The Beginnings of Wisdom, Part 3

Second Sight
by Judith Orloff, M.D.

(Page 3 of 3)

To help earn living expenses, I got my first job as a salesgirl in the towel department at the May Company, earning seventy-five dollars a week. It was located on Fairfax and Wilshire, less than half a mile away from the Climax nightclub, where Terry had been commissioned to paint an outdoor mural. From our studio in Venice, he would drive me to work each morning on his BMW motorcycle. On the coldest, rainiest days, our eyes tearing from the cold, bundled up in our army jackets, I would hold tightly on to his waist as we sped through the city streets. I had never felt happier or more free.

It was through Terry's love and insight that I slowly began to accept myself and my images. Whether or not they were psychic, they were an intimate part of who I was, and Terry recognized that. He understood and valued their importance as no one had ever done. Terry was the first man I'd been with who I felt could truly “see” me. By encouraging me to explore my psychic life, he also helped me to start trusting Jim.

In the course of my therapy, I slowly recalled other premonitions I'd had as a child. For instance, one day when I was nine, my parents introduced me to Evan, a longtime friend of theirs from London who took frequent business trips to the States. An impressive man, he was an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur who appeared to have it all: a beautiful wife and family, good health, and the means to maintain an elegant lifestyle, complete with servants, a Rolls-Royce with chauffeur, and a country estate in Surrey.

Within minutes of first being introduced to Evan, however, a sense of dread overtook me, a sinking feeling in my stomach, a certainty that something bad was about to happen to him. My feelings alarmed me because I could see no apparent reason for them. Here was this successful friend of my parents, but I couldn't wait to escape his presence. When I told my mother, she said, “How can you feet that? You've barely met him.” I couldn't explain my feelings; there was nothing to back them up, and I felt terrible about myself for having them. We both gladly dropped the subject. Nonetheless, I couldn't help my response. It was automatic, instinctive. I was reminded of how my dog once reacted to a friend of mine, barking and growling at her whenever she came to the house. That was annoying to me, so I had a sense of how my mother felt.

But then, three weeks later, my parents received a call from mutual friends. To the surprise and shock of everyone who knew him, Evan had committed suicide. This time my mother didn't call it a coincidence. Rather, she acknowledged that I must have sensed something: “You were right about Evan. I can't figure it out, but somehow you knew.” It was also clear, however, that she was unsettled, reluctant to have further discussion. There was an unusual resignation in her voice, a heaviness, a mix of awkwardness and sadness. She seemed not to know what to do with me-I was odd, a curiosity, something from another planet. My mother had validated what I'd said, but in the end she left me more mixed up than ever. She dropped the subject and life went on as if all this had never happened. Once again, I felt alone, tainted, fearing I'd colluded in something awful, as if stranded with my own thoughts on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. So I tried to act normal, didn't talk about my feelings.

Jim's attitude toward these incidents was enormously comforting. What I appreciated the most was that he didn't seem judgmental or afraid. A psychiatrist, trained of course in conventional medicine, he could very well have pigeonholed me as a “nut” and dismissed my experiences. Worse, he could have analyzed and interpreted them, searching for hidden meaning rather than taking them on their own terms. Or he could have prescribed antipsychotic medications to squash my abilities. But he didn't. Nor did he hide his bewilderment. It was an odd situation: He was confused; I was confused. But we were trying to sort out our confusion together, which in a roundabout way, allowed me to feel safe.

One day, Jim recounted a psychic experience of his own, which occurred when he was a psychiatric resident at the Meninger Institute in Kansas, During a snowstorm, his car had a flat tire on a remote country road. When it was clear that he wouldn't be able to return home on time, he knew that his wife would be worried. He really wanted her to know he was okay, but there were no phones. During what they later established had been the same period, his wife had a dream in which she saw Jim's car having tire trouble but that he was unharmed. Not surprisingly, this unusual communication between them had stirred Jim's interest in the psychic.

I was touched by Jim?s story as well as incredibly relieved to be in the company of an educated person with advanced academic credentials who'd also had such experiences. At least I wasn't the only oddball running around! This gave me solace. Also, I'd taken a risk in trusting Jim, and he didn't let me down. Far from condemning me, he'd shown a profound respect for what I was going through. So when Jim encouraged me to go farther and remember other such events, I felt safe enough to do so.

My mother had a close friend, Harry, a Superior Court judge in Philadelphia. She thought of Harry as her mentor, loved him dearly, credited him with inspiring her to attend medical school in an era when few woman were being accepted. When I was ten, Harry ran for reelection to the post he'd held for the past thirty years. Few things in life meant more to him than being a judge. A week before the election, I had the following dream:

I'm in a huge, well-lit room jammed with people. Harry is up on the podium giving a speech. It's so crowded I can barely breathe. My head pounds. I'm afraid of something but I don't know what it is. A man's voice comes in over a loudspeaker and announces that Harry has lost to his opponent. Harry lowers his head, walks into the crowd, and is about to leave the room when suddenly a woman whose face I can't see rushes toward him and bites his hand. From Harry's expression, I know he recognizes the woman and is crushed.

I didn't want to alarm my mother, especially after her reaction to my premonition about Evan. But I was upset and wanted her support, so I took a chance and told her. Anticipating the success of her friend, she of course found my dream the last news she wanted to hear. She sighed and put her arm around me. “Why do you say such negative things?” she asked, exasperated. After my predictions of her father's death and her friend's suicide, this was just too much. I sat there and wished I could take it back, but the damage was already done.

The night of the election, I sat with my parents in Los Angeles, anxiously awaiting the outcome. Nightmarishly, it was as my dream had predicted: Harry lost by a landslide. If it had only been his defeat, the dream would have seemed less significant. But there was more. At the polls that night, Harry's daughter-in-law, a manic-depressive under psychiatric care, had an acute psychotic break and rushed up to him, viciously biting his hand. Immediately following this attack, she fled into the crowd to hide. Later, she was found and admitted to a hospital for treatment.

Of course, the lives of Harry, his son, and his daughter-in-law were radically disrupted that evening. Over the next few months I heard a lot about their suffering, and couldn't help but question what role my dream had played. Although my parents never suggested that my prediction was in any way responsible, I had my doubts, especially when in a moment of frustration my mother told me never again to mention another dream to her. I knew she was disconcerted by what had happened; I knew she hadn't meant to hurt me. She was simply on overload, and I backed off. But it was also true that she could be overbearing, that she was a woman of great force, and that I couldn't help reacting to her. From that day on, in any case, I kept to myself what I'd come to regard as a shameful secret.

With Jim's support, I was able to feel my tremendous sense of guilt about having made these catastrophic predictions. It seemed, in fact, that I could easily foresee death, illness, and earthquakes, but rarely picked up anything on a happier note. I'd grown up believing there was something malign in me, that somehow I was causing the negative events I was able to predict. Could I have contributed to Harry's defeat, triggered his daughter-in-law's psychotic break? I wondered. None of my friends ever spoke of such experiences. Increasingly, I felt like an outsider, never quite fitting in anywhere.

Then, I told Jim, in 1967, my junior year of high school, I discovered drugs. Although I attended University High, affectionately known as “Uni,” in nearby West Los Angeles, most of my friends were seniors at Palisades High in the Pacific Palisades, a more prestigious part of Los Angeles some ten miles away. After school my “Pali” friends would pick me up and we'd go get stoned. I found that most drugs, with the exception of hallucinogens, dulled my psychic abilities, giving me the illusion that I fit in with my friends. My yearning to feel a sense of belonging would temporarily be satisfied. But no matter how many friends I thought I had, a part of me knew I was living a lie. Then came the night of the accident.

Was the tunnel I encountered as I plunged downward over the cliff related to my premonitions? Neither Jim nor I was sure, but he taught me to trust the authenticity of my experiences. Most important, he helped me see how irrational it was to believe I was causing the events I predicted. He conveyed how children with these gifts who were not educated about them were prone to making preposterous assumptions about themselves. Jim showed me that the real issue was not my abilities, but my misunderstanding of them.

Jim's only concern about helping me explore this aspect of myself was that I'd get so absorbed in it I'd let go of the rest of my life. He had watched people become obsessed with extrasensory experiences and lose track of reality. Even so, he felt I had enough strength to straddle both worlds.

When I first opened up to Jim about my psychic abilities, he had to accept whatever I told him on faith. For all he knew I might be fabricating grandiose stories to manipulate him. There was no proof because, out of fear, I'd suppressed my gifts, and they didn't come back right away. But Jim trusted me, in part because he believed that everybody had such sensitivities but discounted or rejected them. They just got crushed by parents, teachers, or therapists along the way. But Jim didn't think these abilities ever really disappeared-they kept trying to reemerge, and that scared people. He said it took immense energy to keep anything so powerful sealed up within, resulting in depletion and depression, but added that he'd get little support for these beliefs from his peers.

Though everything Jim told me made sense, I'd lived with isolation for many years, and still resisted his authority. It was a long time before I could really let him in. Over a year after the car wreck, I was in one of Jim's group-therapy sessions. Six of us met in his Beverly Hills office each Tuesday afternoon. I was the youngest and by far the most angry, combative, and disagreeable. It wasn't that I really wanted to pick fights; I just wanted to keep others at a distance. Everyone else in the group had been in therapy long enough to understand that I would either work through my anger and settle down, or leave. I had little doubt that most of them were hoping for the latter.

Toward the end of one of our meetings, John, a businessman in his late fifties, and our newest member, started talking about his depression. Though I was listening to, him, my attention began to drift: I must have been either daydreaming or in a light trance when suddenly I saw a car catch on fire with a woman and child trapped inside. I gasped, and everyone fell silent, their attention focused on me.

When, as Jim asked, I recounted the vision, John's depression turned to anguish. Through his tears, he revealed to us for the first time that his wife and young daughter had recently been killed in a tragic explosion when their car collided on the freeway with a gasoline truck.

Even though I logically knew I couldn't have been linked to his family's fate, at that moment I felt responsible for John's sorrow. Every childhood fear I'd ever associated with my psychic abilities erupted; the self-accusatory voices in my head took over, full of blame.

After the session ended, Jim took me aside. It had been one thing for him to sit in a plush Beverly Hills office and listen to my far-out stories week after week, but it was something else to witness a living demonstration. I remembered when I was a child, my mother, in her desire for me to have a normal, happy life, had warned, “Don't tell anyone about your predictions. They'll think you're strange.” I'd believed her. Now I was really worried that Jim wouldn't want to see me anymore, that he'd decided I was too much to handle.

It turned out that my apprehensions were unwarranted. Reassuring me, Jim said I wasn't crazy; my suffering and confusion had been caused by the suppression of my “gifts.” Rather than being gotten rid of, they needed to be developed with proper guidance. He suggested I meet Dr. Thelma Moss, a psychologist and psychic researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute who specialized in the study of paranormal phenomena. I was astonished that such a person actually existed. In the past, she'd referred numerous people to Jim who were having difficulty coping with their psychic experiences. Jim was certain that if anyone could appreciate my experiences and support me in learning more about them, it would be Dr. Moss. For the first time, I felt a glimmer of hope.

Copyright © 1996 by Judith Orloff, MD

About the Author

Judith Orloff, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, and a staff member at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She is also the author of Second Sight, a memoir about coming to terms with her intuitive abilities. Dr. Orloff is an international lecturer and workshop leader on the interrelationships of medicine, intuition, and spirituality. Her work has been featured on CNN, PBS, Lifetime, A&E, and NPR and has appeared in New Age, Self, and USA Today. She lives by the ocean in Los Angeles, California.