The highlight of my psychic medium experience was undoubtedly when the medium approached a morbidly obese woman with crutches by her side and let loose this gem:
“You have problems with your hips don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” the obese woman said, nodding enthusiastically.
“And trouble sleeping?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve recently been diagnosed with diabetes.”
“You know, I was going to say that,” the medium said. “The dead are telling me this.”
Irrefutable proof this woman could to talk to the dead.
I went into the medium experience with an open mind.
I’ve done tarot readings, had open-minded conversations with people about angels and crystals, and I rank in top percentile in the world for trait openness. In short, there couldn’t have been a mind more open than mine. And I reserve judgement.
But the “mediums” – translation: two overweight bitches, one in her forties, the other in her twenties, standing on a stage in front of thirty desperate grieving working class people – shattered my ability to keep an open mind the moment the show started.
Here’s my main problem with these medium shows.
“Mediums” exploit the vulnerable.
They know that almost everyone walking into that room has suffered a loss, likely recently, and is desperate to connect with their lost loved one.
These people want hope.
They want guidance.
They want the pain of loss to lessen.
The audience at these shows want their loved ones back.
They haven’t let go and are still in the denial stage of grief.
And the “mediums” know which audience members will leap to make their background and history fit their vague “psychic” evaluations.
The people in the audience desperately want someone to come through to them.
So when the medium says, “I’m sensing an elderly man who smoked who passed away before his time,” of course someone is going to be able to make that fit.
And when the mediums actually try to be more concrete with their details, this is what happens:
“I’m seeing striking blue sparkly eyes,” the medium said. “Did your husband have striking blue eyes?”
“Ummmm…” The woman in the audience desperately racks her brain trying to make it fit. “No, but my son has nice eyes.”
“That’s it!”
“Yeah, my husband must be thinking about our son.”
And everyone in the audience gasps – how did she know? – while the woman wipes the tears streaming down her cheeks.
Anything these mediums, these con-artists, these sadistic bottom-feeders, these budget low-life predators, anything they can do, I assure you, without a single day of training, I could do better.
Just like the medium’s guess that the morbidly obese woman with the crutches had hip problems.
I could have guessed the overweight woman had hip problems.
And even without training in how to read people, how to read body language, how to analyse voice tone, I could have immediately gone to every person in that room who had suffered a recent loss and correctly told them so.
Why?
Because they came in wearing their grief on their sleeves.
The medium spent fifteen minutes per person that they had a “link” with.
So in an hour show, they only dealt with five people (time ran over by ten minutes).
They obviously held on as long as they could with each person because there would only be so many susceptible people in the room (like hypnosis).
But each one they chose was a person who I thought was close to the edge before the show even started.
By the end of the show, each one of them was weeping.
This is where I feel the sting of the exploitation the most. It’s when you see the tears.
The tears in the victim, the person being read for, not the tears in the medium who seemed sociopathically detached.
She needs to be – that’s how she makes her money.
And let’s talk about money.
You can tell everything about the demographic and the mediums by the cost of the show.
Three pounds (British sterling) per head. That’s less than five dollars.
Ask yourself: who spends less than five dollars for an event and truly believes that they are meeting someone who talks to the dead?
Gullible people.
If someone truly spoke to the dead, this gift would be so coveted and prized that the cost would be astronomical.
Either that, or benevolent people would refuse to charge for it.
And the mediums themselves looked and spoke exactly like the sort of people who not only didn’t value their “talent” above three pounds per head but had enough contempt for an audience that would pay that amount.
When you go to a Tony Robbins seminar, you hear the same pacing and leading language. But Tony charges a grand a head. People who go to Tony’s seminars are typically more discerning (not always though, with many going into debt for feel-good pump-up sessions).
If you charged a thousand pounds per head and called yourself a medium, you would need to bring your A-game.
Not only would the experience have to be the most compelling theatre experience of your life, but you’d have to read people so accurately, and couple it with such groundbreaking applicable life advice, that the cost would never be called into question.
But I left this medium experience not only knowing my three quid would have been better spent at Burger King, but also depressingly figuring out what my per hourly wage would be and subtracting that from the hour-long experience plus travel time and feeling like I was completely ripped off.
If I were a medium, here are a few things I would do to improve the experience:
I wouldn’t recycle the vague phrases that I use.
“Your grandfather was a chip off the old block” and “You’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulder” were used with each person they read for.
I would formulate advice for the people.
If I could consolidate the fact that I was exploiting grieving people and if I could be okay with that, I would ensure the show wouldn’t just be vague descriptions of people (“Your grandmother always wanted the best for the family” or “I’m getting the letter B. Does that mean anything?”).
I would do more vivid readings and then pass on some wisdom that had direct advice for the person concerned.
In the seminar, there was one woman suffering from diabetes, another who was cheating on her husband, and another who wanted to take a new partner after her husband passed away but was feeling guilty.
None of these people left the experience better off, but the problem is they probably were duped into thinking something magical had happened when really they had just been pushed over a precipice they were altering teetering and broke down in tears.
The thing that really gets me about these shysters, if you put the callous exploitation of grieving people aside, is the fact that I can’t help but think, ‘So what?’
Let’s pretend they do have “the gift” and really can speak to the dead.
Not once do they actually communicate anything.
They begun the session with a prayer (making a mockery of the religious institutions – they’re doing a good enough job of that themselves, they don’t need this too) and then they said they were “opening a telephone line to the afterlife”.
If they really had your recently deceased grandfather on the other end of this invisible telephone, wouldn’t he be telling you something of worth?
Instead, these deplorable scumbags delude you into thinking your loved one’s spirit is in the room by doing nothing except throw out vague definitions – “He’s taller than me,” “She was a mum,” “She liked to talk to people but also enjoyed being quiet on her own”.
But when they started saying shit like “He’s drinking a can of Fosters in heaven” and “She’s chaining smoking in the afterlife” I decided that the people who were truly to blame were the audience members.
Of course, some mediums can be extremely convincing.
And it doesn’t take much to exploit the grieving.
But if you’re ignorant enough to swallow the horse shit these losers are feeding you about your dead aunt buying cigarettes in heaven’s off-license, then you deserve every last morsel of manure sandwich you choke down.
And while we’re at it, would you be interested in this deal-of-a-lifetime timeshare offer on Jupiter?