Someone I knew and respected had taken a workshop with Ellen Tadd and believed that her abilities held up to close inspection; she seemed worth further investigation. During a trip east, I met with her in person. At the beginning of our first session, I gave her only my name, no more, and told her I just wanted her to tell me what she saw. Again, I felt every skeptical muscle in my body working.
Ellen started by looking at my right hand, which she said activated her clairvoyance, and began to describe my past lives. My wariness meter leapt into action: past lives?
I said nothing, but Ellen must have sensed my resistance. “By the way,” she told me, “don’t worry if you don’t believe in past lives. Just treat them as a metaphor. I personally find past lives a useful way to read people’s histories and see how those histories influence their current lives, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t.”
I calmed down. At least Ellen was a savvy clinician; she knew how to manage resistance. Metaphor. I could handle that. The conversation shifted to my daughters. Ellen said she saw that there was something out of balance between me and one of my children. That child, she said, was currently reworking a trauma from a prior life and I wasn’t helping her with it. Ellen continued, “I see one of your children – a girl, I think? – as very careful, very serious about things. She seems much older than her age.”
In fact, I would describe one of my daughters that way, but I quickly reminded myself that it’s hardly a unique characterization. Ellen went on:
“You’re trying to get her to lighten up. That’s a mistake. She’s re-working an experience she had many lives ago. That’s what this lifetime is about for her. She was a feudal lord on the Scottish border. She’d built a little utopia there. People were well-fed, content. She’d devoted her life to them. People were so content they got careless about watching the border. One night a band of Picts, some tribal group, came over the border and destroyed everything. The people were completely unprepared. All the women and children were raped, tortured, killed. Your daughter is still carrying the terrible guilt she felt at letting her people get so comfortable they forgot how to fight.”
“When your daughter asks you whether she should paint the leaves on a tree light green or dark green, you think you’re reassuring her when you tell her that whichever she chooses will be great. You’re not reassuring her at all. For her, every decision is a decision about how to run her fiefdom, with all that consequence attached. It’s life and death for her. All those people are on her shoulders. You won’t help her lighten up by trying to convince her the color she chooses doesn’t matter. For her, it matters totally. For her, it’s not about paint, it’s people’s lives. You’d help her more by taking every one of her decisions just that seriously.”
What Ellen told me didn’t have the compelling specificity of Deb’s image of clasped hands. On the other hand, the psychological truth Ellen had captured about my daughter and our relationship hit me as astonishingly apt. Even if I discounted completely the business about past lives, Ellen was absolutely right about my daughter’s psychology. Even more to the point, she accurately discerned that my attempts to help my daughter worry less weren’t working. That daughter does worry a lot. She loves to draw, but often asks my advice about every tiny detail of a picture. I typically tried to reassure her that any decision she made would be lovely, wonderful, good enough, but I’d been aware that the reassurance wasn’t helping.
Suddenly, because of Ellen, I saw my daughter in a new way, with a clarity that was deeply illuminating and useful. I knew that what Ellen had told me was not just correct, but important. No matter how petty the issue might seem to me, I was much more likely to help my daughter worry less by letting her know I take her worries seriously. Of course, I think, I should have known that. Again I had the sense that Ellen was telling me, just as Deb did, exactly what I needed to know – what at some level I already knew, but hadn’t quite let myself know that I knew.
In one sense, there’s something completely familiar about the way Ellen’s insight about my daughter hits home. I’m used to the way an insight feels when it’s right. I’ve been a psychoanalyst for thirty years. I’ve spent thousands of hours with patients. I’ve experienced many thousands of moments when some truth makes all the difference because it’s precisely on target, exactly what someone needs to hear. Much of my teaching is aimed at helping students hone their abilities to develop and articulate insights like that – insights that are precisely, exactly right. There’s nothing more key to clinical skill. So I recognize the ingredients. I recognize insight when it feels right. What’s not remotely familiar is getting there this way. How on earth did Ellen manage to get there? How did she get me there?
By the end of my second conversation with Ellen, I decided to ask her a specific question. I was planning a research project and had five people in mind as possible collaborators. I needed to choose one. I gave Ellen a list of all five names – only the names – and asked her to assess the virtues and liabilities of each.
Ellen was quick in her response on the first three; everything she said fit with what I already knew of them. She got to the fourth name on the list and stopped. This was a man I’d never met, but whose work I’d read; I’d planned to contact him when my research proposal was a little further along. Ellen asked his name again. She was quiet for a minute, then said she simply couldn’t find him. This happens sometimes, she told me; she just couldn’t make a connection. She moved on to the fifth name and once again had plenty to say.
A month or so later, I was ready to contact the man whose name had been fourth on my list. I tracked down his phone number and called; a woman answered. I told her who I was looking for. “I’m very sorry,” she replied, “but he died unexpectedly about six weeks ago.”
Coincidence? I compared the dates. He died exactly two weeks before Ellen and I had spoken. I asked Ellen when she first became aware of her intuitive abilities.
“I had many experiences as a child where I felt other people’s feelings. I was often overwhelmed by the fact that what people were verbalizing and what I felt they were actually feeling were actually quite different. I also slept with my light on because I saw faces in the dark and I felt safer that way. I tried to talk to my father about my experiences. He was a physicist, but he felt only that I had a creative imagination. He didn’t really understand what was happening to me. I sought out books for answers, but not another person. When I was nineteen, my dead mother came back and spoke to me and for the first time I realized that my sensitivity was a gift and not a problem. After that encounter I started to become comfortable with my sensitivity and worked to develop it.”
I felt the crack in that familiar surface of things widen just a little more.
EXTRAORDINARY KNOWING
Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the
Human Mind
By Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer
Forewords by Freeman Dyson and Carol Gilligan
Bantam Books, Inc., March 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer