Never Trust
a Medium

Before we beginHi.

Yes, you read the cover correctly. I have worked as a professional medium for more than thirty years — private sittings, public demonstrations, teaching all over Europe — and I am telling you: never trust a medium.

Not the famous ones. Not the gentle old lady in the little room. Not me.

This is not a book against mediumship. I have given my whole life to this work, and I believe with all my heart that it heals people. This is a book against giving your power away — to anyone. Because I have watched a few careless words from a stranger become the law of somebody's life, and I have watched it too many times to stay quiet.

I was fooled myself, for ten years, by someone I loved and believed in completely — a respected medium. The court that eventually convicted him said it in one sentence: he used his position as a respected medium against those who turned to him for help. I wrote a whole book about that story — it's called The False Healer, and if you want the full telling, it's there. What those ten years taught me is simple and uncomfortable: it is very, very easy to be fooled — especially when you are grieving, or lost, or hoping. Believe you me, fooled as I've been: if you want it to be real, you FEEL that it is real. And it might not be.

The people most easily fooled are not stupid. They are open-hearted. They are you and me. And here is the pattern under every spiritual deception I have ever seen, including my own: the system is always "trust the guide — doubt yourself." This whole little book is that system turned exactly upside down: test the medium. Trust your gut.

So consider this little book your protection. It costs you nothing, and it asks nothing of you — except one thing, which is the whole point:

Keep your power. You'll need it.

Much love,
//Mia

Chapter 1The pedestal

When a person comes to a medium in grief or confusion, something dangerous can happen quietly: they put the medium on a pedestal. Because this person can speak to the dead, surely their words are God's words.

I've seen it many times. A client hears something from a medium — one sentence, sometimes — and it becomes their law. They make enormous life decisions based on a few words from a stranger.

A good medium will never want this power over you. Read that again, because it's the most reliable test in this whole book: the good ones hand your power back. The dangerous ones keep it.

Here's what the pedestal hides: we are normal people. I've wanted to quit this work several times a year in my hardest seasons. I get nervous before I work — thirty years in, my body still shakes while I tune. I've been sick, tired, wrong, and human my whole career. The stage version of any medium is real, but it is not the whole person — and the moment you believe someone lives up there permanently, you've stopped seeing a translator and started seeing an oracle.

For you who know me, this will sound strange coming from a medium, but: I'm the biggest sceptic in the world — because I've been so naive, and I've been so fooled. Scepticism isn't the enemy of this work. It's the seatbelt. I'm not here to prove anything to anybody anymore, and that gave me a freedom I wish for every sitter too: I give you an experience, and whatever you do with it is up to you. I can't prove anything. You have to prove it for yourself.

There are no oracles. There are only translators. Let me show you what I mean.

Chapter 2The human filter

You must understand how information from the spirit world actually reaches you, because it is not a telephone call. I do not hear a clear voice and repeat exact words. Every piece — every image, every feeling, every name — must pass through my own human mind, my imagination, my life experience.

Think of a medium as a translator. If your father in spirit wants to talk about being a car mechanic, but I've never held a wrench, I will struggle. If he wants to talk about being an artist, I'll understand perfectly — because that's my own life.

This is why two excellent mediums can bring you the same loved one with completely different evidence. It's not that one is wrong. Each medium has a different dictionary, and the spirit world can only use the words that are in it. If you had a secret password with your father, it may simply not exist in my dictionary. It doesn't mean he isn't there. It means that piece couldn't fit through my particular filter.

A true story about how strange the dictionary can be: I once saw a chessboard with a spirit in Gothenburg. I worked everything I knew — strategy, the game passed down the family, a black-and-white personality. All correct, all accepted. And I could feel the whole time I wasn't hitting the point. Afterwards the lady told me: the spirit had worked on the musical Chess. Everything I said was right — and I still missed what she came for, because "musical" wasn't on that page of my dictionary that night.

The filter even has a nationality. I work in my second language, and sometimes mid-demonstration I have to turn to my colleagues and ask: "What do you call a man who lays stones and builds walls?" A bricklayer? — "I have a bricklayer with me." Sometimes I skip a piece of evidence entirely because I don't know the English word for it. The spirit hasn't gone quiet; my dictionary just has a missing page.

And the filter explains one of the old mysteries of this field. Albert Best, a famous Scottish medium, was renowned for producing names and street addresses — the rarest evidence there is. He had been a postman. He'd carried those names and addresses in his hands for years; his dictionary was full of them. Meanwhile I, thirty years in, rarely get names at all — and I never give anniversaries, because I don't even remember when I got married. Every medium's evidence is shaped by the life they've lived. That's not a flaw in mediumship. It's the nature of translation.

One more thing about the filter: it learns. The first years, whenever I felt pressure on the head, I called it a stroke — and it worked, until it didn't. Today that same pressure can mean fifteen different things to me — tinnitus, tumours, the mind, the migraines. When I get a "no" now, I don't collapse. I say: I'm learning something new — and I ask the person to come and tell me afterwards what it was. A medium's accuracy isn't a fixed talent. It's a dictionary that grows — if the medium is humble enough to keep adding pages.

Now you know the first secret: a reading is a duet between a spirit and a human filter. Judge it accordingly. Which brings us to what the filter does with YOUR hopes.

Chapter 3Your dreams, sold back to you

Twenty-five years ago a woman sat with me, and I told her, full of confidence: "I can see you going back to Thailand."

At the end she asked quietly: "That's my dream. But how is it possible? I'm a single mother of six children, living on social welfare."

I have never felt so stupid in my life. I hadn't read her future. I had read her longing — her hopes and dreams, which sit so close to the surface of a person that any sensitive reader will touch them first. And I had sold her own dream back to her as a prophecy.

I learned the lesson. Many readers never do — and some, sadly, learn to use it. When you're told "I see a new love coming, a move abroad, the business succeeding" — ask yourself honestly: is this my future, or is this everything I want, read aloud back to me? You will feel wonderful either way. That's exactly what makes it the most common counterfeit in this business.

I saw the same thing from the other side, as a student. When I didn't want to work on stage, every medium told me "you're not for the platform." The moment I started wanting the stage, they all suddenly saw me on it: "You belong on the stage!" They were reading my wishes the whole time — not my reality.

And here is the damage it does: I knew a woman who was told by a medium she would meet a particular man — and she stopped living while she waited for him. She excluded every real person who came near her, because the prophecy had to arrive first. A careless sentence became the doorkeeper of her whole life.

I'll tell you where this pressure comes from, because I feel it too. The last ten sittings I've done have all ended the same way: "Am I with the right man? Is she the right woman?" The other day a ninety-year-old lady asked me, at the end of her reading: "I just met this man. Do you think he is the right one for me?" — and honestly, I hope I'm that much in love at ninety. But I gave her question back, the way I always do: what do YOU think? Because who is she going to blame if I'm wrong?

That's the whole ethic in one exchange. When it comes to evidence of your loved ones, I'm direct. When it comes to advice for your life, I'd rather say less — "this is what I can see; then it's up to you what you do with it." Any reader who confidently hands you your romantic future has forgotten, or never learned, whose life it is.

The future isn't written in stone. A reading that makes your choices for you hasn't given you anything. It has taken something.

Chapter 4Words that plant themselves

Careless words from a "spiritual authority" don't just mislead. They grow.

A famous reader once told a woman her chart carried a cross of karmic hardship. She never dared to be happy again — her whole life spent braced for the punishment, "because that's my karma."

Another woman told my late father-in-law — the most positive man I ever met, in his wheelchair — that his disability must be punishment for a past life. I have never forgotten my anger.

Even kindly-meant words plant themselves. The first person who ever gave me healing told me to check my thyroid. I panicked and went to the doctor — nothing wrong. But I DO have a thyroid problem today. Who knows — the mind is so powerful, she may have sown the seed herself. That's why, in my own work, I would rather say less than more.

This is also why I take the whole subject of the mind so seriously. I once knew a young man in Switzerland who could materialize sacred ash — I held what appeared in his hands. Then he converted, trained for the Catholic priesthood — and his phenomena changed religion with him: stigmata and holy oil instead of ash. The power was real. The shape of it came entirely from belief. "You don't understand how powerful your mind is," the spirit always told me — and neither do you, which is exactly why you must guard whose words you let into it.

A medium once told me my own future in one sitting, years ago. If I had lived by every word of it, I would have missed my actual life.

If you want to know how deep planted words can go, medicine has a name for it: nocebo — the evil twin of the placebo. There are documented cases of a man swallowing what he believed was a lethal overdose and his body beginning to shut down — from sugar pills. Belief alone drove the failing. And in cultures that practise cursing, people have sickened and died on schedule, from nothing but the announcement. Now imagine what "I see darkness around you" does inside a grieving, open, trusting mind. The words of a spiritual authority are not commentary. They are ingredients. That is why the careless ones are dangerous even when they mean well — and why the fear-sellers are dangerous on purpose.

So here is the rule, and it applies to me too: take everything — everything — with a pinch of salt and personal responsibility. If a sentence from any reader starts making your decisions, it has overstayed its welcome.

Chapter 5How mediums fool themselves

Here's the part most books about fraud get wrong: the biggest danger is usually not the con artist. It's the sincere medium who has fooled themselves.

I say this with love and from the inside: self-awareness, in all honesty — I am the biggest liar to myself. We all are. We have an animal instinct that flees whatever is painful, and we don't even notice ourselves doing it.

Mediums are not exempt. We all think we're right. A medium who has never once questioned whether a message came from spirit or from their own mind is not more spiritual than the rest of us — they've just stopped checking. I've been schooled to check for thirty years and I still ask myself, after certain readings: did I give her false hope? Did I truly serve? The day I stop asking is the day you shouldn't sit with me.

I watched this from very close once. I was married to a trance medium, and over the years I watched the work slowly change — and I can tell you exactly what going wrong looks like: it is not the spirit stepping back. It is the medium stepping away from the power, and the performance continuing without it. The audience rarely notices for years. Sometimes the medium doesn't either. That experience cost me my trust in trance work for a decade.

And I have to be honest about my own part, because it's the part that protects you: I couldn't even comprehend that someone would fake it — I had seen fabulous results with my own eyes. So I fooled myself. And by talking everywhere about how great he was, I fooled a lot of other people too. That is how the machine really runs: not one liar, but one liar and a hundred honest believers doing the advertising for free. I was the most convincing part of the fraud, and I didn't know it.

So learn the patterns I learned too late. They are always the same, in every spiritual deception, big or small: your doubt gets reframed as your flaw ("your ego is blocking you"). You are made special — chosen, spiritually married, the only one who understands. Secrecy is demanded — what happens here is too sacred to discuss with outsiders. The guide always excuses the guru — whatever the human does, a spirit had a reason. And the watching never stops — spirit "sees" what you do, even when the medium isn't there. If you meet even two of these at once, you are not in a spiritual relationship. You are in a net. The strange mercy of my story: even the man who fooled me once said, in a careless honest moment, "listen to your own intuition first, and don't blindly trust what others say." The fraud himself handed me the antidote. It only took me ten years to swallow it.

Want to feel the mechanism in your own hands? I've bent spoons with my mind — twice, when I was relaxed and just playing; the metal goes soft, like butter. But every time I try to prove it to my sceptic husband, nothing. Not even the beginning of the feeling. When I want it too much, the ego walks in and the door closes. Now flip that around and you understand half the false phenomena in this field: wanting doesn't just block the real thing — wanting manufactures the false thing. A medium who desperately needs tonight's trance to be real will produce something that feels real to them. Sincerely. That's why sincerity is not the test.

How do honest mediums stay honest? We police ourselves. I test my own trance with a simple trick: I send a thought toward the spirit — if what's coming doesn't change immediately, it's coming from me, not them. And I hold a brutal standard for the altered states: if what comes through in trance is not better than what the medium can do normally, it isn't trance — it's theatre, however sincere. A colleague of mine once stopped mid-demonstration and told the audience: "I don't know what's me or you anymore, so I have to stop." That sentence is what integrity sounds like. The honest ones check, stop, refund, admit. The dangerous ones never do — because in their world, they cannot be wrong.

And hear this from a professional: of all the mediums I have personally sat with over thirty years, I have been truly happy with two readings. Two. Good mediumship is real, and it is rarer than the advertising suggests. Which is why you need the checklist.

Chapter 9So who CAN you trust?

If you can't trust a medium completely — not even a good one, not even me — who's left?

You. And I don't mean that as a poster slogan; I mean it as the entire discovery of my life.

I have not been to another medium for a sitting in years. Not because I think I'm better — because through many hard lessons I learned to hear my own soul, and it has never once lied to me. My soul is my compass. The whole job of any honest spiritual teacher is to help you hear YOUR whispers more clearly — and then get out of the way.

In spiritualism we have a principle I would keep if I lost every other belief: personal responsibility. It was my lifesaver. Nobody — no medium, no astrologer, no priest, no beautiful reading — gets to carry your life. That weight is yours, and so is the freedom that comes with it.

Here's a small tool I teach, and it's free forever: when you face a decision, ask the question inside before you sleep — am I going right or left? — and don't wait for an answer. The first thing that rises when you open your eyes in the morning, before the mind starts arguing: that's the soul speaking. It got there before the committee woke up.

You'll notice something funny about this chapter: a medium of thirty years just spent a whole book teaching you to need mediums less. That's not a contradiction. That's the job description, done properly.

AfterwordWhy I still do this

After everything in this book, you might wonder why I've given my life to this work.

Because when it's real, there is nothing on earth like it. A mother hears the one detail only her child could send, and I watch a reason to live come back into her eyes. The first message mediumship ever carried is still the truest one: life goes on after death. I love you. I'm sorry.

And because of the thing that took me longest to understand, standing in the wreckage of my own ten years: it was the man who was the lie — not the spiritual world. I lost a marriage, my savings, and very nearly myself. I did not lose spirit, because spirit was never the thing lying to me. That distinction is this book: I am not asking you to believe less. I'm asking you to guard the door better.

That's worth protecting. That's exactly WHY the counterfeit versions make me angry enough to write a book with this title.

So: go to a medium, when your heart needs it. Sit with your whole heart and your whole mind. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Keep your power in your own hands, where it has always belonged.

And never trust a medium.

Not even me.

Much love to you,
//Mia