Situations Mediums Should Avoid — and How to Stay in Control

If you are an aspiring medium, or someone with strong empathic abilities, you have probably noticed that some places exhaust you in ways that nobody around you seems to understand.

You can spend twenty minutes in a busy supermarket and come home feeling as though you have run a marathon. You can attend a wedding and need three days to recover. You can visit a sick relative in hospital and find yourself emotionally wrecked for the rest of the week.

This is not weakness. It is not anxiety. It is the cost of perceiving more than the average person.

In this article I want to explain how mediums actually experience emotions, which situations are particularly difficult, and what you can do to manage your sensitivity without locking yourself away from the world.

How Mediums Perceive Emotions

Mediums and aspiring mediums generally have great difficulty handling their own emotions, because everything is multiplied by ten or more. Anger, sadness, joy, excitement — every emotional state intensifies until it reaches its full climax.

This is why so many mediums end up in periods of depression. Not because they are weak. Because they are flooded.

Imagine you are excited by great news. Then, just after, you receive bad news. The emotional gap is like a roller coaster. For the average person, that experience is going from a 10 to a -10. For an aspiring medium, the equivalent experience is going from a 100 to a -100.

This is the scale most non-gifted people simply cannot imagine. And it is why standard advice — "just calm down" or "don't take things so personally" — is not just unhelpful, it is impossible.

Why This Matters for Daily Life

Once you understand the 100-to-minus-100 scale, you can understand why daily life is genuinely harder for mediums than for ordinary people.

A medium has to control three things at once: their own emotions, their spiritual gift, and their social life.Their emotions have a direct, immediate effect on their social life. They cannot simply have a bad morning and brush it off — their bad morning radiates outward and affects every interaction they have for the rest of the day.

Their gift, similarly, does not switch off in social situations. They walk into a meeting, a party, a family dinner already perceiving everyone in the room — their moods, their tensions, their unspoken concerns. They are reading energy continuously, often without meaning to.

This is exhausting. And it is one of the main reasons mediums tend to be naturally introverted, even when they appear social on the outside.

Situation 1 — Crowded Public Places

Aspiring mediums genuinely dread crowded environments. Saturday afternoon at the supermarket. Shopping centers during the holidays. Public transport at rush hour. Festivals and large events.

These are not preferences. They are real needs to avoid sensory and energetic overwhelm.

Take the example of a busy shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon. From a medium's perspective, this is what is happening: a baby is crying because of teething pain. The parents are stressed. The teenagers are arguing. A woman in the cashier line is frantic because she is late for something. A man is silently grieving someone. A couple are mid-fight, holding it in for appearances. And the medium is feeling all of it simultaneously, multiplied by 100.

Spending two hours in this environment is the equivalent, energetically, of a normal person attending an emotional therapy session for ten consecutive hours.

Avoiding these environments when possible is not weakness. It is wise resource management.

Situation 2 — Hospitals

Hospitals are particularly difficult for mediums — and devastating for those who can see and communicate with the deceased.

In a hospital, people are sick, dying, or grieving. The atmospheric weight of the building itself is heavy. For a clairvoyant medium, hospitals are also full of the recently deceased — souls who have just left their bodies and have not yet moved on.

This means too many visions, too much grief, too much suffering, all concentrated in one architectural space. Even visiting a healthy relative in a hospital can leave a medium drained for days afterwards.If you have to be in a hospital — for your own care or to visit someone — keep the visit short, focus on the person you are there for, and plan recovery time afterwards. Do not schedule social events or demanding tasks for the same day.

Situation 3 — High-Conflict Family Gatherings

This is one I rarely see written about. Family gatherings where there is unresolved tension — buried grievances, unspoken resentments, old wounds — are particularly punishing for mediums.

The medium picks up not just the surface conversation, but the entire energetic backstory underneath. They feel everything that is not being said. An afternoon at a difficult family dinner can leave a medium with what feels like emotional whiplash for a week.

If you cannot avoid these gatherings, keep them short. Have an exit strategy. Do not arrive on an empty stomach or after a sleepless night.

Situation 4 — Funerals and Grief Settings

Funerals concentrate intense grief from many people in one space, and often involve the recently deceased who may not yet have transitioned. For mediums, this is one of the most demanding environments imaginable.

Attending the funeral of someone you loved is meaningful and important — but be aware that you may need significant recovery time afterwards. Do not schedule anything important in the days following.

How a Medium Can Stay in Control

Avoiding all difficult situations is neither possible nor desirable. The goal is not to live in isolation — it is to develop the skills to manage your sensitivity in real life.

Here are the practices I have found most useful in 20 years of teaching:

1. Develop Energetic Boundaries

You can train yourself to consciously close down your energetic reception when you enter difficult environments. This is one of the first skills I teach my students. It is the difference between being permanently overwhelmed and being functional in the world.

2. Plan Recovery Time

Treat demanding environments like physical exercise. Schedule rest afterwards. A day at a busy mall earns you an evening of solitude. A funeral earns you a quiet weekend. Stop apologising for needing this time.

3. Limit Crowded Environments by Design

Shop at off-peak hours. Avoid Saturday afternoons. Use online ordering when possible. Build a life that does not require you to be in overwhelming environments more than necessary.

4. Cultivate Small, Faithful Friendships

Mediums tend to prefer intimate, deep relationships over large social circles. Honour this preference rather than fighting it. A small group of trusted friends will nourish you far more than a wide social network of acquaintances.

5. Practise the Poker Face — Without Suppressing

You will not always have the freedom to react authentically to what you perceive. Learning to maintain a calm exterior while internally registering what you feel is a skill that protects both your reputation and your relationships. This is not the same as suppressing your feelings — it is choosing your response time.

A Final Word

If you are an aspiring medium, please understand: your sensitivity is not a flaw to be fixed. It is the source of your gift. The same faculty that makes a busy mall unbearable is what allows you to perceive what others cannot perceive. You cannot have one without the other.

The goal is not to become less sensitive. The goal is to become a skilled manager of your sensitivity — to understand which environments cost you, plan accordingly, and protect your capacity to do the work you are here to do.

If you would like to learn the specific techniques I teach for managing emotional and energetic overwhelm, explore the other articles on this blog or visit kimlessage.com for the free masterclass and courses I have built for people exactly like you.