I spent yesterday watching two women fight the same battle — and neither one knew it.

One was my client, sitting across from me in the morning, wearing her daughter’s engineering school sweatshirt. The other was a stranger at a John Edward show that night, who stood up to ask a question about skeptics — and then admitted that the “skeptic” was her.

Same wound. Same brain doing the same thing. Both wanted to believe. Both believed at one time. But both admitted they were sabotaging their own happiness. Their brains were sabotaging their fulfillment.

Maybe yours does it too.

The Problem With Being Smart

My client is not naive. She’s done the work — read the books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, sat with some of the most respected mediums alive. We’re talking Mark Anthony, Fara Gibson, Suzanne Wilson, and Suzanne Giesemann.

Some readings hit her like lightning.

Others didn’t land as well.

And here’s where it gets painful: her brain took both of those facts and used them against her.

The readings that didn’t resonate? “See — maybe it’s not real.”

The readings that were extraordinary? ”Well, they probably looked me up.”

It was like confirmation bias in reverse. She wanted to believe. But her “skeptical” side kept telling her she was deluding herself.

I sat with her and said something I say a lot: we live in a world with 200 years of materialist culture at its back. For most of human history, the prevailing view was that we are spiritual creatures with lives beyond our biological limits.

This culture tells you, quietly and constantly, that consciousness ends at death, that what you can measure is all that exists, that hope beyond the grave is wishful thinking. Religion- pre-scientific nonsense. Realists live by science, what we can prove, what we can measure in the laboratory.

You have to actively work against that materialistic current.

The faith that grief cracked open in you? It doesn’t maintain itself.

I’m Still a Skeptic Too

Here’s something I don’t say often enough: I haven’t arrived.

I’ve sat with some of the most gifted mediums alive. I’ve had breakfasts, lunch, and dinners with them. I’ve attended dozens of demonstrations. I’ve designed experiments that ruled out cheating. And I still walk into every one of these events questioning.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s the only honest way to do this.

I told my client yesterday that this isn’t a destination you reach — it’s a never-ending journey of discovery. You don’t get to a point where you’ve collected enough evidence, and you’re done. The questions keep coming. That’s not a weakness. That’s intellectual integrity.

This past week, I engaged with a woman on YouTube who had posted what I’d call a hit piece on Helping Parents Heal and the mediums we work with. She told me, pointedly, that she’d be willing to share what she knows when I was ready to listen.

I took that seriously, even knowing her history and her hatred for mediums.

I don’t want to only look at one side of this. The moment I stop being willing to hear the other side is the moment I’ve become exactly what I’m arguing against — someone who’s decided what’s true and stopped looking.

My client asked me directly: do I believe any mediums are fraudulent?

Absolutely. Without question.

I think fraudulent mediums — people deliberately deceiving grieving families for money — are a small percentage. But there’s a larger group that deserves the criticism it gets: mediums who speak in generalities, who fish for hits, who throw out vague statements and work hard to make something fit. They may not be frauds in the intentional sense. They may genuinely believe they’re making a connection. But they’re not doing what the best mediums do, and they give skeptics legitimate ammunition.

That’s a fair criticism. I’ll own that.

What isn’t fair is taking that legitimate criticism and applying it to everyone — including the mediums who operate at a completely different level.

Because here’s the paradox: the better a medium is, the more likely they are to get accused of fraud.

John Edward told a story that night about a woman he read for on Crossing Over — a reading so precise, so accurate, that she walked away an unbeliever. She was a believer walking in and an unbeliever after. It was too good. Her brain couldn’t accept it as real, so it recast it as deception. The same thing happened with someone I referred to a medium whose a friend with the utmost integrity. The sitter emailed me after and accused her of fraud. Why? The reading had been too accurate. The medium knew things so precise she must have looked them up. Evidential mediumship is about exactly that. But because the medium was too good. She must be a fraud. In this world of Google and Facebook, you have to dig deep to find something that people couldn’t look up.

Mediocre mediums get dismissed because they’re mediocre. Exceptional mediums get accused of cheating because they’r...