Inside the Other Side: Soul Contracts, Life Lessons, and How Dead People Help Us, Between Here and Heaven

By Concetta Bertoldi

A New York Times–bestselling author and celebrity medium “guides readers. . . . to get in touch with the other side in this life-affirming and personable book” (Publishers Weekly).

World-famous psychic Concetta Bertoldi talks intimately about soul contracts, life lessons, and how dead people help us between here and heaven, as she leads us on an eye-opening tour Inside the Other Side. With the same compassion and wit displayed in her well-received book, Do Dead People Watch You Shower? the self-proclaimed “average Jersey girl who talks to the dead,” shares her own experiences with loss, as well as the fascinating and comforting anecdotes of those she’s read for over the years. You’ll be inspired by Concetta’s powerful insights and guidance as she explains how to cope with life’s most difficult issues by getting in touch with angels on the Other Side.

“With her fun loving and sparkling personality, it is no wonder the spirit world wants to speak to her.” —James Van Praagh, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Talking to Heaven

“Concetta Bertoldi is definitely not your run-of-the-mill medium.” —Billy Baldwin, actor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062087430

Concetta Bertoldi

Concetta Bertoldi is a full-time medium with a two-year waiting list. She is regularly consulted by members of Britain's royal family, American celebrities, politicians, and others. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.

Book preview

1

A Few Words About the Way It All Works . . .

Death is not extinguishing the light, it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

—Rabindranath Tagore

A while back I was talking with a psychologist friend. He’d asked me to explain how I’m able to connect with and listen to dead people. After I told him he said, You know, you’re just like a schizophrenic. At the top of your consciousness, both you and the schizophrenic have got holes in the roof. The only difference is that you are able to control what voices come in through the holes and the schizophrenic can’t.

Nice.

The reality is that the spirits of our loved ones who have crossed to the Other Side are with us all the time. But most people, I guess, have fewer holes in the roof—that is, they’re not as tuned in to this reality as a psychic medium is—so those voices aren’t getting through to their consciousness. For most, I realize, connecting with the spirit of someone no longer alive in physical form is a pretty strange thing. And even though I’ve been hearing from the dead my entire life and I’ve done readings for thousands of people both privately and at my larger shows, I’m well aware that there are some who do not believe this is possible. So it’s probably important to say a little bit about how this all works before we get into other subjects.

I’ve heard dead guys talking to me since I was a young child—it’s an ability that I just happen to have so I always find it challenging to explain how I do it when people want to know. It’s like trying to explain any other natural ability—like, How is it you sing so well? or How can you draw like that? Someone with those talents might say that they practice a lot, but it’s a sure bet that they were better than average at their particular ability even before they began practicing seriously. Aside from the colorful way my psychologist friend described my ability, I’ve often said that the job I have now is a lot like the ordinary job I held before I went public—as a receptionist, basically picking up and directing calls.

An Art, Not a Science

One difference is that the caller does not always clearly identify themselves. They might tell me their name, they may even spell it out, or they may simply give me a first initial. There can be an impressionistic aspect to it, in that I may know the name has two syllables and I’ll hear part of it and the other part may be indistinct. Also, the medium is the filter through which a message is delivered, and she is limited by her own personal life experiences. So if a name is unusual, one I’ve never come across in my life, it can be a challenge to grasp it and I may need an assist from the client.

Receiving a message is not a perfect science; it’s more of an interpretive art. I’ll hear something—or more accurately, I’ll get a thought in my head that runs parallel to my own thoughts; I’ll see an image or smell something, like perfume or smoke or alcohol. My ability is what is called clairsentient, which means that all my senses are psychically involved. (There are other mediums who rely more on just one of their senses. If that happens to be their sense of hearing, they would be called clairaudient; if they mainly are seeing visions, they would be called clairvoyant.) I really don’t know how the spirits make me smell alcohol or smoke or cologne. It just happens to me, just the same as if a living person were smoking a cigarette or wearing a particular scent. And I can always distinguish the source of the smoke, whether it’s from a cigarette, a cigar, a pipe, or a marijuana joint. But the truth is I don’t know if I’m actually smelling it physically using my human olfactory capabilities, or if I’m smelling it in some energetic way via my mind. It’s hard to say, because it comes to me in such a way that sometimes I sense it and feel it the same way I’m smelling it. The person I’m doing a reading for doesn’t smell anything, while for me it’s quite clear and obvious.

Physical sensations also play a role. For instance, I’ve had spirits pinch me, hug me, or just use my body as an instrument to describe their own symptoms in life or the manner in which they crossed over. I may have a sensation of something very fast and dramatic, which could indicate some sort of accident. If a spirit wanted to convey that they had crossed due to a problem with their lungs, they might either visually show me this or they might create the sensation within me that would let me understand this—pain, pressure, or shortness of breath.

Over the years I’ve had so many different experiences with the dead and the different ways they express themselves. They are not all the same, but by now I’ve got a pretty good handle on a broad range of their repertoire.

It’s Not About Me

Even though they are using me to get their message through, the connection is really between the spirit and the person I’m doing a reading for. A medium is just an intermediary. I really am like the receptionist in that I first pick up a message from the spirit, I make a connection, and then I deliver the message to the intended recipient. I don’t have to be near the client and I don’t have to scour the universe to seek out the spirit. I can be right in front of the client or I can be across the world talking with them by phone. The spirit who is connected to that person will come to me in order to be put through to that person.

When I’m doing a reading for someone they have to help piece things together—some of what the spirit tells me may be literal, while some of it takes a bit of reading between the lines in order to give the fullest possible picture. For example, during one show I did in Totowa, New Jersey, at a Holiday Inn, this girl’s father came through, but he showed himself to me as an image of Popeye the Sailor. I said, Don’t take this the wrong way, but this is what I’m seeing—he’s showing me this cartoon image of Popeye. She said, Well, he was in the navy. I said, Was he a real character? Because he’s showing me this and I get the impression he thinks he’s being funny. She was laughing and she said, Yes, that’s just his personality. So with one image I got something about what he’d done in life as well as an example of his humorous nature when he was in the flesh. The fact that he had shown me this image in this way gave me a little extra so his daughter could know it was really him, because she recognized his personality as well as something specific about his life.

What people need to remember is I’m not making this stuff up. I very often don’t even know what spirits are talking about. They will always try to give me something particular to the person I’m doing the reading for, something that the person will recognize even if it means nothing at all to me. I had a client named Lena whose mother had died. In the reading her mother kept showing me a cat, but it was weird because, as I told Lena, her mother didn’t want me to say cat. I said, It’s like she wants me to say ‘pussy’ or ‘pussy cat.’ Lena confirmed that her mother was known as Grandma Pussycat—that was her nickname. Who knew? During that same reading I kept seeing horseshoes. I thought that was pretty strange and again had no idea what it meant. But when I asked, Lena easily solved the riddle. She said, Concetta, hanging on the inside of all the doors in my relatives’ houses are horseshoes for good luck.

Sometimes it takes guesswork on both sides. I’ll never forget one show I was doing, during which this man named Dennis was taking photographs the entire time. He just seemed to me like an old soul. He was blown away when I was able to give him validation from his father. I told him that his father looked at him as a brother, not as a son. They were so close, like best friends. I also said, There’s somebody here named Holland—an unusual name, but I knew it was a person who was telling me his name, not a reference to the country. He completely freaked out—he said, That’s my grandfather! Then I told him, Your father’s telling me to mention Gina, and he went nuts. He went Oh noooo! That’s my ex-wife! Don’t bring her up! It was so funny—but there was more. I said, He’s trying to tell me something about dental work. Are you having any dental work done? He said no. I said, Well, maybe it’s something about your ex-wife? He said, Well, I hope it’s not that I’m going to have to identify her by her dental work! The whole audience went crazy laughing.

Sometimes the person I’m reading for may just not remember something—the experience of having a reading is not an everyday thing. A lot of people feel caught like a deer in the headlights when they have a reading. There was a perfect and very funny example of this at a recent show when I was talking to a woman and the dead guy who was coming through for her was talking about some bar where she hung out. I told her that he was mentioning the name Michael and asked her if she knew what he was talking about. She drew a complete blank. I said, Who owned the bar? She was shaking her head like not for the life of her could she make any connection with this, when the woman next to her, her sister, shook her arm and said, Your husband! Turned out her husband, whose name was Michael, had owned a bar, but as clear and obvious as this sounds, she literally could not connect to it without her sister practically slapping her into awareness. Of course the audience laughed when she realized, but I completely understood. For most people, it’s just really strange to be talking to someone who has passed on, and the experience makes most of us a little gaga!

In a letter I received recently from a woman who attended one of my shows, I became aware of something else that can happen when people are put in this extraordinary position of hearing from a deceased loved one. What she related was that because she was so stunned by being in the spotlight, somewhat unexpectedly her perception during the reading was that not much had been conveyed. She’d witnessed numerous other readings before she was chosen to be read and had felt they were all deeper than her own. She wrote:

But at the end of the event, I chatted with a woman and her husband. They had enjoyed my reading and felt that it was—contrary to my observation—very satisfying. We each had felt the other’s reading had been more poignant than our own. As I was driving home reflecting on this new experience of hearing from my dead mother through a stranger’s voice, I realized that I indeed had been like a deer caught in headlights. And perhaps this prevented me from being able to truly appreciate the value in my reading. I also realized that what you conveyed could only be as revealing and telling as the messages you receive from your dead fans. That said, let me tell you that I could barely concentrate on the other readings after my own reading. I came to your show unprepared. No paper and pen to take notes. It never occurred to me the level of focus that would be necessary for me to remember all of the messages my mother would funnel through you.

Solving a Mystery

By now, I’m sure you understand that in a reading situation the souls are providing the clues and sometimes it takes a little Nancy Drew to figure out what they are trying to convey. Occasionally I can inadvertently create my own red herring—a false clue—by projecting an incorrect interpretation onto what I’m hearing and will confuse the intended recipient of the message. I try very hard not to do this—after all, we’re both attempting to solve the same mystery—but at the same time I’m also trying to get the message across. So I will make an effort to interpret and it’s not always right. It’s difficult to find the middle ground between not saying enough and saying too much. My ability to interpret correctly can have a lot to do with my own personal life experiences, as it does for any medium, I suppose. Once, during a reading, I was seeing a kitchen, and below the kitchen I was seeing shelves of jars with all kinds of vegetables and fruits stored in them. Well, my mother didn’t cook—I was raised on Pop-Tarts. And I’m not the cook in my family—I rely on my husband, John, and my friend Mushy (a.k.a. Cornelia DiNunzio), who are both great cooks, and some wonderful local restaurants, or I’d starve. So I don’t know much at all about food preparation in terms of just cooking a meal, let alone canning and preserving anything. So when I saw all this food on shelves I asked the man I was doing a reading for if his mother had a double kitchen. That’s what it looked like to me—one kitchen on top of the other. Of course, he said no. It took a lot more back-and-forth for me to describe it and for him to realize I was talking about a cellar where his mother had stored all her canned goods—the vegetables and fruits she had prepared to use later in the year.

So at times, the confusion stems from a client who can’t, in that moment, recognize something that would make sense to them if they weren’t in the middle of such an unusual experience. In other instances it’s because I’m trying to communicate a concept or situation that I just have no experience of and I completely misinterpret it. It also can be because I’m saying a name that the soul knows, but the living client has never met or heard of the person. Perhaps it was a family member who died before my client was born, or when they were very young, or it was a friend of the deceased individual whom the client never even met. In this case, when they don’t recognize someone who’s mentioned I’ll tell them to just mark it down so they can check with other family members or still-living friends of the deceased who might know what they’re talking about. I can’t tell you how often someone has left thinking that they didn’t know someone who’d been referred to, and then on the way home it suddenly clicked for them: mystery solved! I get e-mails and letters about that all the time. But I love it if I can stay with it when they are there in front of me long enough for us all to figure it out.

As with any mystery, I often have to piece things together like a jigsaw puzzle. I might get pieces from several different parts of the puzzle but can’t get them to fit until I find all the edge pieces and connect them first. When I was younger and had not been doing this for very long, I used to get frustrated when someone I was doing a reading for didn’t seem to recognize what the dead person was trying to tell them. I would be embarrassed, like I wasn’t doing it right, or like I thought my client would think the whole thing was fake. But after years and years of talking to dead folks, I’ve learned that even though they’re doing their best and I’m doing my best, there can be a temporary disconnect. I really rely on my client to help piece together all the clues in order to communicate the message intended for them.

Over years of working with the dead, I’ve learned to keep trying, to not give up on them and move on too quickly. I remember once I was trying to describe something about a wedding and the person I was reading for didn’t know what I was talking about. I heard the dead gal saying, Stick with it, she’ll get it, she’ll get it! They do know what they’re talking about and usually, with a little extra effort, we can all figure it out together. Since I’ve learned to do this, to invest a little more effort in the unraveling and piecing together, I think I have far fewer people leaving my office or one of my big shows with the feeling that the Other Side isn’t real.

At Home with the Dead

The spirits walk always among us—and for me, this is a major understatement! In my household spirits can show up pretty much anytime. I love them, but on occasion it can be like getting a call when you’re just sitting down to dinner. It’s not always convenient and you might be tempted to just let the machine pick up.

If I’m in my kitchen and maybe our home burglar alarm isn’t turned on, and I see someone walking by out of the corner of my eye, I might initially be startled like anyone else, but I regain my composure quickly once I realize it’s not an intruder. When I go to sleep, I turn on the alarm—I don’t want to have to get up in the middle of the night to investigate and assure myself that the individual moving past my door in the hallway is not a live person but a spirit. But when I’m awake and the alarm is off, I’ll check out every noise, whether it’s a rattling noise, a knock, or anything else. One time I was in my upstairs hallway and heard bells ringing right in my ear. I have a hearing impairment, so I was wondering what the heck I heard. I walked around looking for where the sound was coming from and I went into my office, where I have a little doll no bigger than a Christmas ornament, a joker that has bells on the tip of his hat. I realized that was the noise I was hearing. The doll was on the floor. But weirdly, even though I’d been a pretty good distance away, down the hallway, it sounded like someone had taken the doll and rung it right next to my ear. I’d been with clients all day long and souls were coming and going, so it had to be a soul who had done that.

If someone needs glasses to read but they haven’t got their glasses on, they’re really going to have to work at seeing signs, letters, and notes, and they might not be very successful. But if they wear their glasses, they see perfectly and the words practically jump out at them. That’s how it is for me with my spiritual glasses, so to speak. My glasses are always on so I’m always seeing spirits. But sometimes I just want peace; I just want to be quieter. I don’t always want to see them or hear what they’re trying to tell me. Fortunately, I have a relationship with them that allows me to say, Listen, I want to watch this movie right now (what I really say is, In the name of God, let me be at peace now), and they’ll pretty much make themselves scarce. So it’s not like I have to look for spirits in order to see them; I actually have to ask them not to present themselves in order not to see them. Let me put it another way . . . if, for example, my best friend, Mushy, has a story she wants to tell me that’s really important, she’ll say to me, Let me tell you what happened at the garden club, you gotta hear this! And I might say, Listen, honey, right now I’m cooking dinner, I can’t concentrate, or Mushy, listen, right now I have my next-door neighbor in the house, she’s dropping off a few things from her vegetable garden—I’ll have to call you back. That’s the same type of thing. She’ll say, Okay, I’ll call you back later, or I’ll say, I’ll call you back when I can talk. We hang up the phone and I go back to what I have to do, but in the back of my mind I know that Mushy is there and has something she wants to tell me. So I’ll call her back, whenever I’m done taking care of whatever I’m involved in, to listen to the garden club story. The spirits are always available to me in the same way. Sometimes I’m preoccupied with other things, so I have to put them on the back burner while I’m doing my cooking on the front burner.

Whenever I do a show, I’m there—ready, willing, and able to listen to them. Or when I’m seeing a client, I’m ready, willing, and able to work with them. But other times, like when I go to sleep at night, I’m going from the Alpha to Beta to Theta to Delta states of consciousness. And those different states make it very easy for me personally to listen to the Other Side. More likely than not I’ll hear messages that someone has for me or that they want me to pass on to someone else, someone I know or even a client who’ll be coming to see me the next day. But sometimes I just need to sleep, so I have to say a short prayer and ask them to get back to me later!

2

Dead People and You: Opening to a Connection with the Other Side

Ghost of the Future, he exclaimed, I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

I’m convinced that everyone, to some degree, can