How Transitioning My Gender Improved My Psychic Skills

You can't truly ground if you can't trust yourself.

My childhood was spent in dissociation. Because my brain was starved of necessary dopamine, it generated more via chronic daydreaming. I never knew what was going on around me because I lived in my head where my imaginary queer chosen family unconditionally loved me. I existed half the time in refuge from a painful world that, even seeing me as a cute little girl, really didn't seem to like me very much.

I daydreamed from when I was about 2 years old, imagining even then healing and redeeming those who needed it, to when I was about 25 or so. As a result, I didn't have any other coping mechanisms for being in the world. I had to learn via therapy.

Chronic daydreaming is often called maladaptive daydreaming for this reason and because the daydreaming happens nearly uncontrollably, making it not really a choice. I hate "maladaptive" for its stigmatizing sound. It's not the daydreaming that's really the problem. It's the neurodivergence, the ableist world that doesn't want to see, understand, or provide access for it, and potentially as well the failure of the person's childhood caretakers for not fulfilling the child's needs. I would not have had to dream of unconditional love if it was ever given to me in real life.

So now as a psychic things get interesting. Like the daydreaming, you could say I chose to pursue honing my psychic skills, but that doesn't mean I can fully anticipate or stop the results. I lose control in a different sense. In my daydreams, the surroundings are always friendly. When a psychic surge hits, that is very much not the case. I very easily lose an interior sense of stability and I am constantly overstimulated because I am taking in things I usually can't, like the trees talking to each other. My psychism is also in a significant way built around my connections with my closest loved ones, which in the best case scenario is comforting because I am never alone and have unusual opportunities to intervene in the case of trouble. That is interdependence.

In the worst case scenario, I lose myself in my Others. I feel their feelings as if they're my feelings. Their depression pins me to my bed like an elephant is sitting on my chest. My body shakes with horrible anxiety. I often can't tell at first that these are not my feelings, that they are coming from the outside instead. When you have been in therapy for years and you feel a bad feeling, your instinct is to tend to it because you know doing so as soon as possible is most effective toward healing. When I find the end of a feeling and discover its attached to one of my Others, sometimes one of my unhealthier Others, that instinct does not go away. Sometimes I rush to tend to the feeling anyway even though I can't nor should I heal it. This drains me energetically and often alarms the Other person. That is co-dependence.

Since starting my gender journey, grounding has become slightly easier because I know my own center. I know how I feel on the inside, that I am warm, and boyish, and safe like an illustration of The Sun tarot card. I love my body so my spirit can so much easier settle within it. I want to enjoy a nice stretch of my arms or feel the softness of a couch cushion against my ass or hear the sound of a ceiling fan clacking or smell how my own cologne mixes with my current muskier testosterone-enhanced scent. I can turn away from the Other I am co-dependent on; I don't need to seek love from outside of me anymore.

Grounding as trans is simply just being Alive. And being alive, really, truly, fully alive as myself, is making me a better spirit worker and psychic. I didn't work well when I did not know my own limits. Terror reigned over me when I had nowhere to go from what I could perceive. Now, like with my daydreams when I was younger, I have a haven. Refuge is within my own wholeness.