amazing, miraculous, and extraordinary healing 235
to diagnoses that included schizophrenia, post - traumatic stress
disorder, dissociative disorder, multiple personality disorder, border-
line personality disorder, bipolar, alcoholic, and epileptic. Although
you cannot fully imagine the extent of her need for healing in this
short version of her story, simply hearing a portion of it, from her
viewpoint and then from Todd ’ s, will no doubt increase your desire
and faith that you, too, can be healed of anything. As Todd said,
Kimberly ’ s story illustrates the hope for healing that is available to
us all, as Kimberly tells us below.
My story consists of physical, emotional, and spiritual sick-
ness, which paralyzed me in a permanent state of bondage.
The seed that started this journey was a childhood trauma. It
was ugly, indecent, shameful, and, most of all, my secret.
Then fi ve years later, at fourteen years old, another secret
happened. All those years of swallowing emotions and dis-
turbing fear came bursting out of me in the form of mental
illness. The seed was now a seedling, ready to be transplanted
into something bigger. What I did not know was that this
journey was going to be long, painful, lonely, and was going
to get even worse before it got better.
Childhood and adolescence came and went. Both were
awful and not what they should have been. Instead, a new
reality came to live in my head that only I knew and could
understand. To everyone around me, I was delusional. At the
time, my father worked for USAID, an agency of the State
Department. His assignments sent the family to Third World
nations, so from the time I was almost two, I was living over-
seas, moving every two to four years to another assignment.
Just when I would become close to someone, it was time
to move. I had found after a while not to get close, so as to
not get hurt so much. Everything in my life was temporary:
from the country I lived in, to the house I occupied, the peo-
ple I knew, the school I attended, except — and it was a big
except — my painful memories that would be replayed count-
less times again.