From Mystical to Practical: Clair Senses & Soul Parenting

In this illuminating conversation, Dr. Sandra Marie sits down with Bette Freedson, LCSW, clinical social worker, intuitive guide, and author of Soul Mother’s Wisdom, Other Realms, Other Ways, and Passageways, to explore how intuition, psychology, and soulful living intertwine.

Together they uncover what it really means to trust your inner science, how to recognize your natural clair senses (seeing, hearing, feeling, knowing), and why intuition isn’t “woo”, it’s wisdom encoded in your body and mind.

Bette shares her ACE Method (Accept • Cultivate • Explore), the link between intuition and grief, and how parents can model intuitive trust while staying grounded in practical, no-blame, no-shame parenting.

Perfect for therapists, parents, empaths, and anyone ready to bridge the mystical with the practical.

Key Topics

• The six clair senses and how to recognize your strongest one
• How to tell intuition from anxiety or projection
• The ACE Method to develop reliable inner guidance
• Why grief can expand intuitive awareness
• Soul-wise parenting: boundaries, calm discipline, and connection
• Bridging science, hypnosis, and spirituality in healing
• Practical ways clinicians can integrate intuition ethically

Featured Guest

Bette Freedson, LCSW
Clinical social worker, intuitive guide, author, and teacher of the Psychic Studio and Stress Management Through Psychic Development.
Website: www.bettefreedson.com email: bjfreedson@gmail.com

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00.078)
Enjoy this Wild Soul gathering production. I'm Dr. Sandra Marie. Pour yourself a really tall glass of spiritual curiosity and join me for the happy hour for the spiritually curious podcast. In the spirit of happy hour, cheers to some new insights, peace, revitalization, and perhaps an aha moment that may change your life.

Welcome everyone, I'm your host, Dr. Sandra Marie, and today we're exploring the meeting point between intuition, psychology, and soulful living with my guest, Betty Friedson, a clinical social worker, intuitive guide, and author of several books including Soul Mother's Wisdom, Other Realms, Other Ways, and Passageways. Betty brings decades of experience helping people access their own inner wisdom and intuitive, intelligent, and everyday life.

Our conversation will touch on what it really means to trust intuition, how to parent from a soul-wise perspective, and how intuition and science can actually complement each other in the healing process. So settle in. This is going to be a conversation about grounding the mystical in the practical and discovering how intuitive insights can become a reliable ally for living with more clarity, confidence, and in the heart. Welcome, Betty.

Thank you Sandra, it's a pleasure.

Excited for this conversation, we're gonna start with intuition and I think just flow naturally from there. You've written and taught extensively about intuition. How do you personally define intuition as a feeling, an energy, or an intelligence?

Speaker 1 (01:44.632)
Well, for me, it's all of the above. People talk about a definition for what intuition is, and in some ways it's very personal. What I think is reasonably consensual is that intuition is part of thinking. It's part of how the mind works. However, it's also part of how the body works in a holistic,

perspective, intuition can come through thoughts, sensations, and general impressions. I can tell you more about the language of the psychics, which I also use now teaching people in general about intuition if you're interested.

I would love to hear more about that.

So we all have heard the word clairvoyance. And sometimes that gets confused with being precognitive, that if you're a clairvoyant, you see the future. Well, that can be true. But typically clairvoyance specifically is clear seeing. And so for intuitive people, which we all are,

We, some of us are more visual, so we might see something. The other words, which are less familiar, are clear audience, which means clear hearing. Some intuitive people hear things. And if people want to practice that, as you're listening to Sandra and me, you could just for a moment hear the voice of someone who's not here. And that's actually a clear voice.

Speaker 1 (03:32.942)
there's Claire Gustans, which is intuitive tasting. And the little test I like to use for that, Sandra, is to imagine tasting a lemon. And for almost everybody, something happens here. And that has also to do with the brain connection, which we can get to. So Claire Gustans is Claire tasting.

Clear tangents is clear feeling. Imagine feeling the fur, the hair of your favorite pet who's not, you're not touching at the moment. That's a clear tangent experience and clear audience is smelling. And so we can all imagine walking into a restaurant that has just the right smell. Like, Ooh, and it just gets the appetite going. So that, those are,

sensory perceptions of an intuitive experience, which in some ways is pretty mundane. It's not as paranormal as some of the other things that can happen intuitively, but they all can happen through the senses. And also one more word, clair sentience, which is clear knowing, which is something a little bit different than

just a sense experience can include it. But we've all had the sense of, I just knew that. I knew who was on the phone. I knew my friend was gonna text me today. That's a clear, clear knowing, clear-sension experience.

Well, thank you. That was really informative. To dive a little deeper into that, many people can confuse their intuition with anxiety or projection. And I think with some of the explanations you just gave, that would be an easy connection. What helps a person tell the difference between an intuitive knowing and an emotional reaction?

Speaker 1 (05:24.494)
sure.

Speaker 1 (05:43.65)
Sandra, that's such a good question. And something that has intrigued me. The bottom line experience or the bottom line response is about experience. It's important to know oneself. In other words, I want to know the difference between something I'm sensing intuitively and something that I'm scared of.

In order to understand that, I have to know myself because I want to know the things that cause me anxiety or fear. The me can be replaced with you, you, you, you, you out there. Know yourself so that you can trace back to, is this just my general like, or is this something that I really think is happening? Which again gets to,

Intuition isn't necessarily precognition. And so I could be afraid of something, but doesn't mean it's going to happen. It doesn't mean I've seen it in the future. It can also be, and this is where I draw in my therapeutic experience, both helping others and also helping myself. Maybe this is something that says to me, Betty, how about you work on that?

so that you can be less anxious. So there's all sorts of ways to understand something you pick up. And most of the time, it's something to deal with with oneself. It's not typically gonna be a precognitive experience.

Okay, that's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (07:31.564)
I hope that, I mean, there's so much more I could say about it, but hopefully I gave you the essence.

I appreciate that and we'll keep threading and weaving through this, I think. And honestly, intuition from my perspective has really been getting a lot more attention lately. Definitely. And I think part of that has to do with a lot of people are going through some shifts and changes as they're growing. Some are intentionally putting a lot of work into that, but other people are having some things turn on.

And one of the things that has really risen is intuition. I feel like almost everyone on the planet is getting hit with that intuition growing and lighting up. In your work with clients clinically and intuitively, you've done this for a long time. So it's great to have you lead the way with this for a lot of people who are like, I've heard the word before, but I need to understand this better. What's the first step in helping someone reconnect with their own inner guidance?

I love your questions. This is a really good one. Again, there's so much I could say, but I'm going to try to condense it. Other Realms, Other Ways, which was my second book, and the subtitle is A Clinician's Guide to the Magic, spelled with a K, Magic of Intuition. In Other Realms, Other Ways, I introduced a very short but

I say not complex in terms of hard to understand, but a schema that's simple but has depth is a better way to say it. It's the ACE model for developing your intuition. Accept, cultivate, explore, and experience. So first step, we all have intuition. I would love to interview you.

Speaker 1 (09:34.56)
and see how you intuitively came to do this podcast. And that would be fascinating to me. can reverse roles sometime. And I would love it. And then to cultivate and you know, people can include the ACE, whatever is meaningful. So except we all have the ability to intuit, but developing it is really what you're asking me about. Cultivate it.

would love to do that.

Speaker 1 (10:04.492)
So talking to people like you, clearly to me, you already are intuitive. Just the questions you're asking are intuitively really spot on for me. And then practice. Sometimes I practice as I'm driving and I advise anyone who wants to do this method, keep your eyes on the road and stay alert. I like to read license plates. So for example, one way to cultivate, you said we're gonna thread the needle through this. I forget your exact.

metaphor. I loved that because a lot of intuitive cultivation comes from thinking about metaphor. We speak in metaphors, we listen in metaphors, we see metaphors in music and art in all around us. And so I love to look at a license plate, even if the letters don't make sense. And I think, you know, well, what comes up in my mind?

which is a little intuitive hit for me, which says, oh, that would be interesting to pursue. So again, it's a short answer, but cultivate is practice. There's more I can say about that, but I wanna get to the explore and experiment. And these overlap, intuition is not linear. There's no algorithm. Like you do this and you do this and you do this. And you're intuitive.

You're intuitive anyway, but these are steps and they're like, use your metaphor, they weave together to help develop a greater sense of how you, Sandra, I, Betty, anyone listening out there, how you experience your own intuition. It's going to be very unique for you. So accept, cultivate, explore, and experiment.

Well, thank you. So Betty, this is something I think we can all relate to. When people are under stress or grief, intuition often feels like it gets muted. How can we still access that quiet voice during chaotic times, which is probably when we really need it to rise the most?

Speaker 1 (12:23.084)
That is a particularly special question for me.

Sometimes intuition can get muted in grief and sometimes it can get expanded in grief. Again, it's very personal to each individual. So a lot of times people in grief will want to go to church or go to synagogue or go to a mosque or to go wherever they go to derive peace of mind. Sometimes it's non-religious, it's non-sectarian, they just go inside.

And one of the things about Cultivate, I would have to put an L in my schema, is to listen. Listen inside. You will hear something. It might be in your own voice. It might be in the voice of your loved one who's departed, or it could be in the voice of someone if it's a breakup, someone you loved and you're hearing that person's voice.

And to think about what it means to you is where the intuitive interpretation is. The expansion of intuition is interesting. I was talking to someone I love dearly who just lost a parent, an elderly parent, but it's still a parent and you know, it counts big time. And my friend said to me, you know, I see things a little differently.

The world seems different. that explains some things to me about how she was seeing things differently. And we talked about how her intuitive knowing seemed to be expanding. I'm gonna say something very personal. I don't talk about a lot, but since I wrote my third book, Passageways, Everyday Adventures into the Paranormal, I dedicated that to my sister.

Speaker 1 (14:27.118)
who died in 2023. My sister Ginny, Ginny was a very spiritual person. And we talked about afterlife a lot. And after Ginny died, and I've written about this in the book, I had a lot of very mystical experiences, even until recently, because it was just her birthday, of experiencing that Ginny was communicating with me. Now that's my interpretation.

Somebody else could say, please, that's ridiculous. Or I'm not sure. Or let me think about that. Because again, it's personal to people. I've written quite a bit about that kind of expanded intuitive consciousness during grief. Can't emphasize enough that it's different for everybody.

You mentioned intuition as magical with a K, yet practical. Do you have a story where intuitive insight created a really down-to-earth result?

So I have a lot of them.

I was gonna say I bet you have a whole bag full.

Speaker 1 (15:39.374)
lot of them. Not sure which one to pick. Well, first let me talk about the K, which actually is a very intuitive experience. Maybe this is the best story to tell you. I had two intuitive mentors, both of whom are now not on the planet. And I connect with them mystically and psychically, and they're very helpful to me. Actually, now I have three. The most recent one wasn't my intuitive mentor, but was my dearest friend who

was a nun who considered herself a Buddhist and she's a fascinating character. But anyway, so I communicate with them when I need help. So a number of years ago, I saw an article in a therapy magazine and the title of the article was, How Psychotherapy Lost Its Magic With A K. And I was intrigued about that. Now for people who are listening. you were. Oh yeah.

people who are listening who are clinical helpers of any kind. The article turned out to be about how I'm trained as a social worker, clinical social worker, how social workers, trained clinical social workers were not able to help this woman who was grieving for her daughter. And this they showed us in social work school, so it's a long time ago.

So it brought me back the memory. That wasn't what the article talked about, but it talked about this idea. I hope I make sense. I'm switching timeframes. What I saw in social work school in this video was that the only person who could help this grieving mother was a spiritual healer from her culture. And she was able then to begin the grief process. The clinical social workers with all their regular business useless.

The article talked about that with a different story. And I thought, I've got to meet the guy who wrote this article. So I said to a friend, introduce me to Scott Miller. And he did. And when I met Scott Miller on the phone, we talking about psychics and Scott's a therapist and he's a researcher. And he was researching how psychics can get results as good as therapists. He said to me,

Speaker 1 (18:03.126)
He was talking, we were talking about it I said, well, the person who, of the people who trained me to do psychic readings was Herb Dewey. He said, Herb Dewey on the phone, so the expression is my own. I said, yeah, and I thought it was some great therapist I'd never heard of. was my Herb Dewey who taught me about doing psychic readings. Fast forward, that was an intuitive experience to meet Scott Miller. Scott Miller wrote,

the forward for other realms, other ways. Scott Miller has encouraged my work. It was a very, very important person to me in my work. So it was a set of intuitive experiences that I saw the article, Met Scott, developed a connection and that he wrote the forward to the book. What happened to me recently on Ginny's birthday,

was an experience with the blue light. I don't know if anybody's ever talked to you about the blue light. Has it come across that in your interviews? Absolutely. Okay. That's a whole other set of things.

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (19:12.804)
That's whole different show.

A whole different show. The blue pearl, the blue light, it's fascinating.

So on Ginny's birthday, and Ginny and I have talked about the afterlife and connections with the departed, many, many issues, highly spiritual. I was in my guest room just putting stuff away. It was night, it was dark, just as was last week. And I turned a little bit to my left and on the windowsill in the dark, there was a grid of blue light across the outside of the windowsill.

where I live in Maine, there's one house across the street and it's dark. I looked in my little bag to see, I had thrown my phone in a little bag and brought it upstairs. I said, maybe my phone went on. No, no reflections in the room. There was nothing. And it was the night before her birthday. And so my interpretation is, thank you, sister. I'm glad you contacted me. So that's an intuitive experience. But again,

Sandra, it's my interpretation.

Speaker 2 (20:21.388)
I agree in both very heartwarming stories. The first event that you shared really fit the weaving that we were talking about and the synchronicities and those kinds of things that you just can't make up. I love that Jenny did that with you and the blue light is again right up there with the intuition. is just a lot of conversation about that. So Betty. Yeah.

How do you recommend integrating intuitive insight with decision making without dismissing logic or data?

I don't dismiss logic and data at all. I include it because intuition is a compilation of everything that we know. So you're asking me a wonderful question and it would be a whole other show, but I'm going to try to tell you a few things.

We will have to do that at some point. have a lot of things to expand on.

lot of stuff and my favorite topics. you know, clearly one of your, a bunch of yours too. Anyway, for now, think about intuition as trying to think of the best way to tell you. So I'm trained also in hypnosis, very, very deeply trained and teach in hypnosis workshops, et cetera. So from my hypnosis understanding, the unconscious mind has managing

Speaker 1 (21:43.002)
millions and millions of pieces of information all the time. And it's all going into that big computer in the unconscious mind. From a psychic perspective, and I'm sure you've had guests who've talked about this or you've read about what psychics call the Akashic records, which is all the wisdom now, then, ever, forever, or everything now.

to make decisions.

the conceptual version is to access the unconscious mind, if that makes sense to you, or if you like the psychic version, access the Akashic records. But then people say, well, Betty, how do I do that? And that's where the practice comes in of accept, cultivate, explore. I've done many, many workshops starting way, way back.

with stress management through psychic development. I still teach that. I'll tell you a psychic experience about that if we have time, it was very funny. So to really understand that what you know is included and to learn ways to access that intuitive development through exercises.

through looking at your own experiences and determining where the intuition was. Now I do a lot of teaching. I teach other therapists how to incorporate intuition. My psychic stress management through psychic development has morphed into what I call the psychic studio. My general psychic studios to help people learn about intuition and exercises and ideas.

Speaker 1 (23:35.608)
to learn how to access it. So it's a practice. And some people are much more tuned in like you and me. Other people are really linear. This is crazy. But like you said, there's much more of an interest, not just in the intuition, but in the spiritual aspects of intuition as well.

I would agree. When it's going to show up on folks' timeline, it'll show up on their timeline, just like it did for us. Let's shift the conversation to soul-wise parenting. So what inspired soul mother's wisdom and what does soul-wise parenting mean to you?

Wow. I just did a program for a bunch of therapists in China last Sunday on this topic was really fun. The translation is interesting. I have no idea what they said about what I said. anyway, so soul wisdom parenting evolved because I was a single mother for 17 years. I was divorced.

I bet.

Speaker 1 (24:41.902)
And after I was divorced for a few years, my ex-husband who was involved with the kids and, you know, there was a fairly, you know, civil situation. He died very young, very, very young. And so I was a single mother big time. And at the time I was teaching the stress management through psychic development groups. And I said to myself, well, I'm going to have to practice what I'm preaching here and deal with stress.

And so I developed a lot of ideas about dealing with stress. And I knew that I had to write this for other people, which is the inspiration. It took a lot of years. And then I was thinking about a few years. And then in 2010, I was at a big conference for the Milton Erickson Foundation, for which I am now really honored to be a teacher. But I was at a big conference for them and I heard Harriet Lerner speak.

was another intuitive thing. Harriet Lerner wrote the Dance of Anger, which a lot of people have read. She was up in front of thousands of therapists and said, for those of you out there writing, do not give up. Walked out of that conference and wrote the first words for Soul Mother's Wisdom on the program. 15 years later, Peggy from Pearlsong Press picked it up and published it.

And my goal was to really put it out for other single mothers, but as it turns out, it's really about all parents. And the soul wisdom is again, to use that intuitive level. However, the real soul wisdom parenting that I've taught and presented is practical parenting tips combined with the inner wisdom of the intuitive knowing goes back to

develop your intuition, have some practical ideas for how to parent. That part came from spending 11 years as a social worker in our special services department in my area in Maine, where I live 11 years. I learned a lot from the teachers and from my wonderful special services director, Carol. So.

Speaker 1 (27:03.38)
Everything for me is an integration, an amalgamation. It's not that we just take intuition and that's a thing. It's not a thing. It's an integration of a lot of ideas and knowing and wisdom.

It's been an interesting journey for you. What would you say is one small practice that helps these parents and I'll say parents in general, single parents, know, they every every situation like you have said with everything else is very unique. What's one small practice that helps them reconnect to their center before responding to a child?

Stop and think.

That's so easy some days.

It's not so easy. What I recommend in the practical parenting tips is to think about consequences before you have to employ them. Have sort of a repertoire of consequences. Keep the consequences small so that you don't torture yourself, such as you're gonna lose your privileges to go out for a month because the person who's gonna be stuck is you monitoring that child. Keep the consequences small.

Speaker 1 (28:18.434)
This is really the key. The one thing, use a no blame, no shame approach. You stupid idiot is gonna stay with a kid forever. You're just like your father. You're just like your mother, especially if it's in a divorce angry situation. No. Keep children out of conflict. Keep them away from conflict between parents, even if the parents are partners and parenting together.

Keep conflict away, use a no blame, no shame approach. Keep consequences small, keep them consistent, keep them predictable, and have as much as you can. So you're toolkit of what you apply when, if you can. And I've written a lot of articles about dealing with children and teens. People are welcome to contact me. I don't know if you want to put my...

website up. I send them articles that I've written with a lot of tips.

We'll do that.

Speaker 2 (29:23.35)
Okay. So that is really great information. Thank you. How can parents model intuitive trust without projecting fear or control onto their kids?

Well, that would be wonderful if we could all do that. So I would say, recognize when you're doing it and have another idea to switch to, I'm exercising too much control, takes a lot of awareness. And you can see where my theme is as a therapist, self-awareness. That is the bottom line, because without that, we are

really prisoners of ourselves and all of the things that we've dealt with as kids, how we were parented, it's a trickle down theory. I mean, I think people could benefit from therapy or sometimes 12 step groups if they've had, you know, an alcoholic background with in growing up, but some sort of self development work is really the key and understanding your own reactions.

I love it and thank you. These are great practical tools that people can wrap their head around versus theory. Both are important. So I think that it's paramount and I really appreciate your willingness to put that out there and share it. Is there like one thing if you had a wish that you wished all parents understood about the intuitive connection between a parent and child?

Well, I guess I would say the bond is really strong. It can produce both positive and negative experiences sometimes. And I would encourage parents to learn about, get some developmental understanding. There's a wonderful book called The Magic Years, which was a book I studied in social work school, but it's not a clinical book and it's very helpful.

Speaker 1 (31:28.896)
understand something about development so you have some idea of what your child is going through. Know yourself, you get that theme. And what I would wish all parents would do would be to study the art of healthy detachment, which doesn't mean I'm done with you. It means it's about boundaries, what's mine, what's theirs. The children are themselves. They have their own trajectories. They come in with their own issues.

and their own lives and to be able to learn what is healthy letting go. It starts from the minute of birth once that umbilical cord is cut. But we have emotional cords and there's some research that shows that the cells of the babies remain in the mother's body for years if not forever. And so.

I literally just read an article about that in the past two weeks. So that was the first time that I had heard about it. And I thought, wow, this explains a lot.

It's amazing. I know it does explain a lot. like, why can't I get rid of you? Grow up. Well, I don't want to get rid of you.

But some of it is the knowing. mean, you sometimes when they do grow up or even if they're at home or but if they're in another state, there's just there's things that you know, there's things you speak, you get hit with these these moments or this information or this intuitive. Whatever part it is for me, the knowing things a biggie, it has also created a lot of problems and that could be a whole nother show show right there.

Speaker 1 (32:48.44)
things you

Speaker 2 (33:06.412)
When I read about that with the cells and I thought that definitely made sense to me that that plays a role into how I can feel and know these things. I know I'm going to get this phone call in the next couple of days. Yeah. Yeah. Basically what the emotion, the emotional drive of that will be. And when I the article, I was like, you know, sometimes you just like to

Sandra, that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 (33:34.038)
At least pretend there's some sense to it. The article gave me some sense.

I know. That's a great way to say it. I mean, we love them so much. We want to keep them close, but we have to let them go. We have to let them flounder and make decisions. And the knowing thing you're talking about is like, I have a pretty good idea what's going on with you as your mother. But there's a certain time in life where you cannot say that anymore. And if you do, then you're going to push back. You don't know. You're not living my life. So what's the one thing I would like people to

parents to know. We love them forever. Even some parents who are just estranged from their children. I don't think the love ever goes away, the caring. I had a wonderful mentor, psychiatrist who sadly left the planet two years ago, who was my first consultant out of social work school. And he said to me, all parents, he was a child psychiatrist.

All parents do the best they can. All parents love their children the best they can. And I truly believe that. And sometimes we love them so much we want to step in and give this guidance and I know this and I know this and can't always do it.

Yeah. I agree with everything you said. Every single thing makes sense. The love never stops. Would love to have a lot of do-overs, but that's a growth lesson for all of us. You know, it's, yeah. So I'm going to say thank you so much for writing this book, putting it out there. People hear the words. It really, I think it hits a chord.

Speaker 1 (35:06.478)
correctly.

Speaker 1 (35:16.27)
was so glad that you're drawing attention to soul mother's wisdom. I was disappointed that there wasn't more attention given to the book when it first came out in 2015, but it's getting more attention now, which is interesting because there's a lot in it and combined with the development of intuition, but also these sort of more mystical ideas in.

passageways, which also has a lot of my stress management material, kind of they've all fit together for me in a certain way. So, but I'm really grateful that you're landing on some of the parenting stuff. Thank you very much for that.

You're welcome. That being said, I do want to move on to bridging the mystical and the clinical. That really fascinates me. You've spent years in clinical practice. How do you begin integrating intuition into that professional framework in a conscious way?

Well, you hit the key word, which is conscious. And a lot of the consciousness is that as clinicians and some of the things particularly that we study in the hypnosis community is that each client is unique and each way that you bridge something spiritual with the clinical has got to be unique to the individual.

And that takes a lot of discussion and understanding. For me, I start with myself and wanting to understand my own, understand my own interpretation of what the mystical is. So for me, it has something to with consciousness, with the blue light. But some people hear the word psychic and they go,

Speaker 1 (37:19.342)
And so psychic has had a stigma to it. And so if I'm working with someone in therapy, I'm not gonna necessarily use the word psychic because I've got to understand where that person is. So the first integration is happening in me and where can I help the other person understand it? I've been asked to teach a course in next summer.

on the spiritual dimensions in hypnosis. So I'm thinking a lot about that. What I would wanna help my clients to do is to understand that there's something inside of them that can bring them to a deeper or a higher understanding of what it is they need to do to solve their problems. And I developed a method, again, a schema, which is not

It looks linear, but it's really an integrative system of solving problems. call it the solve method. So it's very useful for people because it incorporates intuition and facts. And so the mystical and the therapeutic really have to do with the person. know, I, long time ago, when I first started thinking about integrating this material,

I said to a woman, this is probably three decades ago, a long time ago, I said, maybe some stress management work would be useful for you. This person said, no, that's against my religion. Now that's okay, but I'm not gonna force stress management on somebody for whom it's against their religion. So I delved a little bit further and found out that this woman really believed in praying to God and that God would answer her.

her prayers, that was okay with me. And that was a beautiful way of incorporating how she could help herself through prayer. Didn't have to be my language, but it was all basically the same. Finding, for some people it's a higher entity, God of your understanding, as they say in 12-Step Program. It was a great story in 12-Step Program, an older man who

Speaker 1 (39:43.596)
had been sober for a long time and went out and drank and came back. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about higher power. And this guy said, I don't believe in God. I believe in G-O-D, group of drunks. That was his higher power. And that's where he got some spiritual help for his problems. That's fine. In the hypnosis world, we call

this idea of being where your patient or your client is, we use the word tailoring. You think about tailoring a soup. We tailor the idea of the spiritual or the mystical to where the person is, assuming they even want any of those ideas.

Right. You have to meet people where they're at for sure. So you know, you're already talking about this. How do you help that skeptical client or colleague understand the value of the intuitive? So do you just sometimes have to step away until they're ready or?

Sometimes they're not going to understand it the way I understand it. And that's okay because people come into therapy with a problem that they want to work on. And I have my toolkit.

and I'm going to draw from my toolkit what's going to help them. Sometimes my understanding is going to be different from their understanding. So can I give you an example? I use this in my teaching.

Speaker 2 (41:22.956)
Yes, I was actually just going to ask if you could give me an example. So that worked out well.

few examples, right? We're in sync. A woman came to me number of years ago. Her mother had died in a tragic accident. was just somebody drove the wrong way. Awful. And so I used my therapy training in a very kind of, I guess, the normative establishment way, asking her about her mother.

asking, you know, how is she doing? What support does she have for her grieving process? After about three sessions, she came in and she said, I feel so much better now. So Betty's patting herself on the back thinking, I'm doing a really good job. I said, well, what happened? She said, I went to a medium. And so I'm thinking to myself,

I could have done that with her. I could be a medium, but I don't put myself out as a psychic medium. I am a psychic reader and I psychic readings, but I'm not a fortune teller and I have channeled spirits, but I don't always know when and how and if. So anyway, so I said to her, well, that's fantastic. And I found out what happened. I said, you know, we can do some of that here. Would you like to do that? She said, yes, I would. And so,

We did. And we included her mother's spirit in the room. And sometimes she talked to her mother and sometimes I talked to her mother. Am I going to tell you definitely that her mother was there? Sandra, I don't know for sure, but it felt to her like her mother was present. And that's what really mattered. I'm thinking of another story, which I can tell you, which is really just in passageways.

Speaker 2 (43:22.892)
Yeah, no, I'm really interested. The other one was very powerful. let's do this one.

Well, this is different and this is more personal, but it's also really interesting because it happened with, when I was sitting with a client and it goes back to, you know, what's intuitive, what's mystical. Do we have enough time? I think we have. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, we're good.

Speaker 1 (43:48.086)
So I wrote about this in passageways when Ginny and I were little, I'm the older, so I would sometimes whistle for my baby sister and she would come. it was always the thing we laughed about as we grew up and went into our adult lives. So right after pandemic, I was using a space that was a little bit of a bigger space when I first started seeing people in person again. And I was in this space.

And it was late spring, there were no windows open, there were no birds singing, there was nobody in the building but me and my client. And this was the final session of this very effective therapy. And all of a sudden in the room was this sound. Let's see if I can do it.

Speaker 2 (44:45.623)
okay.

It wasn't a bird sound, it was the whistle. And it happened two times. And the blessing for me is that someone heard it. And the client in the middle of our termination session said to me, what was that? And I said, I don't know, just some random sound that happens in these old buildings. It was this very old property I have. But I knew what it was because it was unmistakable.

Had it been earlier in the therapy, I might've said, well, I don't know what it is, but what did it mean to you? And I might've just used it to explore further if there had been something meaningful about it for that person. But as it turned out, it really wasn't. And it was my sister, I think.

and it was affirmation for you.

was affirmation that someone else heard it, yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:42.85)
Yeah, absolutely. I am curious because I know that you have mentored a lot of clinical people. If a clinician wanted to begin exploring the intuitive dimension of their work ethically and responsibly.

That's the key.

What are some of the suggestions of where they could start? What kind of things would you share with them to get them?

I would encourage them to get my book, Other Realms, Other Ways, because I've been told by people who've read it that it really does help explain. It does have some ideas about hypnosis, but it's really a lot of case examples. Come to my psychic studio, get in touch with me. I'm going to, not until after the first of the year, I'm going to start another general psychic studio.

where we just study the development of intuition, what is intuition, it's for anybody. I do have a psychic studio now for healers and helpers, but that's gonna be ending in a few weeks and I do another one next year. So get in touch with me, read, do some reading, my book of course, but there's so much you can find online. And there are a lot of books.

Speaker 2 (46:59.725)
So.

If somebody, if for therapists, a really wonderful book, which I used for my research is a book by an Australian therapist and she's a very smart woman, Terry Marks Tarlo, The Neurobiology of Intuition, it's really good book. Sarah, I think her name is Sarah Vaughn, how I'm blocking if that's her first name. Vaughn, V-A-U-H-N, Intuition, Extraordinary Knowing is a,

really interesting book. Now I'm thinking of her last name, I think is Meyer. And she was a psychologist and she really looked at all of the development of psychical research here and in Britain and how interesting it is that every time culture would start to really look at intuition, which is happening now, as we said earlier, then it would kind of go underground because there were so many skeptics.

She herself started her research because she had had a precious object stolen and she hired a psychic to find it and the person helped her find it. So that's a, so Reed, I know there are other, there are other people who are looking at the more psychic and mystical aspects of our work. If you're a therapist, Philip Acaria, you could look up his website.

He does some work in understanding ancient practices and how they relate to today's work. So explore again.

Speaker 2 (48:39.382)
I do love that there's actually research out there these days on it and people are looking deeper into it because it's more accepted. As you said, you've really covered the spectrum of what that journey's been like in your career and your personal life. Betty, you mentioned a few times about some work that you were doing for those who want to connect with you. How did they do that and what does it look like?

Well, it's pretty simple. I don't know if you want to put up my, you can, I'm happy to give my email. My website is bettyfreedson.com and you can contact me through that. bjfreedson.gmail.com you can contact me that way. And it's simple. What are you interested in? Do you want to have some ideas of what to read? Are you interested in consultation? Are you interested in a psychic studio? Are you interested in just having a reading or it can be a clearing house to

help people find other therapists for certain things, but it's simple. It's just, what's your interest? Let me know. I'll do my best to help you find a pathway.

Perfect, I'll get that put up and I'll make sure that it's included in the show notes. So you sort of teased us a little bit. What's next for Betty? What's new on the horizon there? I feel like you've got some new stuff on the horizon.

Well, I think it's focusing more on the spiritual dimensions. I'm really excited of being invited to teach one segment of this course by the Milton Erickson Foundation. So I'll give a plug to that. Milton Erickson was a brilliant psychiatrist who helped many people learn about hypnosis, including my mentor, Jeffrey Zeig, who's been a wonderful teacher for me. And so...

Speaker 1 (50:28.822)
Jeff founded the Erickson Foundation to honor his mentor, Milton Erickson. And they run an intensive teaching program and it's gonna be running from January through I think the end of August and wonderful teachers in that. invite people to explore that. It's of course, it's more geared to hypnosis but there are a lot of things for therapists that are really good, just solid.

educational stuff. Also, I'll give a plug to the North Carolina board, North Carolina Society of Clinical Hypnosis, of which I'm a board member, thanks to pandemic and Zoom. Maine can be in North Carolina on the same night. And we run a program called the Hypnotic ID Exchange, not just hypnosis, you know, slanted a little towards hypnosis, but hypnosis is remember,

the unconscious mind, all the information that you can access, which is akin to intuition. And first Monday of the month, it's a wonderful program, it's free, and we just have wonderful speakers and we have breakout rooms, we can meet people from all over the world. To register for that, just look up North Carolina Society of Clinical Hypnosis and register on the website.

Awesome, that sounds super cool. So you've got a lot going on.

Yeah, I don't know what's next. Maybe a little book on some of my work.

Speaker 2 (52:04.908)
Or sometimes you think you know what's next, but that's not quite what the universe has in mind for you. Some more to come. It'll be interesting to cycle back and reconnect with you at some point. Any last thoughts for the listeners?

Well, whoever's listening, thank you. I hope you've gotten something out of this discussion. Sandra, you're a great interviewer. Your questions were just terrific. Thank you. And appreciate your invitation to join you. And hope people will trust their intuition more from listening to us.

That and help make some sense of some things. Sometimes you just need to connect a few dots, I think. Betty, this has been fascinating and insightful conversation. Thank you for really personalizing it and being very authentic. I really appreciate that. Trusting your intuition isn't about escaping reality. It's about seeing more clearly. And you emphasize that so many different ways. A big thank you to Betty Friedson for reminding us at Wisdom

lives within all of us, not just a few. Until next time, stay curious, stay open and keep listening to that quiet voice that knows. Thanks again, Betty, for joining us today.

Thank you Sandra, it's been my pleasure.

Speaker 2 (53:24.366)
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Wild Soul Gathering's Happy Hour for the Spiritually Curious. To learn more about our guests, please go to our website, WildSoulsGathering.com. We're very eager to hear from our listeners what you thought of the episode, topics you might like us to cover in the future, your thoughts on spirituality, questions you may have. Please feel free to send us an email at WildSoulsGathering.gmail.com.

This is your host, Dr. Sandra Marie, sending each of you peace and love. Until we meet again, embrace your wild soul.