Standing at the Edge of Something I’m Not Ready to Try

I have spent years talking to the dead. Scrying in a dark room, staring into a black mirror until my eyes ached. Tarot spread across a table, reading the cards for anyone who asked, myself included. I still do both, though rarely now. Most sessions bring nothing. Every so often something comes through, just enough to keep me at the table.

So when I read that a two session therapy might do what years of ongoing practice still can’t reliably do, I didn’t believe it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it either.

I found this in a Medium article by a working medium named Catherine Churchill. She described something called Induced After Death Communication, or IADC, and the moment I read the words two sessions, something in me went quiet. Years at the table, hoping for something to come through, and here was a method claiming results in two sittings. That contradiction is what pulled me in.

IADC wasn’t built by a medium or a mystic. It came out of a Chicago VA hospital in 1995, from a psychologist named Allan Botkin who was treating a Vietnam veteran for grief. During a standard EMDR session, a trauma therapy built around guided eye movements, the veteran reported something Botkin never expected. A vision of a girl he’d lost during the war, and with it, relief from grief that years of standard treatment hadn’t touched. Botkin didn’t go looking for an afterlife breakthrough. He stumbled into one while trying to treat PTSD.

What followed was Botkin refining the process into something repeatable. He worked it down to two sessions of ninety minutes each. In the sessions you work through anger, guilt, and the deeper sadness underneath the grief. This is done by using bilateral stimulation. Then as the sadness begins to lift, some people report something unexpected. They see the person they lost, hear them, sense their presence, or simply know they’re there.

And this isn’t running entirely on anecdotes anymore. A 2026 study followed 43 bereaved adults through the two-session treatment and found substantial reductions in grief symptoms. Seventy-nine percent also reported some form of after-death communication during therapy. That’s a small study, and it doesn’t tell us whether anyone actually spoke to the dead. But 79 percent is enough to make me stop and look twice.

Reading that, I kept circling back to something I’ve come to believe after years of reaching toward the other side. Not every type of spirit communication method works for every person, no matter how long you practice it. Think of it this way, a man can train for years to be a soccer player and find out baseball was always his sport. The failure isn’t in your effort. It’s in the fit. Scrying and tarot bring me something, just not consistently. Maybe something else brings more.

I think about grief a lot too, more than I probably let on. People say time heals, and maybe for some things it does. But I don’t think all grief closes. Some of it just learns to sit quieter, and it’s still there years later when you’re not expecting it, the same weight it always was. IADC itself doesn’t claim to prove that any of this is actually communication with the dead. The therapy is meant to treat grief, and what the experience means is left to the person having it. If a two session method can reach something scrying and tarot only touch sometimes, that matters to anyone still carrying a loss that never actually left.

Here’s where I have to be honest with you. I haven’t tried it. I keep reading about it, turning it over, telling myself I will look into a trained therapist and see what it actually involves. And then I just stop.

It isn’t fear of the method itself. Maybe it’s closer to not being ready for what might be waiting on the other side of it. There’s someone I want to reach for, if this really works the way people describe. But I don’t know if I’m ready to hear what he might have to say. After all, it was supposed to be me that day and not him.

I don’t know if that readiness will ever come, or if it will announce itself when it finally does. For now, I’m standing at the edge of something that might actually work, for once, and I’m letting myself stay there a little longer before I decide.