SheSue Experience

It’s that time of year for holiday parties. As usual, I am on the planning committee. The one thing missing for this year’s party is the psychic reader. At last year’s party we had 3, so I decided to give it a try. I had never been and was curious. Most people assume that the accuracy of a psychic reading is simple and fixed. They read the cards and tell you what you want to hear. I went for fun. I was curious.

But some take it much more serious. For these people, just like going to see any kind of counselor, they see a psychic to come up with guidelines on how to live their lives and accept future experiences. The startling predictions are just icing on the cake.

An authentic psychic reading is accurate, but the predictive accuracy is only one part of it. Anyone trained in psychology can tell basic facts about someone and what they want to hear by the way they talk, the questions they ask, and their mannerisms. This is called cold reading, it is not psychic power. Psychic readings tend be more influenced by someone’s future. Therefore, an accurate psychic reading will tell people enough about the future to convince them of the psychic ability of the fortuneteller and then dispense with some good advice. According to a psychic, it is the good advice that matters, not to reading.

Back to my party. I go into the booth with a lady who is all dressed up like what you see in the movies. She has the long velvet purple skirt and peasant style blouse. She has a small table that has a red tablecloth that goes to the floor. Instead of the crystal ball, she uses tarot cards. She asked me it I was searching for a specific answer or whether I wanted a general reading. I chose a general reading. I was then asked to choose five cards from the deck. This is where it gets a little freaky because the first card I drew was the death card. Now the lady is quick to point out that it doesn’t necessarily mean death literally. She says that for most people it means that we have recently ended something and are moving on to something else.

“Do you know anyone who has died recently?” she asks. I’m not sure what prompted her to ask this. Was it her reading my mannerisms? Because I didn’t say anything when she drew the card.

“My mother,” I reply. My mother had passed on just 2 months before.

The lady is momentarily speechless. Shocked by her own accuracy? Then she quickly recovers and starts laying out the other cards. These cards all had pretty generic meanings. All about how my family would gather around me in my time of sorrow, stuff like that. Just like the psychic above, this lady took my lead and went with it. She dispensed some advice and I was on my way.

Did it make a believer out of me? No. But I have to admit that that death card threw me for a loop.