From Abracadabra to Zombies
Psychic Intuitive Profiling for Parents
15 Feb 2011. Some professions are recession proof. Julianna Suranyi, who works out of Brisbane, Australia, claims to be a psychic who trained with the Australian police as an intuitive profiler. (She says so in her paid advertisement that looks like a press release on NewsMaker.com.au.) Julianna has combined two occupations for which there is scant credible evidence for their reliability, psychic and profiler, and created a third occupation: psychic profiler parenting instructor. Next month in Brisbane she'll be offering her Proactive Parenting Course "to help parents profile themselves and their children for better, calmer, and stronger parenting." Has her parenting method been scientifically tested and validated? Of course not. But Julianna has many years of experience, she says, "teaching people ... how to use and build their intuition."
Julianna’s premise is that if, as a parent, you know your profile and the profiles of your children and partner (should you have one) you are able to operate your family at its optimum. Profiling is knowing how you think, absorb information and communicate – and once you know how you and the members of your family each do this, you can work to be consistent in your parenting for each of your children – practically working to your and their strengths and acknowledging your and their weaknesses along the way.
You'd think this profiling business would be complicated and tricky. How is she going to help a classroom full of eager parents to learn to profile themselves and their children in just one four-hour session? Easy. She asks that the parents bring a video with them "of their child/children at rest and play to the course for Julianna to specifically identify their profile so they know exactly how their child/children think, absorb information and communicate." She doesn't say how long the video should be, but being an intuitive will surely speed things up.
How will she do it? Say twenty people show up (at $500 each). She can devote 10 minutes to each person and still have time for an introduction and short question period at the end. The skeptical reader might doubt that anyone could do much of a job in such a short time, but if you understand how cold reading and subjective validation work, you'll understand that it doesn't take too long to say whatever comes to mind if you have the gift of gab.
Parents will walk away from this workshop with practical, usable tools to create new and improved behavioral responses within their family. It will also give them the ability to understand why they react emotionally to difficult situations – especially with children. Parenting is highly emotional and a lot of hard work and this workshop will help parents to develop sustainable emotional balance in any family situation - and for life in general.
In just four hours, Julianna will help the weary parent "understand." The wonderful thing about this occupation is that the parents have no standard by which to measure your advice, except common sense. Now, it would be a cheap shot to say that any parent who enrolled in such a course probably doesn't have much common sense to begin with. I won't say that. I will say, though, that any parent who would sign up for Julianna's psychic intuitive profiling parenting course is desperate. Any advice on how to handle a child that provides hope for a resolution or lessening of a serious behavioral problem would be welcome. My guess is that, beside some obvious common sense advice, Julianna provides hope. That's what she's really selling and that's what desperate parents long for.
I'm sure the clever reader is already thinking of ways to exploit this information. Why not add a faith healing session for a small extra fee? If psychic profiling isn't your cup of tea, use some other tool like astrology or tarot cards. Offer face, hand, or butt readings of the family members. The possibilities are endless.
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