Somebody Taught You to Shut Off Your Psychic Gifts

Who taught you to stop talking about what you knew? The Army sent Joe McMoneagle to a rest home.

Nov 12, 2026

If you were psychic as a child, if you were always the kid who knew things but as an adult you just don’t feel it anymore - I don’t think your gift faded on its own. I think somebody taught you to shut it off.

I’ll walk you through how to start noticing it again at the end of this, but first let’s talk a bit about who might teach you to find the off switch for your gifts.

Most of what I write about when I write about “the forgetting,” how knowledge and memory get lost, happens to whole cultures - a library burns, a tradition stops getting passed down. But this kind of thing happens to one person at a time, usually at a kitchen table or in a classroom, and it happens because somebody the person perceived to be in charge reacted badly to what the person said.

So, let’s start with a soldier....

What happened to Joe McMoneagle?

In 1970, Joe McMoneagle was overseas with the Army, working hard and exhausted. He told the story years later to Jerry Snider, in “Remote Viewing: An Interview with Joseph McMoneagle,” in issue 52 of Magical Blend magazine, and the Monroe Institute reprinted that part of it in its newsletter in August 2017. He took a sip of a before-dinner drink, feeling like he needed air, and then he collapsed in the doorway of the restaurant. He went into convulsions and stopped breathing. At the hospital, they couldn’t find a heartbeat.

He was out of his body, watching all of it. He went backward through a tunnel, reviewed his whole life with what he felt was an all-loving being, and then a bright white light told him to go back to his body, even though he didn’t want to.

When he woke up, the first thing he did was tell everybody about the white light and God. In his words: “The military authorities took my talk as a sign of brain damage and put me in a rest home for observation. They said I was fine, and I realized it was best not to talk about my experience. So I shut up and tried to act normal.”

A rest home! For telling people what he saw while the hospital couldn’t find his heartbeat! The Army heard a soldier talk about God and a white light, filed it under brain damage, and sent him off to be watched. “So I shut up,” he said.

But it didn’t stop him. From that point on, he said, he “started having spontaneous out-of-body experiences and spontaneous knowings, or certain knowledge about things I had no ordinary means of knowing.” In 1978 he was recruited into the Army’s remote viewing program, which is the practice of describing a place or a target you can’t see, using nothing but your mind. On the Shawn Ryan Show in 2024, he was still telling the same story: “They thought I was brain damaged.”

Where did the Army’s “brain damaged” soldier end up?

At the Monroe Institute, of all places. According to the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia, McMoneagle “participated in a Gateway course in 1982” while he was a remote viewer for the Army, and found that it cut the time it took him to get ready for a session and made his results more reliable. His wife, Nancy “Scooter” McMoneagle, tells it from her side in a 2017 piece for the Institute: Joe went looking for tools to speed up his “cool down,” the time it took him to reach the special state of consciousness he needed for remote viewing, and he and Bob Monroe worked together on the Hemi-Sync frequencies for it. “All the while I was falling for the love of my life,” she wrote. Nancy was Monroe’s stepdaughter, and she was the Institute’s President and Executive Director.

So in 1970 the Army put him in a rest home for talking about leaving his body, and twelve years later he was at the Monroe Institute learning to get there faster, on purpose.

He had a second near-death experience in 1985, a major heart attack five months after he retired from the Army, at thirty-nine. He met the white light again, and this time, he said, “I realized it was finite and had limits.” He concluded that the white light is “what we would call the totality of self: what we are when we’re not physical.”

Who else was told to keep quiet?

In 1995, a researcher named Justine Owens wrote a paper for the Monroe Institute’s Hemi-Sync Journal. She was on the faculty at the University of Virginia and had researched over 500 cases of near-death experiences, also called NDEs, and she wrote that she “became attuned to society’s biases around the study of NDE through the pain of those who shared their experiences with me.” One of the people she quoted said: “At the time I mentioned my near death experience my doctor advised me to put it out of my mind and not tell anyone else about it. I believe he thought it would cause me to appear unbalanced.”

Owens also wrote about where a lot of us hear it first, in the “everyday phrases often repeated to children: ‘that’s just your imagination’ and ‘it’s only a dream.’” And when you’re told “it’s all in your head,” she wrote, it’s “said as if that meant ‘it’ was nowhere.” (How many times did you hear “it’s just your imagination” before you were ten?)

What happens to a kid who gets punished for knowing?

P.M.H. Atwater has been studying near-death experiencers for decades, and in her 2019 book, The Forever Angels, she focused on people who had them as children. I recommended that book back in 2024, and I’ll keep recommending it. It’s mind blowing.

A woman Atwater lists as Patricia described what she called “time slips,” a kind of precognition, which means knowing about something before it happens. She’d experience something “just a few minutes into the future.” In second or third grade, she “heard the teacher tell us to open our books to a particular page” before the teacher said it. “Several times the teacher saw me open my book before she spoke and interrogated me about it. When I couldn’t explain how I’d done it, I was punished. After that, the ‘slips’ diminished somewhat, but continued.”

Another woman, Penelope, told her parents things as a little girl that she “should have no way of knowing.” Her father was excited. Her mother would “insist that it all be put away and denied.” Atwater herself writes that she was born with synesthesia, which means her senses blended together, so she could “see music, hear numbers, and smell color,” and she was “continuously punished for being a bad child” for it, including being put on a tall stool in front of the class in a hat that said DUNCE. Atwater found that it takes the average child experiencer “twenty to forty years, some even longer,” to integrate what happened to them.

So why do psychic abilities go quiet?

If you think you’ve lost psychic abilities you had as a kid, here’s my personal opinion: The ability doesn’t go anywhere. The kid learns that talking about it gets you punished, so the kid stops talking about it, and after enough years of not talking about it, the kid shifts their attention away from it and stops noticing it too. In 2024, I wrote that expanded consciousness “is a human trait. It’s only ‘exceptional’ if it’s being suppressed in the majority of the population.” I still think that.

What bugs me is this. One school can hand a kid a test that’s ALL pattern recognition, the way my GATE test was, and reward her for spotting the pattern before anybody else does, and another school, like Patricia’s, can punish a kid for knowing the page number early. From the kid’s perspective, that’s the same skill.

How do you start paying attention again?

Write down the earliest time you remember knowing something you shouldn’t have known. Then write down who you told and exactly what they said back. A lot of the time, you’ll find the sentence that shut you off, word for word.

Keep a log for two weeks of every time you know something a beat before it happens - who’s calling, what someone’s about to say, which page the teacher’s going to tell you to turn to. Write down the time and what you knew, and check it later. Don’t act on your intuition yet. You’re just getting back in the habit of noticing it.

Pick one person you trust and tell them about one thing you know you knew. You learned to go quiet around other people, so it helps to start talking again around someone safe.

When you catch yourself saying “it’s probably just my imagination,” finish the sentence differently: “and I’m writing it down anyway.”

Do you think kids lose these abilities, or do they learn to stop mentioning them until they stop noticing them too? Tell me what you think in the comments.

If somebody taught you to shut your gifts off, Starfire Signals is where I help you turn them back on. It’s my live intuition class on Zoom, Monday, November 30, 8PM to 10 PM Eastern.

The Hemi-Sync audio I stream puts your body into deep rest and keeps your mind awake. Then you write down every impression you get, before you have time to argue with it.

SIGN ME UP FOR STARFIRE SIGNALS

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