Tarot therapy in Arkansas

Hands laying colorful Tarot cards out on stone tile floor.

Go beyond mere words. Unlock the answers deep within you.

Bring the power art, images, symbols, archetypes, and intuitive wisdom into your healing journey. Unlock your inner knowing.

You’ve tried traditional talk therapy. You need something that goes deeper than words alone. You want something different.

You want something that can move beyond mere talk to give you new perspectives and shake a few new ideas loose. Deep down, you know the answers are there inside you. You can feel it intuitively but you can’t draw it out.

Words alone just seem to fail you in therapy.

Every time you think you have a hold on all of the stuff inside you, it slips away. Your therapist tries to help and offer understanding, but all of the words just keep getting in the way. It’s like the more you talk the more confusing things get.

Stacked deck of Tarot cards on wooden table.

With Therapeutic Tarot, your intuition and inner knowing take center stage - supported by the power of imagery and your deep mind.

Using Tarot cards in therapy may sound like a radical idea, but it’s no different than other clinically-accepted methods such as art therapy or sand tray therapy.  Therapeutic Tarot uses ideas from these other methods and combines them with concepts such as the parts of Internal Family Systems Theory (IFS) and archetypes of noted psychologist Carl Jung to give you a way to tap into your hidden layers of consciousness, find new ways of looking at your problems, and connect with the answers inside you.

Best of all, you don’t have to know anything at all about Tarot cards!

How does it work?

Rather than using Tarot in the classic fortune-telling sense, Therapeutic Tarot uses the cards and their images as a “projective tool.” This means that we’ll go through the cards and exercises to find the images that really resonate with your circumstances, your problems, and even see possible solutions!

Therapeutic Tarot blends the images and abstraction of the cards and the structure of a clinical mental health session to help activate the creative, intuitive side of your brain as well as the structured and orderly side. Images and themes in the cards can trigger thoughts and ideas that talk therapy alone might miss and provide inspiration for the outcomes you want to work toward.

Use of the cards can be easily paired with clinical counseling theories such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems Theory (IFS), Narrative Therapy, Client-centered (Rogerian) therapy, and more!

What to expect.

A Therapeutic Tarot session can look a lot like any other therapy session, only with focus on using the cards as a way to explore your problems, create a vision for desired outcomes, and brainstorm solutions. Some sessions may only involve looking at one or two cards, depending on how deep with go with what those cards inspired.  Other sessions may involve looking at four to six cards, also depending on the things you want to talk about.

The layout of the cards isn’t like the typical spreads you see traditional Tarot readers use with lots of different cards. Sometimes the layout will be chosen based on the kinds of problems you want to talk about. Other times, the layout may be guided by whatever comes to mind during the session.

Clients often find that the use of Tarot cards in a session brings all kinds of unexpected things into the conversation, such as memories they hadn’t thought about in a long time, new perspectives on old problems, and images and ideas that inspire a sense of hope that wasn’t there before.

Together, we’ll use the cards to explore your problems in creative ways.

Therapeutic Tarot can help you:

  • Clarify your intention for counseling.

  • Use the power of metaphor to help you understand and describe your problems.

  • Process emotional imagery that words alone struggle to express.

  • Explore inner conflict between different parts of yourself.

  • Envision the possible positive outcomes of the hard work you’re doing.

  • Reflect on things that bring you a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

  • Weave your life story to look at how your past affects your present and blocks your future.

  • Assess your attachment style to improve your relationships.

Stacked deck of Tarot cards. Ace of Bows visible, showing bow and string used as firestarting tool.

Uncover the answers already within you...

FAQ for Therapeutic Tarot

  • Therapeutic Tarot uses Tarot or oracle cards as projective tools, not predictive ones. For the purposed of therapy, the Tarot cards are just cardboard and ink with images that help stimulate creative thinking. In the same way that sand tray therapy uses little figures, Therapeutic Tarot uses cards with pictures.

    Another way to think about it is like art therapy except you're using art rather than making the art. It's also like making a collage or vision board. The pictures already exist and you're picking ones that are meaningful to you to help inspire ideas.

  • That's okay! The important part of Tarot Therapy is interpreting the images in ways that are meaningful to you. In fact, a lot of Tarot decks use images that are different enough from the classic Tarot deck - the Rider-Waite-Smith deck - that sometimes it's hard to find the exact same things in the same cards from different decks. Oracle cards don't even use the same images as Tarot decks.

    It's all about what you interpret from the images based on your own inner knowing and the questions you're exploring - not what you've memorized about Tarot cards.

  • That's fine. I have several decks to choose from that I have bought specifically for my practice so that you can find one with images that feel meaningful to you.

  • Then let's use it by all means! Many people have a deck that is special to them and I invite you to use it in our sessions if you feel good about doing that.

  • Some people may be nervous about using Tarot or oracle cards in therapy because of their religious upbringing. Therapeutic Tarot is simply an option I offer for those who are interested in it. It is not a part of the counseling I do with everyone.

  • This can certainly be honored as part of the spiritual path you find supportive in your challenges. For clinical mental health work, however, the focus in sessions will be on using Tarot for projection and interpretation in the same way we would use any set of images.

    This is to help keep our work aligned to clinically ethical best practices while also honoring how you work Tarot in your own life.