How to Use Tarot to Heal From Abuse
By Practicing Shadow Work
The term shadow work tends to frighten people. It sounds like you’re going to lean into your inner villain.
Shadow work is learning to explore and integrate the parts of ourselves that we’ve repressed or ignored, also known as the “shadow self.” It involves working with your unconscious mind to uncover parts of yourself that you repress or hide. This can include trauma or parts of your personality that you subconsciously consider undesirable. The goal is to understand ourselves better and become more balanced. The term sounds scary; “shadow” tends to imply something dark, but it’s the purest form of self-love you can practice. Shadow work is learning to show the parts of yourself deemed “unlovable” that you are worthy.
I practice this by working with tarot cards. When I am presented with an issue, a memory, or something I want to better understand about myself, I turn to tarot because it mirrors our subconscious. It’s the perfect healing tool for me because it lays out the issue like a story right before my eyes. Having it broken down card by card allows me to examine and take in the information presented.
My tarot and shadow work practice has given me a deeper understanding of myself and is the biggest tool in my arsenal in understanding my trauma and learning to heal from it. To demonstrate this process, I’ll break down the session I did for myself this morning.
On my healing journey, I often wished that someone had warned me. “Don’t marry that guy.” Last night, as I sat at the dinner table with my mother, I explained that I was hesitating on a purchase because, at the moment, I’m not receiving child support. As discussed in previous articles, finances are a significant stressor for me, and the withholding of support is triggering. There was more to this conversation, but the important part is that it led to my mom saying, “Your brother called me when you were dating him and said, “Get her away from that guy. He’s no good for her.”
I felt like the floor dropped from under me and said, “I wish he had told me that!”
My mom replied, “I tried to tell you, but you told me, “You can’t help who you fall in love with.””
Memory loss is common for people who have PTSD. I have extensive periods with little to no memory, but I was shocked because how the hell did I forget that? I can vaguely remember saying something similar to those words, but I remember it in a much different context.
It’s important to understand that I was raised in the Mormon religion, and that includes a particular road map on how someone will live their life. While education is encouraged, culturally within Mormonism, the men are supposed to get the education and career to be the head of the household. Women, meanwhile, are supposed to get married in the temple, have babies, and be the sole emotional support at home. When this warning was delivered, I was 19 years old—legally an adult, but still a child in many ways. I had long struggled with my faith. It was a point of contention within my home as a teenager, and when I found myself dating a Mormon man, who was 25 at the time, I felt a sigh of relief from my family that I was finally getting with the program.
When wedding plans were being made again, at the age of 19, I expressed not wanting to be married in the Mormon temple for several reasons. I remember saying, “You can’t help you fall in love with.” I remember struggling to explain why I was going through the marriage but didn’t want to get married in the temple.
I remember feeling like I was a disappointment.
I am positive my mother does not view or remember things that way and probably believes she tried to warn me, but I was too stubborn to listen. The warning was perhaps buried between questioning why I didn’t want to go to the temple more than, “There are red flags here.” However, with the memory loss that accompanies PTSD, I was spiraling.
Did I remember things wrong? Did my family try to warn me? Was I just an idiot teenager plowing ahead, disregarding my family's warnings? If I remembered that wrong, what else has my mind twisted and warped? Am I wrong about all of this?
Thanks to years of conditioning, my natural response to things like this is to believe that I am wrong and that I am the problem. I immediately fell into that thought pattern and contacted a friend to help me sort through my thoughts. I felt deeply ashamed, and I felt like if I had been clearly warned, then what happened to me was, on some level, my fault.
The thing is, that's the trauma talking.
So, this morning, I decided to treat this half-remembered memory of a warning as an investigation and got my decks out. Truthfully, I use a wide variety of decks to practice shadow work. Due to the heightened emotional state I was in, treating it like I would a paranormal investigation was fitting.
The issue at hand: examining the lost memory.
The first step is to prepare a list of questions. If you use tarot, shuffle and pull however many cards feel appropriate, and look at what they mean. I like to write down my meanings and use a chalkboard because it's visually appealing. You can write these things down in a journal or not at all. Here are the questions I asked about this issue:
- Why does this memory bother me so much?
If I was warned, it meant that the adults in my life knew that there was an issue with my relationship, but religion was more important. At the time, I was in a very vulnerable. My life plans had fallen apart. When I was accepted into several art schools, I was told that my dream was unattainable and that I would be left paying student loans for the rest of my life, and I was encouraged to pick a more normal life path. I had no backup plans and was scrambling to decide how to proceed with my life. It’s a tale as old as time. A child lost at sea. I didn’t know how I would make a living or what profession to follow, so I fell back on the only other life plan that was laid out for me: Mormonism. The trouble was my experiences within Mormonism as a teenager left me feeling like an outcast. I didn’t fit in, and the things I enjoyed made me stick out further. I felt unworthy. When I met the man in question, I was so surprised that he would like someone like me. I felt lucky that he deemed me worthy. I was already traumatized and doing my best to try to figure things out. So, hearing that I was warned and didn’t listen triggered the shit out of me because I’ve spent a lot of time examining these events to understand how I ended up here.
2. Is there more to remember?
I was terrified that if I had forgotten this warning moment, there could be more that I missed. I needed to remember the state of mind I was in as these events occurred. I cannot emphasize enough how devastated I was that my college plans were, for lack of a better description, denied to me. Since college was off the table then, I was lost and trying to figure out how to proceed with my life in a way my family would approve of. This is a complicated issue. There are so many layers to it. It’s hard to express in this format. Add to that, going to the Mormon temple was incredibly traumatizing for me. I left the walls of that building, essentially deciding to destroy any part of myself that didn’t fit in with what the ideal Mormon should be, and thus experienced my first spiritual death.
At this point, one of my other decks was nudging my mind because it added something to the conversation. I often pull from multiple decks for each question, but this felt specifically like, “Hey! Pay attention to this!”
The message from these cards is essentially that I was in a deeply toxic situation, probably several of them, if I’m being honest. It was an important reminder not to blame myself because I was a teenager. I was doing my best with the information I had at the time.
3. What am I not seeing about this situation?
This one is a doozy. These cards brought me back around to the grief I felt at everything I lost and the loss of myself when I went through the temple. And that, to an extent, a blind eye was turned to my situation because at least he was Mormon. I believe it was assumed that while maybe they had some concerns about him, if we did the right thing, got married in the temple, and lived as faithful church members, we’d figure it out. Another reminder that even though I was legally an adult at 19, I was still very much a child trying to find my place in the life path that was laid out for me before I was even born.
The final step in this process is to feel your emotions. You have to feel it to heal it. You have to allow yourself to experience the grief or whatever emotion has been brought to the surface. I have already felt this grief at many points in my life. We’re old friends at this point, but for me today and for as long as it takes, I need to allow room for the grief that potentially other adults did see that this relationship wasn’t a good fit, but religion mattered more.
There is a lot more to that period of my life and deeper reasons why I felt like I had to commit to that marriage, but it all essentially boils down to me feeling unworthy and desperately trying to please everyone else instead of asking what I actually wanted for my life.
After I’ve allowed myself to grieve, the last step is to show myself that the love I felt was lacking at that time. I deserved to be loved for who I was then, and I deserve that same love now. Teenage me had a lot on her emotional plate and didn’t get to pursue her dreams. I’m healing both of us by forging my own path and pursuing a career that I truly love.
Shadow work is the process of exploring and integrating unconscious aspects of yourself. By examining and acknowledging our repressed thoughts, feelings, and experiences, we can better understand our behaviors and why we react to certain things the way we do. It’s a deeply introspective journey that leads you to face your fears, pain, or insecurities and bring them out of the shadows. Shadow work is a transformative process as it takes your pain and turns it into a powerful form of personal growth.
Practicing shadow work after abuse helps promote healthier relationships by showing you the patterns and triggers in your life from the traumas you experienced. Once those issues have been brought to life, it allows room for more authentic connections with other people.
Abuse steals a person's power from them. Shadow work is how we reclaim our narrative and fully embrace our true, authentic selves.
**Please note: I am not a mental health professional. I am writing based on my own experiences with emotional abuse. If you are experiencing abuse and need professional help, please seek out a trauma-informed therapist**
