Orenda Fink talks about childhood trauma and the connection with allergies

In May 2023, I was playing bass for the indie rock band Bright Eyes. At our sold-out show in Chicago, we were about a quarter of the way through the 20-song set when I started to feel nauseous. The nausea quickly turned into an overwhelming urge to vomit, which I fought with all my might while playing and singing background for Conor Oberst, the band's founder and lead singer, in front of 3,000 adoring fans.

When things got hectic downstairs, I was sweating under the stage lights. I can do itI said to myself. Only a few songs left. But then the lights began to dim – not the ones on the stage, but the ones that illuminated my consciousness.

I felt my legs give out and sat down on guitarist Mike Mogis's amp. “Does it bother you?” I asked as he looked up from his pedal steel guitar like I was crazy. The world disappeared and I realized I had to get off the stage before I passed out. I had no choice but to leave.

After the song ended, I calmly put my bass on the stand and walked off the stage, pausing only to tell Conor that I was sick and had to leave. I gathered all my strength and forced my legs to carry me to the side stage, where tour manager Katy looked at me worriedly as I slid down the wall. “Orenda, are you OK? You're all blue in the face,” she said. I mumbled something like “garbage can,” and the next thing I knew I was vomiting into broken glass and crushing beer cans with a force I didn't know my body could muster.

A paramedic emerged from the darkness, his compassionate face filling my narrow field of vision. He tried to usher me onto a stretcher, but there was no time. As the band continued playing without me, Katy chased me into the bathroom, lifting up my dress to rip my thousand-dollar in-ear monitor package from my tights before I closed the door and my nausea took over. I was a professional musician and had been on stage for 30 years—more than half my life. This was, by all accounts, my worst performance nightmare come true.

It turns out I was having a severe allergic reaction to a dollop of Russian Beluga caviar on an appetizer I'd eaten three hours before the show. As a child, I heard the word “caviar” coming from my television in rural Alabama, where Robin Leach from “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” would wish my family a goodnight of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” in his thick British accent.

What was on the screen was so far removed from my reality that it might as well have been filmed on the moon. My family's eating habits were as erratic as our finances. Feasts featured sumptuous Southern fare: baked chicken or pork chops, black-eyed peas, thick-cut tomatoes and buttermilk cornbread. But during the famine, night after night, there was watery potato soup, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, grocery shopping at “dented” stores and whispers of “How are we going to eat?”

When I was about eight and started staying over at friends' houses, I realized I had an unusual home life. My mother was charismatic and different from everyone else in our small Southern town. She was an artist and professed herself a witch—her stories of black magic, angels, and devils are present in my earliest memories. Looking back, I see a childhood marked by instability: constant moving, emotional volatility, alienation, manipulation, and fear. But as a child, my father romanticized everything my mother did: she was special, a genius, and always right. This insistence of his created the lifelong cognitive dissonance that kept me from seeing the truth. How can any of this be bad if my mother is always right?

The night of the Bright Eyes show was only the second time I had had caviar. In the summer of 2022, a friend got a can of it for her birthday and offered to share it with me when she found out I had never had caviar. After that, I felt terribly sick. I thought I had food poisoning. That it could be an allergy never occurred to me. So when I was offered caviar almost a year later, before the show, at a five-star restaurant in Chicago, I didn't really think there was much chance of a repeat. Boy, was I wrong.

It wasn't until my sister sent me an article linking allergies and childhood trauma that I started to put two and two together. I am allergic to gluten, aspartame, glue, perfume, hair dye, cats, pollen, mold, and dust. My little sister also suffers from at least four of these allergies.

Before the pandemic, I had set strict boundaries for myself when it came to communicating with my mother: I was careful about whether and when I answered her calls, I deleted her voicemails, and I ignored her emails asking for help that no one could give. But when the pandemic hit, I felt sorry for her, so alone and scared in this strange new world. I didn't know what to do – nothing. I let her get close to me again.

Despite my best intentions—my hopes and wishes that things could and would be different—I eventually realized the emotional damage I had suffered from their control and, more importantly, that things would never get better and would probably get worse. Two years later, in 2022, after doing everything I could think of to maintain a healthy relationship with my parents, I decided to cut off contact with them. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. The second hardest was writing a book about it.

I always thought of myself as the strong one in the family, the healthy one, the one who could get my way. But my anxiety, depression, negative self-talk and, yes, even my allergies tell a different story. Brock University studies how childhood trauma such as abuse and serious family problems can lead to an oversensitive immune system. This oversensitivity, called “allergenicity,” can promote the development of asthma, food allergies, hives, eczema, hay fever and other allergies.

In the article my sister sent me from the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Tatiana Falcone writes, “In addition to mental illness, victims of child abuse are more prone to allergies and asthma, autoimmune diseases, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders.” Childhood trauma survivors may also be prone to nervous system disorders, addiction, chronic pain, headaches, cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure, obesity, insomnia, nightmares, hypersensitivity to sound and light, and autoimmune diseases. It seems that growing up in a prolonged fight-or-flight state causes an overactive nervous system, so childhood trauma survivors are predisposed to be on edge and constantly alert, navigating an unpredictable world created by those we love most from birth.

I didn't develop my first allergy until I had already left home. My mother had kept cats all my life. She called them her “familiars,” a term Britannica defines as “a small animal or goblin kept as a witch's companion and given to her by the devil or other witch.” A year after I moved out at 17, I developed an allergy to my mother's cat and to all other cats. I'm so allergic that I even sneezed blood once.

Over the next 30 years, my other allergies slowly emerged – little puzzles that needed to be solved to stop the symptoms that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I believe my complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma kept my nervous system in a state of hyperarousal, always on alert and looking for danger even when there wasn't any.

After the disastrous Chicago show, I did extensive research on caviar allergies and found that they are extremely rare. I could only find one article with a mention of it, and that was about “allergy triggers for the one percent,” because most people never have the privilege of even trying the expensive sturgeon roe.

If you had told me as a child that one day I would leave my family, leave the South, form a successful indie band and travel the world, I would never have believed you. If you had told me that I would drink champagne and eat caviar, I would never have believed you. Because the champagne and caviar of “Lifestyles” stood for much more than just success, they symbolized carefreeness, a life of luxury and leisure, of fun – a feeling of lightness that I had struggled to seek since childhood. It's almost fitting that my body rejected it so fiercely.

The things we experience—as children or at any other time in our lives—can have profound effects on how we exist in the world. Science now tells us how deeply these events penetrate our bodies and manifest later. I know I'm not the only person whose early childhood experiences have left me different than I should be—than I want to be. I can't change the past. However, I can choose what I do now, and part of that change is talking about it. The more we understand how debilitating trauma can be—mentally, emotionally, and physically—the more compassion we can have for ourselves and others, and the better prepared we are to confront and heal from it.

Maybe I will never have the feeling of lightness I longed for. Instead, I experience a measured and cautious happiness. It is a limitation that I am gradually beginning to accept. Similar to my allergies. I enjoy the things I can have, but I am also alert to dangers.

Orenda Fink is a musician, songwriter, performer, author, and certified Jungian Depth Coach specializing in shadow work and dream interpretation. Her work has been featured on NPR, Pitchfork, and more. She has been writing, recording, and touring since 1997. Orenda began her career in Birmingham, Alabama with the pop-rock group Little Red Rocket. In 2000, she formed the acclaimed ethereal folk duo Azure Ray with longtime friend Maria Taylor in Athens, Georgia. She now lives in California's Mojave Desert with her husband, Todd Fink of The Faint, and their dog, Grimm. The Witch's Daughter is her first book. For more information, visit OrendaFink.com.

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