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Hell has been one of humanity’s most powerful ideas for thousands of years. Across cultures, religions, and civilizations, the notion that wrongdoers face eternal punishment in some terrible place after death has shaped moral codes, controlled populations, justified wars, and offered comfort to victims who never received justice in their lifetimes. It is a deeply human idea. And according to spiritual teacher and evidential medium Suzanne Giesemann, it is also, in its traditional form, largely a human invention.
That does not mean there are no consequences for the harm we do. Giesemann’s account of what actually appears to await those who have caused serious damage in their lives is, in some ways, far more confronting than a lake of fire. It is a state of complete, unshielded awareness of the full weight of everything you ever did to another person, felt in the body of your own consciousness, with no escape into numbness or denial.
Whether you find that comforting or terrifying probably depends on how you have been living.
The Origins of Hell as a Control Mechanism
Before exploring what mediumistic and near-death experience research suggests about the afterlife, it is worth sitting with why the traditional conception of hell exists at all. Giesemann is direct about this. The idea of eternal damnation has been extraordinarily effective at shaping human behavior, and not always for benevolent reasons. The threat of infinite punishment for finite wrongdoing has been used by religious and political institutions for centuries to maintain social order, extract compliance, and justify the persecution of outsiders.
This does not mean the impulse behind the idea is wrong. The desire for justice is not pathological. When someone has been genuinely harmed by another person, the wish for that person to face meaningful consequences is not mere revenge. It is a deeply felt sense that the moral order of the universe should mean something, that actions should carry weight, that cruelty should not simply evaporate into nothingness when the perpetrator dies.
Giesemann acknowledges this openly. She admits to her own visceral satisfaction when watching a revenge storyline play out on screen, the cathartic rush of seeing the wrongdoer finally get what they deserve. That impulse, she suggests, is baked into the human nervous system. What spiritual inquiry invites us to consider is whether our nervous system’s instinct for retribution accurately reflects the deeper architecture of existence.
The evidence she has gathered across years of evidential medium work suggests it does not. But the alternative is not an easy ride for anyone who has done serious harm.
Two Readings That Changed Her Understanding
The clearest window into Giesemann’s understanding of what awaits genuinely harmful people comes from two consecutive readings she conducted, back to back, that she describes as among the most unusual and unsettling of her career.
In both cases, she connected with the spirit of a deceased father on behalf of a client. In both cases, the father had been, in her words, evil. Not merely flawed or troubled or self-serving in the ordinary human way, but genuinely, devastatingly harmful. The first man she connected with had raped and murdered multiple teenage boys.
What she encountered was not a tortured soul screaming in hellfire. Nor was she simply told that everything was fine and this man was at peace. What she perceived, symbolically and through sensation as all mediumistic information arrives, was a figure surrounded by loving presences, what she interpreted as angelic or guide-level beings, but contained. Cocooned, as she describes it. Unable to speak. Not punished in the theatrical sense, but not free either. Not rejoined with the wider community of consciousness.
The beings surrounding this man were not tormenting him. They were holding him. Waiting. Allowing him to exist within an awareness that he could not yet process.
The second reading involved another deeply harmful father, and this one was different. This man was speaking. And the first thing he communicated was that he wanted his daughter to know he had been a monster, and that he was sorry. The apology itself, the willingness to name what he had done and reach toward the person he had harmed, appeared to represent a fundamental shift in his state. He was not free, but he was moving.
When the client sent Giesemann her memoir afterward, it opened with the sentence: my father was a monster. The correlation was precise enough to be striking.
What Hell Actually Appears to Be
Across near-death experience literature, across mediumistic accounts, and across the testimony of people who have undergone deep plant medicine journeys, a consistent picture emerges that lines up remarkably well with what Giesemann describes. Hell is not a geography. It is a state of consciousness.
[Also see: Why Psychics Cannot Predict the Lottery]
People who have had near-death experiences and reported encountering what might be called hellish or dark realms consistently describe not a physical place of punishment but something more like being trapped inside the worst version of your own awareness. A state in which you are locked into the energy of what you created in life, unable to look away from it, unable to soften it, unable to perform the ordinary tricks of self-justification and selective memory that make ordinary human guilt bearable.
This actually makes more sense as a model of justice than eternal damnation does. Eternal damnation, if taken literally, involves a punishment that bears no proportional relationship to the crime. A person who lived a moderately unkind life faces the same infinite consequence as a serial killer. That is not justice by any coherent definition of the term. What Giesemann describes is far more proportional and, in a strange way, far more elegant.
The weight of consequences you carry appears to correspond directly to the weight of harm you created. And you cannot simply decide not to feel it, because the very mechanism that allowed you to cause harm in the first place, the capacity to shut off awareness of other people’s inner life, dissolves when the buffer of the physical body and nervous system is removed.
Hurt People Hurt People, Even in the Afterlife
One of the most striking aspects of Giesemann’s framework is her insistence that cruelty is almost always rooted in wounding. People who do genuinely terrible things are, with rare exception, people who were themselves broken in specific and measurable ways. Research on violent offenders consistently shows clusters of childhood trauma, absence of safe attachment, exposure to violence as a norm, and neurological damage from abuse. The list of factors that produce someone capable of causing serious harm to others looks less like a character flaw and more like a predictable outcome of specific inputs.
This does not excuse the harm. Giesemann is clear about that. Recognizing the origin of cruelty does not neutralize its consequences for the people who suffered it. But it does change the nature of the response from a drive toward punishment toward something more like comprehension.
What appears to happen in the afterlife, according to the consistent thread across the sources she draws on, is that the departed soul encounters the full relational truth of their existence. Not just what they did, but why, and what it cost everyone around them. The defensiveness and dissociation that made those actions possible in life cannot survive the removal of the nervous system that generated them. What is left is bare awareness, looking at itself without the ordinary filters.
For people who lived with genuine love and genuine accountability, this is described as liberation. For people who caused serious harm and never faced it, it is described as an unmediated confrontation with everything they chose not to feel.
The Concept of Coherence and Healing Across the Veil
Giesemann introduces a concept she calls coherence, borrowed from the physics of wave patterns, to describe the underlying mechanism of both connection and healing. A coherent field is one that is integrated, stable, and in resonance with itself. A fragmented, dissonant field is incoherent. Harm, in this model, is literally a form of incoherence, a disruption of the relational fabric that connects all consciousness.
The healing process on the other side of physical life appears to involve bringing that field back into coherence. For the man who raped and murdered, the cocooning represents a holding state in which the being is not capable of coherence yet and is being sustained by higher-order consciousness until it becomes possible. For the man who apologized, something has shifted. The act of genuine recognition, of naming the harm and reaching toward the harmed, is itself a movement toward coherence.
This is why, in many readings, the first thing a departed person wants to communicate is an apology. Not because they are trying to rehabilitate their reputation, but because the apology is the primary work they are engaged in. It is the mechanism of their own healing, as much as it might be healing for the person receiving it.
What This Means for the Living
Understanding the afterlife as a state of consciousness rather than a location recasts the entire project of living well. It is no longer about following rules to avoid punishment in some future realm. It is about the quality of the field you are building right now, through every interaction, every choice about whether to open toward another person or close against them.
The loving energy you extend to someone who has wronged you, even someone who is severely blocked against receiving it, does not disappear. It lands somewhere. It participates in the broader field of consciousness in ways that may not be immediately visible but that are, according to this framework, entirely real.
And the harm you cause, large or small, deliberate or careless, does not disappear either. It stays in the field. It is the work waiting for you.
Hell, in this understanding, is not a sentence handed down by an angry deity. It is the natural consequence of having built a field so dense with unprocessed harm that coherence becomes temporarily impossible. It is not eternal. It is proportional. And it ends, not through punishment but through the hard, slow work of recognition.
That is either deeply comforting or deeply sobering, depending on where you are standing. Most likely it is both.
