The Power & Burden of Our Words

By PJ Harlow, Holistic Mold Consultant

9.5 Minute Read.

I’ve always had a fierce love for writing, and the influence of story telling & language. A few years ago I was struck (again) with just how powerful and impacting our words can be.

I saw a post by a woman who was, at the time, going through mold.

In the caption she tapped out the words…

“I had to throw everything away”

Their 2500 sq. ft. home had extensive, hidden water damage & mold inside the walls. The family had since moved into a rental, and the pictures of their now abandoned home felt frozen in time, void of children bustling, simmering meals on the stove, stolen quick kisses & routines that provided a foundation of stability that one never notices so much— until its gone.

I swiped left to return back to the first photo of the carousel & I silently lipped the words in the graphic once more.
*“I had to throw away everything.*”
The casual use of comic sans seemed to soften the words but still, my next thought was, ***everything?… really***?
For the record, I wasn’t being pretentious, or cheeky.
In fact, I was deeply concerned and alarmed to hear such an **absolute** statement. “***Every-***thing” ranks up there with only, always and never. The big guns. The words that you use when things are truly dire, when there is no turning back.
We run a pretty pragmatic, virtual, holistic mold consultancy, and it’s actually rare that a person would need to get rid of 100% of their belongings. Meaning, you walk out naked, no clothes, no phone, no wedding rings, not even your license or credit cards. Nothing. Certain contents ***can*** be cleaned. I’ve only met one person in my career that was even close to being THAT *hypersensitive* & it wasn’t all mold. So, it’s not impossible, but not common.

In retrospect, this would be just one of many similar statements that I would see and hear over the next few years as “mold” continued to trend upwards. These words would inspire me to illuminate this pattern of presenting the experience of mold in a way that really isn’t exactly as it sounds.

More-so…this motivated me to help articulate just why it’s often said this way, & to help the people who’ve been through this feel validated, safe, and heard for the larger-than-you-can-imagine sacrifices they’ve had to make, in haste, for the sake of health & wellness.

Words Matter.

“We had to get rid of all our stuff”

“I had to throw away my mattress”

“He told me I had to discard my books!”

These words put together like this are all super powerful statements that evoke a lot of emotions. For both the person saying it, & the reader taking it in.

First, I am so sorry to the all the people who have gone through mold and experienced the obstacles and encumbrance of having a sick, water-damaged home. Peter (my husband/co-founder) & I know exactly what this feels like. I’ve written extensively about the shame and pain of mold illness. And if you did happen to throw away many possessions, I am proud of you for putting health first.

We threw away about 90% of our contents when our home was taken over by Stachybotrys Chartarum years ago, so if anyone understands losses from living in mold, believe me, I have perspective.

Which way do I turn?

When you’re in the thick of it, (i.e. you discovered mold is the culprit to your declining health or you’ve just confirmed mold elevations in your home w/an ERMI test) things are moving so fast in your mind & you’re pulled in so many different directions— all with this underlying sense of urgency. You’re forced into making these huge, interruptive, executive health decisions to protect your family, based on what little you know at the time, all while you’re hearing 10 very different versions of what you’re “supposed to do”.

In my own story…

My health was debilitated.
I was bedridden & couldn’t talk without stuttering.
I was a shell of the woman, wife & mother I was the year before.
My house was full of water damage and mold, but it was all invisible.
My kids were sick. My husband was sick.
By the end, you could taste it in the air. Our lungs felt like we drank lava, and if you stayed too long, you’d start to feel like you were disassociating. We evacuated at this point.
With little guidance, we decided it was best to err on the side of caution due to our collective poor health.
Peter went back & forth to the dump for days as we heaved our memories into extinction. We threw away many things that could’ve been cleaned or stored. Unfortunately, we didn’t know what we do now. It’s not like these things are taught to us.
Still to this day, the process of sorting & decontaminating possessions is often presented as black & white when realistically, there is a very wide spectrum that requires more than just evaluating how porous something is.

If I haven’t made it transparent already, the majority of people don’t have to get rid of “everything”.

And Yes, before anyone lambastes me, there are absolutely people who are very hypersensitive, but that’s a smaller fraction of the population and not the prime of the niche that we serve. Even that word, hypersensitive, is ambiguously misused, abused, and largely misinterpreted in the online holistic & functional medicine communities.

Again my friends, there is a spectrum.

Prudence.

Words have impact. They are powerful.

As we lay down the groundwork for those coming up behind us, we need to be conscious of what we define, what we imply & what we project. I know everyone out there is doing whatever they can to make their home’s healthy, to raise their kids without repeating past mistakes, to sustain vivacious relationships and marriages, to full-fill their inner desires while affording life and to regenerate & preserve their own agility and vibrancy. Everyone is trying to do right by their own set of circumstances.

If you choose to go public with your mold experience, I applaud you for being so brave to share your experience. I believe we all have an ethical duty to protect the population of people who HAVEN’T made it here yet, including a moral obligation to take accountability for our own individualized actions and decisions. We also must recognize the difference between sharing our stories and subjectively trying to position ourselves as someone qualified to re-teach & educate others simply because we’ve “gone through it”

“Living in a cave does not make you a geologist.” —FSU Professor Anders Erickson

Believe me when I say, what you know now, is NOT what you will believe later.

Check Yo Self

When you’re in it, it’s easy to get caught up in posting about your day by day. If you’re able, try to put yourself in the perspective of the person that you once were. This information can be very alarming. Simply saying, “I had to get rid of everything” or “I had to throw all my furniture away” takes on new meaning & significance.

To be clear, I am certainly not co-signing the new wave of sugar coating or down playing mold, nor am I setting the stage where you should always expect a feel-good, positive-vibes answer to every mold related question & query you have, all so we can try to “spin this” into a pleasurable experience. As much as that sounds enticing and straight from a Tony Robbins seminar, this type of practice minimizes the seriousness of mold and the gravity of its effects on health.

**no regrets**

This topic of mold & indoor home health is still in its infancy. Another justification why it’s so significant to be judicious and pragmatic with the words you use & why we often request that non professionals conserve their protocols for personal use only.
I don’t look back on what we did with regret.
I don’t carry guilt like I made a mistake.
Nor should you if it resonates.
I am 100% confident in knowing I did what I needed to do at the time to protect my health and my family.
When you’re ready, tell yourself that too. **Try to own it.**
If your in a space where your ideology has evolved, that’s ok too. You can tell yourself that you’ve grown & it’s a good thing that you know so much more now.

Your pain doesn’t have to be an anchor.

You don’t have to keep feeding it with reasons or blame to feel content with your decisions. You don’t have to get consent, or acceptance from other people in your life, and you know what, you may never will.

That’s ok. As long as you know you did everything you could, be ok with it.

We can all go backwards to some point in our life and say coulda, shoulda, woulda, but your health is more valuable and worthy than anything. Best of all, at some point you may allow your pain to be a conduit to prevent someone else form having to feel as bad as you may have. You might not be there yet in the timeline of home health, or, that may not be your path, but give yourself some grace if you’ve been through, or are going through mold. Take it from someone who is 7 years out.

You don’t have to do this alone

If you’re new to this world, there are options available to help you determine your individual risk level & help you evaluate your home’s health. This is essentially what we do. (Sidebar: This does not mean this is what other “mold consultants” do)

This isn’t a post to market our services, but, we absolutely pioneered our services from a need that we saw. Going through this alone without any professional guidance, counsel or support is usually too much for people in the middle of a crisis.

You may still see a person say “A consultant told me I had to get rid of my couch”.

That is very unfortunate.

While I’m not exactly sure how often professionals in the mold industry are out there telling people what to do, I do know there are some homeowners and renters who’d rather not take accountability for these hard decisions.

It’s so much easier to tell an unsupportive, in-denial family member that a professional said, “you had to get rid of your furniture” because it’s less painful than taking personal responsibility. This is especially true since its its extremely common to see people going thorough this with very little spousal or family encouragement.

We’ve had clients tell us, “***I wish you’d just tell me what to do”***.
We all chuckle a bit on the conference call after they say this, but they ask because it’s such a heavy burden. No one wants to make the call.

Whose really in charge?

As CEO of a successful IICRC certified mold consultancy and a 30 year veteran of weighing risk for a living, I have never in my career made a decision for a client. Nor have I ever told anyone (besides my children) what they had to do. I have never ordered or instructed anyone to get rid of any possessions, and I never will.

Peter & I have created a system using collected data, combining health & a home’s toxic burden to help our clients better gauge the risk of their circumstances. We teach our clients how to sort categories & interpret exposure levels. We empower our clients with the capacity to calculate their own risk. They are liable for their own conclusions & judgements. Accountability is a huge part of working 1:1 with one of our consultants if this is new for you.

What’s your story?

I don’t write any of this to shame or reprimand anyone, that’s not the message. I am writing this because it’s important to be careful with how we frame our mold experience. Not only to beginners, but how we frame the burden that we continue to carry in our own minds moving forward. It matters how we tell our story, and the shape it begins to take. What parts, good or bad, are you holding onto?

When you go through such an impacting event like mold, you can’t help but feel residuals from this for quite a long time. For some, it can effect you so much it plays a role in defining the new you. Even in my own story, I look the timeline of my life and there is this giant divide that separates everything to either before the mold, or after.

It’s ignorant and unreasonable to expect a person to experience the accumulated burden of adversity, chronic illness, loss & pain, (that all accompanies mold) and to come out unscathed. Trauma is the consequence.

We need to tell our stories so others can hear our pain, our sacrifice, and our strength, and from that, we can hope it didn’t go to waste. We should never hold back on telling the truth because it was scary or because it may invoke fear in someone. But if we do choose to tell others of the unfortunate aspects of this, there needs to be balance. We must keep-on telling the stories of what happens after too. THIS is the part that we need to highlight.

People need to know there is hope, and that it is possible to heal. They need to see how you have you moved on & what helps you mentally.

What people really need to hear is that your home is now healthy, and how you are so proud of the decisions you made when you were faced with such hardship. While it’s certainly a personal choice as to the level of detail that you do or do not share, don’t forget to remind your audience or listeners that your choices were based on your health, and your circumstances. It is not what they should do.

Keep telling stories.