Blog: A Spiritualist Medium's Point of View

When Someone Who’s Troubled Us Crosses Over
When someone with whom you’ve had a difficult relationship crosses over, there can be a great sense of release. Perhaps your relationship was good for many years, and the person deteriorated near the end of his or her life, making things difficult for both of you. Or perhaps the relationship was always thorny. It can feel as if there’s a lot of unfinished business when you’re the one who’s left on the Earth plane. How can you resolve the relationship for yourself after the person has crossed over?

First of all, it’s extremely important to acknowledge and express your feelings in any relationship, but even more so in this situation. When a relationship has been troubled, there are many issues that need to be resolved so that you can begin to move forward again in life. Society doesn’t offer much help – sometimes you even hear over and over what a wonderful person he or she was, and you wonder why you ended up with all the pain and difficulty. This often happens in very dysfunctional families. It can feel “wrong” to acknowledge and express your anger at someone who has passed, but it’s necessary in order to heal and reclaim your life.

When feelings are authentic, and expressed authentically without “dumping” them on others, there is nothing inherently wrong in the process – it’s completely normal and natural. But again, our society offers little or no encouragement for emotional expression. What makes it “okay” for us to move forward in expressing our true feelings is augmenting our own expression of feelings with a desire that the person’s soul may progress in the afterlife. Spiritualists (and many who are not Spiritualists) believe that after death, the soul begins a process of progression, during which the events of the physical-world lifetime are reviewed and integrated, and the soul begins to “progress” in terms of development. In the same manner that prayers offered for someone who is sick can actually have a physical effect, prayers offered for a soul’s progression send encouragement for that soul’s growth.

Depending on the relationship, it may seem impossible at first to both delve into the emotions you need to let go of, and at the same time say a few words of blessing to the soul on the other side. That’s perfectly okay – each person needs to be in whatever process works best for them, and if what you need right now is simply to work through the feelings, that’s fine. But if you can begin to let go of your difficult feelings with that end point in mind – that someday, even while you’re letting go of the old feelings, you may now and then send them a bit of light – you don’t have to feel like you’re sending them any negative energy as you let go of the past, or doing anything wrong like “speaking ill of the dead.”

It’s often helpful, too, to let yourself mourn. When you’ve had a troubled relationship with someone, you may not need to mourn that person’s passing, or the fact that they’re no longer with you, but you may need to mourn what you wanted and needed from the relationship and never received. This is particularly true when a relationship with a parent has been troubled. Many Adult Children of Alcoholics discover that they need to mourn what they never had in childhood, and this is an extremely healing process – in working through it, you begin to discover what you really do want and need in life, and then it’s much easier to find it, and to know on a gut level when you finally have found it.

The goal is to eventually move towards a sense of freedom, so that you can move forward into living your life in a healthy way, and not feel restricted by the past and old feelings that have never been expressed. It’s so hard to move forward when the past is still standing right in front of you, and when emotions aren’t allowed expression they become rigid ways of seeing the world and creating reality.

If this blog hits home for you, you may want to find a good therapist so you have support as you move through this difficult process. Letting go is not always easy, but it is always healing.

If you had a troubled relationship with a parent, have a look at a very helpful book: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller. It’s an easy read, but it explains so much.

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This site provides information and guidance on the subjects of psychic abilities and mediumship. Information is for general purposes only, and is not to be construed in any way as professional counseling or mental health advice.