When the psychic medium first asked if anyone in the room knew someone whose name started with a P, I flinched, then reluctantly raised my hand.
My mother Pamela was in the room – and she had a message for me. ‘She’s a big personality, your mother! Wow, she is a funny one,’ the medium said with a laugh. Seated behind a large desk, he reeled off very specific details about my mother – what the medium called ‘evidence’ – including her epic porcelain doll collection.
Confusion coursed through me. The medium put a sassy hand on his hip and bragged in first person about having ‘hundreds of them’. I laughed out loud – then tears spilled. He sounded just like her, in voice and manners.
When I signed up for this day-long workshop to learn about psychic intuition, I doubted the possibility of making contact with the dead. Even as I sat in the dimly lit classroom with a dozen other participants on a snowy Saturday in January, I was not thinking of my mother. In fact, I’d spent the past five years since she died avoiding the thought of her because – simply put – her death was a relief. But after her passing, I started to experience strange synchronicities, vivid dreams and uncanny coincidences that were hard to explain. Eager to investigate, I stumbled upon a class nearby that promised to ‘unlock the secrets’ of mediumship through ‘advanced intuitive techniques’.
It was just like her – my bold, dead mother – to show up in my life again in this way. That afternoon, the medium delivered three distinct messages from her, three holy arrows that pierced my heart. She told me that the ongoing tensions with my two sisters needed to end; that I was an empath who needed to quit my media job; and that her debilitating food addiction did not exist on the other side. ‘I am completely healed from the insatiable hunger that haunted me my entire waking life,’ she said through the medium.
My mind burst into a million pieces and magnetised back together at the thought of her once-enormous body floating weightless in the curative cosmos. I could finally imagine her without the rage and hunger that had fuelled her tyranny. To picture her free of the weight she carried around her entire life was a particular kind of liberation. We were never capable – when she was alive – of a shared reality. I feared her and then I rebelled against her. Now, in this 10-minute encounter, we were defying reality – together.
In the days that followed, I continued to believe I had spoken directly with my mother. As a newsroom editor for nearly a decade, I was in the ‘business’ of reporting on facts, and I leaned into them. But death has a way of mocking facts. The encounter’s startling coherence – my mind locking into absolute certainty that my mother was in spirit form, speaking through the medium – snapped me into a new consciousness. I found myself relating to her as repaired, sane and whole – completely counter to the person I remembered from my childhood.
Recounting the experience to my therapist, I grasped for imperfect metaphors: the ‘family furniture’ had been radically rearranged; a toxic knot lodged deep within had completely disintegrated; a heavy burden had been lifted; an immense debt, paid in full. Restoration. Correction. Repair. But none of these words sufficed. Every cell of my being felt like it glowed with the potent light of motherlove.
Over FaceTime, my therapist gave me a quizzical look.
‘The medium simply pointed out profound truths that you already knew and likely just needed to hear,’ she said.
My longing for my mother’s attention was, simply put, palpable to others
Her words axed my mind in half. I considered for the first time that this was all a hoax, a wave of shame and embarrassment crashing through me. Had I been so grief-stricken that I’d allowed myself to surrender to the fantasy that dead people communicate with their loved ones through mediums?
My therapist offered the theory of ‘mentalisation’ as a possible explanation: a psychological concept popularised by the Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy in the late 1980s that basically describes the capacity to attune to the mind of another and imagine their innermost thoughts and intentions. My therapist posited that maybe the medium was able to draw such an accurate portrayal of my boisterous mother because she was already so ever-present within the deepest parts of my being. My longing for her attention was, simply put, palpable to others.
I felt myself parachuting down from the heights of cosmic connection to the harsh reality of my still-complicated grief. Landing here meant losing my mother all over again. I trust that my therapist had tried to demystify this experience as a psychological phenomenon to comfort me. But this reductive explanation for such a profound, mystical experience – and so soon after it happened – deeply upset me. Planting this possibility left me feeling trapped: between the world of spirit and the world of reason.
Like a contestant in some strange, existential game show, I found myself spinning a wheel of possibilities. Spun one way, spirits exist. My dead mother was indeed in the room with me, her maternal love piercing me without abuse or baggage. Spun the other way, my grief-tormented heart had simply led me to a medium to expose essential, hidden truths in a room full of wounded believers. My mind flip-flopped furiously, trying to parse out what exactly had occurred in that room. Did the medium do research on participants ahead of time? How did he know about my mother’s dolls? That was certainly a detail that didn’t exist on the internet. Had I ‘made contact’ with my dead mother, or not?
Either way, I knew I wanted it back – that visceral feeling of my mother, whole and healed – revealed to me with such clarity. It was difficult to accept that I couldn’t trust what I had experienced with the medium. For solace, I turned to a Jewish morning ritual, a prayer that acknowledges how the soul leaves the body each night and goes on wild rides through the cosmos, only to return to the body the next day. I’m not religious, but I grew up with Jewish traditions; for weeks, this prayer billowed like a peace banner through the blasted ruins of my mind.
Something about the immediacy and the intimacy of the medium had dislodged years of rage
My therapist later emailed me to thank me for sharing this experience with her. She considered it a gift; it made her more curious about how humans communicate. But it still took us some time to recover. The rift between psychology and spirituality is long and deep, even if the two share overlapping aims to heal and expand awareness. Late 19th-century American psychologists once studied mediumship as part of the fledgling discipline but a growing emphasis on empirical rigour ultimately invalidated it as a field of study. Today, the majority of practising psychologists in the US have little to no training addressing spiritual or religious issues. Signs and synchronicities get recast as expressions of subterranean grief, the mind cleverly outsourcing to others unbearable pain that we simply can’t bear to speak into existence.
I grappled with this split between intellect and spirit for weeks, even as I continued my weekly talk-therapy sessions. My therapist had helped me heal from so much complex trauma, but something about the immediacy and the intimacy of the medium had dislodged years of rage and resentment. I recognised a subtle yet profound shift in the way I regarded my mother. And it finally occurred to me that even if the medium was just mirroring back the messages I needed to heal, then so be it. For the first – and maybe only – time in my life, I had experienced the palpable presence of my mother’s love – universal and specific, expansive within and without.
Making meaning out of mystical encounters demands a deep sense of internal trust and personal authority. I still see my therapist and appreciate our bond. I also accept that my encounter with the medium shifted my reality to one in which my mother would return to release me from the gridlock of grief left in her wake. I gave myself permission to believe that my mother and I made contact. Maybe it was her, maybe it was me – or perhaps we both conspired with the medium to make each other whole.
