How do people react when...

Debi

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How do people react to you when you share your interest in the paranormal? Or DO you share that interest with others? If you have gifts, do you share that part about yourself or keep it quiet until you know someone really well?

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I’ll go first on this one.

I’ve never told anyone I’ve met in person for the first time about my interest in the paranormal nor my gifts. Both are too complex and too personal. It typically takes awhile for me to build a rapport and trust level to be able to discuss either of these topics.

I have only shared either of these aspects with a total of 20 people in my entire life. None of my family know about this. Certainly, anyone I have ever had a romantic or similarly intimate relationship with was aware of my gifts.

To this very day, four of my very longest term and closest friends do not know about either of these aspects of me.

There are two exceptions - the group of witches I used to meet with when I was trying to discover who I am and you all here at the PNF.net. Granted, the anonymity of the internet made it easier to open up here very quickly.

Later I promise to post a short story about being outed on a first time business meeting.
 
I’ll go first on this one.

I’ve never told anyone I’ve met in person for the first time about my interest in the paranormal nor my gifts. Both are too complex and too personal. It typically takes awhile for me to build a rapport and trust level to be able to discuss either of these topics.

To this very day, four of my very longest term and closest friends do not know about either of these aspects of me.

There are two exceptions - the group of witches I used to meet with when I was trying to discover who I am and you all here at the PNF.net. Granted, the anonymity of the internet made it easier to open up here very quickly.

Later I promise to post a short story about being outed on a first time business meeting.
I do want to hear the story for sure.

I've lost family members to this. I have siblings who refuse to speak with me over it. Is what it is and I simply accept it's their choice.

When it comes to meeting new people, I keep it quiet until some sort of bond is made...or not made. Since I run a forum, it's a bit easier now to kinda segue into that conversation...lol It's like a small bomb going off in a quiet room..."What do you do?" "Me? I run a Paranormal Forum..."
 
I do want to hear the story for sure.

I've lost family members to this. I have siblings who refuse to speak with me over it. Is what it is and I simply accept it's their choice.

When it comes to meeting new people, I keep it quiet until some sort of bond is made...or not made. Since I run a forum, it's a bit easier now to kinda segue into that conversation...lol It's like a small bomb going off in a quiet room..."What do you do?" "Me? I run a Paranormal Forum..."


Yes Debi, I promise to share it.

But in trying to address your original question more directly, I have only ever really “come out” to one person. That was my best male adult friend. He was a roommate too for several years. There were only a few things that happened while we lived together so I was never really forced to address this aspect with him. But several years later after he was married, I did “come out” to him. It was pretty chill over all. His immediate response was, “You probably know that I don’t believe in any of that kind of stuff. However, if there was ever going to be a person those things would happen to, I know for certain it would be you.”

His acceptance was probably the most important to me. And his response was the best I could have hoped for. In the years since, he has never asked me anything about that aspect of me.
 
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Yes Debi, I promise to share it.

But in trying to address your original question more directly, I have only ever really “come out” to one person. That was my best male adult friend. He was a roommate too for several years. There were only a few things that happened while we lived together so I was never really forced to address this aspect with him. But several years later after he was married, I did “come out” to him. It was pretty chill over all. His immediate response was, “You probably know that I don’t believe in any of that kind of stuff. However, if there was ever going to be a person those things would happen to, I know for certain it would be you.”

His acceptance was probably the most important to me. And his response was the best I could have hoped for. In the years since, he has never asked me anything about that aspect of me.
I "came out of the broom closet" a long time ago. Since I was raised as this all being "normal", I just treated it as such for the most part. My hubs didn't believe it at first, until...well, that's another story where something held him up against a wall for a bit feet off the floor. And it wasn't human. Sudden believer I had there! lol Dad taught me to not make it all about the "magic", as he said. As people noticed I could do some things, the topic would normally come up after a bit.

It's good your friend just accepted it as part of you. I have good long term friends who just see it as one aspect of who I am and it has never gotten in the way.
 
Later I promise to post a short story about being outed on a first time business meeting.

So here is the haps on that event. I think it important to understand that the backstory that made the outing possible is an incredibly important part of how I grew and learned to become who I am. Let’s see how much I can miniseries the text yet still maximize the informative value in approximately sequential order.

First of all, at one point in my career I was a manager with a staff of 20 employees.

Two of my employees separately discovered on their own, and revealed to me in separate dramatic fashions, that I had been reading their thoughts in very specific detail. These two points are best left for other posts/threads because either could get deep. Suffice it to say they both pointed a clear yet subtle “you’re psychic” finger at me. Thankfully their reactions were such that their discoveries were not a hinderance to our professional relationships.

Maybe two years later, the male subordinate (the other was a female), moved into a position within our company such that he was no longer a subordinate to me. After that point, our personal relationship flourished and I learned he was a shaman. Though he and I and his wife grew very, very close, he and I never looked at each other as “best friends”. Regardless, we became the closest, most intimate of confidantes. He was sincerely interested in how it might be that my psychic gifts were so strong. He was well aware that I was looking into Wicca as a possible way for me to (erroneously) discover more about my psychic self. Those of you who have read other of my posts here in the past 2-1/2 months have heard more about some of the details of my meetings with witches and shamans as a form of “self analysis and third-party research”. This friend and I made a pact to meet every single Saturday for breakfast (often three hours long) so we could discuss openly and deeply our weekly spiritual experiences. This continued for five full years with us missing only a couple of breakfasts. During some of that same time, I was also attending some Wicca classes and rituals and sharing my learnings with this same friend.

At some point during this period, my friend indicated that he had another physically distant friend who was also very psychic and into Wicca. He asked if he could compare notes of our discussions with her to help me learn more from an independent third-party? I was okay with same because I trusted his ability to clearly relate the info to all parties and I knew I could ultimately benefit from his external sharing. What I didn’t think enough about was that this third-party was someone who worked for another competing company inside our industry.

After five years my friend and I met for an unplanned final breakfast. [The rest of the story coming soon...editing my post now to picking up where I left off last night. I apologize all for the interruption.]. At one routine early March, 2003, Saturday breakfast meeting, I had to tell my friend that my SO and I were moving to Florida in four weeks. This would be our last of a really long run of very rewarding weekly breakfasts. He acknowledged my news and shared that he and his wife had just bought a home 40+ miles away so he too thought this might be our last breakfast.

One month later my SO and I moved to Florida at the request of our employer.

Anticlimactic as it may seem after all of that text, here is how my “outing” went. One routine workday morning in 2006, the local Vice President where I worked brought around a new senior level manager to meet the rest of our local management team. These introductions were done in a fairly personal manner meeting with just a couple of managers at a time. When they came around to meet me, I had two other managers with me as they each had offices right next to mine. After the VP introduced me, announcing my name, the new employee looked me directly in the eyes, smiled coyly, repeated my name, and winked. Contrary to how things might have looked on the outside, I didn’t previously know this person. Immediately after the meeting, the other managers started drilling me for info on what that odd exchange was about and “who is she?” I had no answers. Later in the day I approached the new employee to ask her the same questions. My stressor began when she told me we had a “mutual friend” and then announced my longtime confidante’s name. She explained that she was an out and open witch and volunteered too that she had been our mutual friend’s sounding board on some of the material he and I shared during our long past Saturday breakfast discussions. This included many details about me and my experiences. I explained to her that I was not open in public about my paranormal believes and gifts and asked her to honor that position.

She mostly did so for the two years we worked together; she ultimately left the company. But during the time she was there, she would infrequently speak openly with me about very controversial subjects; and, on those occasions I’d have to remind her to help maintain my anonymity.

Though it was sincerely an honor to meet and work with her, it was also a small relief to have her leave. From the moment she arrived at worked, and continuing for nearly two years after she left, I had employees hitting me up for details about “who she was” and what our relationship was about. The one that prickled me the most was a religious fundamentalist who would infrequently chide me that he “knew what I was all about” and implied that one day he would make it public. Though it bordered on workplace harassment, I didn’t feel that I could raise the point to HR without also risking revisiting the same old questions about that earlier suspicious relationship.

So I’d been outed to a stranger who two years later became a coworker. And for the next four years, I was teetering on being forcibly outed by another.
 
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I apologize. I’ve gotten interrupted. I’ll have to finish this short story later. I don’t know if I’ll be able to edit that prior post. If not, my next post will make it clear where I’m picking up in the story. Sorry again.
 
I apologize. I’ve gotten interrupted. I’ll have to finish this short story later. I don’t know if I’ll be able to edit that prior post. If not, my next post will make it clear where I’m picking up in the story. Sorry again.
No problem...I'll edit in for you for pick-up later.
 
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So he is the haps on that event. I think it important to understand that the backstory that made the outing possible is an incredibly important part of who I am. Let’s see how much I can miniseries the text yet still maximize the informative value in approximately sequential order.

First of all, at one point in my career I was a manager with a staff of 20 employees.

Two of my employees separately discovered on their own, and revealed to me in separate dramatic fashions, that I had been reading their thoughts in very specific detail. These two points are best left for other posts/threads because either could get deep. Suffice it to say they both pointed a clear yet subtle “you’re psychic” finger at me. Thankfully their reactions were such that their discoveries were not a hinderance to our professional relationships.

Maybe two years later, the male subordinate (the other was a female), moved into a position within our company such that he was no longer a subordinate to me. Our personal relationship flourished and I learned he was a shaman. Though he and I and his wife grew very, very close, he and I never looked at each other as “best friends”. Regardless, we became the closest, morst intimate of confidantes. He was sincerely interested in how it might be that my psychic gifts were so strong. He was well aware that I was looking into Wicca as a possible way for me to (erroneously) discover more about my psychic self. Those of you who have read other of my posts here I the past 2-1/2 months have heard more about some of the details of my meetings with witches and shamans as a form of “self analysis and third-party research”. This friend and I made a pact to meet every single Saturday for breakfast (often three hours long) so we could discuss openly and deeply our weekly experiences. This continued for five full years with us missing only a couple of breakfasts during that time, I was also attending some Wicca classes and rituals during a part of this time too and sharing my learnings with my friend.

At some point during this period, my friend indicated that he had another physically distant friend who was also very psychic and into Wicca. He asked if he could compare notes of our discussions with her to help me learn more from an independent third-party? I was okay with same because I trusted his ability to relate the info in all directions and I knew I could ultimately benefit from his external sharing. What I didn’t know was this was that third-party was someone who work for a competitor company inside our industry.

After five years we met for an unplanned final breakfast.

(The rest of the story coming soon.)
talk about a cliffhanger!!!!:eek:
 
I’ve never told anyone I’ve met in person for the first time about my interest in the paranormal nor my gifts. Both are too complex and too personal. It typically takes awhile for me to build a rapport and trust level to be able to discuss either of these topics.

that is the reason I would never tell anyone if I saw a UFO or ghost. Also the reason i am skeptical of most reports on them, Especially if the person telling the tale is well educated.