Tarot and the Subconscious Mind (Without Any Woo-Woo) #TarotThursday
Mention tarot, and people tend to sort themselves into two camps. The first camp assumes you are trying to predict the future while the other assumes you’ve misplaced your critical thinking somewhere between a crystal shop and a moon ritual.
Neither of the reactions has much to do with how I actually use tarot.
I have never been interested in using Tarot to predict the future. I was always interested in why it works so well as a tool for self-reflection. Because whatever else tarot may be, it is remarkably good at helping people notice thoughts they didn’t realise they were having.
The other aspect that fascinated me was the relationship between tarot and psychology. I have come to think of tarot less as a mystical system and more as a language for the subconscious mind. A deck of cards cannot magically solve your problems. What it can do is present symbols, stories, and archetypes that encourage you to look at your life from a different angle.
Sometimes a different angle is all you need when you are overwhelmed by life.
We - humans - love storytelling. We understand ourselves better through metaphors, images, and narratives long before we understand ourselves through logic since the subconscious rarely speaks in bullet points. It prefers symbols, emotions, memories, dreams, and associations and tarot speaks that language fluently.
So through this article, let’s explore tarot as a psychological tool and why it works surprisingly well for self-reflection, and what it can teach us about the strange, symbolic language of the human mind.
Humans think in stories
We like to imagine that we’re rational creatures. Presented with evidence, we carefully weigh the options, analyze the facts, and arrive at logical conclusions. At least that’s the story we tell ourselves. Psychologists have spent decades showing that emotions, biases, intuition, and unconscious assumptions influence our decisions far more than we’d like to admit. Most of us don’t think our way through life nearly as much as we feel our way through it and then create explanations afterward.
Long before we understood neuroscience, we understood stories. We learned through myths, folktales, songs, and symbols. We recognise ourselves in fictional characters. We see our struggles reflected in novels. We hear a lyric and suddenly find language for something we’ve been carrying for years. That’s why a character like Kaladin Stormblessed resonates with readers battling depression. It’s why people see themselves in Shah Rukh Khan’s characters. It is why a song written by someone living on the other side of the world can feel strangely personal.
Stories give shape to experiences that often feel too complicated to explain directly an tarot works in much the same way.
A tarot spread is a collection of prompts and a symbolic story waiting for your mind to engage with it. And in that sense, tarot and psychology have more in common than most people realise.
Both help answer the question: What is happening beneath the surface of conscious awareness?
Symbols are the native language of the mind
If you’ve ever had a strange dream, you already know that symbols the subconscious mind rarely communicates in plain language. It doesn’t send a memo saying, “You are feeling anxious about change.” Instead, it gives you a dream about missing a train, losing your keys, or showing up to an exam you forgot to prepare for.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed symbols and archetypes form a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. Whether or not you agree with all of Jung’s theories, it’s difficult to ignore how naturally human beings respond to symbolic images.
Consider a few tarot cards:
- The Tower often evokes ideas of disruption, upheaval, or sudden change.
- The Hermit suggests solitude, introspection, and stepping away from external noise.
- Death, perhaps the most misunderstood card in the deck, rarely points to literal death. More often it represents endings, transitions, and transformation.
Notice that of these meanings are fixed. The symbols create a framework, but the emotional response belongs to the individual looking at the card.
That is where the real conversation begins because when a symbol evokes fear, excitement, resistance, relief, or curiosity, it often reveals something that was already present in the subconscious mind. A tarot card simply helps uncover it.
Your response to a card is the point
When I first started learning the cards, I assumed the meaning lived inside the deck and after learning and working with it for over a decade, I think that the meaning lives inside the reader.
Imagine two people pulling The Fool. One person sees possibility. The other sees risk. One feels excitement. The other feels panic. The card hasn’t changed. Different people see it differently. And, even the same person can see it differently at different stages of their life.
And that is precisely why tarot for self-reflection can be so effective.
The value isn’t in discovering what the card means in some objective, universal sense. The value is in noticing your reaction to it. Some questions to ask yourself at this point would be:
- Why does this image make you uncomfortable?
- Why are you resisting this interpretation?
- Why does this particular symbol feel surprisingly relevant?
Questions like these often reveal far more than the card itself.
In many ways, tarot functions like a psychological inkblot test with better artwork. The images provide a focal point and your subconscious supplies the associations. Then you find yourself talking about fears, desires, frustrations, hopes, and possibilities you weren’t consciously planning to examine because the cards gave your mind somewhere to start.
Can tarot help with self-reflection?
One of the biggest challenges with self-reflection is that we often don’t know where to begin. Sit down with a blank journal page and the mind can become surprisingly evasive.
- How am I feeling?
I don’t know. - What do I want?
Also don’t know.
- What’s bothering me?
Excellent question.
For me, this is where tarot becomes genuinely useful. A tarot card changes the dynamic and gives you a way to ask better questions. Instead of staring at an empty page, you have an image, a symbol, a story to respond to. Maybe a card highlights balance or maybe it suggests withdrawal. It could point toward uncertainty too.
Whether the interpretation is “correct” becomes almost irrelevant as the image creates a doorway into reflection. A card can spark questions that otherwise wouldn’t occur to us.
- What am I avoiding?
- What am I holding onto?
- Where am I resisting change?
- What am I afraid of losing?
In that sense, tarot as a psychological tool that help illuminate thoughts that were already present, waiting patiently in the background of awareness.
Tarot for creativity
Of all the ways tarot can be used, this is the one I return to most often. When people imagine creative blocks, they often imagine a lack of ideas. In my experience, the problem is usually the opposite. There are too many ideas, too many possibilities and too many directions competing for attention.
A card can introduce a perspective I hadn’t considered. It can highlight a theme hiding beneath the surface of a writing project. (Where do you think this blog idea came from?) It can suggest a question more interesting than the one I was asking.
Sometimes I pull a card before writing and ask: What is this piece really about? The answer I give often reveals something I already suspected but hadn’t fully acknowledged. I’ve used tarot to explore characters, writing projects, relationships, and recurring life patterns. I’ve used it to understand why some stories stay with me long after I’ve finished them.
- Why does a particular novel linger?
- Why does a specific song refuse to leave my head?
- Why does a fictional character feel so familiar?
Problem with predictive tarot
This is probably where some tarot readers and some skeptics will become equally annoyed with me.
Humans love certainty and we want guarantees. Especially when we are paying to get answers. We want to know whether we’ll succeed, whether we’ll be happy, whether we’re making the right choice, whether everything will work out in the end.
The future, unfortunately, remains stubbornly unwilling to cooperate. This is why predictive tarot is so appealing. It offers the possibility that uncertainty can be reduced, managed, or eliminated.
The problem is that uncertainty is part of being human and no card can remove it. No reader can provide permanent reassurance. If a tarot reading tells you exactly what will happen, there’s nothing left to explore. No questions left to ask. No responsibility left to take. Psychologically speaking, that’s not empowerment.
For me, tarot becomes most useful when it shifts the focus away from prediction and toward awareness.
Instead of asking: What will happen?
I find myself asking: How am I approaching this situation? What am I not seeing? What assumptions am I making?
Those questions may not predict the future but they often help improve my present.
Why skeptics and believers both miss the point
One of the most interesting things about tarot is that both its harshest critics and its most enthusiastic supporters sometimes make the same mistake by focusing on certainty. While the skeptic wants proof, the believer wants confirmation. Both look for definitive answers. And tarot isn’t particularly good at providing them.
The most valuable conversations I’ve had with tarot didn’t happen because a card made me notice something.
- A fear I hadn’t acknowledged.
- A pattern I kept repeating.
- A possibility I had been ignoring.
In that sense, tarot occupies an interesting middle ground. You don’t have to believe the cards possess supernatural powers and you also don’t have to dismiss the experience as meaningless.
Sometimes a symbolic system can be useful simply because it encourages reflection. Not everything has to be either magic or nonsense. Some things are valuable because they help us pay attention. Tarot, for me, belongs firmly in that category.
Stories, Songs, Tarot Cards, and the search for SELF
The more I think about it, the more I suspect tarot isn’t as unique as people imagine. It’s simply one version of something humans have always done. We look for ourselves in stories, songs, films, and in works of art.
We hear a lyric and suddenly understand a feeling we couldn’t explain. We encounter a fictional character and recognise a struggle we’ve been carrying for years. We watch a film and walk away thinking less about the plot and more about ourselves.
Tarot operates through a similar mechanism. It presents symbols and asks us to engage with them. The meaning emerges from the relationship between the symbol and the person looking at it. That’s why two people can draw the same card and walk away with completely different insights.
The Deck is a mirror
Even after 10 years, I still don’t know whether tarot predicts anything and the older I get, the less important that question seems. What interests me now is why a collection of illustrated cards can so consistently reveal thoughts I’ve been avoiding, assumptions I’ve been carrying, or possibilities I haven’t considered.
Perhaps the answer lies in psychology. Perhaps it lies in storytelling. Perhaps it lies in the human tendency to find meaning through symbols and narratives. Or perhaps the answer is a combination of all three. What I do know is that tarot has become one of my favourite tools for self-reflection. Not because it provides certainty, but because it encourages curiosity. Not because it tells me what will happen next, but because it helps me pay attention to what is happening now.
The more I study tarot and psychology, the more convinced I become that meaning often emerges through interaction rather than instruction. A symbol means nothing until someone encounters it. A story remains dormant until someone sees themselves in it. The same is true of tarot.
Whether you call it psychology, symbolism, or intuition hardly matters.
What matters is that sometimes a deck of cards helps us see ourselves more clearly.
FAQs
- Can tarot help with self-reflection?
Yes, many people use tarot as a tool for self-reflection rather than prediction. The cards can encourage you to explore thoughts, emotions, assumptions, and patterns that may already exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness. In this way, tarot acts more like a prompt for reflection than a source of answers.
- Is tarot psychological or spiritual?
It can be either, depending on how you use it. Some people approach tarot as a spiritual practice, while others view it as a psychological tool that uses symbols, archetypes, and storytelling to encourage introspection. The two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
- How does tarot connect to the subconscious mind?
Tarot cards communicate through imagery and symbolism. Because the subconscious mind often responds strongly to symbols, stories, and metaphors, tarot can help surface thoughts and feelings that may be difficult to access through direct questioning alone.
- Do you need to believe in fortune-telling to use tarot?
No. Many people use tarot without believing it predicts the future. Tarot can be used for journaling, creative thinking, self-discovery, decision-making, and reflection. Its value often lies in the questions it raises rather than the predictions it makes.
- Can tarot improve creativity?
Many writers, artists, and creators use tarot as a creativity tool. A card can provide an unexpected perspective, suggest a theme, spark a story idea, or help you see a project from a different angle. Tarot can be particularly useful when you’re feeling creatively stuck.
- What is the difference between tarot and psychology?
Psychology is a scientific discipline that studies thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Tarot is a symbolic system. While tarot is not a substitute for therapy or psychological treatment, it can complement self-reflection by encouraging people to explore their inner experiences through symbols and archetypes.- Is tarot related to Carl Jung?
Carl Jung did not specifically endorse tarot, but many tarot readers draw upon Jungian concepts such as archetypes, symbolism, the collective unconscious, and individuation. These ideas help explain why certain tarot images resonate so strongly across different cultures and individuals.
- Can tarot predict the future?
Some people believe tarot can offer insight into future possibilities. Personally, I find tarot far more useful as a tool for understanding the present. It may help illuminate patterns, assumptions, and choices, but it cannot eliminate uncertainty or guarantee a specific outcome.
