I spent yesterday watching two women fight the same battle — and neither one knew it.

One was my client, sitting across from me in the morning, wearing her daughter’s engineering school sweatshirt. The other was a stranger at a John Edward show that night, who stood up to ask a question about skeptics — and then admitted that the “skeptic” was her.

Same wound. Same brain doing the same thing. Both wanted to believe. Both believed at one time. But both admitted they were sabotaging their own happiness. Their brains were sabotaging their fulfillment.

Maybe yours does it too.

The Problem With Being Smart

My client is not naive. She’s done the work — read the books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, sat with some of the most respected mediums alive. We’re talking Mark Anthony, Fara Gibson, Suzanne Wilson, and Suzanne Giesemann.

Some readings hit her like lightning.

Others didn’t land as well.

And here’s where it gets painful: her brain took both of those facts and used them against her.

The readings that didn’t resonate? “See — maybe it’s not real.”

The readings that were extraordinary? ”Well, they probably looked me up.”

It was like confirmation bias in reverse. She wanted to believe. But her “skeptical” side kept telling her she was deluding herself.

I sat with her and said something I say a lot: we live in a world with 200 years of materialist culture at its back. For most of human history, the prevailing view was that we are spiritual creatures with lives beyond our biological limits.

This culture tells you, quietly and constantly, that consciousness ends at death, that what you can measure is all that exists, that hope beyond the grave is wishful thinking. Religion- pre-scientific nonsense. Realists live by science, what we can prove, what we can measure in the laboratory.

You have to actively work against that materialistic current.

The faith that grief cracked open in you? It doesn’t maintain itself.

I’m Still a Skeptic Too

Here’s something I don’t say often enough: I haven’t arrived.

I’ve sat with some of the most gifted mediums alive. I’ve had breakfasts, lunch, and dinners with them. I’ve attended dozens of demonstrations. I’ve designed experiments that ruled out cheating. And I still walk into every one of these events questioning.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s the only honest way to do this.

I told my client yesterday that this isn’t a destination you reach — it’s a never-ending journey of discovery. You don’t get to a point where you’ve collected enough evidence, and you’re done. The questions keep coming. That’s not a weakness. That’s intellectual integrity.

This past week, I engaged with a woman on YouTube who had posted what I’d call a hit piece on Helping Parents Heal and the mediums we work with. She told me, pointedly, that she’d be willing to share what she knows when I was ready to listen.

I took that seriously, even knowing her history and her hatred for mediums.

I don’t want to only look at one side of this. The moment I stop being willing to hear the other side is the moment I’ve become exactly what I’m arguing against — someone who’s decided what’s true and stopped looking.

My client asked me directly: do I believe any mediums are fraudulent?

Absolutely. Without question.

I think fraudulent mediums — people deliberately deceiving grieving families for money — are a small percentage. But there’s a larger group that deserves the criticism it gets: mediums who speak in generalities, who fish for hits, who throw out vague statements and work hard to make something fit. They may not be frauds in the intentional sense. They may genuinely believe they’re making a connection. But they’re not doing what the best mediums do, and they give skeptics legitimate ammunition.

That’s a fair criticism. I’ll own that.

What isn’t fair is taking that legitimate criticism and applying it to everyone — including the mediums who operate at a completely different level.

Because here’s the paradox: the better a medium is, the more likely they are to get accused of fraud.

John Edward told a story that night about a woman he read for on Crossing Over — a reading so precise, so accurate, that she walked away an unbeliever. She was a believer walking in and an unbeliever after. It was too good. Her brain couldn’t accept it as real, so it recast it as deception. The same thing happened with someone I referred to a medium whose a friend with the utmost integrity. The sitter emailed me after and accused her of fraud. Why? The reading had been too accurate. The medium knew things so precise she must have looked them up. Evidential mediumship is about exactly that. But because the medium was too good. She must be a fraud. In this world of Google and Facebook, you have to dig deep to find something that people couldn’t look up.

Mediocre mediums get dismissed because they’re mediocre. Exceptional mediums get accused of cheating because they’re exceptional.

The cynical mind always finds a door out.

What I Saw Last Night

A few hours later, I was at John Edward’s show.

I want to be clear about something before I describe what happened: I’m not someone who takes this on faith. I’ve spent years building relationships with mediums — having breakfast with them, dinner, drinks. I’ve had one of them in my home. I’ve watched them behind the scenes, seen what drives them, understood why they do what they do. I worked for Thomas John for a couple of years. I’ve volunteered on John Edward’s platform for a year and a half. I speak regularly with others.

This is not performance for them. It’s a calling.

And I’ve designed experiments — with Thomas John, for example — where cheating was structurally impossible. Not just unlikely. Impossible.

So I come to these events with eyes wide open.

What John did last night wasn’t a magic act. It was not entertainment. It was something far harder to dismiss. And it’s something way more profound.

John is a teacher as much as he is a medium. You might come to his “show” wanting a connection. You might come to be entertained. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of life, your role in it, and how you can do better in this life and the next. That is what John wants you to get out of his show.

In the way of evidence, he described to a woman about the moment she had to tell her son’s father — a man she wasn’t married to — that their son had died. He described her driving to that man’s house. He described the house itself. He described them meeting outside and walking in — and then said they didn’t sit down.

Try to look that up.

He said someone had a horse that died. While working with her, he seemed to get a detail wrong — two horses — but the woman sitting directly beside her had lost a horse too. The energy of both losses had arrived together. The horses had been stabled together.

He spoke about a family’s time in a critical care unit, and knowing that staff don’t allow families to eat and sleep there, he asked whether they had been given special permission to stay. They had. It was unusual. He knew. He described detailed familial relationships between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, generational patterns and encouraged the person getting the reading to be aware and careful— teaching!

These aren’t things you get from hot reading — from looking someone up before the show. They’re not in anyone’s Facebook profile.

And all of that was almost secondary.

What John Actually Does for Two Hours

John Edward could just deliver messages. That would be enough for most people.

He doesn’t do that.

For two full hours — and another 45 minutes for the VIPs — he teaches. About how to live. About how to interpret the patterns in your life using whatever language speaks to you: astrology, numerology, past life regression. About how to recognize the ways you’ve been carrying wounds from before you even knew you were carrying them.

A woman in the audience asked the question I’ve heard a hundred times: What would you say to a skeptic who wants to believe? John said, “Skeptic or cynic?”

Then she paused, smiled a little, and admitted she was the skeptic.

She had believed once. And then — like my client, like so many of us — she had slowly reasoned herself back out of it.

John gave her a beautiful answer. I won’t try to reproduce it here because part of the power was in the room. But the short version: your doubt doesn’t mean you’ve gotten smarter. It may mean you’ve gotten more defensive.

The Doctor Who Washed His Hands

This morning, I was listening to Mayim Bialik’s podcast. The host — a neuroscientist — said something that tied everything together.

She was talking about how many people reject an idea simply because they can’t explain the mechanism.

Mayim is like I am. She wants to know the mechanism. She wants to know how.

It reminded me of a story I love.

In the mid-1800s, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that no one else wanted to admit: women were dying from childbed fever at alarming rates in hospitals where doctors had just been working on cadavers.

He had a radical idea: what if doctors washed their hands between the autopsy table and the delivery room?

He was mocked. Ridiculed. Eventually driven to a breakdown.

Not because the evidence was weak. The evidence was clear.

He was ridiculed because no one could explain why it would work. Germ theory didn’t exist yet. Without a mechanism — without a story that fit the current worldview — the evidence didn’t count.

Women kept dying while they waited for the mechanism.

I think about that every time someone says, “I’d believe in the afterlife if someone could explain how it works.”

The evidence for consciousness surviving death is substantial. NDEs, after-death communications, mediumship under controlled conditions, children who remember past lives in verifiable detail, a John Edward demonstration.

You don’t have to understand the mechanism to let the evidence speak.

What It Takes to Hold Onto What You Know

My client and the woman at the show are not weak. They’re human.

We all have a left brain that runs threat assessments on our hope. It wants certainty before it lets you rest. Our brains evolved to keep us alive, not make us happy. Alive but unfulfilled. Alive but not fully living our best lives.

Certainty was never the deal.

The deal is: you keep showing up. You surround yourself with people who take this seriously and have the character to back it up. You don’t just read about the evidence — you build a relationship with it. You stay curious about what you don’t understand without letting the unknown invalidate what you do know, what you see in front of your own eyes.

Faith isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s what you choose to do with it. Do you keep exploring? I do. I still try to understand the mechanism, even knowing it’s unlikely I ever will.

If this resonates, share it with someone whose left brain has been winning lately.

And if you’ve had an experience that helped you hold on — a reading, a sign, a moment that cracked you back open — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. Subscribe at grief2growth.substack.com.

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