How To Slay A Psychic Vampire

Have you ever met a psychic vampire? They are the people who always leave you feeling drained, who want your time and attention incessantly, but offer nothing in return. I’m an empath, and a softie, and when I was younger this made me especially delicious, and vulnerable, to such folk. I’m older now, and I’ve learnt how to protect myself better. Maybe reading this can help you too.

My most notable encounter with an energy feeder happened about fifteen years ago. For the sake of decency, I shall protect the vampire’s identity and call her Elaine. That was not her name. I met her when I was at a difficult point in my life. I was single, after an emotionally unhealthy relationship ended, and both of my best friend’s had moved away over the previous year or so. I was working in an emotionally exhausting job supporting newly arrived refugees to settle into the country, under the brutal and inhumane NASS system. There is not a more vulnerable and desperate, yet hated and reviled client group in the country. Most people who asked me what I did for work would respond with Daily Mail fuelled vitriol when I told them, and I was listening to soul destroying accounts of rape, violence, and war every day. It was exhausting, and I was a prime victim for a hunting vampire. They circle like a shark, scenting for the blood of the wounded.

I was working late one evening, desperately trying to find accommodation for a pregnant girl who was punch drunk with exhaustion and despair. I had just placed her, and was finally locking up ready to trudge home when the phone rang. The temptation to let the answer machine answer was high, but I was standing next to the handset and a sense of responsibility and obedience caused me to answer it. The caller was a woman, Elaine, who had been a doctor with Medicine Sans Frontiers in Bosnia. She was planning to set up a counselling service for survivors of the trauma of war. She wanted to liaise with our agency to ensure she set up the best possible provision. I explained the office was closed, took her details, and assured her someone would be in touch soon to discuss it further. And so began the most bizarre episode of my life.

I can’t remember if I told my directors about the call, or just decided to follow it up on my own anyway. We didn’t have a team leader, and the charity directors were under investigation for fraud, so we dealt with most things within our team. This is another sign of vulnerability to attack- being a hero.

Anyone who has studied counselling in any form will know about the transactional analysis drama triangle, devised by Stephen Karpman to demonstrate the roles we take when we play games with each other instead of acting transparently and with self- awareness and responsibility. The triangle, with hero, victim and abuser, one on each point, offers a clear visual aid to the theory that if you will allow yourself to play one role; you will end up playing all three. The role to aspire to is the role set to one side, away from the sliding sides of the triangle. That’s the role of the reasonable adult, who refuses to play games.

I didn’t know any of this then, and regularly flung myself into the role of hero/ rescuer, and so slid into the role of victim just as easily. I like to think I never became abuser, other than to myself, but maybe I’m kidding myself, made I did harm I don’t recognise. If I did it was never intentional, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with! (I love this picture by Amy Garner that shows how we can play out each role at once)

So, the wounded, widowed doctor, who wanted to rescue me from the corrupted charity to help her do real good, just as soon as she received her compensation, was irresistible to me. Phone calls became chats over coffee, and we quickly became friends. She showered me with compliments, heralding me as someone she trusted in a world of people she didn’t. That’s a warning sign to watch out for, a slavering of praise, intermingled with dependence. It is very attractive initially, but becomes a tightening noose over time.

Insidiously our friendship became suffocating. She took me to Brussels with her to give her evidence at the war crimes tribunal, but only left the room for half an hour, so could not possibly have attended the meeting she spoke about. She showed my reams of paperwork from doctors and hospitals cataloguing her injuries, but a little voice in the back of my head reminded me of when my friend and I created letter on headed paper for her over controlling parents. Clever photocopying allowed us to create realistic letters about essential courses she had to attend, on selected dates when we wanted a night out. Don’t ever ignore your inner voice- it’s singing up for a reason, and let’s be honest, has it ever been wrong?

I hushed the voice, reminding it that she hadn’t looked for me, hadn’t been seeking help. She’d phoned the charity offering help; this was just a rough patch, just a flare up of her PTSD. This is another thing prey don’t realise about the hunters- they are fishing all the time, they bait their hooks with tantalising morsels and dangle them in fertile hunting grounds. After-hours at a charity is a good bet, anyone still there is likely to have a bit of a helper/ hero complex.

Next, she started to use me to back up her stories, and add believability to her background. I started to get suicide threat phone calls, and I’d rush round, and then I would be the one to call the out of hours doctor, to describe her situation and pain, so they would come out and inject her with super strength painkillers. Then she would send me away again. She had a hundred reasons why other people couldn’t help her, and her demands on me became worse and worse. By now I’d handed in my notice to the charity. The terrible conditions had turned the staff against each other, and I’d tried to straddle both camps, unwilling to take sides which had resulted in my isolation from both. She had not been interested in any of this, and had disappeared on the days I needed support. I had started a new job with an agency after four weeks out of work that left me terrified I would not be able to pay my mortgage. There’d been no sign of her during my dark night of the soul. Classic psychic vampire, only interested in someone when there’s energy to extract, attention to garner, once that’s drained they lose all interest.

I met the man who would become my husband, and she had no interest in meeting him, but being loved and having a new job where I was appreciated had restored me, and she was interested in that. She started demanding my time and attention again, but I was wary now. A clearer mind had stacked up the evidence against her, and I was starting to listen to the alarm bells that were sounding, the defence of her approach to the charity had worn thin. She started to text me as her own friend from a different number, pleading with me to continue to support Elaine, but she muddled up which phone she was texting me from. This playing helpers off against each other, or the threat of it is another key warning signal, it’s a form of control.

I didn’t abandon her.

I phoned her G.P and told her all my concerns so professional help could be put in place, if it was required. Then I text both the phone numbers what I had done. I did not hear anything from her again.

That is the biggest warning flag of all, anyone who will not engage with the help and support available, but expects you to do it all for them. You see professional support will have been trained to avoid feeding the psychic vampire. They will construct the support offered around the basic remit that the supported individual takes responsibility for themselves. A genuine individual, who is going through a tough time and needs assistance will welcome this, indeed insist on it. A psychic vampire will want others to do everything for them, while claiming their victim is the only one who understands them, the only one with the exceptional skills to help them. The vampire will use your own vanity and kindness against you. Don’t let them.

This was when I started my counselling training and learned about transactional analysis, and so learned how to protect myself from further predation. I don’t rush to offer help anymore, I sign post to professionals who are paid to assist. If someone is receptive to this, then I support them to engage. I do not make myself available day and night anymore, my phone is kept on silent, and I only respond to texts. I can send these on my terms. I talk about my own needs and if the friend does not respect these, or offer care in response, then I stop responding to them. I only want friends who offer in return as much as I offer them. I still have to be wary and take care, my first instinct is still to rush in, but I have experienced total burn out now, and I am determined to never reach that point again, and that means looking after me first.

My House Is Trying To Kill Me

houseNo, really it is. You see, we had to sell our massive old house- the big six bed Victorian, where Being Human was filmed when a heart attack forced my husband to accept we weren’t going to foster anymore, and we weren’t moving to France either. Which had been our two year plan, to buy two houses, live in one, rent the other out once my writing had taken off and we could support ourselves between these two incomes.

So with those dreams in tatters round our ankles, and a mortgage we couldn’t afford anymore, we sold to an utterly delightful family and bought a sweet like red brick thirties semi came onto the market. We were the first and only people to view it, it was perfect with 3 double bedrooms, a kitchen that could take an island and dining table, and a lounge that was big enough for a T.V end, and a desk end, and sweeping sea views. The whole house was light and golden, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders as soon as we walked through the door. All it would need to be perfect was a bit of repainting in nautical colours.

Downsizing was hard, even though we’d included a lot of the furniture in the sale of the old house, we still had an awful lot of stuff to fit into little house. The immediate solution was to store stuff in the attic so we had some space to move and sort things out. We needed a larger attic hatch and the attic boarding to allow it to be used for storage. Which is when we discovered the asbestos. No I hadn’t bothered with a full survey- a surveyor won’t move furniture or carpet, what would have been the point of wasting £1,000+ that we didn’t have? So we couldn’t fit a large attic hatch ourselves. We needed specialists. Expensive specialists.

Which is when we found that the electrics in the bathroom weren’t earthed. What a wonderful combination, unearthed electrics and water, my favourite. Because of the asbestos the electrics needed to be replaced by the specialist team, and if the bathroom electrics were in that state I didn’t fancy taking a chance on the rest of the house! So we had to pay for a complete rewire. While everything was pulled apart for the electrics to be restored, it made sense to move the boiler out of my bedroom- it was VERY noisy- and into the utility area. A far more sensible place for a boiler surely? This meant rebuilding the rear wall of the utility space though, another expensive job, and while all the other turmoil went on, we may as well move the radiators in each room to where we actually wanted them, and reskim the walls so we could paint them afterwards and finally have our perfect little home.

Everything took much longer than we expected, and we were without heating until December. The house is lovely and warm- it’s well insulated and has its cavity walls filled (See why we thought it was a safe buy?), but not having the heating on made it damp. First I got the snuffles, then my hubby got a bad case of man flu. Only it wasn’t man flu, it was pneumonia. Not on house, not on.

We had a little break then, we were out of money and patience for sharing our house with builders. Come May though, we couldn’t bear being carpetless with hacked up walls any longer. We found a new team of builders and ran up a horrible debt to get the bulk of the house and gardens finished. Two weeks they estimated to get the interior work done. Maximum. How our little house must have chuckled.

Hubby’s room went smoothly, (we have separate rooms because he’s a lark, and I’m an owl, and he snores like a steam train, also, I’m messy and he’s finicky. He has visiting rights.). With his room finished, I packed enough clothes for a week into a bag and decamped to the sofa, while all my belongings were crammed into the spare room, which will eventually become my writing room.

My room ceiling couldn’t just be skimmed though, it was sagging and needed to be pulled down and completely replaced. That was going to mean an extra couple of hundred pounds and an extra couple of nights on the sofa. Only the house had bigger plans than just a few extra nights poor sleep. Once the plaster was off the ceiling we discovered that the beams were far too thin and widely spaced. It was a miracle that the contents of the attic had not fallen through and landed on me.

This is when I started to suspect the house had it in for us. The beams were sagging so badly they’d dropped several inches and couldn’t be repaired, they had to be replaced. And the wood had to be specially ordered in. You don’t want to know how much extra that cost, and by the end of my third week of sleeping on the sofa I was seriously suffering from sleep deprivation. I was accepting night shifts at the hostel where I used to work the hope of better sleep, not just because I was so desperate for the extra money to cover our spiralling costs.

The day I moved back into my room was lovely. The colour I’d chosen is the softest grey, I can’t remember its real name, but I call it Wistful Sigh. The thick soft carpet is scrumptious under my toes, and the extra money we spent on the quality underlay was worth every penny. I don’t have curtains yet, just a blanket over the window, but you know, after the lounge, it really is luxury to have my own space and all my belongings in one place.

Phew, the end was finally in sight, they just needed to give the hall, stairs and landing a second coat of the glorious New England blue I’d chosen, while Hubby and I packed up the lounge so everything could be moved into the kitchen for a couple of days while the lounge ceiling was skimmed to get rid of the awful aertex, and it was painted a slightly greyer shade of blue than the hall. We wouldn’t have a lounge or kitchen for a few days, but that’s ok it wouldn’t take long. Can you hear the house laughing? I didn’t, I am an eternal optimist.

I did hear the worry in the builder’s voice though, as he called downstairs, he looked sad as he showed me the water running off the new electric socket box when he pulled it out of the wall. Ah, electricity and water, my favourite combination. Our new electrics, fitted less than six months had rusting metal boxes in an interior wall. We frantically looked for exterior causes. There weren’t any.

‘What’s under the laminate?’ the builder asked in a worried voice.

‘Oh, it’s concrete,’ I replied confidently. ‘I asked the seller when we viewed’.

I’d hoped there might still be the lovely original thirties parquet wooden floor to restore. The builder suggested I may have been lied to. He explained that houses from this era were sometimes built with floors tiled straight onto earth, which damp could then rise through. I didn’t need him to pull up the laminate, or show me the foil backed polystyrene to know what he’d find underneath. The only possible solution was to dig up the pantry, which was where the water seemed to be accessing the house, and lay a damp-proof course, and hope that resolved the problem. The original black and white tiles are a lovely find. It’s just a shame there’s a thick layer of black adhesive over them which is going to be a bugger to remove.

Well, there went the budget for the side garden. The one we wanted to slab for us, so we had a lovely space for barbeques and parties with our friends. All the things we’d planned to be doing now we weren’t tied down to fostering. And the couple of days we were spending without a lounge or kitchen was stretched by another five days. We were a little fraught, you know, just a smidge. Finally the pantry was finished, although it would take a month to dry, so nothing could go back into it, but that’s ok, the builder only had the lounge ceiling to skim, would only take a day or two.

Ah ha ha ha. I know! Hubby and I had a rare day off together when I heard that scared tone the builder had developed when he had to tell me there was a problem. The leak we’d discovered and fixed from the bathroom was only one of three, and they were long term problems. You know where this is going don’t you? The ceiling was completely rotten at one end, and needed replacing. We decided to bite the bullet and replace the whole thing, insulating for sound while he was at it. Hubby’s telly watching at half six in the morning would wake me now more. They also discovered that some genius had cut the beam the feet of the bath sat on down to just a couple of inches to fit in the bath waste. So the heaviest thing in the whole house was balancing on a flimsy bit of damp wood. Really house? Wasn’t that stooping a bit low? My marvellous builder saved the day though, strapping some steel strips either side to reinforce it, and fixing the other two leaks.

Which is when the house seemed to take against him instead, the one who was foiling all her fatal plans. First his wife had to be rushed into hospital with a suspected heart attack, which turned out to be fluid on the lung from here she was kicked in work. A scary experience that delayed work by another five days, but we weren’t complaining, we’d been there far too recently. Then, the day he was due back, his lovely two year old dog had to be put to sleep after having massive fits.

It was still essential that the rear garden was slabbed for the dogs. They’d turned the pretty lawned area at the back of the house into a dug up Somme within a matter of days of us moving in. The next day the scalpings and other such builderly things which had been ordered for the remaining garden works were dumped on the pavement at a completely random address, on a completely random day, so the poor man had to spend the hottest day of the year shovelling several tons of scalpings (gravel sort of stuff) into bags to be transported back to the depo.

Then the decorator went AWOL for a weekend. I’m a very sanguine person, Hubby is not so much. Since his heart attack my cheerful laughing man has become much more negative and short tempered. This was about the point he became really ratty. It was also the time the house seemed to decide we were here to stay, and give up fighting us. Not before she’d passed the baton onto the car though, so the gears all failed as he drove me to work. We had to manage without a car for a week. Hubby decided he wanted to sell that one after such a betrayal, so we bought a smaller car, with lower running costs, and somehow, she got passed the baton too! Battery faults meant we were another week without a car. During this time I badly damaged my back in work, and as that got better, developed a virus.

I think what I’m trying to say is, sorry I’m late with my blog posts and newsletter, and sorry I haven’t made better progress with Book 2 of The Darkly Vampire Trilogy, but there has been a series of unfortunate events! It’s been four whole days now since anything untoward has happened. They start the garden tomorrow.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

So, what made me decide to write about the paranormal, vampires, ghosts, zombies and horror? Why does my writing have a dark and gothic twist? I thought that today I could share some of my real life paranormal experiences with you, so you can understand my inspiration for choosing to write in the dark fantasy genre, or how it chose me?

First of all let us consider the definition of Dark Fantasy. There are many different definitions out there, but my interpretation is that Dark Fantasy is a novel where the world seems the same as our own, but with a super natural / paranormal twist. The story will have a dark, gothic feel, and the monsters with be sympathetic, while the humans may well be worse.

How did I decide to write in this style? Well, it came naturally to me. As well as twenty years as a support worker meaning that I met many human monstrosities, and helped to heal their victims, I grew up in haunted houses.

It wasn’t actually me who noticed the ghosts in the first old Welsh mining cottage we lived in. It was my little brother who complained of the woman in white who woke him up at night. Apart from her nightly walks, she seemed peaceful enough. That house was only rented though, and we had to move quickly when we were given notice. The house my parents chose was actually a collection of three old cottages, one was habitable, one was a wreck, but recognisably a cottage, and the other had burnt down, and been rebuilt as storage. It didn’t take me long to realise it was very haunted. From my bedroom window I could look out at the raised plateau of grass where our swing set stood, and I could lie in bed and watch the swings move. First the two outer flat swings would swing, and then the middle baby seat would start, swing, brief stop in mid-air, swing, exactly like it did when I pushed my little sister, catching her on each upwards arc.

These children were friendly, and would help me find things I’d lost. If I told them what I was looking for, I’d quickly find it nearby. One night I left them a charm bracelet, telling them it was a gift, and the next day near the bracelet I found a perfectly round pebble, which I later found out was a Victorian marble. The man who bought the old wreck of a cottage to restore told us about being visited by a woman while he worked. He was not a man taken to fancy, and was very shaken up by the whole experience.

The next house we moved to though was not such a positive experience. There was a thick pine forest around the edge of our rear field, and there was a feeling of such malevolence from that woodland that I hated to go outside at night. Animals behaved skittishly near the woods, and my sister and I had the same nightmares at night of a laughing male face and the river filled with lashing eels.

The worst happened when I moved away to University. One morning as I woke up, I felt the bed sink behind me, as if someone had leant their elbow on the bed, to bend closer to my ear, and then a harsh male voice, right next to my ear said: ‘So you thought you could get away, and laughed. My sister developed Fibromyalgia while we lived in that house, and my Step-Father was diagnosed with M.E after he moved in, although he hadn’t had it before. My first boyfriend became ill soon after he started seeing me. Not long after that morning visitation I was finally diagnosed with Glandular Fever and Toxoplasmosis, which eked all the colour and joy out of my world, and plagued my right into my thirties.

It plagued me, in fact until I became friends with a Shaman, who I had approached for accountancy help. She taught me how to protect myself, state my intentions to only communicate with positive energies, as well as telling me that an energy cannot haunt you if you refuse it permission. I learnt that all I had to do with anything unpleasant that I felt approach was tell it firmly to go away, and it had to.
The very first time I meditated the blue bubble of protection around me, a furious male figure tore it open with clawed hands, and screamed at me in fury, but with my new knowledge I was able to tell it to leave, and close my bubble. Since then the Glandular Fever symptoms have gone. I’ve used the skills I was taught to help the curious child ghost in our old house move on with a feeling of love and acceptance, and whoever it was shaking my bed in the night to stop and go away.

In the hostel where I used to work, a hostel for homeless, and therefore unhappy teenagers, they often told me about a ghost. Year after year different tenants would do an Ouija board, or have bad dreams about a female who played the piano. The details were startlingly consistent. I always told them they were imagining it, because I didn’t want them to be scared, but I felt a malicious presence too. One that thrived on the discord and unhappiness of so many damaged young lives.

I hated to be left on my own there, and would hear footsteps stamp downstairs, linger in the office doorway, and then move across the room to where I worked at the computer. Then it would fiddle with papers besides me while I refused to look at it, or acknowledge it. Other times it would hurl into the room with an unhappy service-user, and swing letters pinned on the noticeboard around in semi-circles behind their heads, while I tried to smile and pretend everything was fine.

Once I had met the Shaman though, I knew how to tackle the malevolence, and so one night, when all the tenants were in bed, I stopped avoiding it, and met its energy head on. Like most bullies it cringed at confrontation. I told it sternly it had to leave, it could not be here anymore. I immediately felt the atmosphere lighten, and after that none of the subsequent service users ever complained of ghosts again.