Coffey - Growing up psychic : my story of not just surviving but thriving--and how others like me can, too

Copyright 2012 Chip Coffey
Foreword copyright 2012 Dr. Raymond Moody

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint
of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coffey, Chip.
Growing up psychic : my story of not just surviving but thrivingand how others like me can, too / Chip Coffey.
pages cm
1. ChildrenPsychic ability. 2. Parent and child. 3. Coffey, Chip. I. Title.
BF1045.C45C65 2012
133.8092dc23
[B]

2011049425

eISBN: 978-0-307-95675-0

v3.1

This book is dedicated to every person who has suffered
the pain of intolerance, indifference, bigotry, prejudice,
hatred, and/or abuse.

I pray to God that, someday, our world will be
a different, kinder, better place.

Amen.

The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals mentioned in this book have been changed in order to protect their privacy.

They live among us. They are very real and they look just like you and me. They number in the thousands, perhaps millions. In the past, they used to hide in the shadows and carefully guard their secrets, but now, more and more children with paranormal abilities are coming out of the psychic closet in vast numbers and refusing to remain silent.

What can we do to help these psychic kids? Sadly, no one really knows the answer to that question, but until mainstream society at least acknowledges their existence, we cannot even begin the process. And very little will change. They will continue to be misunderstood, mistreated, misdiagnosed, and considered misfits.

The time has come to recognize that these children do exist. They need our understanding and our guidance because right now, at this very moment, there are children and families in crisis.

Thats why I wanted to write this book: to rattle some cages and continue the process of educating the public about psychic kids. It is my hope that I can help to change the ways psychic childrenand all true psychicsare perceived and treated.

APPENDIX A
Prayers of Protection

APPENDIX B
True Tales I Never Tire of Telling

In this delightfully engaging book, my friend Chip Coffey discusses a puzzling, enormously portentous, and yet quite common kind of occurrence: seemingly normal kids who say that they see spirits or talk to dead people. I hear from parents with stories like these all the time, and generally they are curious about whats happening to their child, but even more, they are worried. They worry that their child might be mentally ill or disturbed despite the fact that otherwise the child seems perfectly okay.

Chip Coffeys book will be very useful for these parents, I believe, and a source of comfort and reassurance. He offers insightful observations and practical tips about how to handle this perhaps strange-seeming, but nonetheless remarkably frequent, set of circumstances.

I could relate plenty of cases like those Chip describes in this book, but instead, I would like to share what happened to me with two of my own kids. My wife, Cheryl, and I dont talk about life after death. Talking about life after death is my profession, something I do when I am on the road on lecture tours. At home, Cheryl and I talk about what we are having for dinner that night. We talk about how we are going to pay the phone bill. We talk about what to do about our kids homework assignments. In sum, we just talk about normal, regular, everyday family things. Plus we dont go to church, so our children have grown up insulated from speculations about the afterlife.

Nevertheless, things have happened with our two young kids, both adopted at birth, that thrilled, inspired, and astonished me beyond words. When my son, Carter, was five years old, he and I were sitting together on the bed watching television. I was flipping through the channels with the remote control. As I flipped past what turned out to be the National Geographic Channel, Carter suddenly became very animated. Dad! Dad! Thats my village! he shouted.

When I turned back to the channel, a documentary about village life in China was playing. Carter started chattering away about the life he had lived in China with his previous mother, father, and siblings. Then, obviously realizing that I was utterly dumbstruck and baffled, he paused to orient me.

Yeah, he said, and then I was up in the air and I looked down and I saw you and Mom lying in the grass. To make a long story short, five years before Carter was born, Cheryl and I were touring Greece. One day when we were visiting an archaeological site and were really tired, the guard at the site invited us to lie down on the grass and take a nap. As we were lying there, we began talking about our desire to adopt a child.

The same kind of thing also happened with my daughter, Carol Ann, when she was nine years old. Together these incidents absolutely convinced me that our children came specifically to us, albeit not by the biological route, but by a spiritual pathway instead.

I know that many, many other parents have had these same kinds of life-changing spiritual experiences with their own children, and my hope is that in the future academia wont be as timid or rigid as it is today and serious, rigorous scholarly investigation will be supported for these experiences and the biggest question of human existence, life after death.

Exciting, authentically rational new means of studying the question of life after death are on the horizon, but for now, read Chip Coffeys book to learn about an astonishing, inspiring, unexplained propensity of the human mind.

Dr. Raymond Moody, author of Life After Life

I have often heard the old adage that one should write about what one knows. If thats true, this is the book I was born to write. Growing up psychic is a subject I know very well, because it is precisely what I did: I grew up psychic.

It is my belief that everyone is, in some manner, psychic or intuitive or sensitive. You choose the word. Psychic ability is the sixth sense with which I believe every one of us is born.

My own psychic abilities manifested when I was very young. My family tells me that when I was a very small childbefore I can actually rememberI would frequently stare at the telephone, mention a name, and that person would call shortly thereafter. When telling people about this early ability, Ive often joked that I was the original caller ID.

Perhaps my psychic destiny was written long before I was born. My maternal great-grandmother was a Native American medicine woman whose own abilities were widely known throughout the Southeast during the early years of the twentieth century. And my mother also had unique abilities that she believed shed inherited from her grandmother.