Messages from the other side on the pitfalls of the old soul, mental health struggles among young people, and the importance of communicating honestly about emotions

By Pamela Kribbe

A few weeks ago I had inner contact with Sanne, the deceased daughter of a friend of mine. She passed away five years ago at the age of twenty-six in a car accident. Sanne died alongside a younger girl she had cared for almost daily as a mental health support worker.

I first met Sanne during a reading I did for her mother. She made a deep impression on me with her light, joyful presence; it didn’t feel heavy or sorrowful at all. After the reading ended, I received more messages from her — messages that were less personal and more universal in nature. I share them in this article, but I’ll begin with a brief summary of the reading itself, since it’s essential context for everything that follows.

Why did Sanne die so young?

Sanne told me that in a past life she had been deeply, emotionally entangled with this girl, who back then had been her younger sister. She had tried desperately to protect her little sister from grief after the two of them lost their mother to a contagious disease of that era — something like the plague. Later, the younger sister also fell ill and died. Sanne struggled enormously with this. She had tried everything to keep her sister from death, and made an inner vow: I will never abandon you again.

After Sanne’s own death in that lifetime, her sister couldn’t let her go — Sanne’s light remained a kind of magnet. An entanglement formed that stretched across the boundary of death itself. In this life, Sanne fulfilled that old promise by dying at the very same moment as the girl. This time the girl wasn’t her sister, but a client in her care with whom she shared a powerful bond. Karmically speaking, their shared death was the fulfillment of the vow made in that earlier life.

The moment Sanne’s spirit left her body during the accident, a sudden, profound insight arrived. She understood with total clarity that it was never meant to be this way — that a soul should never become so completely entangled with another. You are not meant to carry someone else’s pain so heavily that you merge with it and abandon your own path. That old idea of entanglement and responsibility simply wasn’t true. Immediately after passing, she let go of the girl entirely; early in the reading she said almost right away: I am no longer together with her.

Of course, Sanne also felt raw grief over dying so young. She had been a talented, sensitive, radiant woman full of unlived potential. And yet she made clear that a soul can choose such an early ending because a particular lesson — in this case, recognizing that emotional entanglement is not the way — takes priority. She put it plainly: the soul sets priorities; first things first. However much potential her earthly life held, this insight mattered most: every soul walks its own path, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Throughout the reading, I experienced Sanne as a vivid, deeply human presence. She spoke with conviction and told me she is doing well on the other side. Life there is anything but dull — she is out there living, exploring, doing all kinds of things.

When the reading ended and I went for a walk in the woods, I could still feel her with me. That’s when she wanted to pass along something more universal. The first sentence that came through was: the old soul and her pitfalls.

Sanne’s first message: the pitfalls of the old soul

Sanne: “The old soul sometimes struggles to put herself in the shoes of the younger soul. That’s a major pitfall — one the old soul can trip over badly. A young soul’s experiences can feel so distant from your own, the way a seventy-year-old might struggle to relate to a fifteen-year-old teenager. This is where the old soul can go wrong in two ways.

First: the rescuer role. The old soul sees the younger soul getting tangled up in hard experiences. Drawing on her own wisdom, she tries to pull the young soul out of that suffering — because she can already see what’s going wrong and how to fix it. But in doing so, she robs the younger soul of her own path of experience. She wants the young soul to skip stages because watching the struggle is painful. But it doesn’t work that way; a young soul has to live these lessons herself. When the old soul tries too hard to rescue, an empathic entanglement forms, and you end up carrying someone else’s pain. That’s the first pitfall: the inability to let go of the younger soul.

Second: the fighting stance. The old soul takes up arms against the world that younger souls are shaping — a world full of fear, judgment, and control. She sees so much injustice, environmental destruction, and war. But these are processes the collective consciousness must move through, step by step, in order to grow. If, as an old soul, you meet that with fierce resistance, you get pulled down emotionally. You start feeling lower emotions — anger, hatred, impatience. You slip into a kind of regression. In both cases — over-helping and fighting — you get energetically dragged downward.”

Sanne explained that the old soul’s true purpose is to lift upward. The focus should be on what’s more highly developed, not on what’s less developed. Old souls are here to build a bridge to the higher realms that sit energetically close to the earth. These aren’t physical places, but realms of higher vibration and higher consciousness — what we’ve traditionally called heaven. Old souls feel most at home there, which is why on earth they often experience homesickness, deep fatigue, and the persistent question: what am I actually doing here?

I asked Sanne if this was indeed her core message. She answered: “Old souls pull the earth forward when they open that hatch and build the bridge to the dimension where I am now.” She emphasized very specifically: “I am truly here, you know.” For her, the astral world isn’t some hazy fantasy realm — it’s every bit as real as the physical world is for us. These astral realms around the earth come in every shape and form. “There are all kinds of places here — ugly and beautiful, highly developed and less developed. There are regions full of kind people who want good things, who want to learn and move forward. But there are also realms where people cling to rigid beliefs, exclude others, and hold harsh judgments. It’s just like on earth. It’s an enormous world, just without the shape of a planet — it’s a plane of being. Consciousness is a world; consciousness is everything. A physical planet, really, is nothing — just a kind of representation. It’s hard for me to explain, but consciousness creates worlds, and right now I exist within one of those worlds of consciousness.

Within it, I want to learn and grow. I want to deeply understand what happened to me in the life I’ve now released, and how I can keep evolving from here. From this vantage point, I can see what’s happening with you: there are souls of great lightness, with profound insight and wide, warm hearts, who still get swept into that deep entanglement. It comes from a misplaced sense of responsibility.”

I asked Sanne: “Why did you do that? Why did you feel such a strong need to care for someone younger than you in that way? Where did that intense instinct to nurture and help come from?”

“That’s a good question,” she answered. “In that past life, I simply wanted to be a good person. I was strongly shaped back then by church doctrine about how one ought to live — that it’s noble to sacrifice yourself and your own interests for someone else. There was a heavy religious conditioning in me, and that, I’ve learned here, is spiritually not correct. True spirituality has nothing to do with self-denial, because you are actually God’s greatest gift. Developing yourself is seen here as the highest good. That excessive self-erasure is destructive — please, let go of it.

In that past life, I was a sensitive, open girl. I was naive, and because of that, very susceptible to that heavy moral code. The church carved those beliefs into me, until you simply came to believe them. The stories left a deep impression on me; I wanted so badly to do good. I looked at the figure of Jesus and thought: he has seen the light, I want to follow him. I wanted to be purely of service.”

A collective field of young people

Now I wanted to ask Sanne something else. Lately I’ve been sensing an inner connection to a collective energy field belonging to a large group of children and young people currently on earth. They’re struggling enormously with life here. They wrestle with mental health difficulties, carry deep psychological distress, and hold something beautiful and pure within them — yet they can’t find their footing in today’s human society.

When I tune into that field, I see a pale blue glow. In my mind’s eye, figures keep appearing with large, beautiful eyes — crystalline, refined, ethereal. Strikingly, they have no mouths. Symbolically, this image tells me they cannot make clear what lives inside them; they can’t express themselves within the current earthly atmosphere. That causes pain, and it’s where they get stuck.

In recent days, I also connected with the soul of a girl I’ve met a few times. She’s still living, has an autism diagnosis, and struggles with anxiety and depression — symptoms so many young people show today, more girls than boys in my sense of it, though I can’t be certain. She radiated a strong feeling of being misunderstood, and that brings her deep sadness. She told me she has real trouble with what feels, to her, like the dishonest communication of adults. Most “well-adjusted” adults no longer say what they actually think. There’s a wide gap between their behavior, their words, and their energetic presence. For someone with autism, that’s extremely confusing — the signals people send out are inconsistent and ambiguous. This girl told me it makes her anxious, and makes people feel frightening to her.

In short, I sense that this group of young people wants to be heard. A message wants to emerge about how they experience this reality. I asked Sanne if she could shed some light on it.

Sanne’s second message: be emotionally honest with yourself and others

Sanne looks me straight in the eye and says: “This is a crucial point. The earth must change now. There is so much psychological suffering in people of all ages. A massive wave of souls is entering young bodies at this moment, but inside, they are anything but young. The young people you’re sensing are already highly evolved and wise on the inside. They carry a higher consciousness they want to bring to earth. They’re here to help transform things and build a bridge to a more harmonious world — one with greater respect for each other and for nature. That higher consciousness is badly needed, because the current system is grinding to a halt; people are breaking under it.”

I asked Sanne what she believes is needed now. She answered with conviction: “People need to reconnect with their feelings, their hearts, their vulnerability. All those emotions flowing through you at every moment are exactly what make you human — there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Whether you’re angry, sad, jealous, insecure, or full of doubt: all of it is allowed to exist. Once you fully let your emotions in, you’ve already won half the battle. Only then are you truly human. And when you can then speak about it openly and honestly with others, a healing heart-energy naturally arises. Real conversation, real connection — that’s what it’s all about.

Parents often fail at this, because they don’t really understand what’s going on inside their children. They themselves were never taught to openly express their emotions, and have become emotionally blocked. It’s really the world turned upside down: these children are the ones who need to teach their parents. The younger generations are often already far ahead of the older generation in speaking their inner truth. The learning, right now, flows from young to old. Adults need to find the courage to open themselves to youth. Young people still stand much closer to their spontaneous emotional core, while the older generation is often trapped in armor made of fear, convention, and ‘how things are supposed to be.’ That immense pressure to conform keeps you silent about what’s truly on your mind. That creates shame and emotional distance, and that barrier has to be broken down.

This is exactly what these young people are here to bring. Their mental health struggles can only be resolved once they’re given room to speak about who they really are and what they truly feel. By claiming that space, they push the older generation to loosen up too. In my eyes, the young people are actually far more normal than the adults,” Sanne says with a smile. “Adults sometimes act so strangely: hiding everything, afraid to name the truth, constantly disappearing behind masks. Children absorb all that unspoken fear from their parents and teachers. To receive the gift this new generation is bringing, adults really need to pull the earplugs out already. You are collectively deaf. The problem, so often, lies with you — because you’ve never learned how to handle your own emotional world. And that’s why you can’t really listen.

Most adults on earth would do well to go deep into therapy. We do that here in the spirit world too, by the way,” she adds. “Making contact, again and again, with your deepest feelings — especially the ones you’d most like to bury — and listening to them with full attention. That is the only path to real spiritual growth. You have to be willing to face that confrontation, otherwise your life stalls and you get stuck. That is what we mean by rising upward: looking straight at what’s hard for you, and daring to speak about it. That’s what it all comes down to.”

Closing

I find myself moved by Sanne — by her directness, and by her passionate case for emotional honesty. It reminds me that this is really what it all comes down to, not lofty spiritual theories. It’s purely about humanity and vulnerability.

I thank Sanne for her messages. I hope to speak with her again in the future — she’s told me she remains available and would love to share more when the time comes.

She ends with a reassuring smile and says: “Everything always turns out okay.”

Thank you, Sanne.

© Pamela Kribbe

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