Well. I have my opinions, of course - an ex-boyfriend or two might even claim I have too many of them! But having read professionally for thirty years, I think I have something to offer to the debate.
The tarot, along with astrology and other such tools for intutive guidance, play perfectly into the human mind’s preference for symbolic thinking. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, identified this trait in the 1800s and began to treat clients with intractable mental problems by decoding the symbols that their minds used to hide painful information from their conscious selves.
The world is a scary place and almost all of us go through traumatic experiences that we don’t want to face. Sometimes, it’s not even a case of not wanting to face things, it’s more that if we want to be able to function on a conscious level in everyday life, we have to push the pain and fear deep into our unconscious and just get on with it. But those experiences don’t go away; they are like bogey men, hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out at the most inconvenient time to scare hell out of us.
For instance, you might have had a terrifying relationship with a stalker when you were fifteen years old. The stalker’s name might be Bob and his effect on your life was such that you had to move towns. This is traumatic and your mind cannot deal with it properly and get you off to school everyday.
So it pushes the experience deep into the unconscious so that your conscious mind can continue to function and files it away safely under the label ‘Bob’. The word Bob soon becomes the symbol in your unconscious for Danger! Run away as fast as you can!
The file evolves over time and also becomes the place where your mind stores all of its disappointments about men in general - it’s a matter of convenience really. Why make new folder and a new symbol for ‘Problems with Men’ when you already have a perfectly good one with plenty of room in there for new stuff?
And look - none of this matters one little bit. Well. Not until twenty years have passed and you’ve been married and divorced, you have a couple of kids to bring up largely on your own, and you still haven’t found the time or space to excavate and deal with all that old trauma Bob the Stalker caused you when you were fifteen.
But what happens when you meet a great guy who sincerely wants to love you and your kids but you just can’t trust him no matter how perfect he seems? Why? Why can’t you trust him when he’s done nothing wrong by you?
It’s simple really - can you guess why you look at this poor guy like he's Charles Manson every time he moves too fast around you? The poor guy’s name is Bob, of course, and he’s paying not only for the sins of Bob the Stalker but for every other guy who ever stood you up and every cad who didn’t call when he said he would.
Symbols are a like a filing system for our emotions and humans can be very easily manipulated via their identification with symbols. Flags and national anthems for instance, as symbols for the love of country, have always been used to lead young men into wars. If we don’t decode and keep which symbols work in our favour rather than against us, they can be very destructive.
One of the many things that the symbols of the tarot deck help us to do , is bring your own personal symbols to consciousness and unlock past traumas that are still affecting our lives and decisions at a conscious level. The process of bringing these painful things to consciousness is one of the most important things we do in our personal growth. Until you have shed light on your shadow selves, they will remain frightening ghosts you cannot hope to defeat.Thanks for visiting! Please subscribe and hit the follow button to be kept up to date with what's happening, tarot-wise, in Townsville.
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