I Spent Years Studying Psychic Mediums: 6 Myths About Them I No Longer Believe

Before I committed to learning more about psychic mediums, I believed so many commonly accepted misconceptions about them. Here are six such myths that I personally would now consider busted:

To avoid mediums who are fraudulent, I suggest staying away from the storefront psychic shops where they have signs offering cheap, $10 readings. I also suggest, as I mentioned above, concealing your information so mediums cannot "cheat" by looking you up beforehand. (The ethical ones won't anyway, but if they end up giving you accurate information, this will ease any potential doubts about how they got it.)

However, if I'd known the name of her grandmother, her hobbies, her personality, or the cause of her death, that would be harder to attribute to logical deductions. There is a small selection of mediums that get to this level of specific information regularly.

For example, The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) is a research group of the University of Virginia School of Medicine that studies everything from past life memories to near-death experiences to, yes, mediumship. The Windbridge Institute administers rigorous testing to psychic mediums to assure they get accurate information without cheating. And The Forever Family Foundation is an organization that combines science and spirituality to help those grieving, and they work with certified mediums and also have a scientific advisory board. 

A psychic reading is when someone connects with a living person to read their energy, thoughts, and life path. When you want information into your own life choices, you want to get a psychic reading. During a mediumship reading, the medium connects with a person or being who has passed away. I've found that all mediums can give psychic readings as well, but not all psychics are able to connect with those who have passed away. 

No. Psychic mediums do not know the thoughts, deep secrets, and internal dialogue of all their friends or everyone they hang out with socially. They might know something that the average person wouldn't, such as that someone is cheating or has a deceased loved one. However, there are boundaries and limits. Mediums want to socialize and have friends like the rest of us. They learn to "turn off" their abilities and not "tune in" while they are just going about their lives.

Mediums are humans, and they grieve like the rest of us. While their "knowledge" or experience of the afterlife can help ease their pain, they still miss their loved ones just like anyone else. Since a medium reading is more like playing charades than talking on the phone, they cannot talk to their loved ones the way they could when their loved ones were alive. We would all love medium abilities to be that perfect!

If you too are dealing with grief or are anxious about mortality in general (aren't we all?), don't dismiss the possibility of psychic mediums and that there is more than this life. Once I opened up my mind to the world of mediumship, I was surprised to find that some common misconceptions about it might not be based on truth.