Nobody handed me an ethics policy. When I started reading tarot professionally, there was no induction day, no booklet, no senior practitioner sitting me down and saying here’s what you do and here’s what you don’t. I looked at what other people were doing. I read some samples. And then I figured the rest of it out for myself, mostly by getting things wrong and noticing what that felt like.
That’s how most tarot readers come to ethics, I think. Through trial and error, through the moments that made you uncomfortable, through the question that came in that you weren’t sure how to answer, through the reading that went somewhere you hadn’t expected. The thing is, there’s no governing body that’s going to sanction you for getting it wrong. TABI exists. Various other organisations exist. But they don’t regulate the field. Anybody can pick up a deck and read for somebody. Which means the ethics are entirely down to you. And that’s both the freedom and the weight of it.
Starting With Non-Negotiables
The first thing in my ethics policy is a list of non-negotiables. These are the things I’ve decided, for readings with me, are not up for debate. You might make different choices. That’s fine. But I’d encourage you to write yours down, because vague intentions are a lot easier to abandon in the moment than something you’ve actually committed to.
The first one is that what I do is reflection, not fortune-telling. I don’t make claims that I can predict the future. I’m not here to tell you what’s definitely going to happen. I’m here to help you look at what’s going on under the surface in your life so you can make informed choices. That distinction matters a lot, and I want people to understand it before they book.
Everyone’s welcome in my readings. All beliefs, all identities. I don’t restrict who I read for based on whether they agree with me theologically or politically. Confidentiality is in there. Adults only, I don’t read for under-18s. And the last one is probably the one I care about most: my role is to empower the client, not to make their decisions for them. I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to help you understand your situation clearly enough that you can figure out what you want to do.
I also don’t offer third party readings. Not, generally speaking, without express consent. The basic version is this: if your ex isn’t in the room, I don’t have their permission to read into their life. And more than that, it’s not actually useful to you. The question that serves you better isn’t what your ex is thinking. It’s why you’re thinking about what your ex is thinking so much. We can work with that.
Where the Hard Boundaries Come From
A lot of my harder lines came from TikTok Live, which was a baptism of fire in ways I genuinely wasn’t prepared for. When you’re reading live for strangers, you very quickly find out what you’re comfortable with and what you’re not, because they ask you everything. Health questions. Money questions. Legal questions. Whether they’re pregnant. Whether they’re going to have a boy or a girl.
And then there was the time someone came to me asking what the results were going to be, and I thought they meant an exam. So I did the reading, said it looks like it’s going to be okay, and they said thank God. And then told me they’d been screened for cancer.
Oh my god, what have I done.
Because here’s the thing. Regardless of whether tarot works in these situations, getting involved in something that is sensitive and regulated, whether that’s health, money, or legal matters, is genuinely dangerous. If someone makes a major health decision based on what I said in a reading, going against their doctor’s advice because some cards looked positive, there’s a real problem there. I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a therapist. I’m not a lawyer. And it is not my place to overstep into those roles when I’m not trained in that, and when the stakes for getting it wrong are so much higher than I’m equipped to handle.
The Problem With Certainty
Even outside the obviously sensitive areas, offering certainty is a problem. The idea that the future is fixed, that I can read it, and that therefore you don’t need to think too hard about the choices you’re making because it’s all going to pan out this way. That’s not how I experience the future. And I don’t think it’s how the future works.
I used to tell this story when explaining why I don’t do prediction. Say you’ve got your French A-level exam tomorrow. You come to me, you want to know if you’re going to pass. I do the reading, the cards look positive, I say looks like you’re going to pass. You go, fucking great, I don’t need to stay up revising, I’m going out. You party the night away, roll up to the exam still half cut, and you fail. Because I told you the outcome, and you stopped doing the work that would have created it.
Or I tell you the opposite. Looks like this might not go well. And you go, oh shit, and you revise everything, cram it all in, turn up focused, and you pass. Because the reading didn’t predict your future. It changed it. It prompted you to take control of it.
That’s what I want tarot to do. Not to describe what’s coming. To open up what’s possible.
Fear-Based Readings
The last thing I want to talk about is what I’d call fear-based readings, and I think it’s the most actively harmful thing I’ve seen in this space. This is where a reader consistently goes to the worst case scenario, manufactures urgency, and creates dependence rather than clarity. People come in confused and leave more anxious than when they arrived, now certain they need to come back.
It’s not the same as being direct. It’s not the same as not sugarcoating things. If the Tower comes up in a reading, I’m going to say this is not looking good, because that’s what I see. But there’s a massive difference between honest and exploitative. Exploitative is where you pull the Tower and say things aren’t looking good here, but for an extra £300 I can give you a spell jar that’ll fix it. Come back in two weeks for a top-up. This destruction is on its way to you unless you give me more money.
That’s manufactured fear to extract money. And it’s not what we do here.
The point isn’t to leave people with certainty about what’s going to happen to them. It’s to leave people with clarity about what they’re actually dealing with right now, so they can move through it. If someone leaves a reading feeling more dependent on you than when they arrived, something has gone wrong.
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