Woman berates depressed sister for paying a medium to speak to dead grandfather.
When this woman is concerned about her sister, she asks Reddit:
'AITA for urging my sister to be critical, careful and maybe stop seeing psychics, mediums and such?'
My sister has been depressed for a long while and one thing I know she has always found some comfort in is spirituality. No specific religion, but spirituality as a whole. Energy, universe, vibration and psychic stuff.
A few days ago she went to a medium. She was told that our grandfather is speaking to her, and this medium did say some things that could ring true for our culture (we're born and raised in northern Europe but with a different ethnic and cultural background).
Our grandfather apparently told her stuff about how we should be as a family, how our virtues and values should be like and how we should pursure our future.
To make it more believable, my 'grandfather' said some stuff that are specific to our culture, which convinced my sister even more that it is true.
Today, we met up as a family. She wanted to tell us all together. My parents were sceptical and questioned her about all these things, but also kind of humoring it to not make her feel bad.
I was, to be fair, a bit annoyed and said that I do not want a part of this because I am strictly against psychics and mediums and all that stuff and don't want this to be something that we should have in the family.
I'm not going to conduct myself, change myself or reevaluate my values because of what some medium said. Never.
I told her to be critical. Question all of this. She said she had given her last name when she booked this meeting. Our last name kind of says things about our ethnic background.
I also told her that these people do get a lot of money and have resources that we don't know of, with investigators that will dig into your personal information and background to make it feel more personal.
She has been paying so much money to these, and it makes me mad that these people can so easily feed off of her vulnerable state. I don't want that for my sister.
She didn't want to listen. Stormed out and drove home. We haven't talked since, and I don't know how to approach this. AITA for telling her to be critical and careful of these people?
Because I really do feel like they're preying and feeding off of her vulnerable state, while at the same time, this does make her feel somewhat better. AITA?
Let's see what Reddit had to say.
mekoids writes:
NTA. All psychics and mediums are frauds. Your sister is being conned and you are trying to protect her. She doesn't want to listen to you because the con artist is telling her what she wants to hear.
mmhomebody writes:
NTA. But you're not going to get through to her. You can only control your own actions. You've let her know how the scam works, and it just upset her. Set a firm boundary that she can talk with you about anything but this. You have your own belief system and this isn't acceptable within that, so it's off limits.
When she figures out she's been scammed, as she eventually will, you will be a person who's not enmeshed in the whole disaster and she can then talk to you about some other belief system that's not built upon how much money you fork over for the info.