RESISTANCE AGAINST DIVINATORY DEVICE

As some of you may know, I am psychologically trained. I have a doctorate in Pastoral Counseling. I will also tell you that when I was a pastor, I saw very early in my career that my initial training in counseling was shitty in addressing real psycho-spiritual issues people often brought to me. I DID know how to connect to community resources, so many issues were referred out to professionals with more of that training. But I knew that I would need to gain more training, which I did later in my career.

One of the bedrock concepts of psychology, counseling, and therapy is that all clients have defense mechanisms. Part of any counseling or therapy is knowing how to work with and, in some cases, bypassing a person’s defenses to get them the help they came to you for. In many cases, their mechanisms are the thing that helped them survive as long as they had before they came to your office. So, it is not intelligent or wise for a counselor to have an adversarial stance with this in people but to engage defense mechanisms with compassion and competency in their training.

There is actually something similar that happens in giving readings to people. I have seen it so much that there are times when I feel like what a person really is coming for is psychological help. Many times, my spirits, knowing what I know, will point to the root issue being psychological and cognitive and not spiritual. As an example, I read for someone who is pagan in their practice. It is their core. I saw it right away. But part of their problem is they were all over the place with their spirit work. They were doing the Pokemon thing. I had to talk extensively about the value of focusing their practice and gaining a firm foundation, then venturing out through the guidance of their foundational spirits.

Not long after this discussion, I discovered that they completely ignored that advice and conjured some very wild spirits. Ironically, they had come to me partly because of problems they were having from a very wild spirit they conjured years ago. So, they knew the consequences of drawing the wrong spirit but did it anyway.

As a reader, I don’t get angry or upset. I step back and take a deeper look at the resistance and how it is coming up. And I ask lots of questions. I am genuinely curious why someone would come to me for help but then ignore what I said. What in their ego is making them think they know better? Is a spirit causing an intransigence to get them stuck? Do they have trauma that makes it hard for them to absorb new information? Or are they just flat-out arrogant?

Any of these answers and more could be the truth. But I would ask anyone even considering going to someone for help to have the following in the front of your mind:

*Be open to the answer you are seeking not being what you assume or expect.

*Be prepared for the reader and their spirits to confront you on blinders you may have.

*Be prepared to work independently and not just expect the diviner to do your work for you.

*Be open to things you have done up until the reading, either being incorrect or not working, because there may be things you don’t know about your situation.

*Be very prepared for spirits bringing up more significant and profound issues that you are coming with because if you have a lot of defense mechanisms, odds are you have been avoiding certain pieces of your personal work and spiritual development.

These are just some suggestions to help prepare you for a reading. They will make the process go more smoothly and help you get on track!