Teri's journey
The occult, ESP, the paranormal: popular subjects in America in the last two decades. The New Age movement is a part of that. Yet many people have not experienced the supernatural, so they assume it is all a product of overactive imaginations. That is what I would have believed, too, if it had not happened in my own life.
My early childhood was mostly happy. My parents and my younger brother Ernie and I lived in a small town in Florida, in a nice country home with a yard and a home-made swimming pool built by my father. Mom didn't work, but when I was six and my brother was five, she started taking us to the babysitter every day. We both began to have horrible nightmares. I was afraid to go to sleep and Ernie would sneak into my room to get away from the terrifying man he saw in his room. Mom blamed Ernie's nightmares on his asthma medication. Young as I was, I sensed Mom was seeing another man. "Something bad is going to happen between Mom and Dad," I whispered to Ernie one day. But he had already guessed the same thing.
Sure enough, just before Christmas, Mom coolly packed up all our things and drove away with us kids. I will never forget the look of shock and betrayal on my father's face. We drove straight to the house of the man Mom had been seeing, and the three of us moved in. Not long after that he and Mom were married.
When we first moved in, my stepfather Bruce was a kind and generous man. But the longer we lived with him, the more we experienced his fits of rage. He was a very big man and I was terrified of him. His was a Jekyll and Hyde personality; he could be extremely nice one moment, and the next moment extremely cruel. For a few months, he and my Mom drank and fought. Then, through sheer determination, they both stopped cold turkey. I watched Bruce go through 'the shakes'. Afterwards, he never again raised his hand against Mom.
My mother was never an affectionate person--I don't remember her ever hugging or kissing me--but after her divorce and remarriage she became downright cruel. She convinced us that our real father didn't love us, and forced us to tell him we didn't want to see him again. She was filled with hatred toward him, in words and actions. She seemed obsessed with tearing him down. Ernie and I lost both time with our father and our childhoods. Mother demanded total perfection and we were never able to live up to her standards. If we made the slightest mistake, we were accused of doing it on purpose; and if we protested, we were accused of lying and locked in our room. Once, Ernie was locked in his room for three days without food or drink until he decided to "tell the truth." The "truth" of course, was only what my mother or stepfather wanted to hear, and we were kept guessing as to which version of the "truth" they wanted.
My stepfather wholeheartedly agreed with my mother's accusations. Consequently, Ernie and I were screamed at so much we were afraid to talk above a whisper, something my mother's relatives wondered about when we visited them in Pennsylvania. My brother bore the brunt of most of the attacks because he could not stop his asthmatic wheezing and coughing on command. I remember a few days of peace for him once after he told Mom he was thinking of suicide. Almost daily my mother and stepfather threatened to send Ernie to Shiloh Youth Camp for delinquent boys and me to an insane asylum because I "was crazy." Once, I privately asked our school bus driver if the boys' camp would accept girls; I wanted to be sure Ernie and I would be able to stay together. We were so young, we believed every wild story or threat they told us.
Even before we moved in with my stepfather, he and my mother consulted mediums (known in the New Age movement as "channellers"). After we moved in, they took me with them sometimes, although never to a seance. They loved to talk about the thrills of their astral projections (out of body experiences) and the power of the mind. Ernie and I were fascinated by all they told us. Looking back, however, I could see that the more they became involved in their quest to become 'higher beings', the more my parents became abusive, paranoid and delusional. The most dramatic personality change was evident in my mother, something I did not want to admit to myself because I clung to memories of an earlier Mom.
The mediums often spoke of the spirits that surrounded and accompanied my mother and stepfather, who was proclaimed by the spirits as a 'psychic healer'. My stepfather was a chiropractor and incorporated his psychic approach into his practice as much as his patients would allow it. He was very interested in helping people, and according to him, many thanked him for his help.
Apparently, these 'spirit guides' attached themselves to us when we were with the medium, and followed us home to stay with us. You could actually feel their presence, and strange things kept happening. Doorknobs would move when no one was near them, and our cats would follow something around and meow at it. Although Ernie and I were both scared, my mother and stepfather always laughed, insisting that they were friendly spirits, or at worst mischievous. They themselves also experienced the presence of their various 'friends', and were not alarmed.
I knew nothing of Jesus or God, except what the spiritualists taught. However, when I was eleven a friend from school invited Ernie and me to a Baptist revival where we heard the gospel for the first time. What the preacher said scared me enough that I went to the altar and sincerely prayed the sinner's prayer. As I knelt there, I felt the sweet touch of a different spirit, but I didn't know then that it was my first encounter with God's Holy Spirit. Ernie and I were baptized in water during that revival, but I hid our baptismal certificates from Mom because I knew she would be furious. Sure enough, when she did find out I believed in God, she overwhelmed me with questions far beyond my ability to answer. Mostly out of self-defense, I abandoned my new faith. For some odd reason, my mother also demanded that I say I did not believe in the Holy Spirit, either. I did not even know what that was!
A year later, when Ernie was eleven, Mom threw him out of the house and told him to go live with his #%$@!! father, since they both looked so much alike. I was devastated. Ernie and I had fought like brothers and sisters do, but we were very close; I felt he was the only family I had. Suddenly, I comprehended the magnitude of the hatred in that house. Losing Ernie forced me to make a decision: I had to survive or let the hatred destroy me. I decided I would become a survivor. However, I was to pay a price: having gotten rid of Ernie, my mother and stepfather turned the full force of their rages and demeaning verbal abuse on me.
In spite of my best efforts, the rejection I suffered turned me into an angry child who hated her parents. I was convinced the world was ugly and that everyone hated me. I did not like the person I was becoming and I longed to be free of the hatred. I began my long search for the Truth I had not found. I studied many of the major religions for awhile. "All roads lead to the same end," Mom said.
When I was twelve, I began to see what the mediums saw in the spiritual realm, even at home! My stepfather was very excited, since all the mediums he took me to had very positive things to say about my 'old' soul and spirit guides, telling me that if I chose to, I could become a very powerful medium and help many people. Thrilled that I seemed to be a gifted psychic, my stepfather made sure that I was well-supplied with all the literature I needed about spiritualism. With his encouragement, I explored hypnotism, ESP, numerology, palm-reading, and auras. Eventually, I decided to concentrate my studies on astrology and white witchcraft, which is the practice of removing a hex or curse or invoking good fortune on someone. Like him, I was very interested in helping people.
Of all of my 'supernatural' experiences, there was one that puzzled me the most. One morning I woke up filled with an overwhelming appreciation for God's creation---even though I no longer believed in God. This was not my usual angry state of mind, and I wondered at the joy and peace I felt. As I tried to get out of bed, an invisible hand pushed me back. Suddenly I saw the incredibly beautiful underside of a white dove, made completely of light, flying by at great speed. A quiet voice in my mind whispered, "Father, Son, Holy Spirit." I knew the vision was from heaven, but I honestly had no idea what the words meant. Later that summer when I attended a Catholic Church with my maternal grandmother and heard the same phrase, I at least understood that it had something to do with the Bible. My Mom bought me a 'Living Bible' at my request, although I still had trouble comprehending it, which disturbed me. Bruce could not object to my reading it because he quoted scriptures at times. However, he was an atheist and he could become hostile at the mention of God, so I did not tell him everything about the vision. I myself almost completely dismissed the incident.
My stepfather's mother was a 'black witch', and he firmly believed she was determined to destroy him. Thoroughly frightened, he rallied his family behind him to "return her hexes" (a white witch tactic), explaining to us that he was weary of her curses. She soon became ill, and sent me a letter telling me that I was "her favorite." The night she died, I was awakened from a dream with a very loud knock on my bedroom door. In the dream I had seen a picture of Jesus at a door, knocking, and had been told, "The devil knocks, too. Don't let him in." The knock was so loud that my parents heard it too, but acted unconcerned.
That same night, I felt a cold chill enter my room and witnessed objects move around. This 'poltergeist' remained in my room for the next few years. It was easy for me to deduce that it was related to my stepgrandmother, since my stepfather told me later how she had tormented him with her spirits late at night: "I used to be terrified at the knocks in my room, and she would laugh down the hall. But that's just how the spirits announce themselves. We hear it in seances." Because of their earlier reactions to such things, I didn't report the 'poltergeist'.
My stepfather began to include me a little in helping those who asked him for help, and I was given a cross necklace in gratitude from someone whom I had 'protected' from a black witch. I liked the power and recognition, and truly felt I had found my destiny, but the more I meditated to increase my powers, the more I was tormented by an irrational sense of dread. I compulsively charted my astrological signs every day.
You would think that my success in my 'powers' would improve my relationship with my parents. But it most definitely did not. I still spent the next few years trying to survive the psychological abuse from my mother and stepfather. Mother was becoming even better at twisting everything I said, did, or didn't do, into some evil motive. Unable to escape their constant assault, I began to break under the stress. My brother visited once or twice and said he felt sorry for me, but my father seemed to think that I was well-off because Mom had gotten me a horse. I knew I needed help but I had nowhere to turn. If I ran away, who would believe me? Bruce and Mom kept up appearances well. Things got worse. Once when I was about fourteen, as we were coming home from the movies, my parents started screaming at me about the chores I was to do when I got home. I knew perfectly well what I was supposed to do, and as they listed them for me again and again as if I were a retarded child, I felt the anger rise in me like a volcano, then something split inside.
When we arrived home and I headed across the yard to feed the rabbits
and the horse, I realized I was standing outside my body and
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