Dear Abby, I’m a Psychic!

WTF! If that dingbat is a psychic.. he should know that people thing his moonbat helmet is on too tight..

How many lotteries has this kook won lately? And why is she writing for advice from Dear Abbey when she should already know how Abbey will respond? Hmmmm, I wonder if maybe she’s just psychotic instead of psychic?

I was hoping this would end up here. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

More importantly, this person needs to be referred to a mental health facility. “It’s hard to separate my own thoughts and emotions from those of spirits around me.” WARNING SIGN.

Heh, I do believe in psychic twinkles. The difference between my crazy beliefs and others is that I believe everyone has that twinkle, since we’re all just an assortment of flesh and energy, both of which interacting with the environment around us. It’s less powahs of teh MINED and more “sensitivity to certain types of energy, especially high concentrations of, and those originating from another human being.” The same oft-spoken of sensitivity to being stared at from behind is an example of the body’s natural awareness of the proximity of others, as well as the mild, almost magnetic awareness of someone standing nearby (whether it makes you uncomfortable or not – personal space bubbles vary drastically from one country to the next. I’ve known plenty of Japanese people who were more comfortable having several people standing nearby than having space, and it’s indispensable to speak in close proximity in some middle-eastern countries).

Can a person ever be sensitive enough to actively read someone else’s mind, or *spooky fingers* READ THEIR AURA? I personally doubt it (and I don’t believe there’s ever such a thing as a visible manifestation of personal energies, although I do think said energies would register on an instrument), but I think there’s enough Borg Collective among us that people who spend a lot of time around each other start to become aligned enough to have an unusually high occurrence rate of coinciding thoughts. Since people rarely think about exceptionally interesting things while going about their day to day life, these just have a tendency to be mundane. “Hey, you want to go to Burger King instead of McDonald’s today?” “I was just thinking how a Whopper sounds great.” The most common uses of such sensitivity blend together with social skills to form the backbone of nonverbal communication. Less mysticism, more Jung.

I wouldn’t have encouraged this person the way Abby did, but I would have had to say that if they are getting a bad vibe surrounding someone, pay attention to them. Who knows? One person’s attentiveness could save that child’s life, or drastically improve it. At the very least, a little personal attention can brighten up somebody’s day, and that’s a worthy goal in itself. If in the process of brightening that someone’s day, they let on that Daddy pushed them down the stairs again, then suddenly you have legally admissible evidence to report to Child Protective Services.

The important thing is to be skeptical. I’m aware my beliefs are difficult if not impossible to quantify, and therefore I could very well be wrong about them. If you believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that a child is being abused because your MINED POWAHS divined that fact out of the blue, then… so what? You can’t legally act on a hunch, no matter how strong it is. You need real evidence first. And if all your not-so-delicate probing reveals nothing and you remain unshaken in your conviction, then perhaps you’re just expressing paranoia by proxy and need to reconsider your lurasidone dosage. :p

Sorry, but if being skeptical was actually important to you, I doubt you’d hold the beliefs you currently do. There is no reason to believe in some mystical “energy” (a word that, by the way, doesn’t mean what you think it means) that we can “read” or “intercept” or “detect”. In fact, social cues and body language are the most likely culprit. Hell, even pheromones may very well play a role in what you interpret as sensitivity to “certain types of energy”. But it certainly isn’t some mystical unseen force with the all-purpose “energy” label slapped onto it.

psychic, although I dislike that word because it conjures up visions of … scams

You don’t say.

Silly T-Rex, it just doesn’t work that way. haha

This was not just silly, it was deeply irresponsible. The report of “having interactions with ghosts” (i.e hallucinating) and “cannot separate my own thoughts and emotions from those of spirits around me” rings all sorts of mental illness bells. This woman needs psychiatric help, not someone to tell her that her illness is some magical gift that she can rely on in her profession. What if she does “see” that a child is abused, and asks leading questions to that child to coax that admission out of him or her? Can you even imagine the pain visited upon parents who have their child taken away and are further tarred with the label “pedophile” because a social worker “saw a vision” of their child being abused?

I’m sorry to say it, but hallucinations, particularly ones applied to clients, precludes this woman from continuing on in her profession, at least until she gets them under control. The last thing a vulnerable person needs is someone with a mental illness being in charge of their wellbeing.

 …WTF is that guy wearing on his head? There is no power on this earth that can convince me that is supposed to be his hair.

Maybe Psychic Lady should have a chat with Mark Driscoll. After all, he gets porno-visions about child abuse from GOD!

Dear Howl Do I Cope:

Join the Republican party. You’ll fit right in.

Oh, believe me, I’m very conscious of the fact that I use “energy” in the generic form for an unquantified something which may or may not exist. That’s why I call bullshit on anyone who believes they have the power to, say, psychically dowse for a murder victim’s body by holding an article of the victim’s clothing in their hands as they sweep through a forest. My argument is that what people call psychic powers is really nothing more than a part of us that’s so natural that we’ve never properly explored it. Since science has yet to advance to a stage of being capable of fully analyzing how thoughts work (not psychology, but the actual mechanisms by which we make decisions, recall information, etc), all we have are subjective experiences with correlating neural activity and causal hypotheses to measure our senses.

That’s why I’m equally skeptical that such a thing doesn’t exist, because as of this point, we can’t truly rule it out. Prove charlatans are faking it, certainly, but what about the lay person who isn’t claiming to speak mind-to-mind with the dead, or the dead’s pets, or dead pets? If the person who wrote in to Abby had phrased themselves, “I have this unshakable feeling that this child is being abused, even though s/he has never said anything to me about it,” the worst the reader would do is inquire why this person has that feeling. We understand gut feelings and hunches, even though there’s no scientific way of quantifying the unconscious, which is why we don’t consider (most) psychologists to be frauds.

I think the problem is one of language. We don’t have the words or capacity to explain certain things without coming across as a lunatic, even when it’s an experience many of us share (which for some reason makes me want to take a poll on how many people have dreams about their teeth falling out). The bullshit factor is when it’s an experience that we don’t share, like pre- or post-cognition. It could be innovation or a mutation allowing the brain to function in some new way, but it’s much more likely to be a crackpot who wants money and recognition.

i know i’m going to get totally flamed here for this, but… i am psychic. i am a firm atheist and i don’t believe in woo. i have problems but i’m not technically “crazy.” but i can’t deny that i know, at times, when something is about to happen. generally, it’s simple stuff, like “feeling” my sister a few minutes before she calls (unexpectedly; her children keep her busy enough she calls at all hours of the day). or the knowledge that something is going to break, not work, whatever, right before it happens. stuff like this happens to me at least several times a week. the strongest psychic moment i have ever had probably saved my life.  i was driving home after work one night and needed to go to the store for some stuff for dinner. i was tired, so i went to a store i’d never been to before, rather than drive a few extra miles to my regular grocery. about 1/2 a mile before i pulled into the parking lot of this place, i got an intense, 3-d/color “vision” of the store. i saw a man with a gun, and a man behind the counter looking very scared. i have an active mind so i didn’t really dwell on it, thinking it was just random brain activity. i got out of the car, walked into the store, and saw the same man i had just “seen” behind the counter. he was pale and shaking, because literally 1 minute before i walked in, his store had been robbed. he hadn’t even called the cops yet. i had another equally strong experience that i don’t like talking about, but let’s just say i saw 2000 coming as well wrt Bush/Cheney. flame away.

I’d expect this sort of nonsense from a lady who repeatedly nurtures a belief in her readers that pennies are really messages from dead relatives.

 The difference between your crazy beliefs and other peoples crazy beliefs is wording.   The key point in that it is all supernatural mumbo-jumbo bullshit.  Everything else is trivial details. 

My wife, who’s an “apatheist” also believes she has a direct line to her mother and sister.

She is convinced that whenever they think of each other one of the two calls. I know for a fact that many, many times she has been thinking about either of them and no call was made. Yet, she remains convinced. 

In reality, since she thinks of her family often (apparent also from our conversations), the odds she will be thinking about one or both of them at or before the time one of them calls, is quite good. Plus, those times when they call and she hadn’t been thinking about them it won;t register as much and so the myth continues.

*That* was scary. I literally couldn’t watch the whole spiel.

 Not so…the letter Howl wrote wrote indicates a concern for the environment, which is instant disqualification from the Republican party.

I’ll bet you dimes to donuts this woman is a late-blooming or “successful schizophrenic”. It won’t take much stress at all to push her over the edge into a full-blown psychotic break. All Abby has done is reinforce her thought disorder.

 Ugh, the teeth-falling-out dream.

Been there, done that, seems to symbolize a fear of losing power, of losing one’s “teeth”, so to speak. The mind can be an interesting thing.

Look out folks, we’ve got a JREF million dollar prize winner here.

Is Gary Spivey going to help President Skroob and Dark Helmet steal Planet Druidia’s supply of air?

As soon as I saw the title for this I had a “vibe” Abby would say something stupid.
… I MUST BE PSYCHIC TOO !!!!

Anyone here seen Spaceballs? You look at that Spivey guy’s hat and tell me he doesn’t look like an Asshole. 

The skeptic in me would ask to what degree your memory of your vision has changed based on the event that came later.  I’m sure your memory is clear, and uncannily prescient.  But I’m sure the skeptic in you knows how our minds can manipulate our own memories.

What I would suggest (not that you’re asking for suggestions, but hey, it’s free!) is to record as many of these as possible.  If you think your sister is going to call, write it down.  And at the end of the week, see how many of your premonitions were correct.  And if possible, record things that you predict, but occur at some other time.  If your sister calling is something you get a feeling about, then write down all the times she calls.   Obviously you can’t write down every event you ‘should’ get a premonition about if there’s no particular reason to get a premonition about anything, but you get the idea.

“Keep firing, Assholes!!” 😀

Not to mention that it’s very easy for someone, especially a therapist, to implant false memories in someone else.  People were arrested and sent to prison for occult child abuse mostly based on false recovered memories given to children by therapists and law enforcement.  There was a famous case of it in Bakersfield, CA back in the 80s.

 Or even worse, that the child come to believe that they were abused due to false memories implanted by some delusional “psychic”.

I think we’ve all had times in our lives when we get “bad vibes” off of a person or place, ignore those bad vibes, then regret it.  I don’t think that means we’re “psychic,” but I wonder what, exactly, we pick up on a subconscious level about certain things.  

And, of course, there’s the ol’ theory of confirmation bias.  You forget the numerous times that your “psychic powers” were wrong, and remember the one time you didn’t listen to them and got yourself in trouble.

Dear Howl:

In the first place, you’ve drawn the lowest prize in the supernatural lottery.  Vampires get all the girls (and boys), while werewolves (excepting Michael J. Fox) just get dandruff issues …

That’s why I let the “client” lead the reading.

 This is a nice first draft, but if you want it to stick you’ll have to throw some vampires or werewolves in there somewhere.

I agree with HA2 here. I think your use of the word “energy” rather than “information” is the cause of most of the dissonance here.

I worked for a couple of psychic lines/websites in my checkered past – that pretty much sums up my experience as well. The people calling generally go out of their way to confirm everything you say (except for one woman who was clearly stalking the object of her affection, and when I’d ‘read’ something that indicated she should move on she’d just tell me to shuffle my cards again, because that couldn’t be right… )

Our most popular psychic (which was determined by his ‘hold times’, how long he could keep ppl on the phone and paying) didn’t believe in it at all. He was a very charismatic guy who read the paper the whole time and just chatted to callers, telling them pretty much what they wanted to hear.