After O'Reilly: The Unexpected

After an appearance on Fox News Network’s nationally televised The O’Reilly Factor, I had an experience that was right out of the movie The Sixth Sense. It was only a few hours after my appearance when I was watching television in my bedroom. The room was well-lighted. During a commercial, I nodded out for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, I saw a striking woman, a brunette, wearing a black suit. She appeared to be in her thirties.

This elegant woman’s beauty was a cross between Gloria Vanderbilt and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She was seated in the chair at the foot of my bed staring directly into my eyes. I had a thought that she was the spirit of Ann who was a woman in her forties who had died a year earlier. Ann was Gretchen’s friend of twenty years. Gretchen, who was also in her forties, had called me the night before I was to go on The O’Reilly Factor. However, I was puzzled because somewhere I had gotten the impression that Ann was a blonde and not a brunette.

Gretchen was consulting me for help with her continuing pain over the loss of her dear friend Ann. As I looked into the eyes of this brunette in black, I said, “Ann?” With that, I felt the sensation of energy come through the back door to my heart and fill me from head to toe. At the same time, the woman atomized before my eyes the way perfume becomes tiny droplets when sprayed into the air. I say atomized because it was as if her spirit had coalesced into a mass of some kind of misty molecules or atoms.

Immediately after this apparition atomized, I called Gretchen and asked her what Ann looked like. I told Gretchen, “I think I may have had a visitation from Ann’s spirit.” Gretchen said she would e-mail me a picture of Ann.

When I received my e-mail and looked at her picture, I saw it was as I suspected. Ann was blonde. I wrote Gretchen an e-mail to tell her that it was not Ann. I went to e-mail Gretchen but the e-mail would not go through. I tried four times. Then I thought that maybe the visiting spirit was Gretchen’s mother. I added this thought to my e-mail. It went right through. Gretchen called me and confirmed that the description of the woman in black sounded like her mother. Shortly after her mother’s death, Gretchen told me she was visited by the spirit of her mother.

The interesting thing to me was the clinical significance of this vision of Gretchen’s mother. Her appearance gave me insight into what was complicating Gretchen’s bereavement. Gretchen was losing her mother all over again with the death of Ann. For Gretchen, the wound of losing her mother had been ripped open again by Ann’s death.

The other thing I noticed was that Gretchen’s loss of Ann was complicated by what could be termed the ugly ducking syndrome. Just like the ugly duckling in the children’s story, Gretchen did not appreciate her inner and understated outer beauty. From my vision of her mother, I could see that Gretchen grew up in the shadow of a very beautiful mother. Ann stepped in and filled her mother’s shoes as she was flamboyant and charismatic.

Again, Gretchen was overshadowed. Ann was outgoing and popular. Having compared herself first to her mother and then to her friend, Gretchen had never developed a strong sense of self-worth apart from her mother and her friend. This insight helped me help her begin to deal with the loss of her mother and friend as more than the loss of two very important people both of whom she had loved deeply. She experienced the loss of her mother and friend as a loss of the external source of her self-worth.

For Gretchen, feeling good about herself was tied up with Ann’s charismatic qualities. With Ann as her friend, she could borrow a sense of worth—worth by her association with an attractive and dynamic friend.

Gretchen’s situation reveals how time, distance, and even death do not interfere with our being connected to each other. As I mentioned in 8 Steps to Love, I have felt the palpable loving energy of people’s deceased loved ones bringing comforting messages of love during Reiki healing sessions. I would get a small snapshot of the person’s departed loved one. But with Gretchen, the appearance of her mother from beyond the grave was much more dramatic. Her deceased mother appeared to me to be as real as any fully alive full-bodied flesh-and-blood person.

It is interesting to note that just a few hours before this paranormal experience, I had been on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss Dr. Phil McGraw who had made his weekly appearance on Oprah. I was to critique Dr. Phil’s work with individuals and couples. My role was to draw on my clinical experience in my work as a psychologist.

Here I was engaged in trying to help Gretchen only a few hours after my appearance on national television. Then it hit me, my approach could be described as Dr. Phil meets John Edwards. On his show called Crossing Over, John Edwards helps audience members with their grief by communicating with their departed loved ones. I was attempting to use my clinical skills to help Gretchen with her grief only I was blessed with the added benefit of having seen the spirit of her deceased mother. This paranormal event helped me apply my clinical insights.

• Today, consider how love and concern do not die. In this case, a mother returned nearly two decades after she had died to help her daughter through me. Reflect on what this story tells us about who all of us really are in the core of our being? About our true essence?