Making People Cry In Public
The idea that making people cry makes me look good at my job tells you something about my job. I am a professional psychic. People come to me for depth experiences, to work through difficult things, to be seen in all their complexity.
This past weekend, I did readings at a witchy market in at a Royal Canadian Legion branch. It was a packed room. People coming to me for a reading had to walk all the way to the end of the row to get in behind my table for a reading and there was very little privacy with a constant stream of people picking of flyers from my table on one side and other vendors on all other sides.
In the midst of all this, I made three people cry and two out of the three said “well, me crying is great advertising for you.”
The idea that making people cry makes me look good at my job tells you something about my job. I am a professional psychic. People come to me for depth experiences, to work through difficult things, to be seen in all their complexity.
I always start my readings with a new person by explaining that my process is to tune directly into people, situations, relationships, etc. and describe what I sense. “You can point me in the direction you want me to read. We can start with a specific question or an area of your life or I can just tune into you generally and tell you what I sense.” I have no preference about how we begin, but the vast majority of people choose the general option to start off and then ask the questions they came with. Most people like to hear what comes up for me and they like to hear what I come up without having any information.
Once after a reading, I was told that my readings are unusual. “It’s not really a reading,” my subject said, “it’s more like an intuitive exploration of self.” I loved this description. I love to talk about the inner worlds of people and I love to help people see themselves the people and situations in their live more deeply. I prefer to give insight over answers.
The comments about crying being good advertising also tells you something about the clients who tend to find me. A lot of my clients are people who immediately think about the value that they are providing to others, even apparently as tears run down their faces.
The people who are drawn to me online tend to be empathic, intuitive, creative types. It’s mostly women, but the men who do come tend to be quite engaged. They come more frequently, often for short periods as they work something through.
By the time someone who follows me on social media books a reading with me, they usually know a little about my style and are expecting long-form, in-depth conversation and exploration of the topics they want to explore. What I do is describe what I sense. I tell people about how their family members process emotions and understand each other. I tell people about the relationships they are figuring out. I advise people about where to adjust how they are using their energy.
In my live readings and at markets like the one this weekend, I always get a range of people with different expectations one after another. One person might come with absolutely nothing in mind and “I’ve never done this before. I just felt drawn to you” and then let me talk for 20 minutes. The next person might come with a list of questions that require only brief answers like “Is this person ever going to want to be with be with me,” or “when will I get a job?” etc.
For some people it seems to be enough that I am able to describe the situations in their lives. I might describe the dynamic between the client and their mother in a lot of detail. “You hit the nail on the head,” one market client said after I described the dynamics in a few areas of her life. And when I described how her internal world feels to her she said “I’ve never told anyone that and glanced nervously at her friend who was standing on the other side of the table listening. I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d said much that was helpful, because I’d given little advice, but she assured me it was very helpful and went on her way.
Other people come to me expecting fortunetelling. “What’s coming in for me this month?” they ask or “am I going to have a baby” or “will my partner come back to me.” I can tell them what I sense about these questions and I try to answer they questions as helpfully as I can, but I have some ambivalence about the helpfulness of future readings.
People want to know the outcome because they think it will soothe them. But I’m not convinced this is the case. For example, if someone wants to know if their partner is coming back to them and it feels very clearly that there is more to resolve, how does that help the person? Is it soothing? You still have to live in the separation of the present. All too often the person will benefit most from acting as if the other person is entirely out of the picture and focusing on themselves and their own lives.
Perhaps I feel this way simply because I find it to be one of the hardest things about having psychic information in my own life. What do you do with it? How do you work with it? The short answer is always “Intuitively.” You stay in the intuitive process. But that is often harder than it sounds. It’s ever so tempting to try to force a partial picture into a clear and easy-to-understand map.
This is why I am ambivalent about future readings. If they are hard to handle appropriately for those who already know how to work intuitively, I don’t see how they are going to be helpful for people who are specifically looking for something tangible to hold onto. To work with information about the future you need to be able to relax and allow.
I will read the future, though. I do my best to give people what they want unless I think strongly it’s not going to be helpful. Occasionally people have asked me about their lives being cut short early and I have refused to read the question. I will certainly never bring up anything like that in a reading.
One time when I do like to read the future is when I pick up that the person has an intuitive sense of how something is going to turn out and I can encourage them to have confidence in their own intuition. “I can feel it too,” I might say, “and when you have a sense like that of something coming, it can make it hard to focus on the immediate present. The sense of the future hangs over you.” In these cases, I can then give tips about how to relax and allow the information to be there without letting it get in the way of living in the present.
To get the most out of a reading with me, I think it helps to be trying to understand yourself and your situation rather that soothe yourself with certainty. I get nervous when I see people are looking for answers instead of insight. I’m nervous that they are looking for a kind of certainty that will be hard to hold onto even if the reading is accurate.
I find that the people who tend to cry are people who feel seen and who are open to shifting their relationship with self, but everyone engages with my work a little bit differently. They come in with whatever expectations they come in with and they will use what I say in the way it makes sense to them. In every case, my role is to use my process to the best of my ability to give insight and to meet the person where they are, whether they are completely unexpressive, just look surprised by the accuracy, or crying.
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