Not the person you were replying to, but I found it useful.

The way that I saw it was that asking a particular question and doing a tarot spread for it was a way of getting some distance from the topic at hand. Like, if I am interpreting the cards/symbols and trying to understand how they fit together as a coherent answer to my question, I'm less preoccupied with actually feeling the feelings themselves (and so better able to healthily interrogate them). It reminds me of a much milder way of how therapy works (the distance of someone external is pretty important in therapy, which is why even therapists will often have their own therapist).

And there were certainly times where the cards seemed to so effectively and insightfully respond to a question that it felt uncanny, and I was like "man, I can see why so many people think that tarot has legit divinatory power". Of course, the insight that surprised me wasn't coming from the cards, but from me. Knowing that felt validating. Like, sometimes I'd be consulting the cards because I felt so overwhelmed by a situation that I didn't know what to do, but "the cards" responding with the perfect plan for that situation reassured me that despite how overwhelmed I felt, the wisdom to know the best way forward was something I had within me already — I just needed a mental space to work through my thoughts.

Though the physical space helped too; the ritual of tarot — clearing a space, then unpacking and shuffling the desk — can be super grounding too.

Well it's mostly an academic religious term and for a lot of people those two things don't go together for one reason or another. It's sad because they both have a lot of benefits.

And yes on the tarot cards. I actually used them in a therapy session recently because I haven't done it in a while and I feel like that's pretty symbolic of my current life state. It gave my therapist a lot to work with because she does EMDR and I basically started babbling about which people in my life resembled the court cards and events in my life that were similar to the pips and so on and so forth and her EMDR direction / redirection technique helped go in the right directions more consistently.

And no it's not rude, I love TIL moments.