home we were renting and another in a workplace. As I worked hard to detox and recover from the mold exposures, I had no idea they had provided the tipping point for my pancreas to become severely damaged. When I was finally diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (LADA) and given insulin, the final parts of the hyperaccusis I had been unable to resolve, finally did, as my blood glucose dropped into a healthier range. Unfortunately, due to being undiagnosed for so long, I developed severe peripheral neuropathy that I still suffer with today. Within another year, I also lost the functioning of the exocrine part of my pancreas, leaving me with Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency, as well.

 

This isn't the end of my story. I continue to work to heal every day. And I find joy in watching my son thrive in his life, and helping other people be empowered to know what to do to protect themselves and to heal from exposures to toxins in our world.