Lately, I’ve been asked quite a few times, “when did you first figure out that you are psychic?” The answer is complicated. On one hand, I’ve always known. On the other hand, it took me decades to believe in myself.
The very first time I remember having a paranormal experience that made me feel like I was different from others, I was 3 or 4 years old. I do remember experiences prior to this (I can remember being in diapers and potty training too), but when I was a toddler I just took it for granted that people could see and feel the things I can see and feel. Even at the age of 43, I sometimes still figure out certain things I do that others don't. It's a surreal feeling. When I was pre-school age, I started to occasionally see apparitions. The dark is never just darkness to me. I see energy most clearly in the dark. Often, it is just blobs of colored light moving around in the darkness. Sometimes, these blobs of light take on a human type form. Objects also have auras and I can see their outlines in the dark. But what I call an apparition appears as tangible and as solid as looking at my own reflection in a mirror. I can’t see through it but I also can’t actually touch it…it’s there nonetheless.
One night shortly after we moved into a new house, I saw the apparition of a man standing in my bedroom near the door. He would say my name. I would scream and scream until my parents came into the room and searched for him. They never found him. I thought they were lying to me. I was told I have a vivid imagination. But I was 4 years old so I didn’t tend to dwell on it much until it was time to go to bed. I stopped screaming for my parents at bedtime after a while and just dealt with it. I tried to convince myself that it was all just my imagination and I wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30's that I figured out and tried to accept that I am a medium. Until I broke through the programming of society, religion and my upbringing, it didn’t really matter how strongly or frequently I was experiencing psychic phenomena. As I grew older I thought my imagination was my curse and I worried for my sanity.
So after I was told it was just imagination a few times, I realized nobody believed me and I stopped calling for someone to rescue me. I just asked the spirit in my room not to hurt me (I thought he was physical and had resigned myself to being murdered). He told me he was just there to make sure I was safe. With much relief, now that I was actually listening, I recognized his voice. This was the same man who used to tell me about the plants and insects in our back yard at the house we lived in before we moved to the place where I started seeing him. Prior to this I used to hear him but not see him, so suddenly being able to see him took some getting used to. I didn’t understand how it was connected, I just knew it was. I couldn’t ask anyone because everyone I knew just thought I was an imaginative little kid. Luckily for me, it didn’t last long. Once I accepted that he meant me no harm, I stopped seeing him. I just felt his presence whenever I got scared. Sometimes he would sing or tell me stories until I fell asleep but I can’t remember any of them. I wouldn’t see another apparition until I was 18 years old. In my life, I’ve only seen a handful of apparitions with my own two eyes. I most often see spirits in visions or what is called my “mind’s eye” or as a disembodied aura hovering nearby.
He did, indeed, keep me safe. Whenever another spirit came around and frightened me, he chased them away. As a child, I was never even stung by a bee; I never had stitches, broke a bone or had a case of poison ivy (knock on wood lol). Before the age of 4, I used to hear his audible voice as clearly as I heard my mom’s and dad’s voices. He would warn me by calling my name when I was about to step in front of a car, step on a weak branch of the tree I was climbing, come into contact with a bad person, or even just before I was about to walk into a room where my parents were arguing. I didn’t always listen and he couldn’t always protect me in every instance, but things could have turned out a lot worse for me if he wasn’t part of my life. Over time, his voice only appeared in my head like a thought and gradually his voice in my head began to sound more and more like my own as I approached puberty. I learned to separate his voice from my own again as an adult. But to this day, I’ll hear him call my name out loud if I’m in danger. Hearing like this is called clairaudience.
He showed me how to watch people’s light, a.k.a. their aura, for signs that they might not be safe to interact with... Something happened to me around age 4 that created a need for this kind of guidance and he helped me when nobody else did. It doesn’t matter what happened. The reason I bring it up is that children can often hear and see things that adults can’t, but one of the things that makes these abilities stick is trauma. I suppose being believed would work better but that wasn't the case for me. When I was growing up, I was often on my own. In my environment, there were alcoholics and addicts and everything that goes along with that. For the longest time, I only thought of my intuitions and psychic abilities as a survival instinct. I never forgot how to discern what was going on in people’s auras. My biggest problem as a psychic has always been confidence in the reality of it. I was taught not just to be skeptical but that it was just plain wrong to believe in it at all on every level. That’s why it was more instinctual than anything else for so long.
In general, to say I was a precocious child is an understatement. I didn’t always understand everything I saw or heard but many times, I would experience something a short time later and I would hear that familiar voice tying things together for me. The spirits were always teaching me something. I remember being able to understand words I had never heard or seen before without looking them up. I would just see a word in a book and think, how do you say that? And I would know how to say it. What does that mean? And I would know what it meant. People would ask questions and I would know the answers but I couldn’t explain where I learned it from. This got me into some sticky situations in school a few times. I never figured out what it meant to study until I was in college. I’ve since learned that this is called claircognizance, which I think is imperative to mediumship but it is hard to trust because there’s no reasoning behind it - you just know.
My teachers were always complaining about my daydreaming. Sometimes even though I would get A’s on all of my work, I would still get a B in the class because I didn’t pay attention and some teachers marked me down for it. Back then, kids weren’t diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and for that I’m thankful. There came a time in my adult life when I tried to take medication to stop my feelings and visions but the medicine always made things much worse. I don’t know what would have happened if I had been raised on Ritalin or Adderall. What would most often set me to daydreaming was the lesson being taught in class though. Especially in social studies or literature classes, my imagination would take over and I would begin to see scenes and have conversations with the characters being talked about. So by the time the teacher called my name 3 or 4 times to try to put me on the spot and somehow keep my attention, I could still answer any question about the lesson that they asked me. They started to say I was belligerent.
Ironically, I never even learned the term “aura” until I was in my 20s. I continued to assume other people could see these lights that surround people and objects. Once connected with somebody’s aura, sometimes I could hear and see their thoughts if I looked into their eyes. I could feel their emotions in my own body. Snippets of their lives would play in my head like a memory. Other times, I would just hear a whispered question and I would answer it, not realizing they didn’t speak it out loud. I didn’t understand why people would give me funny looks and back away from me. Unfortunately, until I learned to understand and be aware of it, this caused a lot of conflict and hurt feelings in my life in more ways than one. Now I know this is called empathy and telepathy.
When I was 24, the things I was going through were driving me over the edge and I started seeing a counselor. She noticed a difference in how I think and act and gently suggested to me that I might be psychic and that it would be worth looking into. She was the first one who told me that most people weren’t experiencing life the way that I was but that it didn’t mean there was something wrong with me. Thankfully, she didn’t think I was crazy or think I was lying. She helped me a lot. At the time, I wasn’t so sure being psychic was the answer but I said I’d look into it. The role models I had in my life at the time were evangelical Christians so when I talked to them about it, they began to invite me to church on a regular basis. At first I resisted but I thought well, if this stuff is supernatural maybe God is real (something I didn’t believe anymore). For about a year, I really enjoyed it but this new activity seemed to raise my energy enough to attract more and more spirits and not all of them were nice. I went to the church for help but they accused me of dabbling in witchcraft and tried to shame me for it. I had done no such thing but I did note that the occult might hold answers for me someday when I was ready. I certainly wasn't going to get answers where I was though. I stopped attending and just tried to figure it out on my own for a few years.
By the time I was in my late 20s, I had developed my own catalog of aura meanings. The people I steer clear of have what I call muddy auras. Most people have a clear light with what looks like one or more watercolors within it. These colors take on different qualities. I can see yellow, like sunshine, around somebody who is happy and energetic. I can also see yellow around somebody who is very ill or dying, only this yellow will look more like bile with a sickly green tint. But when I see a muddy aura, that person usually is up to no good in one way or another. A muddy aura looks like a light submerged under dirty river water. The “mud” feels heavy or dense, unlike other auras. Every person who has ever harmed me or abused me had a muddy aura. When I was little and I saw a muddy aura, I would try to make myself invisible. If that person tried to talk to me or touch me, I would freeze up or withdraw. They called me introverted. They called me shy. I was actually afraid…but I also knew that it was a bad idea to show fear to a person with a muddy aura because then the grown-ups would force me to interact with them. Being able to see visions and energies like auras is called clairvoyance.
I’ve always known I could read people, situations, buildings, and more since I was in diapers. I was told that none of it was real and that it was all my imagination or wishful thinking. I was told that it was evil to talk to spirits or to read people’s minds. I was told that I had a demons whispering in my ears. The older I got, I would begin to get into trouble for talking about it. My dad would tell me there was no such thing as ghosts and I would get yelled at for scaring my little sister. I did tease my sister about ghosts and I probably deserved to get yelled at for scaring her. But she was also the only one I could really talk to about it and compare notes with. When I got older and found out that auras were a thing, a family member was told by the church that Satan was marking me and they put me on a prayer list to stop my visions. It didn’t work. By the time I was 30, after struggling with being simultaneously wide open psychically and also carrying a serious case of self-doubt and low self-esteem, I began to develop mysterious illnesses. At this time, I thought the extent of my abilities was seeing and reading auras. It was too hard to believe anything else yet.
When I got so sick that I was walking with one foot in this world and one foot in the next, I started to “know” that the only way for me to get better was to learn how to control my energy and to take a serious look into psychic development. By that time, I had completely rejected the idea that I was a medium. I didn’t believe I could actually talk to spirits because they weren't appearing to me in front of my face like the man did when I was 4 years old. I didn't understand that there are many different ways to be psychic and every psychic has a different combination of gifts and styles. Then I started describing the things I saw and felt to people, which took a tremendous amount of courage for me given my background. To this day it surprises and delights me when I describe the things I’m seeing, hearing and feeling and then the person sitting in front of me says, yes I know who that is or what that’s about.
In the beginning, I practiced psychic development in secret. I just wanted to prove to myself once and for all whether it was real or it was my imagination. I joined anonymous online psychic development groups. It was so refreshing to meet people like myself! It took some time being repeatedly bonked over the head by the accuracy of my readings to accept that I have a natural talent for it. To be honest, I never intended to do professional readings, let alone anything else of this nature. I went through a lot to get to this point and one of the reasons is I doubted and resisted it every step of the way. If I haven’t experienced something beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's difficult for me to accept it. Experience builds my faith and that is something I've had to accept about myself. But whenever I’m not helping people with my gifts, I experience a decline in my own ability to heal. That's not a fun way to be convinced! Every time one of my clients experiences healing because of a reading I do, I also experience healing. I’m not perfect and sometimes I can’t connect or I get the wrong information but for the most part, it just seems to be too easy to be actual work. It energizes me. It heals me. It’s fun! It often seems too good to be true but it is what it is.
So that’s the overview of how I figured out I am psychic. Of course, a lot more happened in between the lines. Maybe someday I'll write a book about it. Until then, I appreciate your interest in me and what I do. Thank you for asking.
The very first time I remember having a paranormal experience that made me feel like I was different from others, I was 3 or 4 years old. I do remember experiences prior to this (I can remember being in diapers and potty training too), but when I was a toddler I just took it for granted that people could see and feel the things I can see and feel. Even at the age of 43, I sometimes still figure out certain things I do that others don't. It's a surreal feeling. When I was pre-school age, I started to occasionally see apparitions. The dark is never just darkness to me. I see energy most clearly in the dark. Often, it is just blobs of colored light moving around in the darkness. Sometimes, these blobs of light take on a human type form. Objects also have auras and I can see their outlines in the dark. But what I call an apparition appears as tangible and as solid as looking at my own reflection in a mirror. I can’t see through it but I also can’t actually touch it…it’s there nonetheless.
One night shortly after we moved into a new house, I saw the apparition of a man standing in my bedroom near the door. He would say my name. I would scream and scream until my parents came into the room and searched for him. They never found him. I thought they were lying to me. I was told I have a vivid imagination. But I was 4 years old so I didn’t tend to dwell on it much until it was time to go to bed. I stopped screaming for my parents at bedtime after a while and just dealt with it. I tried to convince myself that it was all just my imagination and I wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30's that I figured out and tried to accept that I am a medium. Until I broke through the programming of society, religion and my upbringing, it didn’t really matter how strongly or frequently I was experiencing psychic phenomena. As I grew older I thought my imagination was my curse and I worried for my sanity.
So after I was told it was just imagination a few times, I realized nobody believed me and I stopped calling for someone to rescue me. I just asked the spirit in my room not to hurt me (I thought he was physical and had resigned myself to being murdered). He told me he was just there to make sure I was safe. With much relief, now that I was actually listening, I recognized his voice. This was the same man who used to tell me about the plants and insects in our back yard at the house we lived in before we moved to the place where I started seeing him. Prior to this I used to hear him but not see him, so suddenly being able to see him took some getting used to. I didn’t understand how it was connected, I just knew it was. I couldn’t ask anyone because everyone I knew just thought I was an imaginative little kid. Luckily for me, it didn’t last long. Once I accepted that he meant me no harm, I stopped seeing him. I just felt his presence whenever I got scared. Sometimes he would sing or tell me stories until I fell asleep but I can’t remember any of them. I wouldn’t see another apparition until I was 18 years old. In my life, I’ve only seen a handful of apparitions with my own two eyes. I most often see spirits in visions or what is called my “mind’s eye” or as a disembodied aura hovering nearby.
He did, indeed, keep me safe. Whenever another spirit came around and frightened me, he chased them away. As a child, I was never even stung by a bee; I never had stitches, broke a bone or had a case of poison ivy (knock on wood lol). Before the age of 4, I used to hear his audible voice as clearly as I heard my mom’s and dad’s voices. He would warn me by calling my name when I was about to step in front of a car, step on a weak branch of the tree I was climbing, come into contact with a bad person, or even just before I was about to walk into a room where my parents were arguing. I didn’t always listen and he couldn’t always protect me in every instance, but things could have turned out a lot worse for me if he wasn’t part of my life. Over time, his voice only appeared in my head like a thought and gradually his voice in my head began to sound more and more like my own as I approached puberty. I learned to separate his voice from my own again as an adult. But to this day, I’ll hear him call my name out loud if I’m in danger. Hearing like this is called clairaudience.
He showed me how to watch people’s light, a.k.a. their aura, for signs that they might not be safe to interact with... Something happened to me around age 4 that created a need for this kind of guidance and he helped me when nobody else did. It doesn’t matter what happened. The reason I bring it up is that children can often hear and see things that adults can’t, but one of the things that makes these abilities stick is trauma. I suppose being believed would work better but that wasn't the case for me. When I was growing up, I was often on my own. In my environment, there were alcoholics and addicts and everything that goes along with that. For the longest time, I only thought of my intuitions and psychic abilities as a survival instinct. I never forgot how to discern what was going on in people’s auras. My biggest problem as a psychic has always been confidence in the reality of it. I was taught not just to be skeptical but that it was just plain wrong to believe in it at all on every level. That’s why it was more instinctual than anything else for so long.
In general, to say I was a precocious child is an understatement. I didn’t always understand everything I saw or heard but many times, I would experience something a short time later and I would hear that familiar voice tying things together for me. The spirits were always teaching me something. I remember being able to understand words I had never heard or seen before without looking them up. I would just see a word in a book and think, how do you say that? And I would know how to say it. What does that mean? And I would know what it meant. People would ask questions and I would know the answers but I couldn’t explain where I learned it from. This got me into some sticky situations in school a few times. I never figured out what it meant to study until I was in college. I’ve since learned that this is called claircognizance, which I think is imperative to mediumship but it is hard to trust because there’s no reasoning behind it - you just know.
My teachers were always complaining about my daydreaming. Sometimes even though I would get A’s on all of my work, I would still get a B in the class because I didn’t pay attention and some teachers marked me down for it. Back then, kids weren’t diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and for that I’m thankful. There came a time in my adult life when I tried to take medication to stop my feelings and visions but the medicine always made things much worse. I don’t know what would have happened if I had been raised on Ritalin or Adderall. What would most often set me to daydreaming was the lesson being taught in class though. Especially in social studies or literature classes, my imagination would take over and I would begin to see scenes and have conversations with the characters being talked about. So by the time the teacher called my name 3 or 4 times to try to put me on the spot and somehow keep my attention, I could still answer any question about the lesson that they asked me. They started to say I was belligerent.
Ironically, I never even learned the term “aura” until I was in my 20s. I continued to assume other people could see these lights that surround people and objects. Once connected with somebody’s aura, sometimes I could hear and see their thoughts if I looked into their eyes. I could feel their emotions in my own body. Snippets of their lives would play in my head like a memory. Other times, I would just hear a whispered question and I would answer it, not realizing they didn’t speak it out loud. I didn’t understand why people would give me funny looks and back away from me. Unfortunately, until I learned to understand and be aware of it, this caused a lot of conflict and hurt feelings in my life in more ways than one. Now I know this is called empathy and telepathy.
When I was 24, the things I was going through were driving me over the edge and I started seeing a counselor. She noticed a difference in how I think and act and gently suggested to me that I might be psychic and that it would be worth looking into. She was the first one who told me that most people weren’t experiencing life the way that I was but that it didn’t mean there was something wrong with me. Thankfully, she didn’t think I was crazy or think I was lying. She helped me a lot. At the time, I wasn’t so sure being psychic was the answer but I said I’d look into it. The role models I had in my life at the time were evangelical Christians so when I talked to them about it, they began to invite me to church on a regular basis. At first I resisted but I thought well, if this stuff is supernatural maybe God is real (something I didn’t believe anymore). For about a year, I really enjoyed it but this new activity seemed to raise my energy enough to attract more and more spirits and not all of them were nice. I went to the church for help but they accused me of dabbling in witchcraft and tried to shame me for it. I had done no such thing but I did note that the occult might hold answers for me someday when I was ready. I certainly wasn't going to get answers where I was though. I stopped attending and just tried to figure it out on my own for a few years.
By the time I was in my late 20s, I had developed my own catalog of aura meanings. The people I steer clear of have what I call muddy auras. Most people have a clear light with what looks like one or more watercolors within it. These colors take on different qualities. I can see yellow, like sunshine, around somebody who is happy and energetic. I can also see yellow around somebody who is very ill or dying, only this yellow will look more like bile with a sickly green tint. But when I see a muddy aura, that person usually is up to no good in one way or another. A muddy aura looks like a light submerged under dirty river water. The “mud” feels heavy or dense, unlike other auras. Every person who has ever harmed me or abused me had a muddy aura. When I was little and I saw a muddy aura, I would try to make myself invisible. If that person tried to talk to me or touch me, I would freeze up or withdraw. They called me introverted. They called me shy. I was actually afraid…but I also knew that it was a bad idea to show fear to a person with a muddy aura because then the grown-ups would force me to interact with them. Being able to see visions and energies like auras is called clairvoyance.
I’ve always known I could read people, situations, buildings, and more since I was in diapers. I was told that none of it was real and that it was all my imagination or wishful thinking. I was told that it was evil to talk to spirits or to read people’s minds. I was told that I had a demons whispering in my ears. The older I got, I would begin to get into trouble for talking about it. My dad would tell me there was no such thing as ghosts and I would get yelled at for scaring my little sister. I did tease my sister about ghosts and I probably deserved to get yelled at for scaring her. But she was also the only one I could really talk to about it and compare notes with. When I got older and found out that auras were a thing, a family member was told by the church that Satan was marking me and they put me on a prayer list to stop my visions. It didn’t work. By the time I was 30, after struggling with being simultaneously wide open psychically and also carrying a serious case of self-doubt and low self-esteem, I began to develop mysterious illnesses. At this time, I thought the extent of my abilities was seeing and reading auras. It was too hard to believe anything else yet.
When I got so sick that I was walking with one foot in this world and one foot in the next, I started to “know” that the only way for me to get better was to learn how to control my energy and to take a serious look into psychic development. By that time, I had completely rejected the idea that I was a medium. I didn’t believe I could actually talk to spirits because they weren't appearing to me in front of my face like the man did when I was 4 years old. I didn't understand that there are many different ways to be psychic and every psychic has a different combination of gifts and styles. Then I started describing the things I saw and felt to people, which took a tremendous amount of courage for me given my background. To this day it surprises and delights me when I describe the things I’m seeing, hearing and feeling and then the person sitting in front of me says, yes I know who that is or what that’s about.
In the beginning, I practiced psychic development in secret. I just wanted to prove to myself once and for all whether it was real or it was my imagination. I joined anonymous online psychic development groups. It was so refreshing to meet people like myself! It took some time being repeatedly bonked over the head by the accuracy of my readings to accept that I have a natural talent for it. To be honest, I never intended to do professional readings, let alone anything else of this nature. I went through a lot to get to this point and one of the reasons is I doubted and resisted it every step of the way. If I haven’t experienced something beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's difficult for me to accept it. Experience builds my faith and that is something I've had to accept about myself. But whenever I’m not helping people with my gifts, I experience a decline in my own ability to heal. That's not a fun way to be convinced! Every time one of my clients experiences healing because of a reading I do, I also experience healing. I’m not perfect and sometimes I can’t connect or I get the wrong information but for the most part, it just seems to be too easy to be actual work. It energizes me. It heals me. It’s fun! It often seems too good to be true but it is what it is.
So that’s the overview of how I figured out I am psychic. Of course, a lot more happened in between the lines. Maybe someday I'll write a book about it. Until then, I appreciate your interest in me and what I do. Thank you for asking.
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