There is a very particular moment in some tarot readings where I can almost feel the client thinking, that is not the answer I ordered.. and listen, I get it.
Most people do not book a tarot reading because everything in their life is crystal clear and going beautifully. They come because something is confusing, painful, uncertain, emotionally charged or refusing to make sense. Usually there is already an outcome they are hoping for, even if they haven’t said it out loud yet. They want the relationship to work, the ex to come back, the job, the money, the confirmation that whatever they have been waiting on is finally about to happen. There’ s nothing wrong with hoping for a particular outcome, I mean we are human, so of course we want things. The problem starts when somebody stops asking for clarity and starts asking the reader to help them negotiate with reality…. That is where tarot stops being useful… and that is also where I stop pulling cards.
Asking again does not automatically create a new answer
One of the most common things I see is somebody asking the same question in slightly different clothes. How does he feel about me? We look. Then it becomes, okay, but how does he feel underneath that? What if I reached out? What if I did not reach out? Does he miss me though? Is there still potential? Girl… At some point, we are no longer reading the situation. We are trying to find the exact combination of words that makes the universe change its answer.
My rule now is fairly simple. I will usually pull on something twice if I feel there is genuinely more context to uncover. If the same message keeps coming through however, I tell the client exactly that: the same context is coming in, so do what you will with that information. Because what am I supposed to do after that? Wrestle the cards until one of them agrees with us?
Earlier in my career, I was much softer about this. If somebody became upset by what I was seeing, I would explain everything from seventeen different angles, soften the delivery, reassure them and at times I would even find myself apologising because the reading had triggered them. Experience taught me that there is a difference between being compassionate and making myself responsible for how somebody feels about information they asked me to look at.
These days, I am much more likely to say, it might not make sense right now, and that is okay. If it does not resonate, do not force it. But I can only tell you what I see and feel. Then we leave it there. They might come back a week later, six months later, or never again. All three outcomes are fine. I would rather lose a client because I did not validate what they wanted to hear than keep one by feeding something I don’t believe is true.
I understand why people cling to potential because… I have done it too
This is probably why I have so much patience with love readings, even when they make me want to gently put my head through a wall. I know what it feels like to stay attached to potential. I’ve spent years in relationships where part of what kept me there was not simply what the relationship was, but what I believed it could eventually become. That distinction is huge, because the person in front of you and the person you believe they could become are not necessarily the same person. I have had clients wait years for someone to act on a connection that, when I look at it, is not actually moving anywhere. The client may know that on some level too, but there is still this tiny part of them going, yes, but what if…? Potential is seductive because it asks you to stay invested in a future that has not happened yet while ignoring the evidence sitting in front of you right now.
I had one client who had been waiting on a karmic connection for years. The man was not showing meaningful interest, but she remained attached to the possibility that something would eventually change because the connection felt significant… and this is where I think people misunderstand karmic relationships.
Significant does not mean permanent. Intense does not mean compatible. A person can change your life and still not belong in it forever. A connection can open a wound, expose a pattern, teach you something enormous about yourself and then be completely finished. That doesn’t make it meaningless, if anything, the meaning may have been the event itself rather than the relationship you hoped would grow from it.
And because I have lived my own version of clinging to potential, I don’t sit there judging the client thinking, God, how can you not see this? I know exactly how they cannot see it. Hope edits reality beautifully but what I won’t do is help the editing process.
Comfort and false hope are not the same thing
This is probably one of the biggest things I have had to learn in my work. There is absolutely a place for comfort in a reading. If somebody is heartbroken, frightened, grieving, overwhelmed or dysregulated, I don’t believe the solution is to throw the cards at them like, well, Spirit said he does not want you. Good luck babe. That’s not honesty, that’s poor delivery. If somebody comes back to me for the second or third time around the same situation and I can see they are spiralling, I will often stop making the reading about the other person altogether.
We start talking about them.
What are you actually afraid of here? What happens emotionally if this person never comes back? What are you holding on to? Are you looking for information, or are you trying to calm yourself down? Have you eaten today? Have you slept? Have you been sitting on this person’s social media for three hours looking for clues? Do you need another card, or do you need to get out of the house?
A lot of the time, the reading becomes much more useful once the focus shifts away from what is he doing? and towards what is happening inside you right now?
One question I use a lot is: If your best friend came to you with this exact situation, what would you tell her?
That one gets people, because we are often incredibly wise when the life in question isn’t our own. The answer comes out immediately: I would tell her to leave. I would tell her she deserves better. I would tell her she is overthinking this. I would tell her to stop waiting. Okay.
So why does that compassion disappear the second the person sitting in the situation is you? That is the kind of conversation I am interested in. Comfort should help you regulate enough to face reality. False hope changes reality so you do not have to. Those are not remotely the same service.
My delivery has changed because truth does not need to be brutal
Anyone who has worked with me for a while knows I can be direct. Very direct.
Earlier in my career, I genuinely had to learn how to polish the delivery because there is a difference between clarity and dropping information on somebody’s forehead like a brick.
A first-time client doesn’t know me yet. They don’t know that my face reacts before my mouth does, that when I suddenly go quiet it is probably because something strange has appeared in the reading, or whether my bluntness is coming from care, irritation, judgement or simply the way I communicate. So I learned to meet people where they are. That doesn’t mean changing the answer. It means learning how to deliver the same context in a way the person actually has a chance of hearing. Once I have built rapport with someone, the tone can become much more candid because they already know where I am coming from.
I have regular clients where something comes through and my immediate response is genuinely, oh, okay. What is this bullshit then? And they laugh because they know exactly what I mean. On video, it’s even worse because my face can’t hide a damn thing. But that authenticity is part of why some clients stay with me. They know I am not reading from a script. They can hear the confusion, surprise, concern or relief in my voice as it comes through. If I have delivered the same message gently several times and the person is still trying to negotiate with it, I can also become more explicit: just because I am saying this in a softer way does not mean the context has changed. That’ s usually where I suggest they sit with it, pray on it, meditate, journal, talk it through with me if they need to, or simply go away and experience life for a little while before returning to the question.
Because another reading is not always what the person needs.
A tarot reading should not become your lifeline
This is where I think both readers and clients need to be very honest with themselves.
There is a healthy way to work with a reader. You are going through a transition, something is unclear, you want another perspective, you want help identifying blind spots, so you book the session, we look at the situation, talk through what comes up, you leave with more information and then you go live your life. Beautiful.
Then there is another dynamic where the reader slowly becomes part of the client’s decision-making system. Should I message him? Should I apply for this? Should I go out tonight? Should I buy this? Should I wait? Should I call? Should I leave? Should I breathe on Tuesday or Wednesday? At that point, something has gone wrong. A reading should help you reconnect with your own ability to choose, not replace it.
I once worked with a woman who had been getting readings from multiple readers about the same major life situation. Every reader was telling her something slightly different, so she booked more readings trying to figure out which answer was correct. Eventually she was more confused than when she started. I told her something that apparently no reader had said to her before: pick one person you trust. It does not have to be me. Or take a break from readings altogether. Do some inner work, live your life for a few months, see what actually changes, then revisit the situation when there is new information. She did. Now she checks in every few months rather than every five minutes. We have a proper session, look at what has changed, what worked, what did not and create something useful from where she actually is. That is much healthier.
She is participating in the time between readings and that’s really important to me.
I have always seen myself as a bridge or a translator. I can help you make sense of what may be coming through spiritually, I can help you see a dynamic from an angle you cannot currently access and I can point out what seems to be sitting in your blind spot.
Then you decide.
My job is not to become your replacement nervous system.
Readers have boundaries too
There is another side of the emotional vending machine conversation that I think gets ignored because readers are often expected to remain endlessly available. We are not.
This work can be emotionally heavy. People come to us with grief, trauma, betrayal, infidelity, family conflict, financial problems, abusive dynamics, mental health struggles, huge life decisions and information they may not have told another human being yet. That deserves the utmost level of care, and it also means I need to know whether I actually have the capacity to hold it. I have clients who will message me before going into something particularly heavy and ask whether I have the emotional space for it that day. I respect that enormously, because I am human too.
There have been times I have chosen not to work even though I could have used the money because I knew I was not mentally present enough to give somebody what they were paying me for. If I am exhausted, dysregulated, irritated and running on fumes, who exactly am I helping? Trust me when I say that there’s no medal for pushing through until I can’t stand the sound of another client’s voice, and there’s no ethical award for being permanently available. Part of protecting the integrity of the work is recognising when I shouldn’t be doing it.
Reader dependency can become incredibly profitable
This is the part of the industry nobody particularly enjoys talking about. A vulnerable client can be worth a lot of money…. That is the uncomfortable truth. If someone is anxious, emotionally attached to an outcome and willing to keep paying for reassurance, an unethical reader can very easily learn what keeps that person coming back. Give them enough hope to maintain the attachment, tell them the person is still thinking about them, say there is another delay, tell them Spirit says to wait, tell them contact is coming soon and if it doesn’t happen, move the timing. Then repeat. That can become a business model and the dependency can work in both directions. The client relies on the reader for emotional regulation, while the reader relies on the client for financial regulation. Now both parties have an incentive to keep the problem alive.
That’s not guidance, that’s an ecosystem built around somebody remaining stuck… and yes, I am self-employed. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I understand perfectly well why repeat business matters, but there has to be a line. I would rather somebody come to me less often and actually use the information than pay me every week to ask the same question while nothing in their life changes. Maybe that’s why I’m not a millionaire from tarot.
Oh well.
I sleep fine.
I don’t believe in manufacturing urgency either
There is another practice I personally avoid, which is reaching out to clients first with some mysterious spiritual cliffhanger; Hey babe, I was thinking about you and Spirit showed me something. We really need to talk.
That is an incredibly powerful sentence when somebody already trusts you. Now they are wondering what you saw. Is something wrong? Is it about their relationship, money, children or job?And conveniently, the answer is sitting behind a paid session. I don’t like that dynamic. If a client wants to check in, they know where to find me. I don’t need to create anxiety to generate a booking. The same applies during sessions. If we reach the end of the time and there is genuinely more to unpack, the client can decide whether they want to continue or come back another day. I’m not interested in deliberately leaving somebody hanging so they feel compelled to spend more.
Trust is too valuable for that.
Timing is guidance, not holy scripture
Timing questions are another place where people can get very attached; When will he contact me? When will I get the job? When will this money arrive? Timing can absolutely come through in a reading, I’ve had timings come through very clearly. I’ve also had timings shift.
People have free will. Circumstances change. Someone delays a decision, another person enters the situation, you change your behaviour, they change theirs, a new opportunity appears. A hundred variables can alter the trajectory between the moment I am reading and the moment the predicted event would occur and that’s why I always explain that timing is probability, not a court order. If I sense that somebody is likely to fixate on a date, I often give a broader window so instead of saying, 2 August at precisely 4:17pm, prepare the altar, I might say, I am looking around July to September. The information is still there but I am simply not giving an anxious brain one specific day to spend three months worshipping and if the timing shifts, I’m not going to invent some elaborate explanation to protect my ego. Circumstances changed, that happens. The moment a reader becomes more invested in proving the prediction correct than helping the client understand what is happening, the work starts becoming about the reader.
Prediction without agency is pretty useless anyway
Even when a future event looks likely, I still want to know what that means for the client. Say your ex comes back. Okay, then what?
Do you actually want them back? Has anything changed? Are you different? Are they different? Did the relationship end because of a solvable circumstance or because the dynamic itself was unhealthy? Are they returning because they love you, because they are lonely, because their other option disappeared, because they want access to your body, or because your house apparently still has excellent snacks? These details matter.
I once looked at a situation where an ex-husband had returned after around fifteen years of little to no contact. On paper, that sounds incredibly romantic. Fifteen years later and they found their way back to each other.
Cute Netflix film… Except when I looked at the actual dynamic, a lot of what was pulling them together was familiarity and old trauma. He also knew that she had historically struggled to enforce boundaries, and that had not changed enough for me to suddenly interpret his return as evidence of profound transformation. The story sounded romantic, the underlying dynamic did not. Tarot should help us tell the difference.
You are still allowed to make the “wrong” decision
This is another place I think readers can accidentally become controlling. If I tell you what I see and you decide to do the exact opposite, you are allowed. You’ re grown, I’m not your spiritual probation officer. I have had clients ask about decisions where I could clearly see potential consequences. My job is not to physically stop them. I can explain what I am seeing around the choice, where the risk looks strongest and what may happen if they continue. Then they choose.
There have even been moments where someone has tried to get me to ask the cards a question in a way that would essentially help them justify something they already know is questionable. You can manipulate the wording all you like but the context tends to remain embarrassingly consistent and at that point my answer is usually some variation of, you can absolutely do whatever you want. Just don’t pretend you were not shown the possible consequences. That is where accountability comes in. I don’t want clients obedient to me, I want clients informed enough to make their own decisions.
The cards are not here to make you comfortable all the time
If you book with me, understand that I have very little interest in maintaining a pretty narrative simply because it’s easier to hear. I will tell you the lovely things too, obviously. If somebody genuinely adores you, I’m not going to manufacture darkness for dramatic effect. If the opportunity looks promising, I will tell you. If the connection is healthy, beautiful. If something amazing is developing, let us celebrate it.
But if the reading shows the blind spot, the avoidance, the unhealthy attachment, the self-sabotage, the other person’s bullshit or your own bullshit, that is part of the reading too. Everybody gets held accountable… Including me… and yes, that can make people uncomfortable. Believe me when I say that I am okay with discomfort, but I am not okay with cruelty. There’s a difference.
If the information does not resonate, leave it. If you need time to understand it, take the time. If you completely disagree with me, that’s also your right. I don’t need you to restructure your entire life because I pulled a card. What I need is enough honesty between us that I can do the job without pretending.
A good reading should eventually make you need the reader less
This is really where I land with all of it.
I don’t think the goal of a tarot reader should be becoming so necessary to somebody that they cannot function without you. That might be good for recurring revenue, but terrible for personal sovereignty.
If we work together over time, I want you to become better at recognising your own patterns. I want you to notice when anxiety is driving the question, understand when potential has become a trap, recognise the difference between intuition and wishful thinking, and ultimately trust yourself enough that you don’t need my permission for every decision. Then when you come back to me, we actually have something new to look at.
The situation evolved, you evolved, life moved. Now we can explore that. That, to me, is a much more meaningful relationship between a reader and a client than spending six months asking whether the same emotionally unavailable person checked your Instagram story. I am a thinking partner, a translator, a bridge if you will but I am not your lifeline - and I don’t want to be.
If you want clarity rather than a script
If what you want from a tarot reading is somebody who will guarantee a particular outcome, validate every assumption you already have or keep pulling until the cards finally tell you what you came hoping to hear, I am probably not the reader for you.
But if you want somewhere we can look at the full picture together — the exciting parts, the uncomfortable parts, the blind spots, the patterns, the possibilities and your own role in whatever is unfolding — that is exactly the kind of work I love doing.
My readings are collaborative. I bring what I see, feel and interpret; you bring your lived experience, your choices and the parts of the story only you can know. Then we meet somewhere in the middle and work out what the information is actually useful for.
You can book a session with me through Venusian Alchemist whenever you feel ready to look at something clearly rather than simply hear what feels good.
I cannot promise you the answer you want but I can promise you that I will take the question seriously and personally?
I think that is worth far more.
Until next time,
Venus — aka Venusian Alchemist ✨
