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Stop Turning to Psychics and Mediums to Handle Your Grief

These fraudsters will stop you moving on.


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Leon Macfayden

2 years ago | 6 min read

Mediums prey on the vulnerable. They take money and give false hope, particularly when they claim to talk to the dead. As a result, many people cannot let go of their loved ones and move on with their lives. People can become addicted to the process, costing them time and money. Sometimes I forget we are in 2022—an era where scientific reason supposedly dominates.

Collectively, we need to get rid of these charlatans, and the best way to do so is to refuse to give them our hard-earned money. Hit them where it hurts right in their wallet.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to learn to grieve in a healthy way, where you gradually learn to let your loved one go. There are no shortcuts to this painful process, but after losing my dad two years ago, I can tell you the pain does get more bearable with time, providing you accept the loss and are not fooled by the supernatural.


I TRAINED to Be a Medium.

I wrote an article recently about my experiences with the world of psychics and mediums. At one point, I thought I could contact the dead. I wanted it so badly I convinced myself it was true.

Looking back, I got lucky a couple of times, and this spurred on my delusion. I got my dead grandad’s name right despite never knowing him. That was it. That was the great result stemming from months of training. I got a relative’s name right which I could have easily heard in conversation over the years and stored it in my subconscious.

I never charged for my “readings” and never progressed to practicing on random members of the public. Thank goodness for small mercies.

One time, I was “lucky” enough to be a member of the audience for a medium. I was a believer at this time, and I sat in awe as she masterfully gave three excellent readings where she hit names and accurate summaries of various spirits’ characteristics. I was confident I wouldn’t be the subject of a reading as I had no dead relatives at the time who had been close to me.

I was wrong. Buoyed on by her three successes, the psychic came to me…and promptly messed up.

She said she saw a little girl with me. I had no connections with little girls who had died.

She gave the girl's name. I had never heard of her.

She gave a description— still never heard of her.

After a few other messages, which were complete fails, the medium decided to move on.

As we left the meeting, the host at the door said:

“Don’t write it off immediately. Maybe a memory will come back to you later.”

This is an old ruse that mediums and psychics use to get themselves off the hook. It isn’t that they have got it all wrong. It’s your fault for having a bad memory!

Years later, I figured out what was going on in that meeting. I suspect the psychic had a few “plants” that she knew in the audience and went to them first to give herself the aura of credibility. She then threw in a couple of random ones, which included me. These flopped, but people will leave remembering how good she was at reading for her stooges.

I cannot prove my theory, but psychics and mediums have employed these strategies for many years. Facebook has been a true blessing for these fraudsters as people become ever more addicted to spewing their details across social media.



A Million Dollar Reward.

James Randi was a magician and Scientific Skeptic. He dedicated his life to exposing Psychics and Mediums and replicating their results through a Cold Reading process, which requires no psychic skill whatsoever.

From Wikipedia:

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) offered a prize of US$1,000,000 to anyone able to demonstrate a supernatural ability under scientific testing criteria agreed to by both sides.

No one ever advanced beyond the preliminary stages. Not a single person.

Randi even began targeting high-profile Mediums. Many refused to be tested, and of the few that went ahead, they all failed miserably.


Why Do People Still Trust Mediums and Psychics?

The problem of Mediums persists to this day. We have advanced medically and scientifically beyond our wildest dreams, and yet we still flock to see a lunatic (or fraud) stand on stage and pretend to talk to our loved ones. We get articles like this talking about Mediums as pop stars.

WHY?

The problem stems from people not wanting to confront their mortality. They want to hold on to their loved ones and cling to life, burying their head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge that one day they too will die.

We also do not want to admit how insignificant we are in the universe. Look at this picture:

Photo by James Daly, Ph.D on astronomytopicoftheday.wordpress.com
This is an image of the earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. It prompted Carl Sagan, an astronomer of repute, to write Pale Blue Dot. An excerpt reads:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Go here to read the entire passage.

I cannot read this and look at the Pale Blue Dot without a sense of wonder and awe. Wonder at the expanse of the universe and awe at human folly, worrying so much about nothing.

But some people don’t read this excerpt with a sense of wonder but terror. Their insignificance frightens them to their core, so they need to find a way to make themselves seem important.

No wonder they flock to Mediums who make them feel special — that there is a paradise after death that we all go to and, for some reason, spend eternity there. Their fear of death has been eradicated in one swoop, and they discover newfound self-importance.

These people are not the problem. We are free to believe what we want. The Mediums that take advantage of these people’s vulnerabilities are the problems, and they know as long as we are frightened by our mortality, they will never run short of clients.


Conclusion.

We have seen that a mixture of fear and grief keeps the fraudsters in business. Until we develop a healthier way to confront our mortality and grieve for our lost loved ones, we will forever be dependent on people manipulating us.

First, we need to find meaning in our life. Nietzsche wrote:

The meaning of life comes from our choice not to be dictated to by society or religion. A meaningful life is one that strives for self-expression. There is no afterlife or God but only what we have in the here and now. Comfort is not important; only self-expression must be pursued.

Perhaps life is a work of art, and all of us are our artists. The purpose of life may be as simple as living according to one’s own goals. Live as if you have meaning by setting targets and ambitions and striving to improve your happiness.

We must also find a way to handle the pain of grief when we are separated from those we love by the cruelty of death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book called On Death and Dying in 1969. She describes five stages of grief:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Every grief journey is unique, and not everyone experiences all of the above stages. If you experience them, they may not neatly move from one stage to the next. Therefore you should treat the five stages of grief as a framework rather than a definite.

The first four stages are painful beyond measure, and as humans, we hate pain and do all we can to avoid it. Now you can understand why seeing a medium is preferable to some people if it allows them to rush the grieving process.

The problem is seeing a medium does not rush the grieving process. It traps you and stops you from letting go. Instead of going through 5 stages, you might get stuck at stage 2 or 3.

So find your own meaning and healthily deal with your grief. Talk to others, get counseling, accept that you feel what you feel. Be kind to yourself and don’t rush.

Just don’t be a charlatan’s next meal ticket.


Sign up here for my FREE 5-day email course on self-improvement.

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Leon Macfayden

From Depression and PTSD to a life of Health, Love, and Joy. I am passionate about sharing my experiences to help others. Open to writing gigs lmacfayden@yahoo.com


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