Dr. Lauren Thibodeau is a psychic medium, intuition coach and author who’s written two books, Natural Born Intuition and Natural Born Soulmates. From her days as a communications professional and journalist before embracing mediumship as her true calling, she holds an MBA, later earning a M.Ed. and a Ph.D. in psychological counseling. Her dissertation was about near-death experiences (NDEs), more information here.

Dr. Lauren became been a licensed professional counselor since 1996 – the same year she first became a Registered Medium at Lily Dale, New York – the world’s largest Spiritualist medium community. She is now located at 11 Cleveland St., a yellow house and home of her new guest house!
Among mediums, Dr. Lauren is unusual, as she is natural psychic medium who later devoted herself to learning psychology at such a deep level. She did so precisely because she knows from direct experience that connecting with spiritual beings like deceased loved ones, angels and spirit guides and teachers can profoundly impact, and help heal, our lives.
FORENSIC MEDIUMSHIP
Since her early days as a professional psychic medium, when she assisted prosecutors on difficult cases, Dr. Lauren has found working with legal and law enforcement professionals particularly intriguing, despite the challenges it poses.
Along with her personal hero Detective Rob, she appeared in Psychic Investigators, Season 1, Episode 3 Marge Calciano, which is available to Amazon Prime members and has been broadcast in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany and Italy.
Her colleague psychic medium James Van Praagh, whom she first met in 1997 when they were both speakers on an intuition cruise, includes her as a vetted psychic detective on his curated list of personally tested psychic mediums.
Dr. Lauren worked in James’ chat room as far back as 1998! That’s the same year she met another mediumship colleague, John Edward, during his only visit to Lily Dale, the day before she defended her doctoral dissertation, after which she was invited to contribute to his newsletter.
AUTHOR, AUTHOR!
BOOKS FEATURING DR. LAUREN
Many books have featured Dr. Lauren and her mediumship, including the best-selling Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker, Your Father’s Voice: Letters for Emmy about Life with Jeremey—and Without Him after 9/11 by Liz Glick and Dan Zebart, and Handbook to the Afterlife by Jon Klimo, Ph.D. and Pamela Heath, M.D. Dr. Lauren is featured in photographer and author Shannon Taggart’s book Seance.
As a strong believer that children are naturally, effortlessly intuitive, Dr. Lauren is particularly pleased to have been asked to contribute an appendix about mediumship to best-selling fiction author Wendy Corsi Staub’s series of books for young readers set in Lily Dale, about 7 miles from where she grew up.
And she’s quite excited about the book Séance by her dear friend, accomplished photographer Shannon Taggart, who has photographed mediums and healers from Lily Dale, as well as several places in western Europe in a wide range of settings, all part of her search to understand Spiritualism and its elusive substance, ectoplasm. Séance features a forward by Dan Akyroyd, creator of the iconic Ghostbusters, and a fourth-generation Spiritualist. Look for Dr. Lauren in Chapter 7 of this fascinating ethnographical memoir.
MUSEUMS
In another example of Dr. Lauren’s work with small, fascinating museums, Dr. Lauren was invited to the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art in Staten Island, NY because staff members were experiencing unusual happenings which unnerved them. Her first session with the curator and the director, during which Dr. Lauren mediumistically communicated with the deceased founder of the museum, Jacques Marchais, resulted in detailed information that led them to embark on a can’t-make-this-stuff-up adventure.
The end result was the recovery of an ancient Tibetan Buddhist sculpture worth millions of dollars that no one realized had been missing. Museum officials concluded that the stone sculpture, about 30” high, had rolled down the steep hill behind the museum, where it was found cemented into a stonework wall behind the house of a retired stonemason, who kindly returned the sculpture—and created a replica to fill the hole in his backyard fence.
CLIENTELE & CONFIDENTIALITY
Dr. Lauren has worked with many thousands of clients over the years from around the world, and is especially valued for her ability to assist creative professionals and entrepreneurs in achieving their career and business goals (maybe it’s that MBA?). Her clientele come from every occupation imaginable, from accountants to zookeepers. (She once was invited as an animal communicator to an unforgettable behind-the-scenes experience with gorillas, orangutans and other primates at a large zoo!).
Since she is a licensed professional counselor as well as a psychic medium, Dr. Lauren strictly adheres to the counseling code of ethics regarding confidentiality, and thus does not publicly identify her clients without permission, which her “higher profile” clients in particular value given the ubiquity of social media. Famous or not-so-famous, all of Dr. Lauren’s clients are assured of confidentiality, and to better ensure that, she does not permit taping of her sessions, although she strongly encourages note taking for future reference.
SKILL DEVELOPMENT: HER OWN & OTHERS
She continues to develop her mediumship skills, even though she’s been a professional psychic medium for decades. Dr. Lauren first studied at the at the esteemed Arthur Findlay College for the Advancement of Spiritualism and Psychic Science in Essex, England in 2002 and later participated in the College’s tutor training program. She has taught mediumship across the United States and Canada as well as in Spain and England. Although no longer affiliated with this nonprofit organization, Dr. Lauren was among the very first mediums certified by the Family Forever Foundation. She served on the faculty of the master’s degree program at Atlantic University affiliated with renowned psychic and healer Edgar Cayce, for over 10 years.
RESEARCH SUBJECT & RESEARCHER TOO
A strong believer in scientific research, and a researcher herself, Dr. Lauren has participated in many studies of mediumship as a research subject, and has worked with professors from the University of Virginia and Yale University among others. The UVA study was a three-way-blind evaluation of mediumship using photographs of deceased loved ones and proxy sitters.
The soon-to-be-published Yale study looks at auditory mediumship and how it differs from auditory hallucinations. Dr. Lauren herself is the lead author, with Susan B. Barnes, Ph.D. of a scholarly article published in 2017 in a peer reviewed journal, for which she developed an assessment instrument to evaluate effective message mediumship based on her unique mediumship development training methods.
Dr. Lauren has also taught and published as a “traditional” academic, and has written for Hospice magazine about her experiences as a volunteer though these days, she identifies more strongly as a “psychic professor,” offering workshops and classes online and in person for those developing their psychic and mediumship skills, as well as one-on-one customized coaching for developing professional mediums.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE…
Dr. Lauren was based in New York City and Princeton, NJ for many years, but now resides with her husband near their Lily Dale summer home, where their too-friendly rescue cat Isabella is known to sneak over to the hotel porch for attention and free food; don’t fall for it if you’re in town.
She trained in standup comedy — and yes, performed in many clubs in New York and New Jersey (like the lead character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, only far less capably) — to tackle her general dislike of public speaking, unless it involves spirit people. Dr. Lauren considers gallery style message mediumship, such as the three-times-a-day message services in Lily Dale in the summer season and on programs like TLC’s The Long Island Medium, to be the ultimate improv experience in the back-and-forth creative process of working with a partner—in this case a spirit being—without a clue of what’s coming next.
Although she paints, she will never become a noted spirit artist since she never gets the eyes right, so wisely sticks to abstracts.
Dr. Lauren is also a not-so-bad poker player who occasionally competes in live poker tournaments as part of her independent research into whether psychics are better bluffers (did you catch that one?).