What I Know After a Lifetime as a Psychic Junkie

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As published on NextAvenue.com

Instead of giving me that sense of preparedness I wanted, seeing a psychic has allowed me to accept that I have no control over my life. But the visits have meaningful benefits.

My fascination with the unknown began with a Magic Eight Ball and a Ouija board. Long before shows like "Long Island Medium" and "Ghosthunters" became popular, I'd shake my black Magic Eight Ball, ask a question and watch through the plastic window as the dice — a 20-sided icosahedron — bobbed and settled on an answer in the blue murky water.

"Don't count on it," the mysterious ball told me. "Decidedly no," it sometimes advised me. "Can not predict now" was the worst.

I didn't take these games seriously until I saw a real psychic for the first time with my best friend as a teenager. In her apartment, an actual crystal ball sat on her cluttered coffee table covered with copies of the National Enquirer, which immediately made me skeptical. But when the slight woman with short gray hair named Edith peered into that dark ball, she saw a charming older man. "I'm an old lady and he's flirting with me," she said, giving more details about him.

"Do you know who this is?" she asked, still looking somewhere I couldn't see.

I nodded. I had a creepy coach. She shook her head and said, "Stay away from him." That's all I remember, but I was hooked, and during college in New Orleans, I went to psychics in the French Quarter for fun whenever I could.

My Role as a 'Sitter'

Decades later, a friend referred me to a University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies study on psychics. I was one of five "sitters." The person I'd chosen for the study's mediums to connect with was my cousin, a striking woman with almond-shaped green cat eyes, who died of heart failure several years earlier.

The study included five mediums who each spent a different week at the university. Every day, they read a different sitter. We were informed of the day the psychic would be connecting with our relative and were told to focus on our memories of that person. The university sent the sitters all five readings, and we had to answer questions, rate the readings and determine which one referred to our relative before we returned the material. In each batch, the reading pertaining to my cousin was clear.

The day I read the initial batch sent to me, nothing resonated. Then I flipped the page. The unknown medium I'd never seen, who only knew my cousin's first name, mentioned a sense of heaviness in his or her own chest, a struggle to breathe, an indication of heart problems. Now, this sounded familiar.

A Connection With My Cousin

I looked through the next page: "She brought up something about the selling of a house, an old house, which means it's either a house in the family or it's a house that's quite literally old, someone living in an old house. She also showed me my symbol for a birthday, and she showed me 10 and 11, so that might mean October11th, or October and November, not sure. There's a birthday."

My own heart raced, and tears flashed around the edges of my eyes. In one month, on November 10th, 11/10, was my birthday. Recently, after much heartbreak and grief, my husband and I sold the family home we'd lived in for the past 30 years, a home marking its 100th anniversary in my family the year we let it go. 

I rested my head in my hands. My cousin and I had connected, we were connected, and we'd always be; a lesson I'd learned more than once throughout my life as someone who's obsessed with psychics and mediums.

In 2009, I found Ronn Rommel, whose Italian grandmother was a "strega" or someone with the gift of seeing. Since 1965, he's read over 500,000 people, young and old, rich and poor, including Yoko Ono, and even helped in several murder investigations.

When Rommel reads, he delivers a tsunami of information as he lays out the Tarot cards. I leave a reading with pages of names, places, dates and observations he's made, much of which resonates, some of which occur years later, and some of which makes no sense and never does.

Over the years, my husband or I have often announced, "I had a Ronn moment." A person's name or a particular event from a Ronn reading will have occurred. It can be the most insignificant reference or a major life event. One time he mentioned the name of one of my friends. "I see a bag of bones around her." Well, that terrified me, but what could I say to her? A couple of weeks later, she ran the Boston Marathon and was very close to the finish line when two bombs exploded.

I was also given information that my father-in-law would die before the overseas trip with my family a couple of years ago by another psychic I met ten years ago named Betsey Grady. She connects with each person's spirit guides and accesses the Akashic Records— supposedly a universal library of information.

"I see a big man and the spirit leaving his body," she told me only a few days before we left for France. I couldn't think of a big man I knew, so I forgot about it. When my father-in-law died of a stroke on the trip with all the family, back home at his funeral hundreds of people packed the church. He was most certainly a "big man" in our community.

Control Is an Illusion

I'd been given an inkling of what was ahead and still misinterpreted it.

What I know is true after a decade of talking to two very different psychics and a slew of other psychics I stumble across is if you see a psychic, be honest with yourself about your motivation. Looking back, I wanted answers to specific questions concerning relationship challenges, health problems, life's transitions, hard decisions, unexpected losses, money issues or whatever was plaguing me with family, friends or career. But my real motivation was control. I wanted to control outcomes, be prepared, avert disaster and not be taken by surprise by life's chances.

But control is an illusion. And time is tricky.

With Rommel's predictions, names or events he sees might happen the next week, never occur or happen five years later. I believe parallel realities and countless probabilities exist in our quantum field. When a psychic taps into this quantum stream and sees an event, we can pivot, change our mind or something larger shifts in the collective to redirect us.

Instead of giving me that sense of preparedness and control I wanted, seeing a psychic has allowed me to accept that I have no control over the movements of the heavens, when people die and what happens when. This acceptance means learning to loosen my white-knuckle grip on my life and live in the present moment.

So, if I truly have no control over life's events and time is slippery by nature, then why do I keep going back?

I've found talking to a psychic who can also connect with loved ones on the other side has helped me deal with my grief. After my father-in-law died, he came through in a reading with Grady when he said he'd send quarters as a sign.

Several weeks after this reading, we were in the ER with my daughter and out of nowhere, a quarter rolled right in front of her, spinning until it stopped. I just laughed in recognition.

After losing loved ones, my sense of loneliness has also eased, and I know now when I speak in my mind to those who've passed, they hear me. In a session, they might reference something I mentioned or comment on something I was doing that the psychic had no way of knowing to let me know they are still around.

Listening to My Intuition

When another dear relative was sick last year, I played an Elvis gospel CD for days as she lay dying. During my reading with Betsey after her death, Betsey said Dorothy keeps mentioning Elvis.

Strangely enough, sometimes a relationship with someone can be better after they've crossed over than in real life. My father, for instance, wasn't the father my family needed him to be because like so many families know, when someone drinks, you can lose them completely like we did. But the first time before I even had a session, he woke Betsey up in the middle of the night showing her apples — one of his favorite dishes was baked apples and his favorite season was fall when we bobbed for apples at the local fair. He has shown up in almost every session since with guidance, humor and support.

Like the Magic 8 Ball said, a psychic can deliver a definitive yes or no and provide affirmation and clarification on a decision. But sometimes the answer is unclear, and I need to listen to my own intuition and wait for more to be revealed.

Now that I'm at the age that the losses are accumulating quickly, and my own runway has shortened, these moments with a psychic have lessened my fear of dying. As John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet said, death is just a translation into another language.   

Having psychics in my life makes me more spiritually grounded by believing we are still connected to our loved ones. By connecting to something greater than myself through a psychic, I'm always in conversation with a playful universe full of the same curious delight I experienced as a child shaking the Magic Eight Ball.