Interview with “Long Island Medium” Theresa Caputo on new TLC series

Talking to dead people is just an average day for Theresa Caputo. The Long Island, New York, housewife/medium doesn’t know why she’s been given this gift, but she certainly is using it as best as she can. Caputo is a psychic medium who spends her days and evenings helping people find closure and connecting them to loved ones they have lost.

She’s never read a spiritual book. Doesn’t watch all those “I see dead people” movies. Nor does she follow paranormal stories or other mediums.

“I’m a very sheltered person,” she tell us.

Caputo’s built her business on reputation alone and has a waiting list that starts taking new appointments first in January 2013. And the wait is only going to get longer.

TLC cameras capture her work in a new series titled Long Island Medium. I caught up with Caputo to discuss her new series and what it’s like to be a psychic medium. Despite the interruption from my deceased mother  [see separate blog  Theresa Caputo talks to my dead mother], Caputo was forthcoming with her gift and how’s she sharing it with others.

Discovering her gift began with the feeling of not belonging… “I was in therapy. The therapist would tell me ‘Theresa there’s nothing wrong with you.’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t feel right.” I always had this feeling of I didn’t feel right. Like I didn’t belong. I can’t explain it, it was like something is missing. I have my parents. I still have grandparents from the physical world. I had the most amazing childhood so blessed to have the family I have. My husband survived a brain tumor. I have two beautiful children so you would think that I have it all, why would you feel something is missing? It was my spiritual gift. It was my spiritual journey and path that I was missing. It had to do with my soul. It had nothing to do with anything else. Because once I accepted my gift that feeling went away. And I had that feeling for most of my life but could never understand it.”

Accepting and understanding her gift was a journey… “I had been suffering from anxieties for many years, went to many doctors and things like that. My mom had asked her friend who is a spiritual healer to work on me, do a little healing energy to try and figure out what was going on and she had immediately picked up it was spirits. It was spirits trying to communicate to me, so I immediately became freaked out by that. ‘What do you mean? How could that be?’ I struggled for many years going back and forth with it.  I attended a spiritual class where I learned what was happening to me and they were showing me how to communicate through a spirit.”

Caputo feels and hears spirits… “For me I feel spirit. I don’t see the way we see here in the physical world. When I say I hear them I can’t explain it. I hear them but I really don’t. It’s more like a feeling for me. What was happening to me was that I could be in a store and I could be standing next to a woman and her husband passed of a heart attack. I would feel as if someone was laboring my breath, like I couldn’t breath. That’s my symbol for someone passing by the heart, chest, lung area when they labor my breathing. So that was happening to me and I didn’t know what that was. I’d be in the store and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe for no reason. So what I learned through meditation was what the feelings meant. You’ll even see me now, if I do a reading, I take a gasp for air and I won’t freak out I’ll ask who passed from the chest and you can actually see them labor my breathing.”

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For more information on how to contact Theresa Caputo, see related blog.

Caputo experiences how a person died… “They will bring me through their passing. So if someone has a question of someone’s passing, I’ll say to them ‘Look, do you really want to know what happened because they’re going to bring me through it and I’m going to have to go through it? I’ll kind of feel certain things, so if there was a blow to the head, for a split second, I’ll feel like someone whacked me in the back of the head. I can’t explain it, It’s odd. It’s not scary because I know what it is now, but I’m able to control it now. I know what the symbols and signs mean.”

It took Caputo a long time to say “I’m a medium”… “Really to be honest with you, the past two years I really started feeling comfortable that when people ask me what do I do for a living that I say ‘I’m a medium.’ You say that to people and right away they think I’m a fortune teller or I’m reading their mind or I know what they’re thinking. It’s not like that. It took me a long time. There would be people I’d say that to and they would be like  ‘Oh, that’s weird” or ‘She’s a weirdo, I’m not talking to her.’ It’s a topic of conversation but people are uncomfortable with death. It took me a long time to say ‘I’m a medium’ or to hand out my business card to people.”

Spirits reach out to people who need them… “It amazes me for every reading I do. People who come to the events that I host and they aren’t expecting to be read, and they are the first ones that get read. You know. Because it’s always about what we need. … What I learned about being a medium — people leave the physical world a lot of times in a very tragic way and we might be wondering if they are at peace. Or if they are OK. What a beautiful gift of knowing they are at peace, and I don’t think you can put a price on peace and comfort, you can’t.”

Caputo considers herself a vessel for the spirits… “I really don’t think it’s me. I really believe I’m just a vessel that allows them to do it. A lot of times a spirit will just validate for the person I’m reading what’s going on around them, what they are experiencing is real. And here I am able to validate that for them. I’m just a vessel that can validate for them that they are still with us.”

It’s hard for Caputo to shut it off… “Technically, I could turn it off if I choose but how do you, it’s there, it’s just who I am. And that’s just how I look at it.”

Spirits don’t always take their turns, a lot can come at her at a time…“Well you know what, that’s what just happened. You kind of just bounce back and forth until they kind of get settled. Sometimes the people I’m reading are nervous. Sort of a lot of little things before we get started. Yes, things can get confused, and more than one souls do speak at one time. And you kind of got to settle them down a little bit.”

And, yes Channel Guide readers, spirits do hear you!… “Oh yeah, they hear me. They hear you!”

Communicating back to spirits has it challenges… “Umm, I know this is going to sound stupid but I can’t tell you. It just happens. How did this happen? I didn’t ask for what happened. It just happens. I know that sounds silly but like I don’t physically say, and you can witness it through the way I read, I don’t go ‘OK, wait a minute, let me ask them this. I may say ‘wait a minute’ because I’m telling them ‘you sit down, you go to the back to the room, you step forward.’ It’s almost just a subconscious thing that happens that I do. To be honest with you, I cannot explain it. I can’t. This is just the way that I am. It just happens.”

For more information on how to contact Theresa Caputo, see related blog.