New Revelations From Therapy And 2 Card Explorations
Hi Musers, I hope you’re all doing well and have had a relaxing weekend. This post will cover three revelations from therapy that I have made over the last month or so. I’ll be honest, I still don’t know what to do with the information and so I have chosen some tarot spreads to explore who I am in more depth.
Privacy
I’m not going to lie, therapy has been both eye-opening and painful in equal measure. I am taking a powerful torch and shining it on the dark dusty places in my mind where I’ve shoved everything I don’t want to / am not ready to deal with. It’s 50/50 fear of the unknown and also knowing damn well that I don’t want to see what’s in there.
Normally, therapy is an intensely private experience between the therapist and the client. This is exactly as it should be. Therapy is hard enough without worrying that your deepest, darkest secrets could be shared with others. The reason I am choosing to share some of my revelations from therapy is that I started this blog because I want to help people. I want to let all of you out there know you’re not alone. That others feel like you do.
Of course, our feelings and experiences may not be identical but hopefully you’ll find it reassuring nonetheless.
Revelations From Therapy – Self Worth
The revelations are deeply tied to what I do, why, and my self worth. Here are the three truth bombs I have uncovered:
- I am a doer – my way of coping with the trauma of my childhood is by always having a plan. I must know exactly where i am going and what I am doing. I feel control and satisfaction when I make lists and tick off each item as I complete it. I want to be seen as intelligent and love scoring higher or learning faster than others.
- I’m a carer – I feel it is my “job” to look after others. I feel guilty if I don’t do it and even more so if I let others look after me for too long.
- My self worth – This is the big one and it’s a combo of one and two. If I’m not looking after people, doing things, being nice, making people happy etc then what is the point of me? What worth do I have to anyone? Why would anyone like me, ever?
I was never someone who made friends easily. I was always slightly odd. I am pretty intelligent but if the ability to make friends was a school class i would definitely have been in learning support. My sister Jayne pointed it out to me a few weeks ago and even though she didn’t mean it in a bad way, it hurt a lot. Made me feel like a loser.
I have recently discovered that children who suffer prolonged trauma experience physical changes to their brain. What’s interesting is that these changes are extremely similar to those observed in autistic brains. It seems my trauma may have made me have autism like traits so my lack of social skills shouldn’t be a surprise.
I think my issues as school, which ranged from isolation all the way to outright bullying, made me keen to do anything to make people like me. By being kind and always willing to help I felt I could earn the right to be someone others would want to spend time with. It’s sad isn’t it? Of all my revelations from therapy it’s the one that’s hit the hardest.
I Want To Make Others Happy
I think that my conscious motivations have changed a bit since my school days. I am a naturally kind person and a large proportion of family members, including my mother and late father, worked in caring professions. I feel like I have their desire or impulse to help people. After growing up in such an unhappy home I also strive to make people happy. Whether it’s by buying them something they want, listening to their problems or helping them with something, I always want to feel I making things better for others.
I now see this desire comes from childhood and has become almost a compulsion. I feel like I’m not an inherently likeable person so if I’m not doing things for others then what’s the point of me? What value do I hold? I fear that deep down I believe I have none. I know logically this is completely untrue but knowing and feeling are very different things.
The Tarot Diagnosis
Needless to say, I’ll be exploring this feeling more deeply in future tarot sessions. However, i do want to do some work myself. I only get 50 minutes per week with my therapist so I want to make the most of it. When I got into tarot, one of the podcasts I found really helpful was The Tarot Diagnosis. It was created by Shannon Knight, a licensed psychotherapist who explores the use of tarot in her practice.
It’s really interesting and has some powerful insights so I recommend you check it out as well as the Instagram page. Earlier this year, Shannon released a book too and it will form the basis of my work. It is a treasure trove of two card spreads designed to explore your psyche and all the parts of you that you might keep hidden. I’m going to start working through them and see what I can learn about myself.
Inner Child
The first spread refers to my inner child and is super simple but pretty powerful. It’s just two cards side-by-side. Card 1 is My Inner Child and the second is Needs… The deck I always used for inner child work is the Happy Tarot by Lo Scarabeo so that’s what I used. Here are the cards I drew.
My inner child feels like she needs to take on the role of loving, nurturing mother. I was the oldest child and my mum worked part time. I felt it was my job to look after my siblings as my stepfather did virtually no housework or childcare at all so it fell to us, or more often me. I literally never came home from school to find he had started dinner, even when he had the day off. I also gave my mother lots of emotional support so my inner child feels embedded in this role.
What my inner child needs is the King of Cups. She needs an adult in full control of their emotions, someone who takes the pressure and responsibility off her. There was a huge amount of emotional dysregulation in my home, neither my mother or my stepfather was in control a lot of the time. My inner child needs aperson like this to give her freedom to go back to being a child. Help her learn how to regulate her emotions.
Wow! I guess revelations from therapy lead to revelations at home if you do the work. I feel quite tearful thinking of myself as a child. Feeling like I needed to shoulder adult responsibilities. That I needed to suppress and contain my emotions even though the people who should have been helping me were less stable than I was. Here’s a few of the things I did.
- I tried to support my mother emotionally for years.
- I took my little brother on trips to the cinema etc because my parents seldom bothered doing that for any of us
- I helped them create budgets
- I borrowed money to help them out financially
- I cooked a lot as mum got stressed when she cooked
None of these are things a child should feel responsible for.
Join Me For Spread Two
This was an incredibly eye opening reading for me and I’m going to need time to process it. I fully intend to carry on with these spreads so I can see what else I can learn. Please let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts, insights or plan to try this spread yourself. Take care til next time xx
