How tarot can be used to understand ourselves: An interview with social worker Jessica Dore

This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

As was the case for many people, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was a time of soul-searching for me. I questioned everything — my values, my career, my relationships.

An essential tool for me in this era of introspection was tarot. It started one night when a good friend offered to do a reading for me, a simple one-card pull. I can’t remember what the card was, but sharp in my memory is my freshly broken heart and a profound feeling of resonance with whatever themes the card represented.

I bought a tarot deck (the classic Rider-Waite) and began pulling a card every morning as I sought understanding and comfort. The card I found in front of me with startling regularity was the Hermit, which depicts an old man standing on a mountain peak, clutching a staff in one hand and a lit lantern containing a six-pointed star in the other. For many, the card represents seclusion, hardship and quiet contemplation, which was certainly my experience during that dark year. I was never unsettled by the card’s reappearance, though; it helped me accept and lean into this chapter of my life rather than resist it, as I’d done during so many other challenging times.

Jessica Dore, a licensed social worker and author of “Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance, and Growth”, offers an alternate interpretation of the Hermit that has complicated my own understanding of its symbols: “In Tarot, the Hermit is often read as an instruction to go inward. To withdraw, or to get quiet enough to hear what’s inside. But if that’s the true meaning, then why is the Hermit’s lantern — which carries a shining star — on the outside of his body? Might this hint at an interpretation of quietude as not blocking out noise from the outside, but becoming more deeply attuned to it?”

Like me, Dore uses tarot not as a form of fortunetelling or divination but as a way to better understand ourselves and live in alignment with our values. Her book, a reflection on each of the 78 cards, weaves together ideas from psychology, behavioral science, spirituality and traditional aspects of tarot reading. Dore replaces the black-and-white thinking that’s all too pervasive in our culture with meditations on the paradoxes of life. As one New York Times review put it: “No one and nothing is all good or all bad — no monster, no witch, not even ourselves.”

I spoke with Dore about how she blends psychology and spirituality in her work, the role of “synchronicity” in tarot reading, and how metaphors can help us become more self-aware. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A Q&A with Jessica Dore

Group Therapy: How would you describe the practice of tarot as you use it in your ife?

Jessica Dore: I’ve worked with tarot in a few ways over the years, including drawing cards for myself daily and pulling and interpreting cards in dialogue with individuals. I’ve even used tarot in individual and group therapy settings. And in each of these contexts, I’ve thought about the cards as supports in processes of exploration — ways to stimulate new ideas or ways of seeing things that maybe hadn’t been previously considered. But the predominant way I’ve used the cards is working with the images themselves as a way to sort of categorize and process ideas that I’ve encountered, primarily in the fields that would broadly be called psychology and spirituality.

For example, when I started studying tarot, I was working for a book publisher that published books specifically about behavioral therapies. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about the visual metaphors and the cards through the lens of these therapies that are geared toward behavior change, like CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] and DBT [dialectical behavioral therapy.]

Like other playing card decks, the tarot has these four categories that we call suits — swords, cups, pentacles and wands. I spent a lot of time kind of tracking how those might be associated with these realms of human experience that we call thoughts, feelings, behavior and so forth. I put “energy” in there as the fourth one. Those are also the big areas of interest in behavioral therapies — thoughts, feelings and behavior. So in some ways, the cards became these mnemonic devices that were helping me visualize concepts like experiential avoidance or willingness, which made those ideas a bit more soluble.

Since I wrote “Tarot for Change,” I’ve really moved away from a focus on behavioral therapies, but I still find that the symbols and images of the tarot are really helpful in terms of making meaning and connection with whatever the ideas are that interest me. Nowadays, it’s concepts like responsiveness and relational views of the self and how meaning is made and remade. I write a weekly newsletter called “Offerings,” which is an essay that weaves together different things I’m reading and thinking about, paired with one image from the Rider-Waite Deck by Pamela Coleman Smith.

Group Therapy: When someone is in a reading with you, what can they expect — especially if it’s someone unfamiliar with tarot?

Dore: I’ve worked a lot with people who are skeptics. For a lot of the time that I’ve worked with cards, I’ve been very secular in my approach and sort of matter-of-fact — these are pieces of paper with images on them and we’re gonna look at them and explore. I’m very interested in exploration and reflection, and I’ve found that the cards sometimes have a complexifying effect rather than a simplifying one. I’m not necessarily looking for an answer or a solution in readings.

I think that that really comes from being a person who has a lot of big questions, and noticing over the years how rare it is to speak with someone who’s really willing to dwell in those uncertain spaces without giving into that urge to fix or solve. And so from the beginning with reading cards, I’ve aimed to cultivate that capacity in myself when I work with other people. Working with cards is just one space to practice that; my goal is to slow down and suspend the “righting reflex” — or trying to make something right for someone, because that takes someone’s problem or their big life question away from them.

I think a lot gets missed when you’re wanting a question or a problem to go away rather than just being with it. People do tend to seek tarot readings when they’re in these uncertain times. And so you wouldn’t think that a person in that situation would be OK with making something more complicated and not less. But I found that people actually are very receptive to leaving that interaction without an answer. And I think that’s because there’s something really powerful about just sort of poking around a problem — in this case, with a set of symbols and images and visual metaphors that stimulate these new ways of looking at something rather than trying to solve or answer it.

Counterintuitively, there can actually be something very relieving and validating about somebody witnessing the complicatedness of whatever it is that you’re going through and not trying to make it seem simpler or easier than it is.

Group Therapy: Metaphors are used often in psychotherapy as a way to help people make changes and better understand what they’re going through. How is a similar use of metaphor used in tarot?

Dore: I studied writing and mass communication in English as an undergraduate. I’ve always been really interested in metaphor and poetry, but I was introduced to the therapeutic use of metaphor during the six years that I spent in self-help and psychology book publishing, and more specifically through books about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — ACT. People in that field get really granular and nerdy about language and metaphor. My understanding is probably an oversimplification of what they would say, but I think metaphor allows people to make contact with thoughts, feelings or sensations that they might be experiencing and struggling with.

For example, there’s this metaphor in ACT called “passengers on the bus,” where a person imagines that they’re driving a bus in a direction that’s meaningful to them, and the bus is filled with these loud and disparaging passengers who are monsters, and they’re shouting insults and telling the person to turn back. This could be a metaphor for social anxiety — thoughts and feelings that tell us that we should stay home from a party even if going to the party is aligned with our values. And so if a person is able to imagine what it would be like to continue driving toward where they hope to go, even with all those monsters screaming and shouting at them, they’re able to make a connection that might be useful when they’re thinking about flaking on plans or avoiding some other values-aligned thing that feels scary.

I’ve worked primarily with Pamela Coleman Smith’s Rider-Waite Deck because it’s so rich with similar kinds of metaphors. “Passengers on the bus” connects really well with Coleman Smith’s Six of Swords; there are six swords in the boat and they’re moving across troubled water, and there’s someone in the back steering. Engaging a visual metaphor offers this opportunity to connect with a challenging experience in a way that’s resonant but significantly less charged, which allows for some experimentation, some wonder, and ultimately some flexibility in terms of imagining how might I respond differently to this situation.

Group Therapy: Some of the most widely used therapies today are behavioral therapies — like CBT and DBT — in part because they’ve been rigorously studied. Do you think tarot is at odds with these methods for learning about oneself, or can behavioral therapies and tarot work together?

Dore: I started studying tarot in 2012, and in those first couple of years I was also learning about behavioral therapies while working as a publicist at the book publisher I mentioned before. Therapies like CBT and ACT and DBT and tarot were immediately connected for me because I was working heavily with those ideas at the time.

If you’re looking at a tarot image, there are countless ways to interpret it. And I think that’s really important to know and name — that you’re gonna be making meaning based on your location in the world. I was looking at the cards and seeing things like mindfulness, acceptance, avoidance, self-compassion, cognitive fusion. Behavioral therapies leave a lot to be desired in terms of how well or unwell they attend to socioeconomic factors that are going to impact the mental health of individuals and communities. But I do think that one of their strengths is that they can be helpful in supporting people to make sense of the ways that thoughts, feelings and behavior can interact and how to develop some awareness and skill around those interactions in service of making meaningful changes in your life.

For instance, CBT is increasingly controversial, but the basic idea that beliefs we’re not aware of might generate thoughts that simulate painful feelings that trigger unwanted coping behaviors can be super helpful. And I don’t think these ideas have to be taken as ultimate truths or facts that apply everywhere at all times. But they offer meaning that could be useful in a difficult or confusing time. Tarot, as a set of cards with these images that can be interpreted in a lot of ways, if nothing else, can support the notion that meanings are always unfolding and contextual. An idea might be really useful in one situation and not useful in another.

Group Therapy: You write in your book that “tarot is often considered more a spiritual practice than a psychological one.” But you argue that tarot is inherently psychological. How can psychological and spirituality go hand-in-hand in self-exploration?

Dore: Psychology, in an older or less considered sense, could be understood as the study of the soul. That’s really a far cry from how psychology is thought of today, especially with the rise of evidence-based interventions. If psychology is a study of the soul, it kind of goes far beyond the understanding of what we consider to be the mind or the self if we’re thinking from this worldview that’s dominant — at least here in the United States — where the mind is considered to be the thinking, rational, intellectual apparatus that’s located inside the head.

If psychology is also a study of the soul, it also involves curiosity about what’s occurring in the body, in our behaviors and how we connect with the world around us. This is obviously not a new idea. Even in the psychology field, specifically counseling, there are a lot of body-based and somatic therapies that resist this post-Enlightenment Era assumption that the mind is this isolated entity and that rationality is this marker of health. The images of the tarot have helped me to have a more expansive understanding of what psychology is, what the mind is, what the “self” is, and what it could look like in practice. So I could be engaging in psychological study or practice when I plant peas in the spring or ride a horse or participate in political action or learn history. I think of spirituality as this small self connecting with something greater.

Group Therapy: You’ve said those who incorporate tarot into their work with people are “facilitating synchronicity.” What exactly is synchronicity and what role can it play in healing? And can you give me an example of this happening in your own life?

Dore: I think of synchronicity in a Jungian sense — though I’m not a Jungian myself and I don’t have a lot of knowledge about Jungian work. Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity is that it’s an experience in which one’s internal and external worlds sync up. Early on I when I started drawing cards, it was a way to sort of manufacture that kind of experience, because so often people would say things like, “Wow, this image resonates so much with how I’m feeling or what I’m going through.” I could see how meaningful that was for people. It was powerful.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about what healing means. I’m doing a year-long training right now in narrative therapy with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, and they invited a therapist and professor named Makungu Akinyela to teach one weekend. He talked about healing in a way that really resonated with me, which was as a spiritual term that has to do with reconnection. I think his exact words were “being brought back into community.” That way of thinking about healing work has really stuck with me as important criteria for any sort of work that might be geared toward healing, whether it’s tarot reading, working with cards on your own, or working with individuals in a therapeutic way.

For me personally, pulling cards in the early days was spiritual for me. I was experiencing a lot of synchronicity there and it was healing because that was a time of alienation and isolation. I was in my early 20s and confused, and I was really feeling seen by the cards and by those who came before who had illustrated, written about and worked with them. There was something about seeing what often felt to me a very specific private internal struggle reflected back in the images that felt connective. That feeling is probably a big part of the reason why I remain as engaged as I do with those images.

I was watching an interview with the theologian Catherine Keller, and she said that often, the synchronicities that have meant the most were these small things — like coming across just the right book at just the right time to lead you on that path that would end up being the right one. That’s exactly how I feel when I use the cards. They relate so well to ideas that I’m learning or things that are really expanding my sense of what’s possible.

. . .

Big thanks to Jessica Dore for sharing her evolving perspective on how tarot can help us understand ourselves and the world we live in. If you’ve had any meaningful experiences with tarot, please share them with us!

Until next week,

Laura

If what you learned today from these experts spoke to you or you’d like to tell us about your own experiences, please email us and let us know if it is OK to share your thoughts with the larger Group Therapy community. The email [email protected] gets right to our team. As always, find us on Instagram at @latimesforyourmind, where we’ll continue this conversation.

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More perspectives on today’s topic and other resources

In his essay “The Querent,” author Alexander Chee reveals that he has found in tarot cards a way of taking power in order to make sense of the unknown that exists in our futures. “It seems to me there are two kinds of people, the ones who want to know the future, and the ones who do not. I have been both,” Chee writes. “For now, I think I know which one is better. Yes, I do have cards again. And it may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me, too.”

In the summer of 2022, artist Edgar Fabián Frías did a three-card tarot reading for Los Angeles — a spread that represented the past, present, and future of the city. Read on to learn more about Edgar’s interpretation.

Other interesting stuff

In Japan, a radical approach called tōjisha-kenkyū has emerged to challenge the prescriptive narratives that dominate mainstream psychiatry. This piece from Aeon explores how the approach has grown from a grassroots movement created by people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in a small Hokkaido fishing town to a revolutionary method for moving beyond psychiatry that’s being embraced across the strata of Japan’s rapidly aging society.