An "intuitive" describes her clairvoyance

After several sessions consulting by phone with Deborah Mangus, a professional intuitive, Elizabeth Mayer asked Deb “if she’d talk with me about the state of mind in which she sees what she sees. Were the images really visual? Where did she think they came from? Was she seeing into my mind? Was she seeing some objective reality outside my mind?

“Deb was responsive: thoughtful, interested, tentative, but willing to wonder and explore. She told me she wasn’t at all sure what she was seeing. She was even less sure how she did it. Some image would just cross her mind—once it was my youngest daughter and the word sprite. In fact, a friend had just been watching that same daughter in our garden and remarked on her being a ‘real flower sprite.’ Amused, I’d told him it wasn’t the first time the word had been used to describe her. Her fourth-grade teacher, trying vainly to help her see that her effervescence could use some control in class, had once compared her to a can of Sprite that had been violently shaken and suddenly opened. The image sent my daughter into gales of laughter for months afterward—during class. And it stuck. For years our entire family dubbed that daughter our sprite.

“Another time, Deb told me I needed nourishment. I hadn’t told her anything about not eating, but in fact I’d been off solid food for two days and had been counting the hours until I could eat again. Deb had me thinking about the word clairvoyance. Clear seeing.

“I asked Deb when she started seeing this way.

It has everything to do with my mother and her many sisters. When I was a small child and the phone rang, my mother would say, ‘Deborah, answer the phone, it’s your aunt Rosie.’ Well, my aunt lived in Yonkers and we lived in Connecticut and we wouldn’t speak to her for months. But with absolute belief, I’d pick up the phone, and say, ‘Hi, Aunt Rosie.’ Without surprise, my aunt Rosie would reply, Hi, Deborah, how are you, baby? Is your mommy there?’

I believe I was taught a certain channel of communication that I didn’t realize was out of the ordinary until I got to first grade. I would answer to what I thought my teacher was saying, but it would turn out I was responding to what she was thinking. So I was in the hall a lot in first grade. What my teacher thought and what she said were very different and I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut. The painful environment of my childhood narrowed it down to hypervigilance. I used the way I knew things to detect danger in the environment, to keep myself safe. The channel was honed by insecurity. The danger detector became well used when I worked as a nurse in high-risk settings. I intuited danger, and then validated it with machines and scientific scrutiny.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).