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Meet Cheryl Bruised, Battered, and Psychic Life-Purpose: To personify intuitive creativity and change more than minds through work contributions. Evokateur changes futures. Evokateur /Sage/ Evokateur Profile boss: Evokateur

Cheryl is about to start a new job to occupy her spare time. She chuckles while telling it, but after years of doing readings for people -- and being praised for the results - she's actually going to work with a Psychic Hot Line! It'll be a challenge, because her previous experience has been with people in desperate need of help. She's never charged for it, and doesn't know what she'll find entering the commercial market. Still, she's undaunted, for Cheryl is a survivor, gifted with an inner-strength that most of us, thankfully, don't need. Cheryl is a victim of physical abuse, both as a child and in marriage. "My earliest memory is when my father first hit me as an infant. That went on for 16 years." Cheryl grew up in upstate New York in the 50s, where her father worked various construction jobs. She credits a vivid imagination with protecting her sanity in the face of physical and emotional abuse.

"My mother would save up all these little sins for when my father got home." After the beatings, she would ask why she had been disciplined, only to be told "You already know." She felt dumb and escaped into a world she created for herself. She took long walks in the woods and made friends with snakes and pollywogs. She hugged trees and found that, in her world, they hugged back. Dolphins and whales rode her around the oceans of her imagination and a golden eagle watched over her.

She baffled teachers who thought she daydreamed her way through class and yet she always managed to stay ahead of the other students. She was bored with school but kept herself sharp by reading anything she could find. She felt different, "a stranger in a strange land." "I felt dumb," she said, "because I couldn't verbalize what was going on in my head." She recalls one time a teacher made her sit in the hallway outside the class because she was looking out the window." "She thought I was daydreaming, but I knew the answers to her questions." Smart? Dumb? She was confused.

 
Cheryl grew up at a time when women were not generally accepted in the workplace. She went to college, but the degree didn't go very far. She shuffled around several jobs in a department store and quit, ending up as a bartender at a stag bar in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. It was a rough place, but Cheryl was tougher. "I had a mean mouth," she boasts. "I could back them off." She met one of her husbands there, something she does not like to talk about and with good reason.

His work took them to Washington, D.C. There, she recalls, he beat her at least once a week for the 8 years they were together. He repeated the pattern established when she was a child, telling her in his alcoholic rages that she was stupid. After awhile, she became convinced. In addition, society's view of spousal abuse was very different back then. "He was psychotic, but there were no shelters," she said. "It was not against the law to beat your family. It wasn't even a misdemeanour. He had a legal right to beat me, and he did." Cheryl was trapped. She had no money and no place to go. When her bruised face could take no more, she crawled into places he couldn't reach, under the bed, in the attic crawl space, in the basement behind the furnace. She got a job and began hiding money to escape. He found it and beat her again, but she eventually saved enough to leave and did. After the divorce, he remarried. That marriage ended when her ex-husband shot and killed his new wife and himself. Cheryl knows it could have been her.

 
Cheryl began a search to discover herself shortly after breaking away. "I went to a psychiatrist for a year but only got bits and pieces. She wanted to talk about relationships. She couldn't see what I could see, and I couldn't say it to her." Cheryl turned to the Internet where she found an endless supply of possibilities. "I did everything, from psychic seers to tarot cards." She also took personality tests, both at work and on the web. She took the Ansir test and bought Instant Feedback (Profile InDepths™) and was amazed. "Who are these people?" was her first reaction. "How do they know this? How did they figure this out? How could they know me like this when we've never met." She recalls the tears at feeling accepted unconditionally while reading the Evokateur profile. "It was such a positive and affirming experience. What you people did was love me, and it has allowed me to be out in the world with a protective covering for my strangeness. What you offer is so much more than the plethora of tests available from the standard psychs. I can't thank you enough."

And now Cheryl faces the future with a sense of wholeness. She's neither dumb nor weird. She was made different and that's okay. In fact, the highly intuitive nature of hers is what she'll be using in her new job. And who knows? Maybe one day the voice at the other end of that helpline you're calling will be that of a survivor, a gifted woman whose friendship with dolphins and whales and golden eagles kept her sane when most would have fallen apart.

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