How Tarot Actually Fixes Impasse: Stop Talking, Start Shuffling

Big dawns, quick talk, flip-facts, tick-tock. I said, never look at mine, I did it, it's way out. Welcome back to another episode of Anatomy of Conflict. My name is Ryan McLaughlin. And in this episode, if you stayed to the end, you will hear about my first few times using oracle cards as I've wanted to do for so long in mediation practice. I was inspired recently. I made a commitment to Julie T. Bo and Doug Richards, where we had a conversation in the untimed and not podcast. I said I was going to do it, and I ordered the deck and did it.

And in this episode, I will go through the exact situations, what I learned, what I would do next time, what I would do differently, what works well, and most importantly, the research behind using these kinds of decks. So, fast and interesting thoughts, this is all about exploring creative research back tools to help with conflict resolution that you won't see in the mainstream status quo. I'm looking for efficacy. I'm looking for proof that they work, and the proof is in the pudding. If you're a therapist, this could be really interesting. If you're a teacher, this could be really interesting.

If you're a parent, a partner, a mediator, may wear complex erupts to the extent that tools like tarot or oracle or any kind of ambiguous stimuli deck could be useful. So, let's get into it. All right, so, to set this up, first, I tried. Twice in session, in the last few weeks, with informed consent, both at impasses, both in family context, both in partner separating, both having to do with one having to do with parenting time, and the other having to do with money situation, like a spousal support situation. Both were at impasse, both had gone for about two hours, and had kind of circled the wagons, circled, circled, circled the problem with taking breaks, tried multiple other things.

Just came, I got the sense from them that they would be open to it. I got the felt sense that they'd be open to it. So, I just pulled the deck off my shelf during a break, started holding it in my hands, off screen, just sort of randomly shuffling, and then pulled the card, and then asked them, I said, would you guys be open to some non-traditional practice, maybe to offer some perspective? And they said, yes, I said, would you be open to an Oracle card? They said, yes, and I showed them the card, and I'm not gonna say what the cards were here. I'm gonna leave that to their own confidentiality.

But it was in each case an illustrated card with an image and a reading to accompany it. And I feel like, and I asked them for their feedback, but both feedbacks from myself and theirself was that it was a helpful, curious invitation to reframe the problem, and it offered a meta-narrative that maybe was missing and really important.

So, it didn't immediately solve the issue of, well, what's parent, the parent time schedule are gonna be, or how much per month is spousal sport gonna be? It didn't offer that, but it offered a sense of, I think, peace, because it gave an overarching vision of where they were, where they are, where they want to be, who they're committed to be as people. I think this is really, really important in the work that we do, particularly in, for me, as in the work that I do with, separating couples in divorce, because it's not just that we want to get a deal done today and have them agree on spousal sport today and solve the quote-unquote problem today.

It's that there has to be a felt sense about the process, about the relationship, because the co-parenting relationship is gonna continue on. And the worst thing we want is a deal that's done today, they agree today, resent tomorrow and for the next 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years.

So, I'm really proud of myself, because I feel as a practitioner, very intimidated by the process of, by the idea of trying new things. I have no problem talking about doing new things. I have no problem coming on podcasts and ideating and talking about, you know, sauna would be cool to do, because the research says, XYZ, tarot would be cool, because the research says, XYZ, deep breathing and prolonged exhale, this sort of physiological side, which we're gonna do an entire separate episode on.

But actually doing them, I feel like I don't want to be judged. I don't want to be judged as woo-woo or hippie or, uh, yeah, I just, I'm nervous about it. And so I've had to confront that and let it go. And so we did, and it was amazing. And I really enjoyed it. And I think it showed me that this is a very useful tool, just like many other useful tools. And that tools are meant to be used. And tools that there is no easy way, I don't think there's no one thing to do that's going to reliably create an aha moment.

But what they do is keep momentum going forward in a positive direction. And I think that's worth it. So for the remainder of this podcast, we're going to talk about why from the research, tarot does and doesn't work. And I'm going to cut straight to the spoiler. Okay, but first a message from your one-in-one sponsor, flannel people mediation. Guys, if you're going through a conflict, flannel people mediation does 100% virtual mediation in Minnesota. And if you are in Europe and you are at an impasse thinking about going to trial, thinking about spending 10, 30, 50, 100 euros on trial prep, bring us over, bring me over for our day rate. You will wish you reached out sooner.

So that's flannel people mediation. Check out flannelpeoplemediation.com. And we'd love to help you. All right, let's get back to it. So the tool of tarot. No, I did not use a tarot deck. It is an Oracle deck, which is different. And it's still a deck still has 88 cards. This one, if you remember from the earlier podcast, is the dirt deck. And I'm just going to Google the dirt deck now.

So I dirt Oracle card deck, dirt gems. It is a plant, Oracle deck, and guidebook. And on Amazon, it says, what can we learn if we take the time to listen to the plants growing all around us? What messages can we take in? And what sense of connection to ourselves and the world around us can we cultivate?

So they're obviously beautifully illustrated. And I chose this deck because I used it with a dancer. And also because I want to have a better connection to the plants and learn more about the plants. Also, it's a 65 card deck and not an 88 card deck. Okay, let's get into the research. And the clinical theory supporting the use of things like, but not exactly, tarot cards or Oracle cards. And the way I want to frame it, and I think the way the research frames it is, these are functioning as a third object. And I think that's the way to think of them. This is also what the mediator is by definition. If there's two parties, the mediator is a third party.

And you could say that the tarot card or the Oracle card is a distraction, but the research and the clinical theory refers to it as externalizing or externalization or if you're going to use it in a positive sense, the idea of triangulation. But the basic idea is you're introducing a third object between or amongst the two parties.

And so this is the first frame. We have three frames that I'm going to talk about today. Three mechanisms, three points of theory. And the first is this idea of externalization. And the goal in externalization is to take a conflict, which is fundamentally a face-to-face, or one person versus another person, or one party versus another party, and move it to side-by-side problem solving. And the research on this comes from narrative therapy. Most of it will be from Michael White and David Epstein. And their core principle is the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.

And the idea here is that when you can introduce a third object, a chart, a drawing, a metaphorical name, or idea, or a tarot card, or an oracle card, you separate, you sort of, yeah, you separate the two people from merely looking at one another and pull their attention towards this third object. And the research shows that this reduces their defensiveness, their physiological arousal of fear. When two people look at the same third object on a table, their nervous system desglates, because they themselves are no longer the target of the other person's gaze.

So this is huge. This is essentially the role and responsibility of a mediator. And this is also an extension of the mediator, a mediator sort of objects that the mediator might use to sort of receive attention. So that's number one. Number two is called bisociation, not association, but bisociation. And this is where you interrupt the brain's default mode thinking. It's often called cognitive interrupt, or cognitive pattern interrupt.

And so the idea is that when two people are in conflict, they're essentially in tunnel vision. They've repeated the same story to themselves over and over and over again that their neural pathways for that specific conflict, those grooves are so deep that they can't get out of them. Just like the grooves in a record, they're stuck in a single track of thought, training of thought, matrix of thought.

And so the idea, the mechanism bisociation, which is first coined by Arthur Kessler, is when you take two ideas that are totally random, not related, and you just smash them together, you put two incompatible frames of reference together. So this would be, okay, you guys are talking about, you know, who's going to get the house on a divorce or what the parenting time schedule is going to be, who's going to pick up some Thursday, and you've gone over these problems at nauseam. And now you throw in there an ambiguous image of a red cardinal on a tree in the winter with snow. And you hand the client the card, and you are forcing their brain to perform an association.

They then have to bridge the gap between frame A and frame B. So frame A is, you know, is $10,000 per month of spouse's sport enough, and frame B is, was the cardinal have to do with it. And this spark, often, this is the theory, this is the frame of reference. This spark often, if it does it puncture the impasse or immediately solve, it introduces sort of electrical creativity to some degree in the brain, because the brain can't maintain its rigid, plastic thought loop, while simultaneously trying to solve the puzzle of what the heck to these two things have to do with each other.

Right? What is the puzzle of the cardinal card, was it have to do with the situation I'm in? And so it's a lateral thinking tool. It's a neuroplasticity tool. And here, this tool relies on sort of the non-relatedness of the images in the cards, the ambiguity of the images in the cards.

So that's why if you pull, like for this plant, if you pull the plant dinko, or if you pull even like a water card, it's like these things we don't typically associate with the texture of our problem. And so they're forcing the brain into force creativity, right? Force plasticity.

So that is number two. So we have number one is externalization, introducing a third object. Number two is bisociation, sort of introducing this, introducing a third object that forces the frame to break a little bit. And number three is, making sure it's clean, and making sure that the, so this is called, maybe let's call it clandliness, or making sure the client or the participant or the party owns the meaning making. And this is based on the work, it's called the clean language. And it's based on the work of David Grove, we don't want the facilitator making the meeting, or suggesting the meeting, or being the meaning provider. We wanted to come from the participants.

And this is for ethical reasons within the profession, but also for lasting meaning making. And so if I'm to turn over a card, like I did in these scenarios, if I'm to turn over the card of, you know, a specific plant in the deck, let's just say it's echinacea, right? I want that card to be a relatively blank canvas for them to, to be their third object, to be their neurochallenge, to be their blank slate, blank canvas for projecting their own metaphors. I don't want to interpret that card for them. I want them to be the agents, the active participants, the active meaning maker.

So instead of saying something like, so let's run what would this look like? So instead of saying, you know, if the bird isn't a cage, for example, I don't want to say, you know, the card looks like you might feel trapped. But I would say like, what do you notice about the card? What do you see in the card? What stands out to you in the card? What are you looking at the card? What do you feel? This in the research is self-generated insight, and this is what we want. The research in the cognitive psychology shows that when we quote unquote discover ourselves or discover a solution, we're much more committed to that solution.

And in the business of conflict management, we want solutions to come from the parties themselves, we want the parties themselves to generate them because they last longer, they're more durable, etc. So that's the trifecta, is the cleanliness of the process, having a third object to kind of get us out of the face-to-face trap, sort of by association, which is having neuroplasticity. And that's the big three. And these are really, really, really important. And let's just go through in summary as to why. Why is face-to-face a trap and shoulder-to-shoulder liberating? And why do third objects work so this way?

Well, because in super-high conflict, often when you have direct eye contact, it's just like it's a mechanism for defensiveness and adrenaline. And if we can go shoulder-to-shoulder, and stop looking at each other and start looking at a thing, that can be the beginning to a solution. The escalates. As far as by association, when you're in impass in the throws of conflict, you're spiraling, circling, spinning in a repetitive loop. You've said your thing, they've said their thing, and the card then, or the object, becomes a pattern, it becomes a little invitation for your brain to bridge the gap between the thing that you're fighting about could be across the these schedule, and this other random object.

So it's like a creativity invitation for the brain. And then lastly, of course, the cleanliness is to maintain the integrity of the process and locate meaning-making within the client's fear. There you guys go. That's how I use Oracle. That's its methodology that it relies on, as the clinical and research foundations. And it's really exciting to me. I think this is one amongst many tools, and as you can see, there's many tools that would work. You could use literally a blank piece of paper. You could use a random object. You could use anything that fits the bill of what we're talking about, so that breaks the mold of if they're talking about child capacity, anything about, like, you could look at a plant.

What does the plant say? You could hold up a child to trip muffin. You could, you know, pour, pour carbonated water on a lime. You know, basically like any art, anything that's new, this whole inquiry just opens up so many opportunities in a field, particularly in mediation, which is kind of legal adjacent. It feels in many ways cloistered a little bit by habit and practice, by the tradition of the space.

And so, I really enjoy thinking through, okay, is, let's say I want to pull a tarot card or an Oracle card, an ambiguous card, a Rorschach card. Is it defensible? Why is it defensible? What are the pros and cons? What do we have to be careful for? What works? Why is it work? What's happening in the brains of people? Why is it happening? These are the conversations. This is the anatomy of conflict that I'm interested in, that we're going to go deeper and deeper into in episode.

So, this was helpful for you. Please like, subscribe, subscribe, share with a friend. Share with a friend who practices in the space. Maybe your brother, sister, mother, father is a therapist or an attorney. Like, these are really interesting tools that are broadly applicable to anyone in the conflict space.

So, that's all for this time. My name is Ryan. This is anatomy of conflict. We'll see you next time. Big thoughts. Quick talk. Flip facts. Tick-tock. Level up your mind. Yeah. Every single line.