My Secret Addiction

Over eight years, I drained my savings and maxed out my credit cards calling online psychics. How a billion-dollar industry fed my need for human connection.

- By Julie Gordon Photography by Grant Harder

THE FIRST TIME I SAW A PSYCHIC was in the late 1990s. I was in my early thirties, living in Vancouver and newly married. When a friend invited me to get a reading with Carole, a visiting psychic medium from Ontario, I went along on a whim.

Before we arrived, I was skeptical that psychic abilities were real. I took my wedding ring off on the way to the appointment so Carole wouldn’t have any clues about my life. But without knowing anything about me but my first name, she picked up that I was married, albeit unhappily. Somehow, she knew I was a writer. What really impressed me was when she channelled my deceased grandmother, telling me about her emphysema, a song she loved to sing, the name of her best friend and an unusual nickname she called her sister. By the end of the reading, I was blown away.

That visit opened my mind to the possibility that some people can access information most of us can’t. Soon, I was visiting psychics and tarot readers two or three times a year, often with friends. I especially liked card readings. They were light, fun. But I was also fascinated by psychics’ abilities. It was thrilling when they pulled a small detail about me out of thin air, or when a prediction came true. I didn’t take it too seriously; it became a hobby of sorts.

A few years after my first psychic reading, my marriage ended (just as Carole had predicted), and I moved to Victoria to start over. There, I met another type of psychic: an intuitive counsellor who used her abilities to help people on a deeper, more spiritual level. I saw her regularly, and she helped me heal from my divorce and process the baggage I had around relationships. This is when I realized that psychic readings could be more than fun—with the right reader, they could be healing.