There definitely were two Toms. One was happily married; the other was a driven by confused psychological motives that would ultimately destroy him. The two Toms have appeared together only once in my dreams. That was the very first one which tipped me off about Tom’s infidelities. In that dream, the good Tom never faced me; he sat with his back turned and shoulders slumped, off to the side. The main focus of that dream was the bad Tom who kept glaring at me, showing me his angry, rejecting face. In that dream, it was very important that I not speak to the angry Tom until the old man, the good Tom, had left. I didn’t know why, then, but I now think perhaps it’s because they are separate energies on the other side.

My understanding of Tom’s psychological division in this life and the next was validated by a book called After Life by the psychic medium John Edward. I learned so much about communication with the afterlife from watching John Edward on television and Youtube. It was while watching him on Youtube that I found out he and his grandmother had been huge fans of The Guiding Light. As a matter of fact, John even uses a picture of a lighthouse, which was the symbol for The Guiding Light, for his new Evolve series on the internet. One of the things that I have learned from mediums and my own psychic experiences is that coincidences are very meaningful, and this was a coincidence that startled me enough that I felt I had to get to know John Edward even better, so I bought his book After Life.

When I read the book, I learned John’s son is named Justin, which is the name of the character Tom created and played for seven years on Guiding Light. I don’t know if John watched the show when Tom was playing Justin Marler, but this is another coincidence that I knew had a personal meaning for me.

I found the most important validation of my idea about Tom’s dual personality and divided soul in After Life where John is reading a young woman whose mother wanted to communicate with her from the other side.

Here is part of John’s reading of the daughter, Mia, from her mother, a famous artist, Cyrinda, about this phenomenon:

John: “The connection is intense. And the emotion that comes up around this feels split, as if there’s a dual type of relationship, where two people are within one in some ways. And I feel like it’s something that has unfinished business attached to it.”

Another quote from John: “Her mother revealed the abuse she’d endured growing up, which Mia acknowledged. Linked to that abuse was Cyrinda’s perception of herself as a “dual personality.”

John: “…so there are two personalities. She left that other person behind.”

Now it was clear to me why I’d been led to John Edward. That was exactly the conclusion I had come to about Tom’s personality. He also was an abused child, and he also had a dual personality with unfinished business attached to it. I was very relieved to find that Tom was not the only person who had suffered this kind of problem resulting from the same cause of an abused childhood.

I think Tom’s subconscious fantasy of some powerful woman’s influence bringing him into the limelight and making him the popular, beloved, and wealthy star he deserved to be was the leftover, unsatisfied child’s desire to be the center of his mother’s loving attention, instead of being sexually preyed upon. Sadly, no matter how successful and popular Tom was, those things never satisfied that empty void in his psyche.



If I hadn’t spent thirty-five years married to a man who was as intelligent, sensitive, and loving as Tom, and yet led a fatally self-destructive, secret life, I would never have believed that sexual abuse could have such profoundly devastating effects on a person, especially not a man. But the facts are there. Sexual abuse by a parent at a young age destroyed Tom’s mind in childhood and prevented him from growing up normally and experiencing and enjoying life. Both Tom and his mother died young, one from alcohol abuse, one from chain smoking; both hiding terrible secrets that unbalanced them.