The Familial Wall of Resistance

The thing no one tells you when you find mold in your home is that it doesn’t just wreck your house or your stuff. It wrecks your reality.

Once you see it — really see it — you can’t unsee it. You start connecting dots in places you didn’t even know there were dots. And honestly, that part is terrifying.

When we finally figured it out, we had already lived in that house for over two years. Two years of chaos we couldn’t explain. Our daughters had gone from honor-roll students to struggling. One of them, who used to absorb information like a sponge, suddenly couldn’t comprehend instructions. She’d get in trouble for not following directions, but it wasn’t defiance. She literally couldn’t remember what was said, no matter how hard she tried. And our other daughter — the one who had grown up in the barn, fearless and steady — developed this crushing anxiety. She’d cry before school, freeze in class, and at home she couldn’t even go near the horses that had been her comfort since birth.

Meanwhile, my husband and I — the couple that never fought, the peas-and-carrots couple who lived and worked together seamlessly — started unraveling. We were arguing over everything, losing the thread of the partnership we’d always had.

And of course, there were other factors that muddied the water and gave rise to all kinds of false attributions. My birth control failed — maybe because of the estrogen-disrupting effects of mycotoxins, something I’ve since learned has a scientific basis — and I got pregnant. From that moment on, every single symptom I had, every sign that something was seriously wrong, was written off as “just pregnancy.”

The same thing happened with my daughter. Her history of depression suddenly became the scapegoat for everything — her psychiatric symptoms, her physical symptoms, all of it. Even though we had all been perfectly healthy by the time we moved into that house, and even though the decline was sharp and obvious if you were paying attention, not one doctor, not one therapist, not one specialist ever thought to look at the environment.

We were on our own. We had to figure it out ourselves.

At first, we blamed ourselves. We blamed each other. We blamed stress, parenting, being too busy. We cycled through doctors and therapists and endless supplements, convinced that if we just found the right specialist, worked harder, pushed a little more, we’d fix it.

It took two years before we realized the truth: the call was coming from inside the house.

That kind of realization doesn’t stop in the present. It forces you to look backward, whether you want to or not.

For me, it went straight back to my childhood. When I was seven, my parents moved us into a new house. The basement had a sump pump — clear evidence of water issues, though none of us thought much about it at the time. And then, slowly and quietly, everything started to change.

My mom, who had always been healthy and energetic, gained a significant amount of weight. The migraines she’d always managed became unbearable, and her PMS turned brutal. My dad, who had always wrestled with feelings of self-worth, slipped into a deep depression that lasted for years. It didn’t happen overnight; it crept in, piece by piece.

My sister was born in that house and spent her first two years in and out of the hospital with asthma. I developed asthma, too, though I wouldn’t be diagnosed until high school, when joining the track team made it impossible to ignore. The strep infections I’d always been prone to escalated into rheumatic fever, and then into PANDAS, though no one recognized it at the time. One day I was a normal kid, and the next I had crippling OCD and uncontrollable tics that nobody could explain.

My sister’s path was just as brutal. She developed severe OCD in childhood that followed her into adulthood — medication-resistant, relentless, and life-altering. Then, decades later, after what we went through with our own house, I called her. I told her what we’d learned. She and her husband moved out of their moldy apartment, and for the first time since childhood, her OCD quieted. Now, when she starts to feel that familiar spin of anxiety or obsessive thoughts, she doesn’t shame herself — she recognizes it as a symptom, her body waving a red flag that something in her environment is triggering neuroinflammation.

20+ years later, I watched history repeat itself. My husband and I moved our family into what we thought was our forever home, and almost overnight, everything started to shift. Old health issues we thought we’d put behind us came roaring back. New symptoms appeared out of nowhere — mental health struggles, physical problems we couldn’t explain, a creeping chaos in the house that none of us could name.

And once we learned about the devastating effects of mold and got out, we began reflecting on our lives up until then. We realized that although we’d reached the tipping point in this house, mold had always been a sneaking saboteur. Once we were sensitized and aware, all of a sudden we couldn’t tolerate our childhood homes or anything that had been in them - including our parents. It was brutal. They, and we, had to make drastic changes and develop new protocols in order to spend time together - and we had to tell them that they, too, had mold in their homes.

This is why the wall of resistance is so high in families. To really see it, to connect the dots, may be to admit that something invisible has been shaping your health, your relationships, your entire reality for years, maybe decades. That is a very hard truth to sit with.

And that’s where compassion comes in. Because when you’ve lived this, when you’ve traced the patterns through your own life, it’s easy to want to shake people awake and make them see. But not everyone can. Sometimes they just… can’t. Accepting it would mean rethinking everything they thought they knew about themselves, their homes, their health, their history.

I try to remember that. Even now, the weight of this truth is heavy for me - and I’ve lived it. So of course it’s heavy, maybe unbearable, for the people who haven’t walked through it themselves.

People think mold is about one bad house, one bad season. But it isn’t. It’s deeper. It’s quieter. It’s insidious. And once you start connecting the dots, you realize it’s been there all along, shaping things you thought were random or just bad luck.

And if you’re lucky — if you’ve lived through it — you learn to hold compassion for the ones who haven’t. For the ones who can’t, or won’t, look at it yet. Because someday, maybe they will. And even if they don’t, you’ll know the truth. And you’ll know that, for you and your family, the only way forward is through.