Misfit Monday – Self-Care for Psychic Misfits and Wounded Healers (with Tarot Spread)

If you are a psychic misfit like me, chances are you had to start looking after both yourself and others at quite a young age. Many of us deliberately chose to enter into dysfunctional family scenarios at birth, in order to best equip us with inside knowledge needed as healers. Various forms of abuse and abandonment will also have contributed to wiring your brain in a way that puts you in the HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) category and allows you to read people before they even open their mouths.

The way you were forced to learn to care for yourself as a young child is probably not sufficient to keep you healthy now. This is part of the reason why you have been drawn to study alternative ways of healing. You need this healing for yourself but (correct me if I’m wrong) you also have a deep longing to help others heal.

The problem arises when wounded healers and psychic misfits rush into the world and start giving without ensuring proper boundaries and excellent self-care. Burn-out is inevitable and sometimes it gets so bad that people completely abandon their calling.

Yet it could be argued that burn-out is better all-around than when seers and healers keep going because they have short-circuited themselves through spiritual bypass (though this too eventually leads to some sort of break-down). Spiritual bypass is very common among energy workers and stems from a tendency to spiritualize every aspect of life, without allowing for deep emotional healing and working through shadow issues. Why do we do this? Because grounding the soul into the body when you have been abused is painful. It means re-opening old wounds and blocked passages. It means reclaiming parts of the soul that have been split off.

But…

Your soul is what makes you uniquely YOU and you actually have to hang out with it to get to know it. You can’t take anybody else’s word for how to serve the Divine in the world…

You accept others when they do this so please trust that others will accept you in the same way – Imperfect genuine self-expression is always going to trump a more polished expression that is a copy of how someone else moves in the world.

So what can we do to ensure that we move forward on our path of service with integrity and meet everyone on it completely without the mask of the Spiritual Super Hero? How do we keep it real? How do we check ourselves for spiritual bypass? Well, NOT by using an oracle deck that is all ‘light and love.’ You need something a bit meatier… like the Tarot – a divinatory tool that can show us exactly when, where, and how you let yourself down. A tool that can act as a mirror for the soul and not just the spirit.

So I created a Tarot spread to help identify both where/how we tend to spiritualize experiences and what we can do to keep it real.

The Psychic Misfit and Wounded Healer Self-Care Tarot Spread

1. Where/when I am most tempted to go into spiritual bypass mode
2. What needs to be healed in order to avoid this temptation
3. What in the past caused this wound
4. How to heal it
5. How to stay grounded and centred
6. How healing this wound will help others

Sample Reading with the Frideborg Tarot

1. When/where I am tempted to go into spiritual bypass mode. The Fool. The correspondences for The Fool are the Element of Air and the planet Uranus (Higher Mind)… As soon as I learn of a new spiritual concept I’m intellectually there so much that I don’t feel the slightest need to hang out in the body. It’s much comfier up there in the ethers of spirituality and philosophy. Flights-of-fancy-r-us. What I’m learning is that just because I’m getting it intellectually doesn’t mean I’m ready to walk the talk. On some level, I’ve been in perennial by-pass mode while vehemently being disgusted by it in others. That’s the power of Shadow for you…
2. What needs to be healed in order to avoid this temptation. 3 of Wands. This card corresponds with Sun in Aries and I often refer to it as the ‘networking card.’ This straight-shooting energy is a snappy wake-up call to keep it real let other people help with the reality check. Live it in the real world before you claim it as spiritual truth.
3. What in the past caused this wound. Ace of Cups. Love withheld. Love denied. Ain’t no way around it but to admit that from a certain age, as a young child, I lost the love of my mother. After she left when I was three years old, I had to fend for myself against an abusive father. She was only sporadically in my life after that and never in a way that made me feel that I could count on her for support.
4. How to heal it. 9 of Swords. Mars in Gemini. There is anger I haven’t expressed over this yet. The 9 of Swords is a ‘get it out of your head and talk about it’ kinda card… OK. Oh boy. My mother was so good at portraying herself as the victim that I never felt I had a right to be angry with her. Instead it came out in a way that lead to massive guilt further down the line. It came out in a phone call where she said she felt like killing herself and I just coldly replied, ‘Then do it.’ It was one of the last times I spoke to her on the phone. She went missing not long after that and surfaced in Stockholm city after having lived rough for a year. She had rapidly progressing dementia at that stage. Oh fuck. This is hard to write about. I always understood my mother’s pain but she never properly acknowledged mine. It was more important for her to hear me blame my dad who, though abusive, was the only parent I knew properly. My dad was equally keen on having me denounce my mother as a ‘witch.’ When me hit me, he sometimes pointed out I was just like her… Right now I have ‘Where is the love?’ by Blackeyed Peas playing in my mind…
5. How to stay grounded and centred. The Hierophant. Faith and tradition. Tried and tested methods. Learning as much as possible about every aspect of the psyche and spirituality. Teaching what I need to learn.
6. How healing this wound will help others. The Tower. Creating safe space for others to feel the anger so that they can have the purge of guilt and shame they so badly need…

Signing off still feeling raw. Writing this was hard… After last week’s Misfit post, I left myself open to abuse in one of the online Tarot communities I have been hanging out in. The irony of that has not passed me by since the post covered the topic of how dysfunctional the Tarot community can be. I guess the shoe fit.

I’m bracing myself for more of the same. I didn’t sign up to be loved and celebrated in this lifetime… I signed up to be of service… But I have a right to surround myself with people who are genuine friends, just like you do. One of the people who expressed her disgust with last week’s post was on my Facebook friends list. I have since more than cut my friend list in half because I realized that friend lists are for actual friends and I have don’t have to let everybody in just because I share personal aspects of myself in public. Valuable lesson that which I feel ties in with this week’s theme!

Wishing you a week of sound personal boundaries!

So much Love!

Lisa Frideborg