By Trish Briggs
Both my daughters could see spirits as preschoolers. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the girls would hold pow-wows out in the woods by the house during playtime. The two of them would sit under a big pine tree with the neighbor boy as the door keeper. He would keep an eye out for any danger and only let one spirit pass by at a time… to talk. The spirits came from many timelines, as evidenced by what they were wearing. The girls never shared any details about the conversations/interactions and by the time I found out about these pow-wows, all the details were long forgotten.
The pow-wows came to an abrupt ending soon after their grandfather entered their pow-wow one day just as I was receiving a phone call in the house that he had died. My eldest knew that he lived several hours away and was surprised to see him. After talking to him, the girls excitedly ran to the house to let me know that he had arrived to find me in tears over the news of his sudden death. This brought new awareness to their secret game that had not been present previously. In hindsight, I believe this is when the nighttime issues began in the house. My oldest daughter was affected the most.
I became aware of my eldest daughter’s ability to see and talk to spirits when I realized that she was not sleeping during the night, double checking that the doors were locked, and afraid to get up to go to the bathroom during the night. Based on her symptoms, doctors were content to diagnose her with obsessive-compulsive disorder; but in reality, I now understand that she was just trying to keep the spirits at bay. Multiple spirits were interrupting her sleep to talk. In hindsight, I believe now that they were not getting their time under the pine tree with the girls during the day, so they came at night.
At this point in my life, I had experienced enough “unusual” things to know that spirits were real, yet unseen, but I didn’t have my own abilities honed or opened where I could see them all the time like my daughters could.
I also had the luggage of my past to contend with; I grew up in a household that experienced and ignored psychic events on a regular basis, while intentionally keeping it secret from outsiders; This is not much different from the dynamics within an alcoholic family and results in a similar dysfunction.
As a result, I had a passive (acceptance), not a proactive mentality towards the unseen. This put me at a disadvantage as a support and resource for my daughter on how to handle the onslaught of so many spirits all the time. There was no denying they were present (and I could validate her on that) but ignoring them was not going to work this time around. The spiritual was persistent.
I fought putting her on medication for several years. Eventually, I reached the end of my coping and support skills and went with what the professionals were proposing because I had the fear that if I didn’t, she would not be here to see her eighteenth birthday. She was already receiving counseling when we made this decision. From my perspective as her mother, the symptoms appeared to settle down. She was sleeping and less anxious.
However, she eventually shared, that from her perspective, everything was still happening all around her. She felt like she was standing in the center of whirlwind of energetic/spiritual activity with no means of protecting herself because the medicine made her feel so numbed down mentally. This reminded me of how I felt the one time I got morphine for severe pain. I still felt the pain but was just floating through the pain without the ability to complain about the pain. From the nurse’s point of view, I was pain-free.
I know as a nurse and mother, there are times that medication is the appropriate choice. However, I caution others that it should not be done without considerable thought and continuous monitoring to ensure it continues to be the right decision. Medication can be viewed as a temporary solution as opposed to a permanent one.
In hindsight, I feel responsible this was what she experienced but didn’t express while she was on the medication. She was on the medication for a few years during her pre-teen years. When she verbalized that she was ready to stop the medication, we listened.
I admire her strength, courage, and resilience to move beyond the experience, while still embodying her intuitive abilities and developing her own self-coping skills. Despite the circumstances of the experience, she came out the winner all around.