I was born a gifted child. This is something that I always was and it never occurred to me that there was anything “special” about me or that there would be specific challenges for my parents, especially my mother, who was with me the most as my father travelled for weeks on end with his job. We often think of “gifted children” as those who are prodigies; the super smart kids that can do amazing algebraic calculations in their heads, the 5 year olds who can peel off a piece by Chopin on the piano, that sort of thing. But what if your child is psychically gifted? What do you do with that? Until I had my own children, I did not even consider the challenges that I put before my own mother when I was a child. Here are a few things that just come to mind when I think about this sort of thing.
When I was born, I was telepathic. My mother was also telepathic, so we would communicate that way all the time. People began to notice, however, that we were not using words. That freaked them out a bit. My mother had to assuage their fears and concerns by just calling it “mother’s instinct” instead of letting them know what was actually going on. And the other challenge was that, as a child, I found it quite noisy when people would talk and could not see the sense in all that noise if they would just use their minds instead. I was a delayed talker (around 3 to 3 and a half) because I just had no need to use words when my mother could “hear” me with her mind quite clearly. She was challenged a few times as to why she was not insisting that I use my words? She would always say, “I know he can speak, so whenever he is ready he will do so.” And then I did. And it freaked her friend out because I told her that she need not worry because her husband was going to leave that other woman and come back to her. My mother then had to teach me about tact. No one had said anything verbally about why her friend was so upset. She arrived upset and my mother put on the tea (because when someone is upset you are supposed to make them a hot beverage). I just said what I said because I could hear it in her friend’s mind and because I “saw” down the road a bit into the future. And, sure enough, after about 2 months or so he did come back to her. As a child I did not care how dysfunctional that situation was. I just saw it unfolding.
What had not occurred to me was that my mother also had no privacy with this little telepath running around. I could hear her inner voice all the time. She was often worried about my father when he was out of the road, and often angry with his behavior when he was home. She was challenged by my older brother who was constantly getting into trouble, and worried about my oldest sister who was in a marriage to an alcoholic abuser at the time. Financial strain was constantly on her mind as was what to make for dinner on a tight budget. There were times that spam was on the menu. The thing is, though, that she did not have privacy for YEARS until I was finally able to learn how to turn down the volume on the telepathy. That could be exceptionally invasive. And while, on the one hand, one could say, “Then don’t think so loud,” on the other hand, one does have a responsibility to mind one’s own business. So in addition to learning to turn the volume down, I also had to learn to “ignore” the stuff that would accidentally filter through. I also had to learn, as the years went by, to not take offence at anybody’s thoughts. They are their thoughts, not mine, and they did not speak them, so they have no importance, whether they are good thoughts or bad thoughts, and whether or not they are about me. But as I was growing up and learning about this, there were many a conversation that my mother and I had to have regarding privacy and how we respond to others’ thought systems. One of the best pieces of advice she taught me was, “Never take it personally, no matter what is thought. But if they SAY it, you get to choose whether or not to take it personally.”
When I was 11 years old and puberty was beginning to hit, I began having nightmares. It was just a matter of my subconscious mind trying to sort out all the massive changes that I was experiencing as I was growing up. Physical changes were tremendous. I grew one foot each year for 3 years running. My bones hurt from the inside out. It was agonizing. Hormonal changes were surging through my body and I was having trouble with emotional control, getting livid at everything and everyone. I became accident prone because my body was growing faster than my visual perception was accommodating, thus I would trip over things, run into things, and when I got to 6 feet in height at the ripe old age of 14, every time I stood up by heart could not keep up with the circulation of the altitude adjustment and I would black out and fall to the ground. Then, if all of this was not enough, telekinesis kicked in. For those of you who may not have heard of that, it is the ability to move objects without touching them. But it was not like suddenly I found out I could do this neat little party trick. It was more that, as I was having a nightmare, all the objects in my bedroom would suddenly lift up off of whatever surface they were on and start spinning at a very fast rate around my room. From outside of my room it sounded like there was an army of people banging things into walls as stuff bumped into the walls at a very fast rate, often breaking. My mother would have to crawl on her belly over to my bed and put her hand on my chest and say, “Wake up, Honey! You’re having a bad dream.” I would wake up to the lights flickering and things flying around my room. She would say, “Breathe, calm down and just allow it all to rest.” I would do that and, lo and behold, everything would come to a stop and just drop to the floor. Apparently she had experienced that before with a relative. But I had never known about that, so I was freaked out. If the nightmare was really bad, it often spilled into other parts of the house. The kitchen cupboard doors would open and slam shut and the dishes and utensils would often fly out of their storage space. Sometimes the piano downstairs would being to sound like someone was pounding on the keys. It was quite the thing to wake up to at 2 am!
My mother thought that perhaps there was also a poltergeist aspect to this. So she called on a family friend who was really good and ridding houses of those things. She looked at my mom, looked at me, looked back at my mom and said, “No. No poltergeist. This is just HIM.” I felt horrible that I was causing all this disruption. But the good news was that I also had access to another family friend who was incredibly telekinetic and he was able to help me get better control of this “gift.” I put that word in quotation marks because there are always two sides to a coin. Many gifts feel, at least at first, like a curse. That is because it is raw psychic energy that has no one driving it with any amount of purpose or control. People often get stuck in the “victimhood” of their gifts because they don’t have the training to learn how to adjust the volume or the energy output of their gifts. We have all seen thousands of memes on social media about the “poor little empath who cannot stand the harshness of the world because…” well, because they are an empath who is untrained and does not know proper energetic boundaries is what that is all about. Often when one challenges this victimhood attitude one will get very negative feedback about how harsh you are being because you actually challenged their victimhood, with which they have become very comfortable. All that is left to do in response to that is roll one’s eyes and move on because they are not in any way interested in learning how to develop the energetic boundaries that would make their lives much easier.
These were all valuable lessons that I had to learn as I was growing up. And as I grew up I found that they were lessons that helped me to help other gifted children along the way. Most don’t have parents with any skill set when it comes to psychic gifts. In fact, some are told, because of a strict religious background, that all of that is “of the devil” and that they need to just shut it down. This actually abuses the child psychologically and spiritually. There have, over many millennia, been hundreds of thousands of people with god-given gifts. And because of the stupidity of the human race, many of them have also been murdered. They have been murdered by small-minded people who, had they taken the time to explore, would have also found that they, too, have gifts. This entire thing is part of our makeup as a human species. It is not that we are mutating and developing “new” abilities. Those abilities have always been there in our species. It is that many of us are simply waking up to those abilities within. We are remembering on a deeply unconscious level. But this gives us an advantage that others find threatening. So, in their self-righteousness, they kill us.
Yes, these types of gifts are a natural part of who we are as human beings. But there is also the nurturing component. For example, most people talk about daily events around the dinner table, whether it be politics, religion, world events, how your day at school was, how your day at work was, etc. Around our dinner table we would talk about things like spirits, ghosts (there is a difference), UFO’s, inter-dimensional travel, astral travel, telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, thoughts as manifest energies, and so on. It was an environment rich in possibilities and perspectives. Yes, there were also some aspects that were more closed-minded, but for the most part, this was stuff that existed on both sides of my family, so when I was developing in my various abilities as I was growing up I did not have anyone tell me anything ridiculous like, “You better not do that! That is the devil’s work!” And between nature and nurture, I was able to develop some really awesome things as I grew into who I now am. There were, of course, many challenges with it. For the most part, though, I was simply allowed to grow and expand and learn and explore. And that makes all the difference in the world.