If I could name the single word that is most often repeated when I read for people or work with students, you know, one that isn’t “Spirit” or “medium” or “and” or “the,” it is “crazy.” “I always thought I was a little crazy,” a student might confess, just after perfectly delivering a message from another student’s loved one. Or a client might whisper, “That’s just crazy,” as I recount details from his childhood I have no earthly way of knowing. And then there’s my favorite: “This might sound crazy, but …” To me, nearly every time, the information that comes after that “but” isn’t crazy at all. In fact, this is usually what someone says right before they drop the psychic’s informational equivalent of solid gold.

When people refer to crazy in the context of psychic development, they’re not referring to diagnosable mental illness. They’re referring to a degree of “wooey” that is socially inappropriate; they’re referring to a fear that possessing or developing psychic gifts is going to make it harder, perhaps even impossible, to interact with the people and environments around them. Here, crazy means “weird,” “bizarre,” “unacceptable,” “disruptive,” “absurd,” and above all, “foolish.”