Black and White: The High Priestess, Thinking Traps, and Dialectics

In 2011, Marsha Linehan, a prominent psychologist and researcher came out, so to speak, about her struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder. Dr. Linehan has published a number of books, training manuals, and journal articles, but she’s best known as the creator of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT. Linehan developed DBT as a skills-based treatment for people suffering from high suicidal urges, self-harm behaviors, issues of emotion regulation, and more.

DBT pulls concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness techniques from Zen tradition, and other sources. In the last several decades, DBT has gained popularity for its ability to effectively help people control the symptoms of emotion dysregulation

Though DBT relies on a number of concepts and skills, the key word is dialectical. At its core, DBT is all about learning to hold the reality of two things being true at once.

I can make a mistake and still be a good person. Someone can be angry at me and still love me. I can follow the rules and disagree with them. I am doing my best and I can do better.

Many people who struggle with the issues mentioned above tend to often engage in black and white thinking. Black and white thinking involves seeing people, events, and yourself in extremes. It’s a common thought distortion and one that often provides comfort. It’s uncomplicated. Seeing people who have wronged you as all bad is comforting. And seeing yourself as all bad is an easy pattern to reinforce. But the world is much more complicated than that, and growth, recovery, and alignment require us to balance often seemingly incompatible extremes. We have to be honest with ourselves about how our black and white thinking holds back from reaching our fullest potential. We all contain all extremes—masculine and feminine, yin and yang, day and night, light and dark. We know how to hold onto two things at once. And the tarot reminds us that this is part of the work. We must learn to acknowledge dialectics in order to transcend them.

Much of the journey of the tarot has to do with balance and imbalance. We see moments of harmony and moments of strife. But no card represents the concepts of dialectics as well as The High Priestess. In many decks, she is flanked by two columns, light and dark. She sits in the middle, holding onto the beauty and necessity of both extremes. When The High Priestess shows up in a reading, I immediately think of intuition and guidance coming from somewhere beyond the conscious realm. The High Priestess guards the gate to the subconscious. She represents the threshold, the point at which we cross from the seen to the unseen (and how we make that crossing).

Many decks including the Smith-Waite use pomegranate imagery for their High Priestess card. famously, the pomegranate is associated with Persephone, the Greek queen of the underworld who ate its fruits and thus spent several months out of every year in Hades with the ruler of death. The Mythic Tarot, based in Greek mythology takes the association a step further and depicts Persephone as the High Priestess. In this version, she is seen standing on the steps of the underworld with the bright door to the surface behind her. Here, she has already entered into the darkness, fully prepared to dive deeper. Though Persephone is often portrayed as reluctant accomplice in the dealings of the underworld, the mythology tells a more complicated story. Persephone loved Hades, and likewise her underworld role. The ingestion of six pomegranate seeds allowed Zeus to declare that Persephone spend half the year in Hades and half the year on earth. A perfect balance.

The High Priestess traditionally alludes to the entrance between the conscious and subconscious realms. However, unlike some cards that also deal with these underworlds (The Moon, Eight of Cups), The High Priestess asks you to be intentional about you enter. Because she is not just the shadow, the underworld, the dark side. Six months out of the year, she is basking in the sunlight and enjoying the harvest. She does not command you. The High Priestess is a sign to look toward your intuition, toward your wise mind, and just notice. Notice where you could come up with a more nuanced interpretation. Become aware of your emotional experience. Notice the places where you’re holding yourself to unfair standards or holding yourself back. The High Priestess is both invitation and reminder.

In this series, I plan to examine this connection and these dialectics from every angle. I’ll be talking about the cards as they relate to core themes of DBT and other therapeutic modalities. I’ll discuss how you can use the tarot in service of your recovery and as one of a number of tools at your disposal. I’ll cover some DBT skills, give you ideas for spreads, and try to clarify the connection between spirituality and psychology.