Sydney mum who talks to the dead booked solid for two years

Judy O’Brien is one of Australia’s most trusted connections to the spiritual world but for years she hid her gift for fear of being “locked up” by those who didn’t understand.

Medium Judy O’Brien. Picture: Supplied

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Judy O’Brien is one of Australia’s most trusted connections to the spiritual world but for years she hid her gift for fear of being “locked up” by those who didn’t understand.

So popular are her services the suburban mum with a direct line to the afterworld is booked solid for the next two years, her books closed to new clients until at least 2021.

But so afraid of her abilities to see those who had crossed over, O’Brien — whose second book about her life as a spiritual medium The Voice Of Spirit: The World Through My Eyes has just been released — started to think there was something wrong with her that could see her institutionalised.

Judy O’Brien is booked solid for the next two years. Picture supplied

“I studied nursing when I was 18 and I thought I was schizophrenic because I did a course on mental health and I could tick some of the boxes but I knew I wasn’t,” she tells Insider. “I didn’t really use it because I thought I would be locked up, I thought my mum and dad would take me to a place that would lock up people like me, so I was very afraid to tell anyone what I could do.”

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Her family knew there was something going on, but she dare not tell them she had been seeing spirits since she was at least five years old when a man appeared to her after a traumatic experience. Others would taunt her for being different.

“My dad would go, ‘there goes Jude, talking to someone that’s not there’ — which I would,” she says.

“My family, not my immediate family but other family members, would laugh at me and call me ‘stupid’ all the time.”

A close aunty was one of the only people who knew O’Brien’s secret.

“She was just amazing and she knew I could do this,” she says.

“She didn’t say anything either, she kept my confidence, but she told me to be myself.”

As she kept her spiritual connections under wraps to most, O’Brien went to university and studied nursing, eventually becoming a critical care nurse in neuro trauma for more than 15 years.

O'Brien's new book The Voice of Spirit: The World Through My Eyes.

In a setting of much death and heartache, the trauma ward was somewhere O’Brien would see many spirits, although it was such a fast-paced environment that there wasn’t much time to do anything other than work. But years later when reflecting on her time in scrubs, it dawned on Judy what her real purpose had been working in those rooms of chaos.

“The interesting part about it was that I was there — if someone went into cardiac arrest, would you believe, I never did any cardiac procedure on anyone, and that’s 15 years of nursing,” she says.

“My job was to help with medications, help with the bagging, breathing, but I didn’t realise until later on, that I was there to help people that, if they do pass, to cross over.”

“It was one of those things
I thought about and went ‘oh wow
I was there, I helped, but I was never doing the compressions or help with doing that because I was meant to cross them over,” she adds.

It wasn’t until after another traumatic experience in her early 20s that she decided it was time to ‘come out’ to her family and friends and start embracing the gift she says she had been given.

“It was (a nervous time for me), you don’t know what people are going to do, you don’t want people saying things or laughing at you,” she says.

She compares her own acceptance and coming out to that of someone who has hidden their sexuality and the freedom that comes with finally embracing it.

“There are absolutely a lot of parallels,” she says.

“You come out and accept you for who you are and that makes it all worthwhile, it makes a difference.”

O’Brien and her biggest supporter, husband Darrin. Picture: supplied

When O’Brien embraced her abilities and decided against just trying to fit in, it was a huge change in her life.

“I actually said: ‘you know what, I can do this, this is who I am’ and I actually felt better, it was like the whole weight of the world had lifted off my shoulders,” she says.

Despite the myriad challenges O’Brien faced before she could finally put her skills into use and be open about her gift, she doesn’t regret the path she had to walk to get to this point. She strongly believes her many years working as a nurse and dealing with the patients and families who are experiencing some of the worst moments of their lives laid the foundations for her new career.

“If I just went into this and didn’t understand grief, didn’t understand compassion, didn’t understand human nature, didn’t understand the anatomy of people, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” she says.

* The Voice Of Spirit: The World Through My Eyes available now from Amazon and Booktopia

Originally published as Sydney mum who talks to the dead booked solid for two years