Why that bad tarot reading wasn't really about the cards

You got a reading and it did not go the way you hoped. Maybe the answer was not the one you wanted. Maybe the reader's tone left a bad taste in your mouth. Maybe you walked away thinking tarot simply is not for you.

In more than forty years of doing this, I have found that a reading almost never fails because of the cards. It fails somewhere else. Once you can see where, you stop being afraid of tarot and start using it properly.

There are three places to look: the question, the message, and the reader.

The question was never right

Picture the question most people bring: does he love me?

It feels direct. It is also a closed yes-or-no question, and it is one of the weakest things you can ask a deck.

Tarot was never a fortune-telling machine. It is much better at reflection and pattern than it is at verdicts. When you ask does he love me, what you are actually asking is for a judgement to be handed down. What you may really want to know is whether the relationship is built on honesty, or whether it has a foundation that can hold weight.

Those two questions feel related. They are not the same question.

And you are allowed not to know the right question yet. A decent reader should not be handing you a colder yes-or-no. They should be asking what outcome you are actually after, and helping you reframe it before a single card is turned. Not fixing the question for you — arriving at your own better question, out loud, with somebody holding the space while you get there.

Sometimes the wrong answer is the real message

Even when the question is good, the cards may bring you something about yourself instead. Your boundaries. Your worth. Something that looks completely unrelated to what you asked.

That is not automatically a bad reading. Sometimes it is the thing doing exactly what it was meant to do.

Think of it less like a search engine and more like a conversation that goes off on a tangent because the tangent is more urgent than the subject. The cards may be showing you what needs addressing first, so that the answer to your original question can make sense when it arrives.

The connection does not always become obvious in the room. Sometimes the penny drops days later. That is not necessarily a fault in the process. Sometimes that is the process.

The same is true of the six-month question. What is going to happen to me in six months. Tarot does not show a fixed future. It shows a path — what might happen if you keep going the way you are going. Nothing is locked. What you get is a choice with information attached, not a prophecy.

The reader is allowed to be the problem

Now the other kind of bad reading: the one that has nothing to do with your question.

Some readers are harsh, or condescending. They say things bluntly without any thought for how it lands, or they let their own opinion in before they have turned a card. A reader who cannot respect the person sitting opposite them probably should not be reading for clients. That conduct gives every reader a bad name, mine included.

You do not need to be psychic to notice when something feels wrong. When somebody tells me a reading felt off, I do not need to know the other reader to believe them. The discomfort is the information.

This is where real harm happens. Not a wrong answer — the feeling that stays afterwards. Some people come to me wanting to be told that another reader was wrong. Others arrive genuinely shaken, having lost trust not only in paid readings but in reading at all. Rebuilding that takes time and proof, not reassurance.

My own standard is simple. I read the same way for everyone. The explanation of the symbols and the way I step into a card are the same whether it is a free three-card pull or a full paid session. The only thing that changes is how long we have, not how carefully I do it.

And if somebody offers to lift a curse for money, or creates urgency so you will pay now, that is not tarot. That is a sales pitch wearing tarot's clothes. A real practice does not need fear to sell itself.

What to check before your next reading

If you have had a bad one, check three things:

• Was your question open, or was it a yes-or-no trap?
• Was the message really unrelated, or was it something that needed addressing first?
• Was the reader respectful, honest, and free of pressure?

Once you can see the difference, something shifts. You stop approaching tarot braced for it and start approaching it with better questions. You know what it can do for you, and what it was never meant to do.

If part of what bothered you is not knowing whether the reading was even the reader's own work, that is a fair thing to wonder about now — I wrote about that in Can ChatGPT teach you to read tarot. And if you came out of a heavy session feeling scraped out rather than answered, Energy Vampires and Protection is about what to do with what you picked up.