Medium ~ Psychic Consultant

Written by: Kelly Sennott
April 16, 2010

Psychics—They Just Have a Sharper Intuition

When I was younger and most susceptible to my storybook fancies of psychics, they were old, skeleton women draped in bawdy, violet gowns with heads adorned with bulging eyes and wiry hair. Their mystical vision reflected through crystal balls, and unwavering palm lifelines translated to a person’s unchanging destiny.
In other words, I thought they were quacks.
So when my cousin told me she would host a psychic party, I laughed; after all, Erin was a successful occupational therapist, well-traveled, and well-respected (or at least, I thought) person in our family. What was she playing at? I wasn’t going to spend my $8.50 an hour on that trash.
At least, that’s what I said at first.
But I couldn’t help myself. My overwhelming curiosity shoved whatever rationality I did possess away and replaced it with $30. Weeks later, I sat face-to-face with the guest of honor: the psychic.
Rose was a short, pleasant-looking woman with a round face and kind voice. She was not as I expected, which I suppose isn’t saying much, as I was expecting a loony. She was kind, sociable, thoughtful, and entertaining. She just also happened to be able to see spirits and read energies.
Rose didn’t appear as though she wanted to jip me from my money; however, I felt uneasy, both about the lost money, and about the possibility of her exclaiming, “Well! You haven’t got much time left to live!”
While I suppose I was not completely blown away with my reading, she did impress me with her ability to guess (or sense?) certain aspects of my character, my parents’ opposite personalities, my drive, and unfortunately, she confirmed that yes, my constant elevation and decline in anxiety would cause heart problems in my future, something I had been wondering about since I had taken on a waitressing job with a stupid Donald Trump of a boss. Crap. In my cousin’s reading, however, Rose saw something significantly more
profound than my own custom of easily stressing: she saw my Erin’s birth father, a person she couldn’t have known was dead in the first place, never mind of his alcoholism or that he died when Erin was very young.
Despite my original doubts about her psychic ability through my images of the fraud psychic and wizard from The Wizard of Oz and the dotty Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter, after talking with Rose, I was fascinated. I wanted to know everything about her, psychics, mediums, spirits, and even her family. I wanted to know how “seeing”, (as I was becoming more convinced) affected her life. How did other people react? How did her family react?
“You know, only my closest friends and family know that I’m psychic,” she told me. As a child, Rose’s parents thought there was something wrong with her, and she began to see a psychiatrist when she saw dead people (no pun intended). When she was a little girl, priests tried to exorcise the devil out of her. I had no idea psychic ability could be that traumatizing.
It’s a curious sensation, being read without talking. Although she said she fed off the energies my body exerted to understand my persona, or as she referred to it, my “spirit,” I felt wary and uneasy that she also had access to my exact thoughts, and I felt guilty of her knowing that despite her honesty (or superb honest acting), I was still unsure.
But months later, reflecting on Rose’s reading, I was still curious; how did she know? Was there some devious trick that I didn’t know about? So I talked to Raven Duclos.
Raven Duclos is a 46-year-old psychic who resides in Manchester, N.H. Raven’s mother felt immediate concern for when her four-year-old daughter began to see dead people.
Raven discovered her psychic ability when she was only thirteen years old while playing with cards. Raven, who has been a psychic for over 30 years, also has two children who are psychic. She describes her ability as something she can “tap in” and “tap out” of. Raven says that she can see her own future, however, she resists at looking into it too much.
“You don’t want to know everything about the future,” she laughed, which I understood, as it was another reason as to why I had originally opposed paying for Rose’s reading. What if she really could tell the future, and the knowing drove me insane? It must have been incredibly difficult for Raven to refrain from looking all the time—wouldn’t that affect how she lives her entire life? For instance, if you knew you were supposed to become a pop star, would you continue work hard, or would you just wait for it to happen to you? If you knew that you would never travel around the world as you always wanted to, would you give up that dream? Do we have some unavoidable destiny that if you did try to travel, your plane would crash as in Final Destination?
But when I tried to explain this to her, Raven chuckled. “There is always free will!” she said almost exasperatedly, as though explaining the concept of sharing to a young child. “When I tell you your future, it is something I can see you doing at this point in time.”
Many people are actually moved to tears when they listen to Raven’s descriptions and explanations. Some of her testimonials profess gratefulness at Raven’s reading; that her communicating with their loved ones helped them grieve and learn to let go. It is not just for entertainment, they say—it’s also for healing.
Asrianna Dameron, for instance, calls her sessions “psychic therapy.” She is a psychic medium in Concord N.H. Asrianna’s take on her psychic ability and spirituality partly coincides with her roots, her Cherokee ancestry. While most of her family was at first uncomfortable with her gift, her grandmother recognized that she had something special and unique, as she also knew that psychic ability ran in their family.
As I talked with both Asrianna and Raven, I felt my guard disintegrate and my interest heighten. The testimonials said for each psychic medium were so incredible and spooky that I ignored my straight logic and rationality and became more and more immersed in the conversations.
Asrianna associates her ability with Shamanism, which she says is a catch-all term anthropologists gave to a medicine man. In a way, being psychic is also being a healer; they gather information and use it to help or heal an individual who comes in.
She then told me that actually, everyone’s a little psychic. I would have chuckled rudely had I not been told the same thing by both Raven and Rose. According to these women, we all have the capability to read into our “inner eye,” but some are more in tune with it than others.
We might be more familiar with the term “intuition,” though. Asrianna and Raven describe it as a talent. While some people are born to be concert pianists, some people are born to be psychic mediums.
I had always assumed it was a mother’s intuition when she could sense when something was wrong or when her child was lying, even when nothing was said. Apparently, a little psychic power might have a role, as well. It’s just like reading people, they explained; psychics just happen to be a bit better at it. Asrianna says that with a visit to her, a person can receive a closure that he or she would have originally been unable to experience. With her ability to communicate with a lost loved one or see past lives, she can pinpoint the source of grief by determining the “original wounding.”
Now I will bet the first to admit that whenever I go to a magic show, I want to look under the clothed table when the magician pulls something out of his hat; I felt certain that these women could not have known the things that they knew without background research.
But Rose, Raven, and Asrianna do not seem to care who believes them and who does not. They like to learn from the people around them and offer help when they can, all the while teaching people who come in something about themselves. Asrianna said, “My hope is that after a reading, people walk out with hope…that they see their own inherent value so they can move forward and make better conscious decisions.”
I had never thought that psychic ability could help heal; I suppose if we were to go there, I never thought of a psychic medium as anything more than an expensive realm of entertainment and a sure way to cut a hole in one’s pocket. But maybe these women weren’t that different from us; sure, when they were young they alarmed adults and frightened their classmates at recess with their ability to sense spirits and realities without tangible evidence, but really, that’s where the differences halt.
At the end of our conversation, I admired Raven’s brute honesty.
“This is probably a strange question, but did you know that I would be calling you today?”
She chuckled and answered, that no, she wasn’t. Her mother wasn’t doing well, and that had been on her mind.
She does, after all, have a real life outside tarot card readings.