The Tarot Diagnosis

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m back with our collective monthly tarot reading for November, and this month we're exploring grief, ancestral patterns, interdependence, and the emotional complexity of giving and receiving care.   November has always been a particularly grief-stricken month for me. Last year, I wrote an essay on Substack called Everyone Dies in November , reflecting...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m exploring the psychology of shame, childhood wounds, and how our earliest experiences shape the way we show up in adult relationships - all through the lens of tarot. This episode was inspired by Come Closer by psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas , a book I recently devoured in two days and immediately started recommending to anyone who would listen. Atlas ex...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m pulling cards for our collective monthly tarot reading for October and this month, we’re exploring the psychological space between who we’ve been and who we might be becoming. For this October tarot reading, I’m revisiting a spread I originally created for my Tarot as a Transitional Object workshop, inspired by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theories...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis podcast , I’m exploring tarot clarifiers and a question I don’t think we ask often enough: Why are we pulling clarifying cards if we already understand the card in front of us? This episode came about unexpectedly after I pulled the Seven of Wands during my weekly tarot practice and immediately felt my body reaching for the deck again. But I already knew what...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m back with another collective monthly tarot reading, and for September, I’m exploring The Courage to Become , which is a four card tarot spread I originally created around identity, existentialism, and the often uncomfortable process of growth and change. Spoiler: Apparently, September is the month of Pentacles - I’ve been pulling them personally and thr...

In this special episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m celebrating 200 episodes with someone who has quite literally been behind the scenes since the very beginning: my cousin and the podcast’s audio engineer, Anthony DiGiacomo. Anthony and I grew up together - our moms are identical twins, we lived a few blocks apart, went to the same schools, and spent our teenage years immersed in the local music...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I’m exploring self-sabotage through a psychological and therapeutic tarot lens and challenging the idea that self-sabotage means we’re just getting in our own way. We tend to label procrastination, avoidance, staying in unhealthy relationships, overworking, turning down opportunities, or repeating painful patterns as self-sabotage. And when we notice oursel...

In this month's collective tarot reading on The Tarot Diagnosis Podcast , I explore one of my favorite concepts from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) : the idea that two seemingly opposite truths can exist at the same time. Inspired by the emotional chaos of Mercury retrograde (but designed to be relevant no matter what's happening in your life) I use my Tension of Opposites tarot spread...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis Podcast, I ask: What actually deserves our emotional investment? This question, inspired by pulling the Ace of Cups and King of Cups , became the starting point for this episode and a much deeper exploration of why we emotionally invest in certain people, relationships, friendships, jobs, and family dynamics even when those investments leave us feeling deplet...

On this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I discuss how I believe we are collectively living through one of the most significant periods of disorientation in modern history. Between political upheaval, personal and collective loss, illness, trauma, and rapid cultural, religious, and spiritual change, many of us are finding ourselves in the liminal, and trying desperately to claw out of it.  But…wha...

Personal note before you listen: To be honest, I sat on this episode for weeks. I almost didn’t share it - mainly because it felt too honest, too personal, too vulnerable. And I think there was a part of me that felt guilty. Despite the hesitation, here it is… In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I explore what it means to be an adult child of emotionally immature parents and how tarot can hel...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I’m pulling for June’s collective tarot reading where I explore a Summer Solstice inspired spread designed to help us step out of the shadows and into the growth of the sun. As we move toward the longest day of the year, I wanted to create a spread that examines what we've been avoiding, the fears keeping us stuck, and the growth that becomes possib...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore a question that has been lingering in my mind for months: What do the pillars in tarot actually symbolize on a deeper psychological level? Using Viktor Frankl’s famous quote - “Between stimulus and response there is a space…,” I reflect on how the pillars in cards like the High Priestess, Justice, the Hierophant, and even the Moon might repres...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I walk you through one of my favorite creative tarot practices: building a tarot spread in real time and then using it for our collective month-ahead reading for May! Instead of starting with a pre-made spread, I decided to let the cards guide the questions. As a therapist, I’m used to being a professional question asker, so this felt like a natural way...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore the Moon archetype through the lens of perception, ambiguity, and psychological insight. I also get super personal about my early experiences as a therapist. This episode was inspired by pulling The Moon after not seeing it in my readings for quite some time. That experience opened the door to a flood of memories from my early days as a therap...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I continue my monthly collective-reading tarot series with the classic Celtic Cross spread for April , using the truly stunning and special Earth Magick Tarot .  This month’s reading felt intense from the start with multiple Major Arcana appearing throughout the spread (six in total omg), the themes that surfaced centered around uncertainty, systemic in...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I share what happened when I found myself in a creative slump and did what I often encourage others to do…just shuffle the cards and follow what shows up. What surfaced were court cards, which led me back to a recent workshop I created on understanding the Pages, Knights, Queens, and Kings through the lens of psychosocial development and Jungian Psychoa...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I’m kicking off March with a new series for the pod: a monthly collective tarot reading. A lot of you asked for more frequent check-ins after my 2026 year-ahead reading, and honestly… I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this sooner. So, thank you for the suggestion! If you’ve been around my work for a while, you know I don’t read predictively. My r...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore why asking better questions might be the most important tarot skill you can develop. As a psychotherapist, I often joke that I’m a “professional question asker.” It’s half joke, half truth because the arc of a therapy session (sometimes even the arc of an entire therapeutic relationship) can hinge on one well-timed, well-crafted question. And...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore a concept called “poisoning the well” and how it can inconspicuously shape the way we interpret tarot, often before we’ve even given the cards a fair chance to speak, or ourselves an opportunity to be curious about the card. Poisoning the well can happen when we learn to fear a card before encountering it in its specific context, which makes a...

In this episode of ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I'm exploring something that’s been stirring in me since a recent book club event inside The Symposium : the way we unconsciously project motherhood onto tarot’s female figures.  After an insightful conversation in the book club (shoutout to Darcy for naming it so clearly: “Tarot doesn’t need another mother” ), I couldn’t stop thinking about how oft...

In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis , I discuss an epiphany I had after pulling the Three of Cups. It led me to reflect on the feeling I have when I’m in the middle of a crowd at a concert. Or, back in the day, when I’d wait in line for hours to be front and center of the stage at the barricade. It was such a euphoric feeling, everyone sharing in excitement and joy at the same moment in time fo...

In this last episode of 2025 for ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , and I’m offering a collective reading using my annual New Year spread. This reading is for all of us - a shared reflection on what we’re carrying forward, what we’re releasing, and how we can meet the coming year with more awareness, regulation, and intention. At the center of the spread is our 2026 collective year card: The Wheel of Fortu...

This week on ⁠ The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore 2026 as a Wheel of Fortune year , with The Magician as its companion archetype - an invitation to step into the new year embracing change, adaptability, resilience, and meaningful participation. I keep returning to the idea of finding the center of the spinning wheel : not perfect stillness like we’re often led to believe we should be finding, but n...

I’ve had “Timekeeper” by Grace Potter & The Nocturnals stuck in my head, and it sent me down a rabbit hole about how we experience time - psychologically, somatically, and through tarot. In this episode of The Tarot Diagnosis ⁠ , I explore why time isn’t a single, objective thing we all live the same way. Instead, our nervous systems, mental health, creativity, grief, and even neurodivergence...