I had taken a good look at the front of the counter. It was solid; there was no glass to peek through. As we left, I asked her how she had known there was candy on the counter without seeing it with her eyes. Bridgett said, “I don’t know, I just know these things.”
A month before the candy dish episode, my mom came over to our house to watch the girls for us while we went to the toy store to buy a gift for a birthday party. While Joe and I were at the toy store, I did something that I never do: I purchased a lollipop to put on top of the gift. When we pulled into our driveway, Bridgett came running up to the car as I opened my door to step out.
“Mommy, give me the lollipop!”
“I didn’t get you a lollipop,” I said.
“Well, I know you have one in the car.” She was right, but how did she know? My husband was still in the car, and no one else knew.
“How did you know I had a lollipop in the car?”
Bridgett was not amused; she just wanted the lollipop. “I don’t know, I just knew.”
This kid is a candy, food, and beverage detector; you can’t hide anything from her. There are too many other instances to share each one, but you get the idea.
A Learning Problem…
or a Gift?
Because I get so much e-mail concerning children who have behavior problems or ADD (attention deficit disorder), I felt I must address this. I have seen instances where parents have misread their child’s symptoms and come to the wrong conclusions. This is an area of great controversy, and sometimes there are no easy answers.
Children with ADD are easily distracted and over-stimulated. They have trouble focusing on what they are doing, so their grades often suffer. Their brains are in overdrive. However, this does not mean that the images in their minds are coming from the other side. There is no real correlation between psychic powers and other common problems such as ADD or depression. However, in my opinion, children with such problems are also no less likely to have the gift than other children. It’s important for parents not to rule anything out or jump to any conclusions.
In one case, a child often spoke of suicides, so his family thought that deceased people were coming through to him. But judging by what the family said, I didn’t think the boy appeared mediumistic. Something made me ask the professions of his parents. It turned out that his mother was a police dispatcher.
When parents work in this sort of field, they have to look even more closely at the child’s claims. If a child’s information is something he could have overheard at home, then look further. Children who are truly mediums should not be limited to sensing grim, morbid deaths. They should also be able to contact deceased friends or relatives, those with positive energy. Of course, this doesn’t exclude the possibility of an encounter with dark circumstances, but they shouldn’t be all a child sees.
A child may be dealing with something other than psychic phenomena, such as a chemical imbalance, depression, anxiety, or simply the need for attention. I highly recommend having the child evaluated by a physician to rule out or treat any of these possibilities. Take everything into consideration.
Chapter 6
Hormones and
Teen Psychics
My mother divorced my stepdad when I was twelve, and that turned my world upside down. It is typical for a twelve-year-old to feel unstable; a divorce in the family will only add to a child’s sense of insecurity. However, psychic teenagers may find adolescence even more difficult than others do.
Teens are already at the mercy of their hormones. Their emotions are riding high, and everything is a big deal. Throw in a heightened sense of awareness and the ability to literally hear what people are thinking of you, and you have a recipe for misery.
Quite honestly, during my own teen years I drank alcohol to keep myself on a more even keel. I am certainly not suggesting alcohol as an escape; it was a bad choice. Having an understanding parent and communication with other psychics would have been much more helpful. I had no support and it would have made all the difference in my youth.
For me, alcohol would temporarily soften the voices from the other side. If I had a beer in my hand, nobody thought twice when I laughed to myself in solitary conversation. Of course, it wasn’t really a one-way conversation, because I was never truly alone.
Fortunately for me, I was listening on the night my guides came through with what seemed at the time to be nothing more than a decorating tip.
I was seventeen and living at my friend Susie’s house. I’d known her since I was two and she was four; we grew up on the same cul-de-sac. We were best friends and partners in crime. When we were little we’d spent half a day coloring our neighborhood sidewalks to make the world a more beautiful place. After our mothers discovered our urban gallery, we spent the second half of that day scrubbing the sidewalks with soap and water. Susie and I couldn’t understand how our mothers could have missed the beauty of our work.
Susie’s mom, Shari, has always been like a second mom to me. She knew what my life had been like at home. I felt comfort when she took me in at such a confusing time in my young life.
I was in my room, getting ready to go out, when I heard a voice telling me to move my bed, which stood against the south wall, under my bedroom window. Without much thought, I pushed it against the east wall. Let it be known that I am not a big furniture arranger. I usually decide how I like something and then leave it alone. I stood for a moment pondering what I had just done, then quickly got over it.
Hours after I moved my bed, I embarked upon a typical weekend night. My friend Barb and I decided to go to a high school party. We finally made it back to my house at around 1:00 in the morning. Barb and I were tired from our long evening, so we went to my room and passed out (literally).
In the middle of the night I was jolted out of my sleep by a loud crash. Blinding headlights, broken cement blocks, and the front end of a truck were in my bedroom! Cement blocks had landed right on my bed and my room was filled with dust from smashed cement. I shook Barb and told her to wake up. She was in such a deep sleep the noise hadn’t fazed her.
I climbed out of bed and realized that there was a woman in the truck; her face was bleeding, cut up like a jigsaw puzzle. She was trying to put her vehicle into reverse gear and back out. Later we found out that the woman was completely intoxicated (not a big surprise). She had blacked out and driven her truck across three lanes of traffic, over a huge divider, and then through the backyard fence. She came barreling into my bedroom by penetrating first a cement wall and then my window.
At first I was angry and wanted retribution. After all, she could have killed me! When I calmed down, I realized how lucky I was to be alive. It was not lost on me that had I not moved my bed hours before the crash, the impact of the truck would without a doubt have killed both Barb and me. As it was, the right side of the woman’s truck missed my head by one foot. Had the truck entered my room anyplace else, my life would not have been spared.
I knew that a higher power had once again played a role in saving my life. I was surely protected. Just as in my escape from my potential abductors at age eleven, a clear voice had spoken to me, and I had listened.
I am approached by many parents whose teens are having scary visions or are hearing information in their heads that they know is coming from a source other than themselves. For teens going through this, an understanding parent means everything.
First, validate the teen. Acknowledge what he or she is seeing or hearing. This will help to build trust, which is important in order to start an open, relaxed dialogue. Then discuss what he or she is seeing and/or hearing, and talk about what it might mean. Using some of my earlier tips, try to confirm whether your child has a gift. After all, you don’t want to confuse having a gift with a having a mental health issue.
Recently I was informed of a teenage girl who was having visions, premonitions of people being hurt or killed. Her visions were very detailed and what she saw in them would later come to pass. The e
xtensive detail and verified outcome were confirmation of her gift. That what she saw in her visions consistently came to pass defied all odds. This is the clearest sign of psychic ability that you can hope for.
The very first thing kids need to know is that the responsibility to save the world does not rest on their shoulders. Having a vision that a bad thing is going to happen does not mean that you also have the responsibility to change the outcome. Sometimes a bad situation isn’t supposed to be altered because it exists for a reason.
This does not mean that you can never make a difference. Young psychics, please keep in mind that sometimes we are given the opportunity to intervene and prolong someone’s life.
Say you have a vision that your father is going to be in a car accident, and in the vision he’s wearing a red shirt and carrying his golf clubs. You wake up the next morning and your dad is on his way out the door wearing a red shirt and carrying his golf clubs.
Stop him! Explain your dream and ask him to wait awhile or even change his plans. You may be receiving a form of intervention from the other side.
If, on the other hand, in your vision you see a bridge in Tibet being blown up, it’s probably out of your hands. Ask a higher power to please lend a gentle hand to those on that bridge who need positive energy. Don’t internalize a vision and let it take a toll on you physically
Often young psychics aren’t listened to by the proper authorities. The parents of a psychic might try contacting law enforcement if a vision is extraordinarily detailed or significant and explaining that the child had a “dream” (this is a safer term than “vision”). They can explain that the child saw something happen and it would make the child feel a whole lot better if an officer could just check it out.
Many police officers are parents and are usually happy to put a child’s mind at ease. Who knows, maybe your child’s vision will help somebody, and if not, your child will have at least expressed the information and will feel better. Visions that aren’t shared build up in the system, causing stress. Always encourage expression.
For what it’s worth, even well-seasoned forensic psychics who have detailed information on terrorist attacks and murders are often ignored by law enforcement. The authorities have a tough time determining who is legitimate and who is wasting their time. Tell your child not to take it personally if his or her information is ignored. It happens to the best of us. This doesn’t mean all law enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to psychics, but many still do.
Teens need to ask their guides to not give them more than they can handle. We are provided what we can handle, and sometimes a little more. If it becomes too much, we have to ask our guides to limit what we are exposed to and remove some of the weight that’s causing us to feel burdened.
As for the girl with the premonitions, my best advice to her parents was to determine whether the maimings and killings she saw were in any way preventable. For instance, could she tell who the people in the visions were? Did she get extremely specific names or addresses? Such information could be used to forewarn the police. There was no guarantee that the police would listen, but the girl with the information could sleep at night knowing that she had shared her information.
Of course, we must always remember to use discretion. Only share information if it’s specific. Psychics have to be careful about unloading on people to make ourselves feel better. It has to be done in the receiver’s best interest, not ours. If it’s not in the receiver’s best interest, ask your guides to relieve you of the information, write it in your journal if needed, and let it go.
Only contact authorities with information that they can check out and that is useful in prevention or conviction. Everything else is useless to them. If there isn’t enough detailed information to establish a crime’s timing or the identity of the person involved, then the information is not enough for any intervention.
If you bug the police too often with every little feeling that you get, they will start to not listen to you. You will be branded a wacko psychic and you will lose all credibility with law enforcement. You want to keep this door open in case you find that you really can help solve a crime.
Remember that not all psychics want to help solve crimes, which is fine. This segment is for the ones who crave to be involved in forensics. You have to fine-tune your skills to make a difference, but you can do it.
And sometimes you have to let go of information and ask a higher power to take care of the person in question. We are only human and can only do so much for others.
Teen psychics must learn to keep their guides in check. I tell my guides not to allow any negative or mischievous energy to come into contact with me. Guides are very accommodating and will act in your best interest. Parents, you can ask your own guides to watch over your children; I do. I know my kids are guided, loved, and protected by my guides as well as by their own.
One way to regain peace is to visualize your heart filled with a radiant white light that expands until it has filled you completely and exits your body through every pore. The white light is there to protect and soothe. This exercise is quite beneficial; I do it myself. Another helpful exercise is to visualize a person on the other side to whom you feel connected. Have that person hold a bucket and place all your problems inside for the spirit to take away. Loved ones on the other side enjoy easing our anxiety. This exercise also strengthens the two-way relationship between those who have passed and those who still remain here.
Teens wanting to sharpen their skills should practice on willing friends and family members, keeping in mind that not all their messages will mean something significant. Sometimes the sitter (the person being read) doesn’t expect a serious topic to surface and will not own up to the information. It took me time to realize that if I uncovered something that the sitter wanted to hide, he or she might fib about it.
This was a difficult, disheartening lesson for me, because I would feel so sure that I was right and the sitter would deny it. I hold myself to a high standard. After several instances in which I received third-party verification that I was right, I realized what was happening. Sometimes when I was walking out the door, my client’s husband or friend would lean in and tell me that my information was correct.
Now when I feel certain of my information I don’t let denial bother me. I let it fuel me to get to the explanation behind my information. Then I let it go. If somebody isn’t ready to share something private, that’s okay, but don’t go see a psychic if you’ve got something to hide.
Sometimes mediums are shown images that require us to play charades with the other side, and sometimes we misinterpret what we are shown. That is why describing whatever we see to the sitter is important; it’s a purer form of relaying a message. It’s not as effective for a gifted person to try to rationalize the information that they receive. You don’t want to taint the information with inferences of your own.
Teens need to remember not to compare themselves with the psychics portrayed in movies. When I was young I questioned whether I had the gift. I looked at the psychics portrayed in movies, searching for a shred of commonality. I couldn’t relate.
I know that the discovery and acceptance of my gift was delayed because I had no role models. I want to let all people know that there are plenty of people in business suits with college degrees who possess psychic and mediumship abilities. There are people from all walks of life. There are doctors, mothers, cashiers, teachers, stockbrokers, musicians, children, who appear to be nothing like one another, yet who have a connection in their ability to communicate with the dead and see things that are yet to come.
If you are a teen with the gift and you don’t want to develop it, that is fine. The other side doesn’t want to give more than a person can handle. Tuning the other side out takes a little practice, but it can be done. If a person makes a conscious decision and ignores the messages, eventually they should fade and be harder to hear. I don’t believe this means that the person no longer has the gift. It is still ther
e; it is just dormant. Turning away from the gift will sometimes leave you with an underlying edgy feeling, as if there is something missing in your life that you can’t put your finger on.
The most important thing I can say to gifted children everywhere is what I was dying to hear for so long: “I understand what you are going through, you’re not alone, and someday this will all make sense to you.”
Chapter 7
Empathy
I had often wondered why I felt so physically edgy when my grandpa’s spirit made itself known to me in 1978. As a grown psychic, I know the answer. It wasn’t that I was looking at someone whom I just saw buried. It was a physical feeling of sickness. Fellow psychics will relate to this.
When people with heightened sensitivity stand next to sick people, we feel their illness. My great-grandfather had just passed over and I was absorbing the cancer energy that had caused his demise. Whenever I have communication with a spirit who passed from cancer, I get the exact same feeling I got from my great-grandpa twenty-six years ago.
Now that I am older I am more closely attuned to the feeling, and often I will sense that the spirit was eaten up or diseased. I can also sense cancer when I am dealing with a survivor of the illness. Seeing the circumstances surrounding someone’s death can validate their presence to loved ones and help us understand their reason for passing.
Ever notice how sometimes you instantly get a good feeling about a person, and while someone else can give you the creeps just as quickly? Some people are good and some are evil; most fall somewhere in between. We tend to use first impressions to determine how much we trust a person. I have found the first impression to be the most accurate one. Don’t ever second-guess a strong feeling that you have. Trust your gut.
Psychic activity is nothing new. Many people exercise their “sixth sense” regularly. In everyday life we frequently hear ourselves say we have a hunch about this or a vibe about that. And consider the judges, doctors, mothers, fathers, and so on who use their sixth sense every day.
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