Channeling session with my mom #3

August 2023 session transcript

“I’m tired today,” announced my mom’s spirit at the opening of our channeling session.

Tired? How could she be tired on the other side?

Demi was quick to explain that aspects of the human experience can still cling to the energetic cord as we transition to our spiritual state. My mom was still in this transition.

Demi also shared there’s a misconception that the moment someone leaves their body at death, they are automatically returned to the full light of who they are as an embodied spirit. But, it doesn’t always work like that. There are layers. The soul/spirit/human connection is more complex. We are always connected to the higher source of love, but there are aspects that still sort themselves out.

She explained that what we’d been channeling through was the space between the human and the soul aspect of my mom. Especially in the earlier sessions, when she was still in her karmic review process and it felt like an exhausting bootcamp.

Her tiredness today wasn’t physical. It was soul-deep. The kind of tired you feel when you’ve burned through every ounce of emotional strength and you feel spent.

My mom’s spirit’s next words surprised me, shocked me, and broke my heart all at once: “I wanted to call you so many times!”

Demi emphasized how strongly she said it and that my mom really meant it. She said my mom had wanted to call me about three weeks before she died.

Based on how she treated me during the time we lived with her and my dad as caregivers, I’d assumed she didn’t care about me at all. Not even a little. Her toxic behavior during those final months was cold, cruel, and hate-filled. So I was caught off guard hearing that she wanted to call me.

My first thought was that if she had called, it probably would’ve been to scream at me about something trivial or to subliminally shame me, just like she’d done countless times before. She had a way of making me feel worthless.

But, knowing what I’d learned in the prior channeling sessions, I felt a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe this call would’ve been different. Maybe it would’ve been a moment of connection.

Maybe.

Still, I know I wouldn’t have answered. I wouldn’t have replied to a text either because I was still deeply disgusted with the way she treated my dad and me and my smallest dog when we were caring for them. I was still grieving the complex loss of our relationship—grieving the end of something that had always confused and wounded me, but that I’d held onto tightly.

At that point, I’d been no-contact for six months and I confess that it was excruciating. People don’t talk enough about how hard can be to go no-contact with a parent. I cried a lot in those early months. Letting go of her also meant letting go of my dad—at least for a while—and that nearly broke me.

So yes, hearing now that she wanted to call me before she died hurts in a very complicated, very confusing way.

“In the two weeks leading up to my death, the alcohol consumption combined with my prescription painkillers really had a hold on me and had a profound impact on me. Even though my consumption of them wasn’t to the extent it had been before, it was more of a drunken state I was in.

“The consumption didn’t need to be the same as what it was because it was just a drunken state I was in during those final two weeks. The lasting effects of all the alcohol and painkillers I consumed on an ongoing basis lingered residually in me as a drunken state during this time,” my mom’s spirit explained, giving me some insight to her last weeks on Earth.

Throughout her life, my mom drank a substantial amount of alcohol, but I hadn’t realized she did it to numb herself. In her final year, I watched helplessly—frozen in fear and disbelief—as she mixed her drink of choice: a potent concoction of vodka and Southern Comfort, poured over crushed ice from her 1960s-era yellow hand-cranked ice crusher.

I didn’t dare confront her about her excessive drinking. The alcohol enhanced her already erratic volcanic behavior and I felt a visceral need to protect myself and my small dogs during those times. She drank more than I’d ever seen her drink when we lived with them as caregivers.

My husband started diluting her booze bottles with filtered water, hoping to reduce the effect. But it didn’t work. She just drank more until she reached the level of numbness she needed.

“During this two to three week timeframe leading up to my death, I had a moment of epiphany that felt like a bolt of lightning moving throughout my body, causing me to deeply reflect on my life.

“I was shown every aspect of my life. By the end of these weeks I was very ready to cross over to the other side. I experienced despair, sadness, regret during this timeframe—all of these things were part of my experience in those last weeks.”

Despair? Sadness? Regret? Those are not words I ever associated with my mom!

Demi asked, “Did the two of you talk during the weeks leading up to her death that could’ve caused the triggering of her deeper memories? She noticed that you didn’t check in on her much or call her as much. This is what began that process of firing inside her system that brought her to deeper realizations.”

“I was no-contact with her,” I said. “I’d been no-contact for six months by this point and I was in a very deep period of grief and broken heartedness because of the end of my relationship with her. I didn’t even wish her happy birthday on what would’ve been her final birthday three weeks prior to her death. No texts, no phone calls.”

This deep, painful introspection my mom experienced was triggered by my planned failure to call her on her birthday and it ignited a transformative process within her.

I was the catalyst of her transformative process!

Demi confirmed it. “It began this process of firing within her system as those final weeks wore on. She became increasingly prepared to depart this world. Her lifetime of experiences and self-destructive behaviors began to take a heavy, unbearable toll on her.

“She had a great awakening. Truly, from the depths of what’s being shown to me, she had a great awakening with complete and total reflection of her life. She had no idea how to explain it. It’s like she knew in the coming days she would be passing away and there were a lot of gut-wrenching realizations that took her to her knees.”

My abusive mother was feeling remorse?!?

She had gut-wrenching realizations about how she treated me and Dad?!?

My mom? My cold-hearted, mean, narcissistic mother felt despair, sadness, regret at the end of her life?!?

This is monumental information and not at all expected!

But, I didn’t know how to feel. Should I feel happy that she had a miserable, emotionally-tortured end to her life? Or should I feel compassion for the fact that she finally saw it? Finally felt it?

Honestly, I feel both.

“Is there anything else you would like to say, Nancy, before we ask questions?” Demi closed her soft brown eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled. “Would you like to come through, Nancy, just a little bit stronger? I can hear you, I can feel you. We want to invite you to really use your voice and to really allow us to hear you.”

“The questions you’ve been asking during our sessions do help me to heal. Thank you for asking the hard questions around abuse [during our previous sessions] because it did relieve me to not have to hold that any longer,” my mom’s spirit said.

I sighed.

She thanked me for asking hard questions about abuse. That stood in stark contrast to her reaction when I calmly broached the subject of her abusive behavior the year before she died.

I’d heard commotion in the family room one late night in October 2020, so I left the warmth and safety of my bed and tiptoed into the kitchen to investigate, praying the laminate wood floors wouldn’t give me away by making her dogs bark. There she was, sitting on the edge of her ugly blue chair, aggressively abusing my defenseless dad who sat slumped and miserable in his recliner.

My stepping in front of her to protect him infuriated her! She forced her distorted body to stand, leaned into my face so close I could see her blue-turned-black eyes fill with fiery intensity, and she shrieked:

“YES! I’M ABUSIVE! PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO STOP ME, BUT NO ONE EVER WILL!”

I froze in place, terrified of her for the umpteenth time in my life.

“I always did my best to protect you, especially in the beginning before my bad behavior took a hold of me,” my mom’s spirit said.

“I’m getting emotional because I feel her emotion right now,” Demi said.

“My behavior was held in shame. There was a lot of shame I held from the way I treated people. This happened before you even came along. I was kind of a bitch. This was even to people who didn’t necessarily deserve it. Sometimes it was to a store clerk or a waitress. I had a way of putting on the show, but also a way of satisfying a craving that was within me to feel superior, to feel bigger than someone else,” my mom’s spirit said emotionally.

“Really!” I slumped in my chair as I absorbed her latest confession. “Entitlement, as well?”

“Entitlement, as well. Absolutely.”

“Feeling superior and feeling bigger than someone else and entitlement are hallmarks of a narcissist. Her confession unveils a lot,” I said.

Hearing her admit she had an unpleasant personality even before I entered the picture lined up with stories my dad shared during our treasured morning coffee time when I was his caregiver.

He once told me that when he introduced his closest friend to her while they were dating, the friend stared at her and said: “I hear you’re meaner than six acres of rattlesnakes.”

She was sixteen or seventeen at the time. That revelation shocked me because it portrayed my mom as venomous long before I was born. And honestly, the description suited her. Why am I surprised by this?

The statement she made about craving superiority and entitlement shocked me, too. I’ve done the research. I know those traits are indicative of narcissism. But, I didn’t want to believe my mother had them.

She always portrayed herself to outsiders as humble, kind, and nice. But, behind closed doors she was spiteful, mean, angry, and hateful to me and my dad.

What my mom’s spirit revealed next left me gasping!

“It was a craving inside my body to have feelings of uplifted, bigger than, and beyond. These are the reasons I backlashed on you and your dad because the beast inside me really needed the space to feel the craving is accounted for and subsided,” she said.

I recoiled when I heard her say the word beast!

A beast?!?

Does this mean I cowered to a fucking beast instead of my mom?!?

I wasn’t prepared to explore this!

“She is showing me where this intense craving for empowerment, superiority, and being bigger than originates within her body. She is showing me her heart and solar plexus where she emphasizes the rapid transition from calm to chaos, from zero to 100 in no time at all.

“One moment she is composed and everything seems fine and good, then suddenly explosive anger without prediction or cause. She was blowing up everywhere. There was no ability for her to control or regulate this. She did not possess a cognitive understanding that there were ways to manage and regulate her emotions.”

Demi described my mom’s 0-to-100 rages with disturbing accuracy, even though I’d never mentioned them to her.

My body tensed. I felt charged and tight as incoherent memories of the beast’s appearances clawed their way toward the surface.

“Make it stop,” my inner child whimpered.

Spirit interrupted my spiral. “It isn’t so much narcissism as it is ‘not resourced.’ The person is not resourced. And while there is a chemical imbalance inside the physical brain and the body, and there are physiological markers that take place, one of the common misconceptions about narcissism is that it cannot be treated. That is not true. People with narcissistic personality disorder, cPTSD, and other different aspects of experience, sometimes the therapy world or the psychological world will say that there’s no real help for it, but there is. There are people who work very hard on themselves to be resourced and live a regular, normal life.”

“What does, ‘This person is not resourced,’ mean?” I asked.

“The first thing that comes through is the word LOVED. She was not properly loved and cared for during her developmental stages. Whenever someone isn’t properly armed and resourced with the ability to receive love from others, the ability to give love to others, the ability to understand what love even is, it’s aggravating because they need something to feel connected,” Demi explained

“You do not have the ComplexPTSD that your therapist suggested,” spirit added. “It was more of a depression. cPTSD is not a label that we want you to wear.”

“I have full chills through my body, so this is very confirming. I am not a medical professional, but this is what’s being channeled through in the moment,” Demi said.

Spirit continued: “When it comes to narcissism, it’s about not being resourced and mom was not resourced. The way the shame compounded created space for this personality disorder to manifest alongside her childhood head injury, her childhood trauma, and her young-adult trauma—there were a lot of different aspects that aggravated this part of her.

“It’s important to understand that we all have a part of us that can be narcissistic. It doesn’t mean that it’s an active part of who we are, but we all have that part of us available should it be aggravated. But, not everybody’s is aggravated because some people receive the proper amount of nurturance, they receive the proper amount of resources, they receive the proper amount of care and love.

“Your mom did not and this is one of the things that aggravated her experience [of life]. Compounded in shame, compounded in alcoholism, compounded in drug addiction that eventually led to her just becoming what she was,” Spirit said.

“Oh man.” I shook my head in disbelief, took a deep breath, and tried to gather my snowballing thoughts.

“I didn’t receive love from my mom. So why didn’t I end up like her?”

“I am feeling that a lot of the love you received came from your dad. When you were a baby, I feel there are spaces where Mom was able to give you that holding, that being together in a good connection. The early days of your birth did give Mom a sense of purpose and fulfillment, but as time went on and she wasn’t fully able to show up for you, it began to create separation between the two of you.

“I do feel there was a level of nurturance and love and connection to the best of her ability when you were an infant. It just was as you got older and life got more difficult for her—that’s where deeper separation began to happen.

“The other thing that comes through is that you were put in a parental role to the adult child (your mother) which activates the nurturing spaces inside you,” Demi said.

She was right. I’d carried a parental-style role with my mom for as long as I could remember.

I wonder if I ever sensed her scared and desperate inner child? Probably.

“Not all people are so lucky to be able to step into that role and take it on the way you did,” Spirit said.

“Thank you for the recognition,” I said softly. I felt honored by spirit’s compliment.

“Mom, do you have anything else you want to share?” I asked.

“It’s OK if you call me a narcissist. It’s OK,” her spirit replied.

Spirit chimed in again. “We are reminding you that this information about your mom not being resourced doesn’t change the direction of your story.”

“Higher Guidance is coming in to say that one of the ways your story is meant to come through is to change the understanding of what a narcissist is. This doesn’t change the direction of your story or discredit your experience. This generation is called to a level of understanding because it is in the understanding that we can make the shifts at the collective level.

“It may have been nothing years ago to leave five children at home with a 10-year-old in charge to go do the things you needed to do as an adult; however, we’re starting to see the impacts of that as a society. This is an impact of how the narcissism and our pull for power was aggravated inside the human experience. This pull for power is one of the things that drove your mom because she felt so powerless,” Demi said.

“One of the ways I felt in power was by abusing you and your father, and by talking down to people so I could make myself the superior being inside the relationship. This is what gave me power,” my mom’s spirit said.

“At the end of the day, all we want as human beings is power and connection. You and I know the greatest power is love and we know the greatest power is our connection to Source (God). But, people who are not resourced or reminded of it like your mom—they don’t have it,” Demi said.

“Mom, was it your goal during this incarnation to come to Earth as a person who was not resourced in order to heal karma and to experience what you were meant to experience?” I asked.

“Yes. It was my intention to completely forget. To completely forget what it would be like to be totally connected to Source (God). It’s in the soul’s evolution to start fresh,” she replied.

“When you’ve always had love and connection at the soul level, you don’t know what it’s like to not have it,” Demi said. Then she paused and her tone shifted—something new was coming through.

“I feel that this obviously is much bigger than her and you, especially because of the way you are communicating your story, because of the way that people are receiving healing from reading your social-media posts, and from just watching the evolution of your healing from the abuse you experienced and witnessed.

“It’s important to understand that right now in this age of the collective consciousness, we are very much in an awakening stage where a lot of people have been aware of the abuse they endured, but they never allowed themselves to heal from it or know what the healing would look like. As a result, they spend their lives in a sleep state of being.

“However, the healing you’re doing, the healing you’re bringing forward for the people reading your story, for the people who will attend your talks, and different aspects of you sharing your story and this experience that is here to ripple out and help to heal others.

“So, while yes, her forgetting about being connected to Source (God) was about her own soul’s evolution, it was also about the ripple it gets to create for us as a collective space because there are a lot of people who forgot their connection. It was in the forgetting that there was a lot of people who needed to forget so that we could shift this energy back to something that is a more neutral state versus the great polarity that we are experiencing in the world right now,” Demi explained.

Wow! I’m really surprised by the scope of my story and the idea that it could help shift the energy of the collective.

Is that really what I’m doing???

“So, you never had the opportunity to experience love, Mom?” I asked.

“It was as if I was birthed and cast aside. I was very much the scapegoat. There was a lot of focus and trouble centered on one of my siblings who was butting heads with my mom and dad. There was a lot of focus on that when I was born and this is why I was cast aside and why I was the scapegoat.

“I also had stomach troubles as a child and there was a lot of anger and frustration with the way I was handled as an infant. I didn’t sleep well, I was colicky, and I cried all the time. My parents were not resourced to take care of me. I was left to cry it out. There was no nurturing. They didn’t know what was wrong with me.

“I was uncomfortable a lot as an infant and a child. This was a very powerless state for me and I didn’t have a way to fix, help, or relieve myself of the way that I felt. These things began to perpetuate and compound as I got older,” my mom’s spirit said.

So, if my mother wasn’t resourced and her parents weren’t resourced either, does that mean I come from an entire lineage of people who never had what they needed? Who never knew how to give or receive love? Who were left to figure it out in survival mode, generation after generation after generation?

I am the first one breaking this cycle! I am trying to do something wildly different with a nervous system trained for war.

Is that why it’s been so excruciating? Because I’m not just grieving what I lived through, I’m grieving what none of us ever got to have!

I discovered evidence that my mom experienced a profound lack of love and nurturing during her upbringing.

While clearing out my parents’ house after my dad’s passing in early 2022, I came across a black leather wallet she’d used in high school. Inside was a collection of little black-and-white student photographs—peers with whom she’d exchanged school pictures. There were also several words clipped from newspapers and magazines preserved beneath two layers of clear cellophane tape, yellowed by age.

A small, yellowed piece of tape slipped out of the wallet. Enclosed beneath its brittle surface were two words: NOT LOVED.

They’d been preserved intentionally. Two little words trapped for many decades under aging adhesive, hidden in the folds of a teenage girl’s wallet. My mother had labeled herself as not loved. She knew.

Further evidence pointed to a childhood deprived of care and connection. One memory, in particular, stood out.

It was the late 1990s. My mom was around fifty years old. We were at my parents’ house on a late summer day. I happened to glance out a second-floor bedroom window and saw her sitting alone on the patio swing. She looked distressed and burdened. She wasn’t speaking to anyone. Just voicing her thoughts out loud.

And then I heard her desperately plead: “Papa, love me! Pleassssssssse!”

She was crying out to her dead father, begging for his love.

I stood frozen and heartbroken as I eavesdropped. I didn’t know what to make of it because if this was in her, then what else had I never seen?

“These are the types of things that in today’s world we have the ability to rewire in the nervous system. To be able to rewire and regulate that inside the human experience through things like EMDR, hypnosis, energy healing, and meditation, for example. However, in her day and age that was not the case.” Demi said.

“None of this is here to discredit your experience. The collective message is that of understanding because understanding makes way for forgiveness and healing,” my mom’s spirit told me.

I can 100% vouch for that because my desire for understanding why runs vast and deep.

Understanding why my mom was the way she was and layering that with the truth of our pre-birth plan has allowed me to begin healing. To begin working on forgiveness.

It’s been messy, yes, and ver excruciating at times. But, also liberating and essential to my growth and my self-reconstruction.

“Mom, if you’re comfortable with talking about it, please tell me more about what you just described as the beast inside you. The final time I experienced what I now understand was the beast inside you was in a terrifying way in October 2020 when we lived with you and dad as caregivers. Despite not being one to seek conflict, that day I decided to calmly approach you about the daily harsh mistreatment and abuse I witnessed you inflicting on dad, who was terminally ill and physically disabled at the time.  

“Knowing better than to provoke you by displaying any emotions or raising my voice, I remained composed yet determined. I looked you in the eyes and very calmly said with intention, ‘You need to stop abusing and hurting Dad.’

“Mom, this was the first time I had ever confronted you for who you really were. The first time I ever acknowledged to myself who you really were! And, the first time I deviated from prioritizing my own personal safety. However, I could no longer tolerate what you were doing to dad and me because it was breaking me mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. I felt compelled to speak up. It required a great deal of courage and bravery for me to approach you this way.

“The few minutes that followed seemed to stretch on endlessly for me as if time slowed down. You gave me a mean, extremely hateful look that was more intense than I’d ever seen. Then, you stood up and leaned unsteadily on your walker to navigate yourself around the kitchen table and into your bedroom.

“So, I trailed behind you into the bedroom because I wasn’t going to let you get away with gaslighting me or blaming anything on me again. I watched you struggle to lift yourself from your walker onto your bed using your forearms. You then used your forearms to move yourself to the foot of the bed where I was standing. With your fierce black eyes fixed on me, you slowly uttered in a deep and guttural tone, ‘Fuckkkkkkkk youuuuuuu.’  It sent chills up my spine! I didn’t know who you were in that moment! I didn’t know what was happening! I was terrified!

“I stood there in your bedroom motionless, staring at you in disbelief and shock for what felt like hours on end, unsure of who or what you were! The scene I had just witnessed was absolutely unimaginable and completely unprecedented. Intense fear, shock, and chaos washed over me. There are no words to describe how much you terrified me in that moment.

“It was a horrific experience! It deeply affected me, Mom, but at the same time, it provided the confirmation I needed: that something was terribly wrong with you! That night I slept with my bedroom door locked and barricaded by the tall dresser.

“No amount of control or manipulation or gaslighting from you could simply make this incident vanish like you’d done to me so many times before. You constantly gaslit me throughout my entire life, plus instilled a paralyzing fear in me every time I questioned you, questioned your perspective, or challenged your opinion.”

I fought back the breakdown that I could feel coming to the surface.

I didn’t know what was worse—the fear and panic and chaos I felt in her presence that afternoon or the unbearable heartbreak of watching my mom turn into something terrifying that I didn’t recognize.

“It was almost like a possession that came over me when I got to a certain point,” she explained. “This is a lot of the reason why I drank—to try to keep the beast at bay. I didn’t understand that drinking a certain combination of prescription pain pills and alcohol actually aggravated that which I was trying to keep at bay. If I had 2 or 3 I was fine, but if I went beyond that it aggravated what I was trying to keep at bay. If I was stone sober [the beast] was uncontrollable, completely and totally.”

This incident happened two months before December 20, 2020—which is the day I finally allowed myself to acknowledge the truth: my mom was abusive and always had been.

I was so messed up afterward. My entire body was locked in terror. My mind spun in survival mode denial yet again.

It probably took me two full months just to crawl out of the trauma-fog far enough to glimpse the truth.

Because accepting what I actually witnessed would have annihilated every illusion I still clung to about who—and what—my mother was. My mind couldn’t hold that level of terror, so it buried it just like everything else.

And, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known about the beast!

That she had to drink and drug herself to keep it down.

Now it made sense.

Now I understood why she drank so much.

And why she’d explode into abusive flames the second she got home from work after being sober all day, barely holding herself together. By 5:30 p.m., the beast within her burst at the seams the moment the garage door opened and she stepped into the house.

“When you say possession,” I asked, my voice trembling, “do you mean a demonic or evil possession?” I was afraid of the answer and had every reason to be!

“No, it wasn’t an external entity,” Demi quickly answered. “This is very much understanding that we all have this darkness inside of us,”

“Like the shadow self?” I asked, exhaling in relief. I hadn’t wanted to believe my mother was possessed, but sometimes, honestly, it felt like she was. She had said and done things that made me believe she was evil sometimes.

“Yes,” Demi nodded. “But, in her case, with all that she had been through, it was a very aggravated version of the shadow self anchored in frustration and anger.”

“OK, so this has nothing to do with her being possessed by anything demonic or anything exterior. It’s just her very aggravated shadow self really coming into play.” I confirmed.

“Right,” Demi reassuringly replied.

“Mom, did the accumulation of shame and other negative emotions throughout your 70+ years of life play a part in this frightening incident I just described? It brings me great relief to learn that it wasn’t an external force taking control of you.”

I needed to know. I needed to understand what really happened that day.

And I needed to know, now that she’s on the other side, if she remembered it.

“A lot was a blur back then. But, at the same time I felt very exposed [by you] and I really didn’t like that feeling,” my mom’s spirit said.

She felt exposed by me because for the first time in my life I didn’t back down from her.

I had to stop the abuse she was inflicting on my dad. And that meant standing my ground. That meant not defaulting to the decades old fear she’d instilled in me.

Was that it? Were all those years of fear and my constant backing down a way to keep the beast shrouded? Hidden? Unseen?

“YES! I exposed you 100% in that moment!” I said, feeling the triumphant truth rise in my chest. “Safety for dad and for me and for my little dogs was my primary goal. And even though I didn’t understand it at the time, exposure was a secondary goal mainly for my own understanding.

“I’d never ever exposed you in the past because of how much I feared you with my whole being. Plus, the consistent gaslighting and threats from you kept me silent. I was extremely brave and vulnerable when I didn’t back down away from you that afternoon. I was 53 years old—it took me five decades to get the nerve to approach you and not back down. Five decades!!!” 

Five.Decades.

The weight of that truth dropped heavily into my chest. I spent a lifetime tiptoeing on eggshells, flinching, shrinking, self-erasing. In that one chaotic moment, I finally stood my ground. It was terrifying, but it was mine. 

“Yes, very exposed. And by the time that point in history came along I was done. I didn’t want to be alive or be present. I didn’t want to do life anymore. I was completely and totally done. And there was no level of you or anyone getting through to me and no level of healing for me. I was just completely and totally DONE.”

“Yes! I know you were done. Several times I saw you throw your arms up in the air and scream with tears in your sad, confused blue eyes, ‘TAKE ME NOW, GOD!’”

“How frequently did you feel the beast, Mom? Did you ever identify with it?”

“As the alcoholism became more prominent, the identification with it began to show up. This was one of the reasons why I was just ready to be done [with life]. And the frequency [of feeling the beast]—there wasn’t really any level of frequency, per se. It was more about the environmental triggers that presented themselves that created the identification or the feeling of the beast coming forward.”

“Did I see your beast in the incident I just described?” I couldn’t believe I was even asking! “I didn’t know there was a beast inside you, but physically you got into a position that kind of looked like a beast, your eyes turned black, you spoke using a deep guttural voice I’d never heard before. Was that the physical embodiment of your beast inside manifesting because I exposed you?”

“Yes.”

Oh my God!

I saw the beast!

I saw it in the color of her eyes.

I saw it in the way her body twisted on the bed, then propped itself up on its forearms.

I heard it in her voice—feral, unrecognizable.

I stood before it.

I exposed it, even though that wasn’t my mission at the time.

“Did I unknowingly see that beast as a helpless child, Mom?”

“Yes, there were moments where you saw it. Again, as I became older and the alcoholism became more prominent, it came through more because my inhibitions were lowered. Even though you experienced a lot of abuse as a child, I really did have a lot more control and a lot more boundary with that part of myself than you may have thought.”

Wait.

Why am I so shook to hear my mom say that I experienced a lot of abuse as a child?

Why is that the line that undoes me?

Because hearing that one sentence clearly validated my childhood.

It felt like life drained from my body. Like every ounce of hope I’d held onto about who she might have been just leaked out through every pore in my skin.

She was saying it out loud: I’d been abused. A lot.

This wasn’t just validation—it’s the fucking confirmation I never got from her!

It brought the collapse of every protective illusion I’d clung to and coping structure that told me it was safer not to know.

Because now it was spoken.

Now it was more real.

I couldn’t un-hear it.

I can’t retreat into illusion anymore.

I didn’t need to hear more about the beast.

“Mom, did you ever struggle with loving me and caring for me when you were on the receiving end of the same love and care and compassion I gave you?”

“It was never about you. It was never about the desire to love and care for you. The understanding of what love is didn’t make sense to me in the way that I know it now in spirit form. It wasn’t about a desire or a struggle with it. It was more about the understanding of what someone actually needs inside the human experience to feel that.

“In the deepest part of me, I always knew, but there was a lost connection in how to display it. That frustrated me more than anything. We all know how to love. It’s the way that we’ve separated ourselves to protect ourselves that creates the gap in understanding and the gap in our unity.

“I’ve learned my lesson. No more forgetting for me,” said my mom’s spirit triumphantly.

“Good for you. I’m proud of you, Mom!”

“I feel like she’s trying to communicate something more about this struggle for the desire to love you,” Demi stated.

“I don’t want you to feel inadequate. Any of the struggles I had were because of me, not because of you.”

“How do you want me to feel, Mom?”

“How do you want to feel?” She lobbed the ball back in my court.

“I want to feel the ways you never let me feel: powerful, confident, in control of my own life, joyful, creative, wealthy. You always made me feel worthless, unvalued, sad, scared, fearful, unsuccessful, never enough, and shameful.”

There was no sugarcoating it. She stomped on every single part of me that ever tried to grow or improve.

“I want to drive home to you to understand the true meaning of power.”

I held my breath.

That woman had stripped my power from me at every turn. She used power as a weapon—to dominate, manipulate, control, humiliate.

And now she wanted to teach me what it really meant?!?

Okay, I”ll bite. “What is the true meaning of power, Mom?”

“The true meaning of power is to be able to hold yourself in love and in compassion while also being proud and forward facing with your shoulders back and heart open as you say to yourself, ‘This is what I’m going after, this is what I deserve, this is what I’m getting.’ I want you to understand that you can do that while anchored and grounded in love,” said my mom’s spirit.

“You never let me go after something, feel like I deserve great things, or have the desire to get anything. I’m paying for it today in the form of self sabotage, performance fears, lack of self reliance, and fear of money,” I said resentfully.

The resentment and anger surged up really fast.

I remembered the way she used to scream at me—that I didn’t deserve anything, that I’d better learn to do without, that money doesn’t grow on trees, that when money is gone it’s gone or good. And now she’s telling me I can go after things? That I deserve things? That I should feel proud and powerful?

How the fuck am I supposed to do that after more than fifty years of being made to feel utterly worthless—of suppressing every piece of potential I had, just to survive the beast she fed me to?!?

And don’t even get me started on power. She didn’t just strip me of it, she beat it out of me. Those are her own words!

My free-spirited personality? Gone. Crushed under her control. Swallowed by my fear of her. Every time I tried to advocate for myself or stand in my own power (always in a respectful way, I might add), I was punished, shamed, humiliated, silenced.

I lived in a constant state of hypervigilance. Walking on eggshells. Trying to shrink small enough to go unnoticed. Trying to stay safe. She derived pleasure from breaking me. From pulling apart every inch of my being until I became a fragile, hollowed-out shell of who I was meant to be.

And now? Now she says I have the right to use my power. To love myself. To feel proud. To stand tall with my heart open. Now she says I can claim confidence, even though her cruelty trained my body to hunch forward, to look meek and harmless, to not provoke her rage. Every part of me is the manifestation of her abuse.

Now she tells me I deserve joy?!? That I can pursue what I love?!?

“What I experienced with my own shadow self manifesting as my beast within in this lifetime is one of the reasons why your light shines so brightly—you didn’t have to go into your own darkness, even though you had levels of what felt like depression and experiencing those deeper, harder parts of life. But, for you to have to go to the depths of your own darkness like I did—I didn’t want that for you.”

Demi entered the conversation: “What you experienced at the end of 2020 when you came into the awareness of your mother’s abuse, the discovery of her narcissism, and when you began your awakening is the receiving of the dark aspects of the Feminine and being able to hold those dark aspects with love and compassion.

“It wasn’t necessarily about you needing to find love and compassion for yourself because as you began that journey of love and compassion for her, it reflected your love and compassion back to you—the deep acceptance for yourself.

“Everybody’s journey with this is different; however, your mom’s display of the most aggravated parts of the Dark Feminine were magnified and not channeled in the correct ways. There are ways to channel this energy and honor it; we’re not looking to completely eradicate it, but we’re looking to bring balance to it.”

That fateful evening—December 20, 2020—was the night I finally allowed myself to land in the unbearable truth: my mother, who had always been toxic, unpredictable, and hate-filled, was, in fact, a merciless and sadistic covert narcissist.

That revelation sucked the life out of me. It unleashed a torrent of emotional wreckage—grief, rage, betrayal, and deep disorientation. I’d been carrying emotional weight for over five decades, but I hadn’t realized just how heavy it was until it was finally exposed.

It was a painful, paradoxical dilemma. On one hand, the discovery brought a sense of liberation. It explained her cruelty and gave context to over fifty years of confusion, fear, and emotional torment. But, the price of that clarity was steep. The knowing came with a relentless flood of memories—some I’d repressed, others I’d normalized. They coursed through me in jagged pieces, uninvited but impossible to ignore.

I didn’t ask to remember. I didn’t try to remember. But the emotions surfaced anyway—raw, unrelenting, and cellular. I was consumed by vulnerability, exposure, and rage as I stood in the rubble of what I used to believe. Each memory that returned became another snowball in the avalanche I could no longer outrun.

Still, somewhere in the chaos, I found it—the source of my lifelong struggle.

Her.

My mother.

And the brutal, soul-altering truth of what it means to be a highly sensitive daughter of a mean, covert, narcissistic mother.

I’ve come a long way since then, believe me.

“Why did you choose me as your target instead of my sibling?”

“It was the contract you and your mom made prior to this lifetime,” Demi answered.

“Your sibling has their own path,” my mom’s spirit confirmed.

That line affirmed what I’d discovered not long after our dad died: my sibling had a completely different experience with our mom.

I had started to realize it while our mother was dying. I’d sent my sibling a photo—one I took during one of the worst moments I endured as a caregiver. Mom was mid-scream, her face twisted in rage. Alongside it, I sent a second photo: Mom unconscious, wearing an oxygen mask. The contrast between the two images was stark. I thought my sibling would understand it, maybe even validate what I’d been through.

Instead, I was ghosted.

And not long after, my sibling tried to force our dad to remove me from their will and trust.

That was the moment I realized we had lived vastly different lives with the same mother. The emotional fallout was immediate. Betrayal and disbelief followed by a fresh avalanche of fear. Because the truth is, I’d always been scared of my sibling. Still am.

There’s a coldness there that’s always terrified me. A vindictive, bullying energy I learned to shrink around. There was no safety in that relationship—only more walking on eggshells, more pretending, more danger.

And now I knew, without a doubt, I was alone in what I’d experienced and lived through with our mother.

“I watched you on my iPhone as you took your last breath. Did you come to me after you died? Do you know I prayed for you while you were dying? After everything you did to me and said to me, I prayed fervently for you! Even though I was feeling so confused about your death combined with feeling free from your torture because you could no longer say anything or do anything to hurt me again! I fucking prayed for you!!!”

I was really heated and upset by this point in the channeling session.

“Yes, I know all those things. I was with you the moment I transitioned. You wouldn’t let me not be loved. In spite of myself and in spite of everything you experienced from me, you still held this air of, ‘I’m holding you in loving presence.’ It’s not so much that I visited you after I passed; it’s that you wouldn’t let me not know that I was loved.

“If it was up to me, I would’ve just dipped out because I was so ready to just go and leave and transition—to be done with this life. I was so ready to be done with this life! But it was your loving awareness and your compassion that held me in this space of feeling it’s ok and to know I didn’t have to carry so much shame over with me to the other side.

“I visit you a lot, especially while you’re sleeping, but I want to also give you your space,” my mom’s spirit said.

Demi spoke quietly: “I’m getting tearful as she’s saying this because this is how she feels right now.”

“There were nights I’d open your bedroom door while I was living and just look at you. I can’t explain and I couldn’t explain what I was feeling, but I would just open the door and look at you and ask myself WHY. Why couldn’t I take this [Demi motions to her heart space] and communicate it and let it be felt and known?

“There was a barrier inside of me where I knew the right things to do and I knew in the depths of my being how to love, but it was miscommunicated because the neural pathway wasn’t there for it to come into external manifestation.”

My mom suddenly switched gears: “I want you to invite me in and ask me for help financially.”

“In the spirit world, the invitation is needed to enter a space,” Demi explained. 

I inhaled sharply. “WHAT?!?”

My mom?

Helping with money?!?

She and money were one of the worst combinations imaginable! It was the root of some of my darkest memories.

Money—specifically the lack of it, the fear of it, and the way she used it as a weapon—was a constant source of volatility in our home. It triggered rage, manipulation, punishment. She had a dreadful, hate-fueled relationship with money. And naturally, I absorbed it all.

I learned early that money was something to fear. It was always scarce. It was always running away. I was conditioned to believe there would never be enough, it would never return, and that I didn’t deserve anything it could buy anyway.

She enforced bizarre money-saving rules: no hot water when washing your hands, no lights on unless absolutely necessary, the refrigerator or freezer door could only be open for a few seconds. Each of these rules came with screaming and shame, sometimes worse.

And, like everything else, I carried all of it into adulthood without even realizing it.

Those beliefs followed me like dark shadows. My husband and I lost everything in our early 40s—our home, our cars, our security. The financial trauma of being destitute haunted us for over a decade.

So to hear her say this now? To hear her offer to help? I couldn’t believe it!

“Ask me for advice when it comes to investments or bringing in revenue inside of any of your experiences. This will really light me up.”

“Well, this is one of the last things I’d ever expect to hear from you because of how angry and fearful you were when it came to money. This is mind blowing to me!”

“I had a lot of anxiety about money and was very clingy with it. My anxieties and my worries about money are mine, not yours. I have a different perspective about money now.”

“When I invite you in, do I simply ask you to join me?”

“Yes,” Demi answered. “It’s simple. You can say something like, “Mom, I’m inviting you into this situation. What are your thoughts?” Then, grab a pen and start writing. Allow yourself to drop into hearing mode and just give your pen the space to write.”

Then came her final words of the session, “Just tell your story.”

“I have been writing and I’ll dive in with writing even deeper going forward. People need to hear what you have to say because I believe it’ll help with their understanding, their healing, and maybe even their forgiveness process.”

“She’s showing me a big white flower like a peony. I take this as a symbol of her moving through her healing. Typically when I channel her I’ve felt her in this area [motions near her abdomen] and she’d been sunken down, holding tissues, and in a space of moving through the emotional body as I channel her.

“Today, I feel her much more in my heart space. She’s more of an integrative part of the channeling versus an exterior part of it. When I channel, the channel is my own rose line, which is the space right in the middle of my body—this is where I channel spirit through. The fact that she is here in the internal parts of me versus outside shows me that she is making some moves in terms of integrating in the whole,” Demi said.

**********

The tears flowed freely the moment I clicked LEAVE and the video call ended.

I grieved openly—all of it.

My childhood.

Her childhood.

Her unbearable last few weeks of life.

The fact that she wanted to call me.

The pain she carried.

The thoughts she couldn’t escape.

The cruelty she wielded and the beast she couldn’t control.

I grieved the tragic truth that she, too, had once been a scapegoat.

Just like me.

The white peony on my website, The Weight of Belief, honors the white peony my mother’s spirit presented at the end of this channeling session.