A reader's pet peeves · or, things that aren't fear-selling but feel close

A woman I'll call Helen came to see me in Edinburgh last autumn. She'd had three tarot readings in the previous year, all online, all from a reader she said she liked. She wanted a fourth opinion. The story she walked in with: she'd been told there was a "dark energy" attached to her ex-partner that needed to be cleared, that the cards "kept showing" she was still psychically tethered to him, and that the reader, very generously, knew of a removal ritual she could perform for a fee. The fee had been quoted to Helen at £180. She had paid.

The reader hadn't broken any platform rules. None of the standard fear-selling alarms were tripped. No threats of curses, no claims of catastrophe if the work wasn't done. The reader had been, by all accounts, gentle. Soft-spoken. Concerned. The cards had even, according to Helen, looked roughly right. The Knight of Swords reversed had been on the table. Helen herself had brought up the ex-partner. The reader had simply followed where she went.

I sat with Helen for an hour. We didn't cleanse anything. We didn't pull cards. We talked. And I want to write today about what I think went wrong in those three sessions, because none of it was fear-selling, and all of it was, by my reading of tarot ethics, a problem.

Fear-selling is the obvious one. This isn't about that.

For anyone newer to the conversation: fear-selling is when a reader manufactures or amplifies a fear in the client and then sells them a service to resolve it. Curse removals on demand. "Energetic blockages" you have to pay extra to clear. "Dark presences" that require a separate, more expensive working. The industry, including the better platforms and the directories I now work with, has been clearer in the last few years that this is unethical. Good. Long overdue.

But fear-selling sits at the obvious end of a spectrum. There's a whole grey region between "fully ethical reading" and "fear-selling" that is, technically, allowed in most rulebooks. I've been in this work fourteen years. I have a list of practices in that grey zone that I find quietly gross. I want to name them.

I'm not interested in shaming individual readers. Most of the readers I know who do these things are not bad people. The practices have drifted into the field over time, often imported from adjacent industries like life coaching and intuitive consulting, and they've gone uninspected because they're not the obvious harm. They're the smaller harm next to the obvious one. They're worth naming anyway.

Suggestive questions that mine for personal information

The first one is the most common, and the hardest for newer readers to spot in themselves.

A client books a reading. They're nervous. They give you a thin opening sentence. "I'm just curious what's coming up for me this year." A clean reader treats that sentence as the question and reads to it. A reader in the grey zone treats it as an invitation to extract more.

"Mmm, the cards want to know if there's a man in your life right now."

That sentence sounds innocent. It is not innocent. Half the women who come to me have a man in their life and the other half don't, and the suggestion that the cards are asking about a man is leading the client to volunteer information they didn't bring with them. Once they've volunteered it, the reader can build the whole rest of the session on details the client just handed over, and the session will feel uncannily accurate, because the client is reading themselves to themselves through the reader's mouth.

The technique has a name in cold reading circles. It's called the open prompt with assumed content. Real psychics don't need it, in the sense that whatever your view on real psychics, the ones who claim to be working from genuine intuition don't need leading questions. The leading question is, by definition, a tell that the reader is filling in the blanks the client is providing.

If you're a reader and you find yourself asking "is there a [category of person] in your life," pause. Ask why. Ask what the cards in front of you would have you say if the client said no. If your reading collapses on a no, you're not reading the cards. You're reading the client.

Reading "what you need to know" instead of what the client asked

This is the one Helen ran into, I think, and it's the one I find most quietly corrosive in the field right now.

A client books a session and arrives with a question. "Should I take this job?" "Is my relationship with my sister salvageable?" "How do I feel about my dad's diagnosis?" The reader nods, shuffles, lays a spread, and then says some version of, "The cards aren't really showing me your job. They're showing me something deeper you need to look at."

Sometimes this is true. Sometimes the cards genuinely refuse the question and offer something else. I've had this happen. I respect it when it does.

But often, the redirection is not from the cards. It's from the reader. The reader has decided, on their own authority, that the client's stated question is not the real one, and that they, the reader, know better. And then the session goes wherever the reader wants it to go, which is often somewhere the client did not consent to go, and is often somewhere the reader is more comfortable performing than where the client actually needed help.

Helen had asked her reader, on the third session, a very specific question. Should I write back to my ex's last text or leave it. That was the question. The reader had said, "The cards aren't here to talk about a text. They're here to talk about the energetic tether between you, which is the real issue." Helen, who had paid for an answer to a specific question, got a non-answer instead, and then got upsold a clearance.

The ethics issue isn't that the reader was wrong about the tether. Maybe there was a tether, in whatever sense that word has. The ethics issue is that the client's question was overridden in service of a frame the reader, not the client, controlled. The client was no longer the subject of her own reading. She was the audience for the reader's interpretation of her.

A clean reader, faced with that question, would either answer it or say: I can't read for whether to send a text, but I can read for how you're holding the relationship at the moment, would that be useful. The client gets to choose. The client stays in charge of the session.

The strategic refusal to give clear interpretation

This is the third one and the one I'm angriest about, in part because I see it on the platforms most often and in part because it's hidden inside what looks like humility.

A reader pulls a spread. The cards are, by any honest reading, reasonably clear. The client asks, gently, "So what does that mean?" The reader then says some version of, "The cards are showing me a lot of complexity here. I'd want to sit with this more carefully. Would you like to book a follow-up?"

The follow-up costs another fee. The follow-up arrives the next week. The follow-up does the same thing. The clarity, somehow, never comes. The reader is presented as cautious. The client is presented as needing more time. The actual dynamic is that the reader has worked out that ambiguity sells better than clarity, and that a client who walks out with a clear answer is a client who doesn't come back.

I want to be careful here. Some readings are genuinely complex. Some sessions should end with "I'd want to come back to this." Some honest follow-ups are appropriate. The peeve isn't about caution. It's about strategic caution, deployed reliably, that always seems to land at the moment where a follow-up is the natural next step.

The tell, if you're trying to spot this in your own practice: ask yourself how often you say "the cards aren't fully clear" in a way that ends with a booking. If it's most sessions, that's not caution. That's pattern. Caution is sometimes clear, sometimes uncertain, in whatever proportion the actual readings deliver.

Why I count these as tarot ethics issues

Some readers will push back at this point and say, well, none of this is fraud. Nobody promised the client a specific outcome. Nobody told them they'd die. Nobody charged them ten thousand pounds for a candle. Why am I treating these as ethics issues rather than as stylistic preferences.

Here's why.

Tarot ethics, in the way I'd like the field to talk about them, are not just about whether the worst harms are present. They are about the fiduciary character of the relationship. When a client sits down with a reader, they are temporarily handing over interpretive authority. They are saying, in effect, you have an angle on this situation I do not have, please offer it. That handover creates a duty. The duty is to use the angle in the client's service, not in your own.

Suggestive questions use the angle to extract. Question-overriding uses the angle to relocate. Strategic ambiguity uses the angle to retain. All three of them transfer value from the client to the reader, in some currency, while looking like care.

A practice can do that and never trip a rulebook. The rulebooks were written to catch outright fear-selling, and they catch it. But the field is more honest than the rulebooks. The field knows when you're doing the soft version. The clients know too, eventually. They might not articulate it. They just stop coming back, and they tell their friends nothing in particular, and the field's reputation erodes a little more, and the next generation of readers walks into a profession a little less trusted than it should be.

What I'd do instead

Read the question the client brought. If you can't read it, say so. Refuse to lead them with prompts that mine for content. Be willing to be clear, even when clarity is uncomfortable, even when it ends the session early. Let the follow-up be the client's idea, not yours. Charge a flat fee so the temptation to extend isn't built into the structure of the call.

Helen didn't book a follow-up with me. She said she felt clear. I gave her a refund on the consultation fee, told her to write the text or not write the text on her own terms, and asked her to come back in six months if she wanted to talk about the deck again with no agenda attached. She did, in March. We pulled three cards. The reading took twenty minutes. She paid the flat fee and went home.

That's tarot ethics as I'd like the field to practise them. Not the absence of the worst behaviour. The presence of a working theory of what the relationship is for.