In Defense of the Tarot and other Pseudoscientific Nonsense

The Tarot deck today carries a powerful stigma.  Fear, superstition, and skeptical thinking have dismissed and disparaged it along with astrology, palmistry, psychics, and all sorts of other cool stuff.  I would like to argue in its favor.

It is my conviction that one will find exactly what one believes and expects from the Tarot deck.  If you think it’s a load of crap, then you will find nothing of value.  If you fear the Tarot, then using it will most definitely scare you.  If you believe that the Tarot will bring through negative energy, then look out, because you’ll find it.  If you use it as a tool to analyze and organize the things you already know about yourself, then you’ll be able to draw up and crystallize a lot of self-knowledge.  And if you believe that the Tarot can be a tool to get in touch with a higher, benevolent power, then you will find yourself richly, richly rewarded.  The point is that the Tarot deck in itself is completely neutral.  It’s just a deck of cards with pictures on it.  It is an entirely subjective experience.  You decide what it means.

For those who harbor religious concerns about the use of the Tarot, I would argue this: if God shares our primitive superstitions about a colorful deck of cards and is too fastidious to dirty his hands by speaking to us through them, then I’m not sure that a god who is so limited and bigoted is the god I want to pray to.  Every means of communication is capable of conveying negativity.  The spoken word can do incredible damage, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an equal capacity to heal.  The same goes for literature, music, theater, our dreams…any communicative device at all.  All of these conduits are neutral.  It’s the meaning that we give to words, art, and the like that determines its effect.  To shun any of these tools simply because they can do harm would be disastrously backwards.  The Tarot deck has some pictures and words that look pretty scary, but so does every language.  It’s what you make of those scary ideas and what you learn from them that matters.  Some of the most foreboding cards in the deck have become my old friends through my experience with the Tarot.

The Bible is very much like the Tarot in the way it communicates to us.  The Bible speaks in symbols, metaphors and parables.  Like the Tarot, its meanings are not always clear, and misunderstandings can often lead to anxiety, pain and anger.  History undoubtedly proves that many have used the words of the Bible as a justification for fear, hatred and violence.  But others have found love, new life and wisdom in the very same source.  Both the Bible and the Tarot convey the bulk of their value in subjective interpretations.  It’s up to you.  And, when looked at with an exclusively objective perspective, they both lose value in both credibility and interest.

Now, I would never advise anyone to trust exclusively in what one reads in the Tarot.  Just like language, the Tarot can convey powerful negativity if misused.  And I would even go so far as to acknowledge the possibility that a foreign negative entity, if such things exist, could certainly come through the Tarot to do harm.  Personally, I find this rather unlikely, though, unless that negativity has been specifically invited in. Anyone who experiences anything like this will do well to have faith that such invitations can be revoked.  I encourage those who have fears like these to consider the more probable idea that those things we fear most in the Tarot are in actuality the things we fear in ourselves.  Those negative things are what Carl Jung calls the “Shadow,” unwanted portions of our own psyches that are projected onto – or, in other words, unconsciously attributed to – an object outside of ourselves as a means of self-defense.  It’s no good to pretend that this shadowy side doesn’t exist: without shadows, we’d all appear flat!  Once one has recognized one’s own capacity for evil, falsehood, and doing wrong, though, and faced and come to terms with those unpleasant things, then these fears will diminish significantly.

When it comes to the Tarot, use your intuition.  If you are unsure of your ability to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, or truth and falsehood, then stay away from the Tarot.  Wait until you learn to trust yourself and your own intuitive capacities.  The truth is that you can trust those gut impulses about good and bad.  If you aren’t sure, listen harder to your own heart.

The Tarot is a wonderful tool.  In a world that is often hostile to the idea of self-discovery, and in a culture trying desperately to find itself in a religious system that is a product of a people thousands of miles away and two thousand years gone, any window that we can find into our own souls is of inestimable value.  And if you’re not comfortable with spiritualism or metaphysics or religion or whatever, don’t dismiss the Tarot.  Its message isn’t necessarily mystical.  My first year working with the Tarot was exclusively analytical, a way of comparing and clarifying my own ideas about my life and the world around me.  And I used the things I learned from the Tarot in a completely non-spiritual way to become a happier and more functional human being.

So, if you’re curious, give the Tarot a chance.  Do some research, and maybe buy yourself a deck.  There are a hundreds and hundreds of Tarot decks out there.  For beginners I’d recommend the Rider-Waite deck.  But if it’s not to your taste, find one that is.  It doesn’t matter how many Tarot adepts recommend the deck or how long it’s been around.  Choose one that has meaning to you.  And, hey, if you ever see me around, ask to have a look at my deck, or to get a reading from me.  I usually have my deck on me, and while I can’t promise that you’ll like or understand my reading, I’d be happy to do it.

So, today on Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the Tarot deck, astrology, palmistry, and all that pseudoscience crap.  If it’s nonsense, that’s fine by me.  It’s really valuable nonsense.

This Blog Is about Feelings

That’s right.  This blog is about feelings, and how they just might be pretty important after all.  For those of you who have known me for a while, you may be aware that this is a bit of a change in attitude.

This blog is also about crappy things that happened when I was a kid, but it’s not a plea for pity.  It’s a story about how things can get better and turn out just fine.

Everything seemed really complicated when I was a kid.  Lots of people used big medical words at me and seemed to think that the simple things that were going wrong were actually big scary diseases and disorders that required doctors and psychiatrists with years and years of schooling and lots of letters after their names to understand them.  I’m not a doctor and I don’t have any letters after my name, but I’m pretty smart and I think that I may have a better explanation.  So, in the interest of clarity, I have chosen the simplest language I could think of to tell this story, because that’s all it really needs.

When I was a kid, I was sad.  I was sad because my mom was mean to me.  My mom didn’t know that she was mean, though.

You see, when my mom was a kid, she was sad, too.  I didn’t know her then, but I think that she was sad because her dad went away.  And where she grew up, being sad wasn’t okay, because people might see and realize that her life wasn’t perfect.  In the small town Texas gentry of the 1950s and ’60s, everyone’s life was supposed to be perfect.

So my mom kept being sad and tried to pretend that she wasn’t.  She pretended so hard and for so long that she came to believe that she really wasn’t sad, at least not because her dad went away.

After being sad for long enough, my mom went to a doctor who said he could help her stop being sad.  It had been a long time since she had remembered that she was sad about her dad.  In all that time her sadness had been kept inside, it had grown and had got all twisted and scary. It started to come out in strange ways that didn’t make sense to anyone.  And the doctor with his clipboard and a plaque on his wall told her that she was sad and acting strange because there was an imbalance in the chemicals in her brain.  She was sick.  So he gave her some pills that he said would help.

My mom took the pills for a while and sometimes she felt better.  But deep down she was still sad, and now she was just sad with pills.  The pills took the sadness away sometimes, but sometimes it still came out in strange, scary ways.  She would get mad or tired or scared for no reason at all, and when she was mad or tired or scared, she made everyone around her miserable.  And after she got mad or tired or scared too many times, she would go and see her doctor again, and he would give her new pills to make it go away.

She went to lots of doctors and she took lots of pills.  But she was still sad because her dad went away.  She just didn’t know it anymore.  And a lot of times she was still mad or tired or scared for no reason.

And then she had me.

When I was a kid, I was sad.  I was sad because my mom was mean to me.  I didn’t know that my mom was mean, though, because kids just don’t know that kind of stuff.  And my mom didn’t know that she was mean, either.  She was too sad and confused to know that she was being mean.

And when I had been sad for long enough, my mom took me to a doctor.  And the doctor with the clipboard and a plaque on his wall told me that I was sad because there was an imbalance in the chemicals in my brain.  I was sick.  So he gave me some pills that he said would help.

The doctor told me that I wasn’t supposed to be sad.  My mom told me that I wasn’t supposed to be sad.  They said I was sad because I was sick.  If I was sad, it was because there was something wrong with me.  Me and my faulty brain chemistry were the ones to blame.

I was eleven or twelve when I took my first pill that was supposed to make me stop being sad.  I don’t remember very much about being a kid, but I do remember taking that first pill.  I didn’t know that I was supposed to swallow it whole.  I tried to chew it and I had to spit it out.  It tasted gross.  It was green and white.  I think it was Prozac.

But soon I learned to swallow the pills, and over the years I swallowed a whole lot of them.  I swallowed Zoloft and Celexa. I swallowed Zyprexa, Paxil, and Wellbutrin. I swallowed Lamictal, Carbamazepine, and Depakote. I swallowed lots and lots and lots of Lithium, and probably a lot of other colorful, helpful pills that I can’t remember.  I believed that if my doctor could just help me find the right pills, I’d stop being sad.

Sometimes I felt better, but most of the time I was still sad.  And sometimes I got mad, or tired, or scared for no reason.  But my mom and my doctor had told me that when I was sad it was because I was sick.  It was because there was something wrong with me, and I shouldn’t feel that way.  It was my fault.

Over the years, I stayed sad, and a lot of times I was mad, tired, or scared for no reason.  My mom was still mean to me, but neither of us knew it because nobody told us so.  And when I kept being sad and the doctor’s pills didn’t work, I tried lots of other drugs that my doctor didn’t give me, because my mom and my doctor taught me that when you’re sad, drugs should help you.  But even with all the new drugs I was taking, I was still sad.  I was pretty upset with my faulty brain.  I was pretty upset with myself for being sick and sad.

And then, when I got too sad, my mom and my doctor locked me up in a hospital for sad people.  People were really really sad there, and they were really mad and scared, too.  They were so sad, mad and scared that they did crazy things like throw up everything they ate or hurt themselves or hurt each other.  They lied and stole and kicked and screamed and peed on the floor and did all sorts of bad things because they were sad.  I had done some of those things, too, but most of the people there were way more sad than I was.  Since my doctor and my mom told me I was sad because I was sick, and they were sick, too, I figured I wasn’t any different from them.  And because they were like me, I made friends with them and learned to do all of the other things that they did.

I don’t know how long I was in those hospitals, but I didn’t get any less sad and I really missed my friends from school.  And when they let me out of the hospital, I tried really really hard to stop being sad, because I was scared to go back to the hospital.  I did okay for a while, but I couldn’t stop being sad.

And after a while I got tired of my mom being mean to me even though I thought it was my fault, so I went somewhere else.  And the longer I was away from her, the less sad I got and the more I wondered whether something wasn’t wrong with my story.

I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life being sad and thinking that it was all my fault.  It was my fault that I was sad.  It was my fault that I had to take the pills.  It was my fault that I was mad and tired and scared.  It was my fault that I had to go stay at a hospital, because there was something wrong with me.

It wasn’t until I was all grown up and had a child of my own that anyone ever told me that it wasn’t my fault.  That was nice to hear, but I’d believed that it was my fault for so long that it took a whole lot of time and thinking for me to decide that he might be right.

But the fact is that I was sad because my mom was mean to me.  It wasn’t my fault.  I wasn’t sick.  My mom was sad when she was a kid, too, and that wasn’t her fault, either.  Her life is a big mess because she’s still sad about her dad going away, but she thinks that there’s something wrong with her and that she needs pills to fix it.  And when I got to be grown up, my life was a big mess and a lot of that wasn’t my fault, either.  It wasn’t my fault, but I was the only one who could clean up the mess.

It’s pretty hard to clean up a messy life when you think that the mess is your fault because there’s something wrong with you.  And it took me a long, long time to see that there really wasn’t anything wrong with me at all.  I’m okay.  My brain works just fine.  And if my brain chemicals are imbalanced at all, it’s probably because of all of those wacky pills those doctors gave me.  I’m not sick.  I was just sad because my mom was mean to me.  And now that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, I can clean up my messy life.

I’m pretty mad and pretty sad that it took so long for anyone to tell me that it wasn’t my fault.  I was a kid and I didn’t know any better, and since nobody told me, I turned out to be a grown-up who didn’t know any better.  But this time I know why I’m mad, and this time I know why I’m sad, so those feelings won’t have to come out in strange, scary ways.  There’s nothing wrong with being mad or sad, and there’s nothing wrong with me.  It’s okay to be mad and it’s okay to be sad. I don’t need drugs to make my feelings go away.  I’m mad and I’m sad that no one told me it wasn’t my fault.  And since I know that that’s why I’m mad and sad, I know that someday I won’t be mad or sad anymore about that.

If you’re ever sad or mad or anxious or tired or scared and you don’t know why, there might be a real reason for it somewhere down there.  Just because you don’t know what that reason is right away doesn’t mean that it’s faulty brain chemistry.  Sometimes the reasons we’re sad or mad or tired or scared are hard to figure out.  Maybe you’re sad about something that happened a long, long time ago, and you’ve just forgotten.  Maybe you haven’t forgotten, but you think you’re over it when you really aren’t.  Or maybe you’re sad that you aren’t what the TV or your family or your friends tell you you should be.  Or maybe your parents weren’t mean at all but expected a little too much of you, or didn’t understand you, or didn’t give you enough structure.  Next time you feel something that doesn’t make sense, think about what happened when you started feeling that way.  Pay attention to your dreams.  Start a journal.  Talk to a therapist.  Give your feelings a chance to speak – it’s not fair to try to shut them up with pills before you’ve heard them out.  And if you are lucky enough to find real reasons for your feelings, then let yourself feel them until they get out of you.  And if that doesn’t make the sad or mad or anxious or tired or scared feelings go away, then look for another reason.

I was sad for a real reason.  It wasn’t my fault, but I’m the only one who can clean up the mess.

And that’s what I’d like to tell everyone, kids and grown-ups, who had a yucky childhood.

It isn’t your fault, but you’re the only one who can clean up the mess.