Getting a Reading Vs. Working with Tarot or Astrology in Therapy

I work with astrology and divination in psychotherapy. I’m often asked what, exactly, this looks like. Here’s an attempt to describe my process.

If you’re seeking an astrology or tarot reading in Atlanta, GA, you’re probably expecting to show up, ask a question, and get an answer or guidance based on the reader’s interpretation of the cards or a chart. It’s the “Moon in Cancer means x” or “the tower card means y” approach. The astrologer or card reader is synthesizing the symbols to give you answers, specific guidance, or direction about your questions within the frame of the reading.

Therapy is different in that it’s a place where we’re focusing on long-term change, your ability to listen to yourself, work through grief, heal trauma, explore your identity, and find your own truth. I know for many of my clients, astrology and tarot have become part of their truth, a connection to something larger than themselves. I make space for this in the therapy and I meet you with my expertise. The possibilities for working from this place are as broad as the issues you experience.

My aim is to empower you to trust your relationship with the symbolic material as you already know it—even if you feel like you know nothing, you’re just curious and like horoscopes. There’s a reason you like horoscopes, how do those words speak to you? That’s a starting point for therapy. I fold in my knowledge along the way, sharing metaphors, myths, timeframes, and connecting them to more conventional mental health tools and modalities.

I’ve studied astrology and tarot for over 15 years exploring various traditions along the way (Modern/psychological, Hellenistic, and horary).

We find our way together.

In therapy incorporating astrology or tarot, we focus far more on the relationship between you and me—client and therapist. If things are going well, you get to do a lot of the talking. Let’s say you’re experiencing a career issue. It might be longstanding, but a specific event in your life (maybe you lost your job) brought all of those dormant issues to the surface, it’s overwhelming. Using tarot, we can bring a question to the cards around the specific event and find surprising connections. Using astrology, we can look at the timing and the stories in the chart surrounding the event or difficulty. Working psychologically, the themes and movement of the symbolism show us unconscious connections and point toward areas of growth and exploration. Dreams in therapy work similarly.

Using our example above, while I will draw connections and offer my symbolic knowledge, I am much more interested in exploring your experience as it relates to the placements in the chart or images in the cards. I’ll be as curious about what you see in the tower card as I am about what comes up for me. Interpretations happen more once we get to know one another better. Even then, my interpretation will come, in large part, from how I hear you, which is informed by my psychotherapy training. In therapy, we have a focused kind of conversation, building trust over time, so you can feel safe enough to share what you’re really experiencing and know truth when you hear it.

Because I’m both a trained psychotherapist and an astrologer, if you have technical or geeky questions about the art of divination or psychology, we can spend time on education and resources. I also have training in trauma work, mindfulness, relational, analytic and experiential psychotherapy. I’ve had success treating trauma, depression, anxiety, grief, and relationship issues. My purpose in incorporating divination tools into therapy is to have another layer of symbolic material available for our process. Because I work from a depth orientation—from the frame of analytical psychology and ecopsychology—we explore the unconscious and how our minds and the environment are connected. Astrology makes space for anxiety and grief about the climate crisis and opens up the mythic history of a vital, alive part of our environment, the sky!

Therapy that incorporates astrology or tarot is a collaborative process. Using cards or paying attention to the sky, we have more symbolic material to be with the work. We have pictures and stories to open up what it feels like to be you, in this very moment of collective history. We can talk about how you play a role in the larger world and how the larger world informs your identity. Therapy doesn’t look the same for each person because you show up with your self and your life at a distinct moment. The most important factor in determining if we incorporate astrology into your therapy is if it works for you! If not, we can stick to dreams, stories, embodied feeling, and other ways of accessing the unconscious.

Your Inner and Outer Life are Connected

Astrology in psychotherapy might see a connection between the moon and Saturn in your chart and our career issue example. The placements are an invitation to explore interdependent aspects of your life and psyche—e.g. how past feelings, limits, depression, authority, death, etc. are related to the problem. The placements are also an invitation to consider your choices and options in the present. The moon is not just a point in a chart, it’s also always out there, rising and setting in the sky each night (it’s somewhere in the sky at this very moment). How is it all connected for you? That’s the work of psychotherapy. Astrology’s thesis, as I see it, is the human meaning that binds presently unfolding events to those that unfolded in the past, to what will unfold in the future. Out there and in here are inextricable. Psychology works much the same.

We mine our histories because they’re still alive within us and somehow, even if we hate it, our untended disappointments determine our future.

So, I guess you could say, our purpose with astrology or tarot is to open up creative possibilities for your future. I want you to live a life you actually want to be a part of. I want you to feel like your future belongs to you. To do that work often requires drifting away from our symbols entirely in moments because our attention is needed elsewhere. Therapy, after all, is an opportunity to sit in your discomfort because you’ve tried everything else and something is still stuck, the pain is still there, the same sabotage repeats. The willingness to be with all aspects of yourself, in the presence of another, is the beginning of transmuting the darkness into new life.

Natal charts & therapy

How do we work with the birth chart? While a birth chart is specific to the moment and place of your arrival on the planet, the symbols come alive in the here-and-now. A symbol, even in the birth chart, never means just one thing, and what it means to you often changes as you change. Therapy is a space to explore the dynamic process that is your life. You bring the human story—the messiness of your past, your family, your inner worlds. We see how it relates to the chart, then move back to you. We partner with the chart like a dream to give structure to our inner and outer exploration. As Mari Ruti writes,

“‘Authenticity’, in my opinion, is not a function of specific personality traits or attributes, but rather a mode of living and relating to the world; it is not some sort of permanent truth of our being, but rather a matter of how we enter into the continuous process of transformation that characterizes human life.”

—Mari Ruti

Ruti emphasizes the importance of how over what in being ourselves. That’s our approach with your chart. It’s human to want change, transformation, and discovery to follow a linear route, guided by a series of predictable steps. Therapy teaches you how to focus on your process over right and wrong ways to get to a destination. Rather than a blueprint or a concrete set of personality descriptions or predictions about the future, I like to think of the natal chart in therapy like a guide in our shared encounter with the unknown you.

The chart describes your process. It is both a means of contact and a picture of how the connecting unfolds. We find our way in the dark through shared stories, both personal and collective. Does the myth of Persephone sound like anything happening in your life?

Learning to Hear your subtle knowing

I’m a big advocate of the accessibility of symbols, including astrology and tarot. Symbols always have a myriad of interpretations. There’s an art to hearing and synthesizing what emerges in the moment of a specific reading and capturing its meaning. You can learn this skill through our work together and through this lens, working with tarot and astrology in therapy is a lot like working with dreams. As Jung once wrote,

“so difficult is it to understand a dream that for a long time I have made it a rule, when someone tells me a dream and asks for my opinion, to say first of all to myself: ‘I have no idea what this dream means.’ After that I can begin to examine the dream.”

—C.J. Jung

The Zen Buddhists call this Beginner’s Mind. There is no ultimate reference book for dreams, astrology, tarot, or your life because an image’s (and life’s!) meaning is deeply personal. It’s not fixed in time. The symbol’s meaning builds upon your history and the timing of its appearance in your life. The moment and place of the image is just as important as the image itself. We find ourselves in the whole story, including the place of its telling.

Even with my training and expertise which draw on tradition—literary, spiritual, and scientific—I’ve developed a personal relationship with the symbolism. My relationship to symbolism is based on my life, experience, and vocation as a psychotherapist. Every time I feel moved by an image or am in awe of the night sky, I’m participating in astrology or tarot. The same experiences are available to you. Those experiences influence how I work with you and the symbolic. I bring my humanity to the work. That’s why no two readers are alike, same with therapists.

My aim for therapy is always to give you the opportunity to connect your voice to feelings and images that arise amid uncertainty. We make space for uncertainty in the therapy room. You’ll have an opportunity to sit in the unknown while another is present. If the unknown has been historically difficult for you—it is for everyone to some degree—you might be surprised at what you discover when you don’t rush to fill the space.

So much in life is clamoring for your attention at any given moment that it can take practice to hear yourself. Therapy that incorporates divination is a great way to keep returning to your practice outside of the therapy hour. Divination is a companion in the unknown, wanting nothing more than to aid your dialogue.

Psychotherapy and Invisible Truths

You know more than you realize. Sometimes we lose or sacrifice what we know for good reasons—things slip into the background of our lives out of necessity. What’s working hums along until it stops working one day. If you’re seeking out therapy, you might be ready to meet life on its terms in here-and-now. We’ll team up to explore the terrain.

If we choose to work together, I will meet you in your pursuit of hidden and invisible truths. Images, myth, and ecology can speak to us on levels that open the way for deep psychological work. The natural world can teach us a lot about boundaries, seasons, bodies, and thought-forms. Astrology or tarot can help what was previously invisible feel seen.

“Tarot does not cause anything to happen. The cards do not contain some magic power to compel events…They give us a greater understanding of the situation right now, so that we can work to shape the future in valuable ways.”

—Rachel Pollack

Divination helps us focus and create a frame for our questions, so we can dwell in what we do and don’t know and feel more capable of meeting the unknown future.

Dwelling in the Questions

Is therapy that incorporates astrology or tarot right for you? working with cards or a birth chart in therapy gives you an extended period to work with transits, particular chart placements, or really let the images breathe with your life. It does not result in quick and easy answers. Though I find when we ask the right question, the need for a quick and immediate answer fades into the background. There’s life in the asking.

If you are looking for key astrological dates or a yes/no answer to a specific question, a traditional reading is likely a better fit than therapy. If you want to linger in the questions and particularities of your life, we might be a great fit.

I want to help you learn to hear your life.

If this way of working interests you, get in touch for a free 15 minute consultation!