Clairvoyance

I was standing in my kitchen, making lunch as I do most afternoons. Working from home allowed such comforts as homemade meals, which was a blessing and a curse for this food lover. It had been a little more than a year since I'd quit my fulltime job as a probation and parole officer to pursue my calling. I'm a psychic visionary, medium, healer, and intuitive coach — that is my purpose — but I didn't always know. I had avoided it my whole life, but it was just starting to feel right. I could say it aloud now: "I'm no longer afraid."

Honestly, though, no matter my gifts, the kitchen was the most unfortunate and unlikely of places to have a breakthrough memory — the kind of memory that nightmares are made of: racing heart, sweating, and the sudden and undeniable desire to run far away as hard and as fast as I could, but I was stuck, feet firmly cemented to the floor. My breath was ragged and slightly labored. I had suffered as a teenager from anxiety and depression, but this felt different. It gives me chills just thinking about it now. I was experiencing the first of many breakthrough memories of a terrible childhood trauma. These memories, usually associated with a traumatic event from years earlier in life, make you feel as though you're experiencing the memory in real time and often leave you feeling frozen in your tracks.

As an empath, psychic, and medium, I was always reminded that the answers to life's questions are available if we choose to listen. I had ignored spirit for years at a time, finding it much easier to help friends and coworkers with their troubles. Through the years, I sought work teaching and helping others in skills that I had acquired. However, at forty-two years old, having just experienced a memory of terror, spirit and my mind conspired to move my consciousness to another level.

Holy crap! I wasn't ready. I was terrified of what else might come flooding back. For now, I stood stunned looking down at my lunch, which I suddenly had no appetite to eat, and attempted to make sense of what I'd just remembered. Was that real? It sure felt real. I knew I needed to talk to someone in the counseling field. Up to that point I'd only had small tidbits of memory from that time period in my life, and they weren't good. I feared it would all come flooding back and I would be rendered useless, an emotional mess, traumatized all over again. I made the very difficult phone call to see a therapist.

Fear in many shapes and sizes entered my life before I was even one year old. This early fear stemmed from a different attack that happened to my mom. I didn't find out about the attack until I was a young adult, but I learned early lessons of fear from witnessing her behavior after the incident and throughout my growing years. I've now learned from my work in probation and parole that secondary trauma is a more technical term to describe what I experienced. I don't blame her for the fear I experienced through her; I just recognize I adopted her fears as my own in the process.

In the middle of the night, a man swept my mom out of the shower at knifepoint and raped her. All the while she was hoping and praying that I, just a baby at the time, was still safe in the other room. I'm certain her fear was compounded by the fact that I was lucky to even be alive. I was her miracle baby. I had been born three months premature, weighing less than a pound. Some say I was touched by angels. Even before this attack, she had suffered as a young mother praying her infant daughter would survive birth and life. And then this happened.

She told me there had been brief counseling and few angry and hurt words between her and my dad. Neither amounted to much healing for my mom. I remember reading an article some time ago that speculated fear and trauma can be passed down through our DNA. I'm no scientist, but I can tell you that in my life, environment and habits changed how I was raised and how I operated in family and school — in all my relationships, for that matter. It would only be speculation that any trauma my mom suffered before I was born also contributed to those factors.

Looking from the outside in, it's quite easy to say, "Stop being so afraid," "There's nothing to be afraid of," "You're being silly," or "That's ridiculous." However, we all know that when we're gripped by fear, it's next to impossible to see a way out or away from it. Even in a case like my mom's, fear shows up as a manifestation of habits created to deal with the trauma that happened years earlier.

Thankfully, I was far too young at that time to remember her attack. Most of my young childhood — at least the years I remember — were good. Selective memory is an effect of trauma and the brain's way of defending itself — blocking out the not-so-great and sometimes ugly parts. More specifically, I remembered one of the ugly parts as I stood in my kitchen that day. More memories would work their way into my mind as I progressed through therapy.

My parents met in high school, and my mom had me when she was just eighteen. Young and in love, my parents were living in a small town, Fallbrook, California, doing their best to make ends meet and raise me. My dad decided he was going to become a long-haul truck driver, and we moved to Idaho. Fear at that point in my life consisted of spiders and not much else. My mom worked as an apartment manager, and she raised me. Even at that young age, not yet in school, I liked to do my own thing. I dressed myself and rode my tricycle to visit my favorite neighbors in the apartment complex.

Later, more fear came. First it was the creepy space under the house, the one that happened to be just the right size, that only I fit in. My mom made me crawl under the house and light the pilot light. It was Idaho. It was the foothills, and it was windy. I had to go under there far too often for my liking. I usually crawled from the area near the front steps. The ground was covered in fine dirt that felt soft to my hands. With each reach, as I crawled down on my belly, I never knew what my hands would grab in that fine dirt — small sticks, bugs, spiders, anything my little mind could dream up. Critters took shelter from the wind. Their glowing eyes looked back at me from the other side of the space.

It was in this house that I began to sense and see spirit. I would often have bad dreams — at least they seemed like dreams; I could see and feel spirits around my bed. They looked like you and me; I saw them as full bodies. It's not that dead people are scary, but I didn't know what or who they were. I just knew, at the tender age of six, that there should not be other people in my room with me other than my parents. Like most little kids, I ran to my parents' room and begged to sleep in their bed. I don't remember that going over very...