Family SecretsHer paternity. Her health. Her very self. For many years, these are all mysteries to Kimberly. As she reckons with this myriad of unknowns, she learns more than she ever expected to know.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today is Kimberly Warner. Kimberly is the founder, director, and producer of Unfixed Media, a production company with a focus on people with chronic, uncurable conditions. Kimberly's is a story of an unfolding life that contains within it big secrets and big consequences. It's also a story of courage, resilience, and making meaning out of very hard things. And by this I don't only mean personal meaning, though that would be plenty, but rather the meaning that comes from illuminating and changing the lives of others through advocacy, generosity of spirit, and art. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
I grew up in Wisconsin in the mid seventies and eighties, and everyone thinks of Wisconsin, and we think of football and cheese. But we were more like the tofu eating goddess groups type of family, so we didn't quite fit in. My dad was a cardiac surgeon in a small college town in Wisconsin, and my mother was a psychotherapist, and they through a tumultuous slash growthful marriage.
They went through about.
Five wedding bands, which might explain the sense that they were falling out of love with each other, breaking commitments to each other. They actually had five years where they or exploring other relationships in an open marriage and made it through all those years, but also learned a lot of tools, and so they became kind of leaders. And I knew this as a child. This wasn't a secret to us. So I knew that my parents were very much into teaching conscious loving workshops and growing through the pain that they had experienced together. So there was a lot of growth, a lot of yelling, a lot of big emotions.
In the house.
That said, we also were sort of the perfect family. And I'm making air quotes as I say that, because of the status of my father and my mom and the sort of the leadership roles that they carried. My brother was very popular. I was a straight A student in Ballerina.
We lived in a.
Beautiful log home on a lake. We were kind of looked at as the perfect warners, and I shied away from that big time it was very scary to.
Feel that label.
I didn't feel it in myself, and that is probably where most of the truth lies. It's just there was a really big schism between this deep onnoored sense that I felt in my own identity, in my own being, and the confidence with which our family was presented to the.
World as a child. How did you understand that schism inside of you? You know, sort of the outsides not matching the insides.
That's a great question. What I did is I buried it. I became a people pleaser. I validated myself through my surroundings instead of through my own intuition. I made sure that everyone else around me was valid and happy, and I would became so good at it that I really didn't feel that schism myself. Eric is three years older, and it was a very popular, charismatic, just social guy, extroverted, and I couldn't have been more opposite than that.
I was the introvert.
In fact, we were just speaking the other day and he said when our parents would argue, when it would just blow up downstairs, he found an escape route through his window, and that was his way of dealing with it because it was just too much to tolerate, and I remember those arguments too. But my technique was to shrink. I call it sort of the shrink wrapped version of myself or the fight fight er freeze.
I was the freezer.
So I would just freeze and shrink down as a coping mechanism.
So your brother would literally leave the house and you would.
Of yourself exactly.
It's kind of an amazing irony that your parents were leading these conscious loving workshops and at the same time had this really volatile relationship themselves. I mean, I don't know what a conscious loving workshop is. Did you know as a child? Did you Were you aware of kind of what your parents were doing as leaders in that community.
Partially I knew that it was very psychological. My mother would bring in that aspect of it through her marriage and family counseling training, and it was also a lot of stress management techniques that my father was bringing in through his work with as a cardiac surgeon. But extending beyond that into more of the energy medicine, biofeedback, some of the things that are more common now, breathing exercises, they do, these crash courses of Okay, we've got a weekend workshop coming up at Wagging Wheel, and we need to bullet point what we're going to be discussing with our couples, and so I would these large, colorful blodderboards and they would basically have exercises, techniques, a lot of eye gazing, a lot of journaling, a lot of truth telling. Later. I know that my father got involved with the Tantra community in Hawaii, and while they didn't teach Tntra, I know that my dad was learning a lot from that community as well. My mom was a little more hands off with it and so it wasn't brought into their work as leaders, But I know that my dad was learning a lot from that space as well.
Tell me about your mom, I mean, the mother of your childhood.
Oh my mom.
Well, this is hard to talk about because I love her dearly and she was young. You know, she was a good Christian when she met my dad.
In fact, she was.
Called Parson Larsen at university and their first kiss Haddock Bible between the two of them. So for them to abandon Christianity, study Buddhism, make a meditation room.
You know, in the progression.
Of her evolution as a spiritual, loving human being, was quite dramatic. What I remember from her reminds me a little bit of Betty Draper from mad Men. There was so much pain beneath the surface, but she had to keep it all together. My dad was very chaotic with his emotions, with his schedule, his commitments, and so for her, she did her very very best to raise a good family, help Eric and I feel safe, but at the cost of feeling like there was a truthfulness in her own being and therefore, by default me feeling like it was safe for me to feel truthful with my feeling like it needed to be a certain way in order to keep up the appearances of this, because if one thread was pulled, the whole thing would unravel. And she, to her credit, dug deeply into this place of forgiving over and over again with my father because of the affairs and trying to grow herself with this. This is my partner, this is what he's going to be doing, so okay, then I might as well do it as well. And let's open this marriage up, let's go to therapy, let's figure this out. And if you're going to have affairs, then I'm going to have.
A relationship too.
And she needed to grow herself. And I know she said that, but I think my brother calls it we were a little fearal, if that makes it, because there was so much drama in their relationship. My mom did a great job at making sure the meals were there, the ballet classes were paid for, the family trips were planned, the house was beautiful, But emotionally, I think my brother and I were pretty fearal, left to figure it out.
On our own, if that makes sense.
Kimberly doesn't just freeze and leave herself as a teenager. She starts to exhibit some pretty severe anxiety symptoms and behaviors, only she doesn't know what she's anxious about. After all, despite her parents' arguments, they are seen as a model couple and the Warners are a model family looked up to by their community. All is perfect on the surface, but definitely not perfect on the inside, so Kimberly is left to come up with her own solutions.
My solution was to control everything within myself, because if something was even though it didn't appear on the surface, then I decided it must be me. The thing that's wrong must be me, And I know I'm not alone in that. When you can't identify the trauma out in the world when.
The secret is buried.
I don't think it's the only way, but I internalized it and said, something's wrong with me. So I did a pretty good job for a while until I couldn't fixing the thing that was, whatever that flavor of the month was that was wrong. I had a few earlier traumas with my body with a developmental need disorder, but that eventually passed. But I remember the first thing that really got me was when I started getting pimples, and.
It was so.
I felt so helpless, and I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours and hours and hours and pick at my skin, tried masks and scrub and I even started taking my brother's tetracycling, even though it wasn't my prescription. I just popped them like pills because I heard that was supposed to help.
I would plead at night.
I would leave the bathroom after just an inflamed face of skin picking and scrubbing, and I.
Wanted nothing more.
Deep down, I couldn't tell this to myself, but deep down I wanted to be held and loved for who I was, for the big mess that I had just created.
I was like bringing the mess.
Inside out to the surface, and I wanted to be witnessed in it, and I wanted to be loved in it.
But of course that's not what I did.
I would belining it straight to the bedroom and make please with the universe that my skin would get better. And this tormented me for years. And I'm not even I didn't even have acne. I mean, this is to the level where I would probably we talked to junior high friends and high school friends and then goa, what you didn't have skin or whatever.
So I was really really.
Anxious and agitated and becoming more and more hyper vigilant around any sort of tiny little change that I would sense in my body because that was the only thing I felt like I could control.
Did you know it was anxiety? Did you have that language or that knowledge or it was just you know, these kinds of obsessions and compulsions and behaviors that were like I have no idea why I'm doing this, but I have to keep doing it.
That's exactly what it was.
And it was really just goal oriented. It was I have to fix my skin. I mean I didn't even allow room.
For why am I doing this.
I would feel the pain afterwards of why did I do that, But in the compulsion, it was just this, I have to fix it. There's no option here to be broken.
There's no option here to feel the.
Chaos that I feel inside. And I think that was a direct mirroring that my mom was feeling. There is no option for me to feel this absolute chaos in this marriage because I have to hold it all together.
And what were some of the other ways in which the anxiety expressed itself during those years you've talked about, you know, sort of the freezing up, the inability to make decisions, that making yourself as small and invisible as you possibly.
Could yeap and really getting a sixth sense for what other people wanted to hear and feel and see. And so I aversion of the shrink wrapping. Nobody probably would say I was introverted, because I also developed a really good social extroverted self in order to please the people that needed me to be that way. So I definitely had a chameleon quality that was ultimately the goal was to protect that fragile, vulnerable truth that was me, and that was the part that was never allowed to surface.
The chameleon could surface. So it varied.
The techniques varied based on the environments that I was.
In during this fragile and vulnerable time. In Kimberly's teenage life, she and her mom are on a walk one day when her mom tells her in a very blunt and academic kind of way, that it's possible her father isn't in fact her biological father.
So I was seventeen, and the way my mom tells it is that my dad had had one night experimental situation with person after they had already closed their open marriage, and so he was feeling ashamed, and on the heels of that, he said, well, I think you need to tell Kim about the possibility that I'm not her father.
So this is something that your parents kind of sort of had a inkling about, but then shoved that inkling away and didn't really discuss it with each other. Certainly didn't discuss it with you.
No, and they but I also get the sense that they put it.
Away the night that the conception happened in Canada. My mother came home the next day. I told my dad I was born eight months later, and it was buried.
At that point.
My dad remembers once looking at me as an infant and feeling like wishy mine, and he felt like, psychically or something that he was worried. I could hear his thoughts or feel his insecurity, and so he put it away. You know, of course nothing gets put away that easily. But the way that I've been told, and up until the age seventeen, it was not discussed. There was there was not even a question in my mind you know who my dad was. I have a pretty good delete button on some memories in my life, so I guess you couldn't call the memories if I'm deleting them. But I remember that it was around the lake, and I remember that it was an overcast day, and I I was a little confused by why my mom wanted to take me for a walk, because usually it was more of a jogging type of thing where she took the jogging movement happened in the eighties and she took that on and so that's usually how we would.
Spend our time together. And this was a walk.
And I remember as we sort of turned the corner around closer as we emerged towards High Cliff, which is got like a golf course and a country club. She said, I your father wants me to know that there's a chance that he's not your father. And in that same breath, she said, but isn't it wonderful knowing that you belong to the mystery? And I sensed a very strong need for this to be a happy story, for this to be a positively beautiful thing. And of course she's trying to protect me. Ugh, I mean, okay, I've got to tell my daughter this. So I don't think there was a fraction of a second where I allowed myself to really fall into what she had just said. I quickly went to how am I supposed to respond to this? And she gave it to me. She fed it right to me. She said, well, it's cool you belong to the mystery. And I'm like, yeah, that's cool.
Right.
It was as if the executive functioning of my brain turned off, and you know, just tell me what to say. So later in life, you know, my mother says that that's actually not what happened. That it was me that said isn't it cool that I belonged to the mystery. I just don't remember saying that. But I also don't leave that as out as a possibility, because again, I was trying to read what I needed to be in this situation, and I very clearly knew that I needed to be optimistic and positive and that this is a beautiful story.
So that's where it was left.
And I truly I don't remember talking about it with my dad, none of my friends. I don't even remember thinking about it after that walk, Right.
You put that beautiful story away.
I put it away. Yeah, that lovely story away.
So was that lovely story tucked away? Life in the Warner family continues in its usual fashion, school dinners, the planning of trips, but then tragedy strikes.
In my senior year, spring break, we have a family vacation to go to Mexico. My brother's meeting us from Colorado University of col Colorado. He's there and he's going to fly to Cancun and meet us all there.
My dad.
The night before we are to drive to the Milwaukee airport, which is about a two hour drive, he was at a retirement party for one of the nurses at the hospital and he had.
To or was dressed up as Willie Nelson.
His two partners were also dressed up, and I think they sang some tunes, and of course there was drinking.
And.
Somebody from the party actually asked if he would like a drive home because they noticed he'd been drinking more than usual. And they said to us that he grabbed the keys and said, I'm my own man.
And I thought that was interesting.
That was a choice that he made to take it on and be responsible for his commitment to just being the man that he thought he was supposed to be.
He got in the car and he drove home, which.
Is probably a twenty minute drive, and we had already left because he was late, and my mom in a frenzy. I remember gathering our bags in the house and it's almost it's two am. You know, we're supposed to be at the Milwaukee airport at four am. And he's not here. He's not here, he's not here. She scribbled off a note that said meet us at the airport. I'm pissed and underline, underline, underline, and left it on the counter or on the bed or something. He got home about thirty minutes later and found that and threw a bag together. So he got on the highway and I think he was nearly to the Milwaukee airport. It was probably forty five minutes from there, and he got tired, and as my mother said he would do when he was tired, he would put his hand through the sun roof and sort of get some fresh air on his hand. Happened to be that the sun was rising at that moment, because the car behind him had seen this. He waved at the rising sun and then swerved over and hit a mac truck head on and was killed.
We did not know.
We got on the plane and received a little napkin on the plane that said call this number.
It was this is the flight attendant had given it to us, and.
You know, we just thought it was some one of the cardiologists saying Dave will be late.
He'll be on the next light.
So when we finally got to the Cancoon Airport and got through customs and my mom was able to call the number, this I do remember, maybe clearer than any memory I have from childhood. She turned to me and her beautiful mouth, with her lipstick stained lips, said, Dad's dead. If this was the coroner's office from Fredonia, Wisconsin. And you know, that was the end of chapter one in Kim's life. That moment, that something ended there, and.
Of course.
I didn't know how to feel. That my coping was denial, and I denied it all the way home. We waited for my brother to arrive, watched him fall to his knees and scream and felt all of their very open emotion, which made me feel smaller and smaller and smaller, because I didn't have space for my way, nor did I know.
What my way was, but it wasn't their way.
So I went into denial and then also justification, and just decided, well, he's closer to me now because he's dead.
I really didn't leave room for.
Any pain or sadness, real pain or sadness.
I went through the motions, I went to therapy, I cried, I wrote letters to my dad, I shared something during his memorial service, but I didn't really feel the deep, deep ache and chaos.
It was too much. It was too much for me.
Did you in the next period of time did you return to the question of whether he was your biological father? Or did that lovely story stay buried for that period of time.
Gone.
Totally gone, not even if there was any bit of it that was still lingering in my psyche even before his death.
His death obliterated it.
I can remember walking through all the different stages of losing him and then grieving him when I went to college, and it was my alliance was one hundred percent to him, and in fact my confirmation of our similarities and how I was going to live out his destiny and you take his DNA where his abbreviated life couldn't take it. I was all on my shoulders and that was a way for me to stay close to him.
So those years in college, how would you characterize the schism?
Well, fortunately I did early on connect with my first love, my first lover, i should say, and we were together for three years.
And he also lost to father. So a lot of our bond was around, and.
You know, writing letters to our fathers and making them larger than life and speaking with them and burying the letters, and the Colorado Rockies, and so there was a way.
That this gives them got bigger.
The sense of my truth and my ability to feel what was going on inside, I think would come forward every once in a while through the tumultuous love that I'm talking about. With this man named Ali. He was violent, he was aggressive, he was passionate, he was everything that I wasn't and so I would feel bubbles of my own truth coming forward, just because it had.
To in that kind of relationship.
But ultimately it was like little firecrackers, you know, just the little ones that you put out on the pavement, not the big ones.
Just the little ones been around it circles.
It was like I would have these little berths of oh, this is how I feel, and then water would get poured on top of it and it would go far far away. The schism and the sense of who I was.
It got buried.
Also because I declared my major the first month I was there, and I was going to be a doctor. My job was to live my dad's life. I was at a wonderful liberal arts school that had all these incredible creative classes and professors. I didn't touch those outside of the requisites. You know, I had this deeply creative life inside, but I didn't allow that to come to the surface because I was supposed to make my dad happy in the afterlife.
He did not want that for me.
This was not something I ever felt the pressure from the outside. This was something I created myself.
We'll be right back when Kimberly is twenty one she's just graduated from college when she's diagnosed with something called autoimmune Graves disease, an affliction which in many ways results from being in a near constant, hypervigilant stress state.
It is one hundred percent like being on twelve cups of coffee. I didn't drink coffee to this day, I can't even drink green tea. But my nervous system was so wired into the sympathetic state that my brain at that point was feeling like something.
Is always wrong.
I wouldn't cognizantly say something is wrong, but my nervous system was on a red al alert all the time. And I'm sure you know I read books. When I first was diagnosed with Graves disease, of course.
I wanted to fix it.
That was my solution, and their solution in the nineties is to cut the thyroid gland out and medicate for the rest of your life. I was losing weight rapidly and eating just gobs of calories every day, and it just was not handshaking, armpit sweating, just not sleeping, insomnia. It's almost as if I was lifting off senator. So the solution was to cut it out, but I did not want that, and I attacked my mom and dad's library of natural health cookbooks and gosh, herbal books and psychotherapy everything on their self help shelves, and I took some dietary measures, but I also read some where I'm not sure if it's medically valid, but I also read somewhere it's probably Louise Hay actually, I want to say, because she would take diseases and then connect to them with the psychological attribute or that what potentially was.
The cause cause of that? And she said it was grief. And at the time, all.
Of this was the bible to me because it was a form of control.
Oh it's grief, Okay, well, then I better go do more grief work.
What wasn't being talked about was trauma, PTSD, nervous system that's stuck in sympathetic.
Mode, and none of that was being talked about.
It was more about how do we control this and how do we eliminate the cause. So, yes, Graves disease is something that I managed, but erratically managed, and then it definitely hit its worst state when I was twenty six and my cortisol levels dropped to zero and I was unable to stand up.
It was a nightmare.
Fortunately, I was in Portland at the time and I had a really good physician who was also trained in naturopathic medicine. He gave me steroids because he said, you have no cortisol in your body, which was a result of the thyroid just running, running, running, running, running, And within two days of being on steroids, I felt like a normal person again. My nervous system had burned me out. And some would say, oh, yeah, the grief that caused that, but I think this pattern was set way away earlier, the hypervigilance and the anxiety. When I moved to Portland, Oregon in two thousand and one to start the naturopathic medical program, I just took a Craigslist job. It was at a documentary film company, and I knew nothing about film. But they handed me a box of phs and CDs and said, watch all of these and log them. And what they were creating was a twentieth anniversary video for the Dougie Center. The Dougie Center is a wonderful international organization that's based in Portland for breathing families, and I would spend eight hours a day watching children talk about their father's dying of suicide and murder and cancer and watching mothers deal with it, and the woman who founded the Dougie Center would discuss sort of the background of grief, not necessarily the stages, but the importance of being able to vocalize and find community through grieving. I was watching one of her talks and she was discussing with a group of teachers what to watch for, and she said, I'm not too worried about the kids that are acting out after a parent or a close loved one dies. And I'm not too worried about the ones that sort of withdraw because we can identify that they're suffering.
There's something happening. She said. The ones I worry.
About the most are the perfectionists, the ones that actually become overachievers and they do everything right and nobody notices them because they are continuing to excel in everything that they do.
Of course, if this were played.
In a movie, this is when everything would slow down. As I'm watching this and hearing over and over again her talk about me, and she said, these are the people that usually five ten years later end up their body's breakdown.
And that was the.
Summer when my thyroid went bsserk, and that was the summer that I found that doctor that saved my life, because, like I said, at that point, I was I so lightheaded. Every time I would stand up, my heart would shoot up to one hundred and fifty beats per minute, and it was a scary time. But I knew that I was going to natropathic school in the fall and everything was going to work itself out. Because that's what I still was doing. I would just go through the motions. I did sign up to train with the Dougie Center. I wanted to be a facilitator. I was still skirting around the truth of me. I was doing everything on the outside that looked like, oh, kid's really dealing well with life and grief and everything, but I was still doing a really good job at burying it. So I started naturopathic school and a month later, nine to eleven happened, and I used that as an excuse to drop out because I didn't want to be there. And I still this day don't really that doesn't sound like me, you know, like I'm still a little puzzled as to how I felt so convinced after all these years of training and applications.
I just wow, Okay, I dropped out, and.
I'm proud of myself when I think about that thing. Good for you, because that probably was one of the first things I ever did that might have been a little bit of my own gut telling me what I wanted.
Yeah, that makes a strange kind of sense. And also I think that when there's a tragedy on a mass scale like nine to eleven was, there's a way in which if there's been, you know, a tragedy in an individual life or suddenly and there's this collective grief, this national global grief, there's a way that it can ship away at and create kind of a ripple effect with individual grief. After Kimberly drops out of her program, she ends up dabbling in the film industry again. She isn't certain that this is the right path for her, but an editing job comes along and she takes it. During this time, she begins to develop another dangerous compulsion born from her perfectionism. She develops an eating disorder and disappears into boleimic behavior, purging toward an impossible goal, as she had done in the past with her skin picking.
I wanted to be empty.
There is a stillness that happened after I would purge, where I would look in the mirror and I would feel myself again. I would feel the pain and I would feel.
Like, oh, what did you do? But I would feel.
Like I was looking at myself and in a weird way, it connected me with that person. It quieted things down. So the behavior would come and go. It was usually around my period, and then sometimes it would be gone for months and then it would rear its head again. But it definitely had a sense of like, wow, I thought this was over, and then here it is again. So that was a period of two and a half three years where I was flirting with the bulimia, working in the industry a little bit, and also reapplying.
To go back to a naturopathic school because I didn't know what the hell am I doing. That's also when I started modeling, just locally for fashion.
Shows and catalogs and things like that. But it ended up being a good source of income and I actually enjoyed it. I enjoyed finding that part of myself that wasn't ashamed and it felt playful and joyful. It was more of like the athletic Portland's full of athletic catalogs and stuff. So it was playful, joyful, goofy. Not nobody was talking about herbs or pills or supplements or medicines. It was just frivolous, and I found some freedom in that s as I took my life so seriously, so there was actually some joy. Strangely enough, that came the authentic joy that came from just doing something that I never would have allowed.
Myself to do six years earlier.
So between thirty and forty, I drop out again. I go to this naturopathic school, transfer to the Chinese medicine school and do two and.
A half years.
There, and then drop out again, and then fall in love with my current husband.
We developed a deep bond together.
I navigate his intellectually disabled daughter, who was eleven at the time when.
We meet, and we sort.
Of navigate that chaos and also so grow into a pretty thriving modeling career and mostly as we joke, kind of like midwestern old lady catalogs.
But boy, we had fun and just travel.
The world and met some wonderful human beings and enjoyed that part of being a woman and celebrating my body in a way i'd never had before and having friendships.
That felt deep and rich. So that was all happening for those ten years.
Do you think that you're you know, thriving modeling career? I mean during that period of time, were you dialed way back in terms of you know, self harming behaviors or those kinds of behaviors. Did that Did that change during that time? And if it did, what would you attribute that to?
Yes, all of it went away. It literally went away. I still carried a lot of anxiety, but I attribute it partially to finally exiting the pressure I was putting on myself to become a physician, and even more so to the partner who is now my husband, because he really rejected the fix it world. In fact, I did it with his daughter when I first met her. Oh she's got an election disabilities. Let's put it on a gluten free diet. What's her you know, Let's take her to get reikie, Let's do all these things.
Let's fix her, fix her, fix her.
And he was like, I want to love my daughter the way she is. And I was really attracted to that part of him. I always described him as like this warrior in the forest, but his sword was down and he was dented, you know, his gear was dented and bruised and dirty, and he was not running, but he was looking at the trees and noticing the light pouring through the trees, and there was something that was I was really drawn to this man who was very surrendered to a pretty hard story and not happy a lot of the time about it, either really in pain about it, but not trying to make it anything else either.
So I wasn't doing it myself yet, but I was.
In his presence and it was teaching me, little bit by little bit.
How to be that way.
I also picked up photography, absolutely fell in love with being on the other side of the camera and finding my creative life, finding that part that was the ballerina who wanted an outlet and needed to express myself. I began in those ten years to express myself. The modeling was like one way, but that wasn't the real joy that was coming from filmmaking and photography and discovering a language that made sense to me and often was a preverbal language that was more about composition and light and story, the story that came with the image. So I think I was finding something inside of me, finally that knew how to express herself.
Kimberly's dented Warrior is named Dave. In twenty twelve, she and Dave take up cycling together. They spend their weekends biking a twenty six mile loop around Portland, stopping to lie in the grass and enjoy each other's company. When winter comes, it's too cold to ride, so they take a break from their weekend ritual. In fact, Kimberly has another winter time ritual ever since her dad passed. She and her mom spend a week together in Mexico.
So February of twenty fourteen, we were in Mexico taking our morning long walk and she starts RETI telling the story which we've heard before, of this wonderful one night stand she had in Toronto at the Maripos and Music Festival with a man named Charlie. And of course this is post her telling the story around the lake. When there's a chance that your dad isn't your dad, this was tied, you know, this story that she would tell about Charlie and Toronto was tied to that. So if there ever was a father that wasn't your father, this would be the man. And I ended up just listening to her tell the story, but she brought out so many more details.
On this walk. She remembered his last name.
She remembered that he had a television show in Wisconsin and it was called Long Ago Is All Around?
And I was like, what an interesting guy I remember. On the flight.
Home, I had a layover in Denver and I googled his name finally the full name. Was never able to google the full name before, and up pops.
One of his albums.
He was also a musician and a poet, and the album picture took my breath away because it was the male version of.
Me, and I didn't say anything.
I flew home the last leg, pulled up the photo as soon as Dave picked me up at the airport, and I didn't without any context. I showed it to him and I said, who does this look like? And he said, I don't know, but it could be your dad.
And something opened up in me of like, hm, I need to investigate this more. I have more information.
And so fast forward to Mother's Day of that year.
I visit my mom for Mother's Day and on the way home again, I guess I do a lot of things in the airport finding out the producers of that album, and it was the University of Wisconsin, and so I called the University of Wisconsin.
Mibray from the airport, and I said, can you find I had any more information about this man named Charles Brower? And she said, oh, it's you know, eight o'clock at night. I have nothing else to do. Let me get on it. I received an email that Monday morning that had his obituary in it. Charles Brower's obituary. He died in a sailing accident in nineteen eighty five when he was thirty six years old, so I was ten years old, and he was never found.
His body was never found. He started to go through the roof that week.
Breathlessly, almost impulsively, trying to get as much information when I could about this person.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Remember Dave and Kim's bike rides. Well, the weather is nice again, it's springtime in Portland and they're on their first ride of the season. It's been a whirlwind of a week for Kim making all these discoveries about her biological father, so she's happy to detach for a bit and get outside. But things don't go exactly as planned.
We were going down the main straightaway before we pulled over to get onto the waterfront path, and a young woman opened her car door in the bike lane and I flew over the door and landed in the street and cracked my pelvis and hit my head and had a concussion. And that ends chapter two. If the other one was my dad said this one ended chapter two because everything changed after that point. I was on deadress, so I had a lot of time to digest this and think about it. I corresponded with the librarian a little bit more.
She sent me a few of his TV shows that I watched.
This suspicion grew inside of me, and as the suspicion grew, I started to feel like what it was the hyperthyroid symptoms before, like I started to feel this deep vibration that wouldn't settle, even as I was on twenty four hour by address. It wasn't until August of that year and I'm still at home in Portland and Davis making me smoothies and scrambled eggs every day that I took the DNA test.
My brother got it for.
Me, but I also remember him handing it to me, going, yeah, you know, like really, what are the chances? And so that's weird to say, because on the one hand, my body's vibrating and on the other hand, my brain is going no way, not chance. And the DNA test came back. It was like three weeks and it came back as my brother was my half brother.
And that was a shock for everyone.
People have asked me, was I a shock for your mom?
Yes, it was a shock for everyone. I went upstairs actually when I first got the email, and I just brought my phone up with me, and I straddled Dave because he was still sleeping, and I just.
Shoved at the phone in his face and it.
Said half brother, Eric Warner, half brother. And I think what I do when I feel so unmoored and so ungrounded, as I again try to find other people's responses and find how am I supposed to respond here, you know, And also fortunately he's porous and bigger boned, and I just like my body needed something to ground me. So I just wrapped myself around him and the weight of his response because his response wasn't gonna be like whoa, holy shit, wow, you know, his response was huh, okay, you know, like, let's digest this. So I needed him desperately to ground this experience for me. That's when the dizziness started. The dizziness did not come directly after the bicycle accident, unfortunately, because a lot of the doctors. When it did come, which started in March of the next year, a lot of doctors were like, well, concussion syndrome, you know, delayed concussion syndrome, something with your neck that happened. Everyone was pointing to the accident because there was nothing else for them to point at.
I would bring up.
This, you know, well I also got the DNA test, and you know, just would just scratch his head and dismiss it. So unfortunately that delayed the diagnosis for me big time. But the dizzyness started intermittently. I remember walking on the sidewalk and it was like dropping out underneath me, and then that grew from the floor of bouncing under my feet occasionally to half a day, and then about a month later it was all day, every day, NonStop.
Lack of sleep.
I was starting to feel out of body. This was a scary, terrifying out of body experience, where it was as if my body was literally running its own course, completely dysregulated. I was terrified to go to bed at night because I would just lay there and feel the feelings of the bed bouncing up and down, and my sympathetic nervous system was contracting so much that I got up to go to the bathroom twelve times.
Over and over and over again.
It was just hell. It was just absolute hell, and I was only getting worse. I was trying to find doctors that would help me. They kept pointing towards concussion syndrome or something in my neck. No one was talking about panic. No one was talking about anxiety. No one was talking about, you know, any sort of vestibular migraine disorder that can come from a severe panic disorder.
So I did.
The best I could with it, but then I ended up having to get on a plane and live with my mom for seven months because I was a mess. I couldn't even walk across the street without someone holding my hand, and halfway across the street, I'd say, let's turn around.
I got to go back inside.
You know, someone would knock on the door and I would It was as if getting shot.
In the chest.
It was frightened all the time, and in hindsight. And I've said this many times. I should have been sedated because my nervous system couldn't reset itself.
There's one silver lining to Kimberly living with her mother for all those months. In all that togetherness, a moment finally arrives in which her mother is not managing Kimberly's reactions and telling her that it's lovely and wonderful to be part of a mystery. Instead, her mother actually apologizes to her.
My mom doesn't cry a lot, but when she does, it gets my attention, and her jaw starts to tremble, and her beautiful, glassy eyes get even glassier. And she was about six inches from my face, and she grabbed my arms and she looked in my eyes and she said, I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I didn't protect you, protect me, meaning tell you the truth. Not that she even knew, because I truly believed that she didn't know. But what they didn't do was take that next step to find out the truth. So she was more concerned about keeping things together than finding out the truth and potentially having everything fall apart. So wow, I took that in. I really took that in. Danny it was healing and at such an overused word these days, but it felt like a calm bath to me to hear her and feel her and see her eyes looking in my eyes and feel I felt her fragility. I felt, Oh my god, you were doing the best you could. You were truly doing and you wanted all you ever wanted was to protect me. All you ever wanted was to protect me under a really, really, really challenging situation. And of course, in the magical thinking world, I would hope that that moment would be the moment where the dizziness would go away.
Oh I's on my feet again.
Wouldn't it be nice if everything was that neat and.
Tidy, wouldn't it?
I had a lot of those though I'm like, Oh, this is it, here's the moment, this is it.
I'm better. But no, that didn't happen.
But it did deeply connect me to her story as a young woman trying to figure things out, the chaos, the insecurity, and it helped me feel compassion for her and also for myself through all of that.
It just softened everything.
When did you actually receive the actual diagnosis, the actual syndrome, reason that this was happening.
Years later, years and years and years.
Well, it happened in the pandemic.
It was twenty twenty because I was able to find a neurologist who specialize on this in Texas and he was doing telemed so I didn't have to fly to Texas to see him. And he heard, you know, listen to me for thirty minutes and said, you have mallet deparkment syndrome. And it was a spontaneous onset, and spontaneous onset happens typically when someone goes into a deep state of panic and the neurotransmitters just get really jumbled up.
So this was years. I found lots of different.
Ways to cope with this, but it was tormenting me for six years total. I'm on eight years now and now I'm I have medication that's helping tremendously. But I've also found psychologically a way deeper relationship with the chaos within myself and allowing it and being compassion with it and loving it that it basically tells my brain I'm not in danger anymore. You know, when I stopped trying to fix myself, my brain said, oh, you're not in danger.
So you know that Charlie has died, but you do at a certain point contact his brother, your uncle, and begin to learn something about his family, and in fact seem, you know, to be embraced by his brother and his whole family.
That happened very shortly after I took the DNA test. Like I said before, I am impulsive, and I think that's how I learned how to deal with all that anxiety. I would just jump in and then figure out how to swim once I.
Was in there. So I wrote him a long letter.
I found him because he's a filmmaker of all things, with two sisters who are artists. And I wrote the letter to his studio and gave a lot of qualify fires in there that said, please throw this away if this is bringing up too much trauma. You know you think I'm a lunatic. I'm sorry. Just hear me out. I don't want anything from you. I just thought you should know I won't feel have any hard feelings if you don't reach out anyway.
Qualifier qualifier qualifier.
He read the letter, and then his sisters were visiting a couple of weeks later. He printed it out, shared with them and wanted to observe them reading it, and all of their responses were. First of all, we kind of thought this was going to happen, because apparently my biological father was quite a ladies man, and they wanted it to be true. They loved their brother deeply. A couple of years ago, Dave asked, my uncle, how did you respond when you first read that letter?
Was the very first thing you thought?
And he reached his hand out to me and looked right in my eyes and said, I wanted.
It to be true.
You know, for this big hands and sixty year old man to say that to me, it just shook me to the core, Like, oh, and Matt is true for the whole family.
It's a giant.
Family, you know, first cousins, second cousins.
I've met them all.
They all gather once twice a year.
They are deeply loving and at.
The same time really casual, you know, like there's no big deal my family, the Warrners, let's sit down and like light candles and psychologize it.
They're like, let's open a beer and go swimming. So I felt at.
Home and I still feel at home with them. We visit every year. That said, the very first time I met them was right after the dizzyness had started, and I had already bought the tickets for Dave and I to go, thinking this dizziness is going to go away. I don't know what this is, but it's not going to last. Kept getting worse and worse and worse. The night before our trip to visit them all, I had to email them and say, I just got to let you guys know, I'm not myself.
I don't know what's going on.
I haven't had a doctor's appointment yet about this, but I feel crazy and I'm scared. And they all emailed me back and said, we love you as you are. Just come even if we see you for five minutes and give you a hug and then you go sleep the whole time, that's fine with us.
We love you know. It was just like, don't worry, no big deal.
So we went and I was scared the whole time and also deeply loved in that, which is kind of cool to feel like.
When I first met them, I was a.
Mess, absolute mess. I mean I even went to urging clinic once.
It was bad, and they just.
Were like, cool, let's go for a road trip.
Let's go drive, you know, and drop you off when you need.
To, and here's a snack, and you know it was. It was very sweet and healing, and that continue used to this day to be my experience with my new family. Meaning in purpose is really important when we are navigating chaos. But I do feel that this I am in a best place I've been in my entire life. And I can honestly say that's because of all of the hardship and the dysregulation and the pain and the suffering. It's brought me to a place of peace now. And I'm still dizzy, not as dizzy as I used to be, but I am peaceful in the dizziness. And it's because I finally stopped caring, not stopped caring about life. I loved my life, but I stopped needing to fix myself. I stopped needing to be a certain way in this world. The dizzyness forced me to be exactly as I was because I could not fix it. Twenty nineteen, I started a documentary project called Unfixed, and this was before I was medicated, but I was realizing that I was done trying to find doctors to fix me because I spent too much money and I was not getting any better. So I thought, well, I'm just going to find some people that are living with chronic illnesses that are doing the same thing, because I don't know how to do this. I don't have all I have on my shelf or self help books, and I don't know how to un self help myself. So my first subject was an als patient and my second subject had tried geminal neurologya, which is so.
Known as the suicide.
To these people that were living with excruciating and actually terminal disorders, I was asking them, how are you embracing this and what does it look like when you hit rock bottom?
What do you tell yourself? And how does your heart feel when the disappointment continues? And I'm just really trying to understand this process again, maybe in a way because I couldn't find my own feelings still, I'm trying to find what I'm feeling by hearing other people.
Tell me and oh, yeah, that sounds right.
And then the pandemic happened and I had twenty subjects for this film and I was unable to continue doing sort of the large film crew situation, and I was desperately looking for their answers. So I decided to start having them record their answers into their smartphones, and we turned it into a docu series for two years. Every month they would reply to questions as profound as would you let go of everything you've learned since you're diagnosis in order to be healed?
Or as simple as what's food like for you?
And we just finished one a couple months ago on sex and what's intimacy like?
And it's just was a.
Deep hand and shake with humanity. I got the experience of feeling my own brokenness in community, and while they were submitting their videos and answers, I would submit them my answers so that they didn't feel like they're just sending them into this black box. And so we learned about each other, and Unfixed became so much more than a documentary.
It became a community.
It became a way for me to unwind my nervous system into allowing instead of fighting. And what really became clear was that once I finally just allowed the brokenness and the dizzyness and the anxiety to just be there, my brain didn't feel it was in danger anymore, because it can only feel in danger if I'm trying to get rid of it, and so my nervous system was.
Like, oh cool, it's okay.
And that's why I can say now that, yeah, I'm actually quite dizzy today because I definitely get dizzier when i'm nervous, and I was excited about this call, and yes, the room of moving around, is it bothering me? No, because my brain knows I'm fine and I'm not going to do anything to try to fix it.
I'm just going to enjoy this conversation with you.
So this, the dizziness specifically, has been a profound teacher for me in allowing experiences to be as they are and to hold them and to love them and have compassion.
For them, and.
Conversely or simultaneously see and hold and loves that in others as well. So I feel it's such a solidarity with humanity now that I never.
Ever experienced before.
I'm calm and I'm happy and I'm peaceful. Never thought this was possible given the way that I used to feel in.
This body mine.
What an extraordinary way to think of it, that our traumas can be our profound teachers to experience them, hold them, love them, have compassion for them, and see and hold that in others as well, such beautiful and wise words from Kimberly Warner. To check out Kimberly's work, go to unfixedmedia dot com. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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