Storytelling: Whose Story Is It?

Last week we talked about storytelling in readings, about connecting cards to personal experiences and using those stories to make a reading feel alive rather than just a recitation of meanings. And I still believe all of that. Stories are one of the most useful tools in a reader’s kit. But this week I want to look at the other side of it. Because there’s a version of bringing your stories into a reading that genuinely serves the client, and there’s a version that, whether you realise it or not, is serving you.

Rachel Pollack said that a reading is a creative act that occurs between three people: the querent, the reader, and the cards. All three are present. All three contribute to what happens in the room. And the moment one of them starts taking up more space than the other two, something’s gone wrong. More often than I’d like to admit, the one doing the crowding is me.

The Stories We Get Attached To

It starts innocuously enough. You find a story that works for a particular card. You tell it in a reading and it lands immediately. The client gets it. So you use it again. And again. And pretty soon you’ve got a repertoire of go-to stories, one for nearly every card, and you’ve stopped asking whether the story is the right one for this reading and started just waiting for a gap to tell it.

I’ve got an Eight of Swords story I’ve been telling for years. Bonfire night, walking home from the shopping centre, a motorway bridge. A kid standing there holding their phone over the rail to film the fireworks. And this intrusive thought appearing from nowhere: just knock the phone out of her hand. Let it fall onto the motorway. Maybe it hits a car. And as soon as I had that thought I went, what the fuck, that’s a bit dark. But I didn’t have to act on it. The thought appeared and I let it go. That’s what the Eight of Swords is pointing at. The thoughts that plague you aren’t instructions. You don’t have to obey every single one of them.

It’s a good story. It illustrates the point. But because it illustrates the point well, I’ve become quite attached to it. And that’s where the problem starts.

Reading the Room You’re Actually In

There’s a specific tell. You’re more interested in getting to the punchline than you are in hearing their response.

If that’s where you are, you’ve crossed a line. You’re not a tarot reader at that point. You’re a comedian waiting for the laugh. And the laugh isn’t the job. The job is to help the person in front of you understand their life a bit better and hopefully make some better decisions.

I say the same thing at the start of every reading now: if anything I say sounds like bollocks, please just stop me and let me know. If the story makes sense in my head but makes no sense to you, say so. Because the fact that a story illustrates the point for me doesn’t mean it illustrates the point for you. And if it’s not landing, I need to find a different way in, not barrel on to the punchline anyway.

I did that recently with the Seven of Swords. Usually I use the beetles story from last week, the supernormal stimuli thing. But that reading didn’t feel like the right context for it. So I used a different angle to get at the same point, that the client was focused on the superficial rather than what actually mattered, without defaulting to beetles humping beer bottles. Same point. Different route.

Projecting vs Reading

There’s a bigger version of this problem, and it’s called projection. Using a client’s situation as a mirror for your own stuff rather than actually reading what’s in front of you.

I talk about my own life in readings fairly often. The Hanged One comes up and I might say, I’ve definitely had periods where everything felt stuck and nothing was moving. A client shares something from their experience, I might share something from mine if I feel it’s useful. That’s fine. The question is whether what I’m sharing is genuinely useful to them, or whether I’m just centring myself. Whether I’m using the reading as a space to process my own things at their expense.

It comes back to Rachel Pollack’s three. The querent, the reader, the cards. The reader is not supposed to be the most important person in that trio. And yet it’s surprisingly easy to slip into behaving as though you are. You start telling stories you enjoy telling. You start looking for the reaction rather than reading the person. You start making the reading about what makes sense to you rather than what’s useful to them.

The Sign You’ve Drifted

More often than not, a reading that’s genuinely been good for someone makes no sense to me. I’ll pull cards, say what I see, ask whether it’s landed, and the client will say yes, completely, how did you know that. And I’ll be sitting there thinking I genuinely don’t know what just happened. The things I said barely made sense to me while I was saying them. But they made sense to the client, which is all that matters.

When a reading makes complete sense to me from start to finish, when every card fits perfectly and every story lands and the whole thing feels satisfying, that’s usually a sign something’s off. It often means I’ve been reading for me. The cards are making sense in my framework, telling a story that resonates with my understanding, and I’ve stopped paying attention to whether any of that is actually useful to the person across the table.

What makes sense to you isn’t automatically what makes sense to somebody else. In the flow of a reading that’s going well, it’s easy to forget that.

Staying Calibrated

None of this means you should stop bringing your own stories into readings. You shouldn’t. They’re useful. The point is to hold them lightly enough that you can set them down when they’re not the right tool for this particular reading.

The practical thing that helps most is just checking in. A lot. Is this making sense? What does this card feel like to you? Have you been in a situation like this? Those questions do two things at once. They give the client the space to direct where the reading goes, and they keep you honest about whether you’re actually with them or just performing at them.

Centring the client doesn’t mean taking everything they say at face value. The Two of Cups reversed comes out and someone says everything’s fine in my relationship, nothing to see here. Sometimes the first response isn’t the whole story. Sometimes they need to hear it from a different angle before it clicks, or they just need a moment to sit with it. That’s not you forcing your interpretation. That’s you reading between the lines, which is part of what you’re there to do.

But there’s a clear line between holding steady with what the cards are genuinely pointing at and telling the story you’ve rehearsed because you enjoy telling it. One of those is for the client. One of those is for you.

The querent. The reader. The cards. Make sure you know which one you’re actually showing up for.