Reviewing Your Own Work — Accuracy, Interpretation and Bias
A medium cannot refine work that is remembered inaccurately. Once a sitting has ended, memory begins reorganizing what occurred: strong confirmations become more prominent, uncertain moments fade, later explanations can merge with earlier statements, and recurring interpretive habits may remain unnoticed because they feel familiar. Disciplined self-review creates a more reliable basis for learning. This chapter examines how recordings and contemporaneous notes can be used without becoming a scoring system, how original material can be separated from later understanding, how personal interpretive patterns can be identified, and how review can lead to specific adjustments rather than judgments about personal worth or ability.
Book Six: Advanced Mediumship — Integration, Refinement and Public Work
A Common Question
How can I review my mediumistic work objectively when I was personally involved in the sitting?
Answer
Complete objectivity is unlikely because the practitioner participated in the event, but greater accuracy is possible when the review is anchored to what can actually be examined. Recordings, notes made at the time, recipient responses and later verification can help separate what was originally stated from what was subsequently explained or inferred. The purpose is not to prove that the sitting was successful or unsuccessful. It is to understand where perception was accurate, where interpretation altered it, where assumptions repeatedly appeared and what specific adjustment may improve future work.
Introduction
Experience does not automatically make self-assessment more accurate.
In some respects, it can make it harder.
A beginning medium may know they are uncertain.
An experienced practitioner has accumulated successful contacts, familiar perceptual patterns, established interpretations and confidence in particular ways of working.
Much of this is useful.
But familiarity can also make assumptions feel self-evident.
A conclusion reached many times before may arise so rapidly that the practitioner no longer notices the moment at which perception became interpretation.
A familiar symbol may seem to carry an established meaning before its present context has been explored.
A statement delivered confidently may later be remembered as more precise than it actually was.
The practitioner therefore needs a way to examine their own work that does not depend entirely upon recollection.
This is not because memory is defective.
Memory is constructive.
Human beings do not preserve every event as a perfect internal recording.
We retain significance, sequence, emotion, fragments, conclusions and relationships between events.
Over time, those elements can become reorganized.
A sitting that contained fifteen minutes of uncertainty followed by one remarkable confirmation may later be remembered principally through the remarkable confirmation.
Another sitting that was evidentially strong but included one personally embarrassing mistake may be remembered as poor because the error carries greater emotional weight.
Neither recollection necessarily represents the work accurately.
Memory is not a transcript.
That principle is especially important in mediumship because later information can change the meaning of earlier information.
Imagine that during a sitting the practitioner says:
“I keep getting a connection with a bakery or somewhere bread was being produced.”
The recipient cannot place it.
Two days later, they discover that the communicator’s father had owned a bakery where the communicator worked as a teenager.
That later verification matters.
But it does not mean the medium originally said:
“He worked in his father’s bakery as a teenager.”
Those details became available afterward.
If the practitioner repeatedly tells the story, the distinction may gradually disappear.
Eventually they may sincerely remember themselves as having given more than they did.
The opposite also happens.
A recipient initially rejects a statement.
Later they verify it.
The medium remembers only the rejection and mentally files the piece as an error.
Review allows the work to be examined again without relying solely upon whichever part became most memorable.
This is why self-review should not be confused with self-evaluation in the personal sense.
The purpose is not to answer:
“Am I good?”
“Am I advanced?”
“Was that an impressive sitting?”
Those questions are too broad to teach much.
A more useful set of questions is:
What did I actually say?
What was confirmed at the time?
What remained unresolved?
Where did I interpret?
Where did the interpretation depart from what was originally perceived?
What did the recipient add?
What became verifiable only later?
Do similar interpretive habits appear across several sittings?
What could I handle differently next time?
These questions turn review toward information rather than identity.
The purpose of reviewing your work is not to decide whether you are a good medium.
It is to discover what actually happened and what your own participation contributed to it.
That distinction protects the practitioner in both directions.
It prevents success from becoming self-mythology.
It also prevents mistakes from becoming self-condemnation.
One sitting cannot establish the full quality of a practitioner.
Neither can one extraordinary piece.
What matters over time is whether the medium becomes capable of examining their own work with enough accuracy to learn from it.
That requires records.
It requires distinctions.
And above all, it requires willingness to discover something different from what one hoped to find.