Questions to Ask a Psychic Medium
Questions to put to a medium before and during a sitting, covering how they work, what they charge, what they will not do, and how honestly they talk about being wrong.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How long have you been doing this, and how did you start?
Why ask it
An easy opener that gets you their own account of themselves, which is all you will ever get: there is no licensing body standing behind it. Listen for whether the story is about practice and mistakes or about a gift discovered in childhood, because the first tends to come with more caution about accuracy.
Did you train with anyone, or are you part of any organisation?
Why ask it
Some mediums belong to associations with codes of practice and a complaints route, which at least gives you somewhere to go if a sitting goes badly. Ask which body, then check that it exists and that they are actually listed. Independent is a fine answer, but it means the only recourse is your card issuer.
What is the fee, how long is a sitting, and what happens if I cancel?
Why ask it
Get the numbers before any emotional investment. The pattern to watch for is not a high price but an open-ended one: sessions that overrun and are billed by the minute, packages sold in blocks, or a fee that varies with how much you want to hear.
Do you work in person, by phone, or by video, and does the format change what you get?
Why ask it
The answer is interesting either way. If they say the format makes no difference, you have a useful benchmark, because a phone reading gives them far less to work with than watching your face. If they insist on in person, ask what specifically they need to see.
What do you mean when you call yourself a medium rather than a psychic or a reader?
Why ask it
These words are used loosely and often interchangeably, and the distinction they draw tells you what they will attempt. Someone who claims contact with the dead, predictions about your future, and health readings all at once is describing a very wide remit and narrowing nothing.
What are the things you will not do in a reading?
Why ask it
The strongest signal in the set. Established practitioners usually have a list: no diagnoses, no predicting deaths, no readings for children, no naming a third party as dangerous, nothing about pregnancy outcomes. Someone with no limits at all has not thought about the harm end of this work.
Do you read for people in the first weeks after a death?
Why ask it
Some mediums decline, and that refusal is a point in their favour: early grief makes people extremely suggestible and a sitting can hit like a second shock. A ready yes, particularly with encouragement to come quickly, is worth pausing over.
Have you ever stopped a sitting early, and what made you do it?
Why ask it
You are asking for a concrete story, which is much harder to fake than a principle. Good answers involve a sitter who was too distressed, or a reading that was not working and was not going to be forced. No answer at all suggests every session ends the same way regardless of what is happening in the room.
What do you say when someone asks you to prove it?
Why ask it
The reaction matters more than the content. Defensiveness, or a story about a sceptic who was converted, is a performance. A plain answer, that they cannot prove it, that sitters find some things hard to explain and others miss entirely, is a much better sign about everything that follows.
How often are you wrong, and how do you know when you are?
Why ask it
Anyone tracking their own accuracy can answer with a rough figure and a description of how the misses show up. An answer that treats every miss as something the sitter has not recognised yet is unfalsifiable by design, which means nothing you hear later can be checked.
What sort of question do you find you cannot answer well?
Why ask it
Invites them to name their own limits. Specific answers, such as dates, or anything numerical, or names beyond first initials, are useful to know in advance so you can spend the hour on what they are actually good at rather than what you hoped for.
How do you handle what I tell you afterwards, and do you keep notes?
Why ask it
A practical privacy question that few people ask. If notes are kept, ask where and for how long, especially if you are going to discuss a marriage, an illness, or money. If you return later, notes also explain how a medium remembers details you told them last time.
Do you sell anything besides readings?
Why ask it
Crystals, cleansings, protection work, courses, and candles alongside the sittings change the incentives of the reading itself. The specific thing to listen for is a reading that concludes you need a product or an extra service to fix what has been found. That is a sales structure, not a message.
What does a bad sitting look like from where you sit?
Why ask it
Their definition tells you what they are optimising for. A medium who describes a bad sitting as one where nothing came through is talking about accuracy. One who describes it as a sitter who was closed or negative has built in an explanation that puts every failure on you.
If I come with one specific question, will you tell me plainly when you cannot answer it?
Why ask it
Get the commitment before you ask the question, because in the moment it is much harder. What you are trying to avoid is the substitution: you ask whether to take the job, and you receive twenty minutes of warmth about your late grandfather instead.
Do you ever turn people away, and on what grounds?
Why ask it
Answers here separate a practice from a shop. Turning away people in acute distress, people who are clearly hoping to replace medical advice, or people who have started coming too often, all suggest limits that exist for the sitter's benefit rather than the practitioner's.
What do you want me to do if something you say frightens me?
Why ask it
You want to hear a straightforward answer: tell them, and they will stop or rephrase. Be wary of a reply that treats fear as a sign the reading is working, or that offers to resolve the fear through further sessions or a paid remedy.
How would you tell me to weigh what you say against advice from a doctor, a lawyer, or a counsellor?
Why ask it
Deliberately blunt, and the answer is the safeguarding question of the whole set. The only acceptable version puts the professionals first without qualification. Anything that positions a reading as an alternative source of truth about your health, your case, or your children is a reason to leave.
How do you feel about people who come to see you every week?
Why ask it
This asks a practitioner to talk about dependency on their own income. Some will say plainly that they cap how often they will see the same person. Others will describe regulars with evident enthusiasm, which tells you what the business actually runs on.
If I only ever sat with you once, what would you want me to leave with?
Why ask it
The closing question, and the answer sorts intent quite cleanly. Something you can use, a decision made or a bit of guilt put down, is a different proposition from a hint that there is far more to uncover next time.
Choosing a medium and sitting with one
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Vetting before you pay
Ask the money questions first, in writing
Fee, length, cancellation, and whether anything else is sold alongside the sitting. Email is better than a phone call because you keep the answer. Almost everything that goes wrong financially in this area goes wrong through open-ended sessions and follow-ups agreed while the sitter is upset.
Look up the association they name
If they claim membership of a body with a code of practice, find the body, find their name on it, and read the complaints procedure. It takes ten minutes and it is the only external check available, since mediumship is not a regulated profession in most places.
Read reviews for the misses, not the hits
Glowing accounts tell you little, because a sitter who paid and cried is a motivated reviewer. What is worth reading are the middling reviews: whether sessions ran short, whether the medium pushed a second booking, whether anyone felt worse afterwards.
Write down what you are actually there for
One sentence, before you go. It stops the hour drifting into whatever the medium finds easiest, and it gives you a clear way of judging afterwards whether you got anything. If you cannot write the sentence, the booking can wait.
In the room
- Give short answers. Yes, no, and I do not know keep the session honest without turning it into a confrontation.
- Do not correct a near miss. If a name is close but wrong, say only that it is wrong, and never supply the right one.
- Watch for questions phrased as statements. I am sensing a difficulty at work, does that resonate, is a request for information.
- Record it if you are allowed. What you remember a week later will be the best moment, not the whole hour.
- Note the misses in the moment, on paper. They are the first thing memory discards.
- Say so when you have had enough. Stopping is always available to you, and a practitioner worth sitting with will accept it without argument.
Reasons to leave and not go back
- A guarantee of contact, or a claim of near-total accuracy. Neither is something anyone can promise.
- Any diagnosis, prognosis, or advice to change or stop medical treatment.
- A curse, a block, or negative energy that a further payment will clear. This is the oldest structure in the trade.
- Pressure to book again immediately, particularly framed as urgent or as a limited slot.
- Warnings about a named living person, especially a partner or a child. These are hard to unhear and easy to misuse.
- Being told a poor reading was your fault for being closed or sceptical.
- Requests for financial detail, account information, or amounts of cash to be handled as part of the work.
- Anything that leaves you frightened and dependent rather than settled. If a sitting has that effect, a bereavement counsellor or your doctor is a better next call than another appointment.