​There is a fundamental difference between living and surviving.
When you grow up in a home ruled by violence, fear, and dysfunction, you don't learn how to thrive. You don't discover who you are. You don't build confidence or develop healthy ways to cope with life's challenges.
You learn survival.
Every day becomes an exercise in reading moods, anticipating explosions, and disappearing before you become the next target.
No one teaches you how to communicate. No one tells you your feelings matter. In our house, emotions belonged to one person and one person only—the narcissist who controlled every breath we took.
Richard.
I struggle even now to call him my father.
A father protects.
A father comforts.
A father teaches.
Richard did none of those things.
He wasn't a husband worthy of my mother. He wasn't the kind of man children should admire. At sixty-one years old, especially after losing my mother, I can no longer force myself to call him "Dad." Even saying his first name catches in my throat because it grants him an identity he never earned.
While chaos consumed my waking hours, something remarkable happened whenever I slept.
The dreams came.
Not ordinary dreams, but vivid, razor-sharp experiences that felt more real than reality itself. Every detail remained with me after I woke, almost as though someone wanted me to remember them.
I rarely told anyone.
Why would I?
I had virtually no self-esteem. Richard had spent years convincing me I was worthless, unintelligent, and undeserving of anyone's attention. Eventually, his voice became my own. I believed every word.
School wasn't much different.
I wasn't a troublemaker. I wasn't cruel. I did my assignments. I stayed out of everyone's way.
Yet somehow, I was invisible.
Violence at home became as routine as brushing my teeth.
Richard's weapons were his fists, his open hand, and whatever part of me he could grab first. Most often, it was my hair. He would yank me backward by the back of my head so violently that I often wondered how I wasn't left completely bald. If I fell to the floor, the attack continued with punches and kicks while he unleashed a relentless stream of insults.
"You're worthless."
"You'll never amount to anything."
"You ruin everything."
Experts now understand what repeated abuse does to a child. When those messages are spoken day after day by the very person who is supposed to love you, they don't remain words.
They become your identity.
Then, unexpectedly, eighth grade gave me something I had never known.
Hope.
Almost overnight, my life at school changed. I found friends. Real friends. We went to football games, basketball games, roller-skating rinks, movies, and sleepovers. For the first time, I experienced something that resembled a normal childhood.
Looking back, maybe I'd become more confident. Maybe I'd simply grown into myself. Maybe God was quietly opening a window after years of darkness.
Whatever the reason, I finally felt seen.
Then it vanished.
Richard received military orders to Virginia.
We were moving.
I remember the crushing weight of that announcement more vividly than many birthdays or holidays. Everything I had begun to build—my friendships, my confidence, my identity—would disappear.
I didn't know it then, but that move marked the beginning of some of the darkest years of my life.
High school became little more than survival.
My grades collapsed.
Attendance became sporadic.
Academics meant almost nothing to me because simply making it through another day consumed every ounce of emotional energy I had.
Thankfully, I dated some genuinely kind young men who unknowingly gave me brief glimpses of what normal people looked like.
Home, however, continued to unravel.
My mother's drinking transformed from concerning into catastrophic. I can still see her standing at the stove, swaying back and forth—not dancing, not humming along to music—but simply trying to stay upright.
She was disappearing before my eyes.
Richard noticed nothing.
Or perhaps he chose not to.
He had no idea what his wife was doing, what his children were doing, or what was happening inside the walls of the house he controlled through intimidation and fear.
What he did notice were imagined offenses that ignited explosive fits of rage.
In homes like ours, lying isn't rebellion.
It's survival.
You become whoever you need to become to avoid becoming the next victim.
Then came the day that changed everything.
Some memories refuse to fade no matter how much time passes.
I watched Richard beat my mother so brutally that she lay unconscious, bleeding on the floor.
I was certain she was dead.
When he ordered me to help carry her upstairs, my body obeyed while my mind screamed in terror. I remember believing I was helping hide a murder. Every step up those stairs felt unreal.
Then he ordered me to remove her blood-soaked robe and wash it.
As if nothing extraordinary had happened.
As if blood could simply be rinsed away.
That was the moment I knew.
If I stayed in that house, it would destroy me.
Maybe physically.
Certainly emotionally.
I didn't know how I would escape.
I only knew that I had to.
People often ask how someone becomes a psychic medium or why I devote so much of my life to helping others navigate the unseen world.
The answer isn't as mysterious as many imagine.
It begins here.
It begins with trauma.
It begins with survival.
It begins with what psychologists call shadow work—a journey I didn't even realize I had begun decades earlier. Understanding that connection would eventually transform not only my own life but the lives of countless people who would one day sit across from me seeking answers.
That story is coming.
For now, know this.
I barely graduated from high school.
To this day, I honestly don't know how.
But one thing had become crystal clear.
I had one mission.
Apply to a college far from home.
Walk away.
And never look back.

My maternal grandmother lived in a classic early-1900s home in central Pennsylvania. It was the kind of house that seemed to hold a lifetime of stories within its walls—a dark cellar, a cozy main floor, creaky upstairs bedrooms, and an attic you could actually walk through. During the day it felt warm, welcoming, and filled with the love only a grandmother can give.
At night, it became something entirely different.
My brother, sister, and I shared a large bedroom with three twin beds and two dressers. Like most children, we were uneasy about dark hallways, strange noises, and closets that seemed to take on a life of their own after sunset. We assumed every child felt that way.
Then one night, everything changed.
I was lying on my side with my bed pushed tightly against the wall, facing the wallpaper and trying to fall asleep.
That's when I saw it.
A hand.
Not a normal hand.
It was jet black, impossibly thin, almost skeletal, with long bony fingers that slowly slid upward between the wall and the side of my bed. I could only see it to the wrist, but that was enough.
Time stopped.
People often describe moments of terror by saying, "My blood ran cold," or "I was frozen with fear." Until that night, those were just expressions.
Now I know exactly what they mean.
I couldn't scream.
I couldn't move.
I couldn't even close my eyes.
As silently as it appeared, the hand slowly disappeared beneath the bed.
I wanted to run. I wanted to call for my mother.
Instead, I lay perfectly still, terrified that if I moved, whatever that hand belonged to would crawl out from underneath the bed.
Then something happened that terrified me even more.
Moments later, I felt a hand rest gently across the back of my neck.
It wasn't choking me.
It wasn't grabbing my throat.
It simply pressed downward with steady, unmistakable pressure.
Again, I was completely paralyzed.
I don't know how long it lasted.
I only know I never forgot it.
The following night, the hand returned.
By then I dreaded bedtime. I didn't want to face the wall, afraid I would see those black fingers again. But turning over felt even worse because it meant exposing my back to whatever might be there.
I was trapped between what I feared seeing...and what I feared might be watching me.
I never told my mother. My father was serving in Vietnam at the time, so he wasn't home. Like many children, I convinced myself there had to be a logical explanation.
I blamed my sister.
Surely she'd crawled under the bed to scare me.
One afternoon I got down on my hands and knees to prove it. If she could fit beneath the bed, then so could I.
Except...
I couldn't even get my head under the bed frame.
There simply wasn't enough space.
That realization left me with more questions than answers.
For more than thirty years afterward, I slept with my blanket pulled tightly around my neck. It became an unconscious ritual, born from a fear that began when I was seven years old.
I never spoke about that experience.
Not to my family.
Not to my friends.
Not to anyone.
For decades, it remained one of the deepest secrets I carried.
It wasn't because I wanted attention.
It was because I knew exactly what I had experienced...and I also knew how unbelievable it would sound.
That single night didn't just leave me frightened.
It opened a door to a world I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

Menopause didn't quietly arrive in my life—it crashed into it like a freight train.

One day, my body no longer felt like my own. I remember the relentless waves of heat, as though I was living inside an MRI machine that never shut off. But the physical symptoms were only the beginning.

At the very same time, my teenage daughter was pregnant, unemployed, and determined not to move in with me despite desperately needing support. My relationship with my parents was deteriorating faster than I could process, and teaching had become emotionally exhausting as I struggled in a classroom filled with increasingly volatile students and very little administrative support.

To say life was unraveling would be an understatement.

Like many women, I hoped hormone replacement therapy and a low-dose antidepressant would be enough to steady the ground beneath me. I wanted to believe they would fix everything.

They didn't.

The darkness became so overwhelming that I reached a point where I genuinely believed the world might be better without me. It is difficult to admit that now, but it is the truth. And I know I am not the only woman who has silently stood on that terrifying edge.

Then something changed.

I found an extraordinary therapist whose work centered on Jungian shadow work. She didn't promise quick fixes or easy answers. Instead, she gently helped me face the parts of myself I had spent a lifetime avoiding.

Healing didn't happen overnight.

It wasn't dramatic.

It wasn't pretty.

It happened one painfully small step at a time.

Slowly—that is the important word.

Around the same time, my relationship with a man I cared deeply about came to an end. The reality was simple: he neither had the time nor the emotional capacity to walk through that season of life with me. As painful as it was, I don't blame him.
Sometimes people simply cannot carry what isn't theirs to carry.

Then I made one decision that changed everything.

I moved out.

Almost immediately, it felt as though nearly 80 percent of the chaos, sadness, and emotional weight disappeared. I remember thinking, Is this what peace feels like?
It felt nothing short of miraculous.

I didn't overanalyze it.

I embraced it.

Approaching fifty, I stepped back into the dating world—a prospect that felt equal parts exciting and terrifying. But this time, something inside me had changed.
A quiet voice I'd never truly listened to before finally spoke.
"Establish deal breakers."

So I did.

And let me tell you something...

Deal breakers work.

For the first time in decades, I stopped measuring my worth through someone else's approval. I stopped criticizing every reflection staring back at me. The woman I had spent years judging, rejecting, and trying to fix slowly became someone I could respect.

Then something even more unexpected happened.

I began to like her.

Not because my life had become perfect.

Not because the pain magically disappeared.

But because I had survived it.

After decades of self-loathing, impossible expectations, and feeling trapped in the quicksand of sadness, I finally discovered the one person I had been searching for all along.

Myself.
​
And she was worth fighting for.

Being who I am today comes easily—for the most part. It wasn't always that way.
There was a time when I felt as though I was slowly losing my grip on reality. It wasn't a dramatic collapse, but a gradual unraveling that left me questioning everything I thought I knew about myself. The onset of menopause intensified those feelings, but the greatest catalyst for change came when I made the painful decision to put a great deal of distance between myself and my parents.
Looking back now, I realize that my journey toward understanding myself was born out of survival.
I grew up in a profoundly dysfunctional home. One parent embodied narcissism, intimidation, and physical violence. The other struggled with severe alcoholism. To this day, I truly believe that the fact my brother, sister, and I survived our childhood—both physically and emotionally—is nothing short of divine intervention.
Long before I understood what any of it meant, I experienced the world differently than those around me.
As a child, my dreams were incredibly vivid. They weren't just dreams; they were experiences. Everything was in brilliant color. I could feel the texture of objects, smell the air around me, and sometimes even experience physical sensations as though I were truly there. I assumed everyone dreamed this way. I certainly didn't think I was unique.
I also knew better than to tell my parents. In our home, being different often meant being ridiculed or accused of lying, and that was a price I wasn't willing to pay.
I was also deeply empathetic. I felt everything.
If I saw someone suffering—even in a movie—I absorbed their pain as if it were my own. I vividly remember watching a television version of Mary, Queen of Scots. Her suffering affected me so profoundly that I carried the sadness for days afterward. At the time, I didn't understand why I reacted so intensely. I simply believed there was something wrong with me.
My father, whom I now refer to simply as Richard—and in time you'll understand why—was not a loving man. He seemed to take pleasure in belittling his children. His infamous words, "I'll give you something to cry about," were never an empty threat. They were often followed by violence.
So I learned to hide.
I hid my tears.
I hid my fears.
And I hid the part of me that seemed to experience life so much more deeply than everyone else.
My teenage years became four long years spent in survival mode. My mother's alcoholism had spiraled completely out of control, and my father remained emotionally absent unless someone interrupted the world he had created for himself. Then his anger would erupt.
During my first year of community college, my mother entered a residential treatment program. It wasn't her first attempt at recovery, and sadly, it wouldn't be her last.
Through all of this, the experiences never stopped.
The vivid dreams continued.
Shadows darted just beyond my peripheral vision.
I experienced a terrifying paranormal event while lying awake in my grandmother's home—an experience I would never forget.
And I continued to feel the emotions of other people with an intensity I couldn't explain.
At that point in my life, I wasn't searching for spiritual answers. I wasn't trying to understand psychic abilities or mediumship.
I had only one goal.
Save enough money to leave that house.
I believed that if I could escape my childhood, I could finally escape the fear that had defined it.
I had no idea that leaving home would only be the beginning of discovering who I truly was.