What a sitter actually means...

Sometimes when your with a sitter you spend time deciphering a code, a bit like lonely hearts adverts, what they say is often not what they mean.

When someone comes to you asking for a relationship reading about a partner much that they dont see much, usually means the partner is married.

When someone says "we have a real connection when communicating, they really understand me" usually means they havent met face to face yet.

"I am in a bad financial situation, i dont know how i got there", usually means "i spent all my money on readings to find out why i have no money..."


what white lies do you find sitters tell you?

Nik
PS i personally wish people would be honest, i dont judge people i read for because thats not what they came for.

Well, to be perfectly honest here, you're reading the sitter and jumping to conclusions instead of just reading the cards without bias. You're playing the role of omniscient in thinking you can know their thoughts and motivations when actually, all you're making are biased assumptions and judgments. It's not up to us to decide what are "white lies" and what aren't. We really don't know. This is where centering yourself and grounding yourself come in so that you get that egotistical part of yourself out of the way and just read the cards.

Now, I'm not saying that sometimes we don't all think we know these things. Maybe we're getting jaded and just need a break from reading for others for awhile or we're having a bad day in areas of our own life and can't get past that---we just feel like our sitters are a bunch of shallow boobs who can't think for themselves when actually, we're the ones acting that part.

But even though I go through those days myself, I have to play whack-a-mole with ego and get out of the way so I can just read the cards without judging the sitter. If I can't do that, I put the cards away for awhile.

ETA: You have to understand, as well, that the sitter may honestly think they're being honest. If they didn't think so, would they pay good money to get a reading on it? It's hard to be totally objective about one's life and that's why they come to us.

I think it is a bit like online dating services. My friend, who did this for something like 4 years before she found a keeper, used to say much the same. She said she could tell they were married and looking for a little on the side within a half hour.

I do not think it has anything to do with ego or judging. My goodness, you could hardly get through a day if you never let your powers of observation and intuition work! If you suppress everything you may be ego-less but not very effective.

I agree with red's comments. Those are pretty classic give-aways. You even see them in writing in Your Readings.

Alta

I don't think it's reading the sitter so much as reading between the lines of what a sitter is saying, to get to the heart of the question. An experienced reader needs to do that. We need to decipher distress, fear, wonder; we need to feel when our sitter are lying to us, and when they are telling the truth. That's so we can focus on the cards and what the cards are telling with a clearer view of what the cards are describing.


Red, a typical one I get is not so much a white lie but a very partial and one-sided representation of the truth:
"I was doing a great job and had received no complaints about my work, when suddenly my boss fired me." That's possible, of course, but on its own, like that, I would think such a statement sounded odd. Something is missing. What I would do is - without interpreting the oddness, but simply noting it - look out for the rest of the picture, what the querent is leaving out, in the cards. Same with any half-truths.

When it's an outright lie, if I suspect it I would also seek it out in the cards, but I'd try to find an honest way to present what the cards are saying without embarrassing the querent. Very often, I use questions; but I find it a difficult problem to negotiate.


At the end of the day, we can't control what our querents say, and some might even be lying to themselves because they can't face the truth that a part of their life they had depended on so deeply was a sham, or built on sand. So they make up an 'alternative version' of events. An astute reader will pick that up - but then the question arises: how do we deal with it?

Grizabella said:

Well, to be perfectly honest here, you're reading the sitter and jumping to conclusions instead of just reading the cards without bias.

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Agreed. "usually" isn't "always." I'm sure it is possible but I can only speak from my perspective. so it's pretty hard to imagine how someone could be unbiased if they already assume that most of the time, when a sitter says one thing, they "secretly" mean another. I have to admit that I do learn something new everyday and I'm no psychological expert. so maybe its possible to assume without bias?

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Rasa said:

it ends up coming out partway through the reading that there is more than one relationship they are wanting to know about.

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This seems fair and non biased -to pull cards then (from the cards) get the feeling that the sitter said one thing but actually meant something else. I guess, if you've got really good psychic abilities it could work, too. But to assume based solely on the question asked is another thing...

214red said:

Sometimes when your with a sitter you spend time deciphering a code, a bit like lonely hearts adverts, what they say is often not what they mean.

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Rarely does a sitter’s statements equate with reality. They think they are reality (“But he really loves me…” often means, ‘I think he appreciates me more than his wife’), but usually their question is not their question.

This is why rapport, and a sublimated ego is so important.

example: Sometimes a sitter comes in with romance questions and you get office/work answers. Rather than go off on ‘affair at work’, perhaps finding out that romance is being replaced by work and work pressures, that romance at home does not exist due to outside issues – not affairs.

So on one hand, it’s not biased at all to listen to, and register their white-lies, so you can relate it all back to their question…

This allows you to read the “nonsense” spread (“the cards made no sense to me so I ‘told the sitter she was blocked’/’redid the spread’) with greater accuracy. The nonsense vanishes with rapport.

We’re not judging.

We’re listening.

We’re building rapport.

Rapport is like the bridge that connects the cards, the card meanings, and the sitter’s question. You can walk a slack rope, or a nice sturdy bridge.

Your choice.

I work in a library and this sounds like what we call 'the enquiry interview'. A customer almost NEVER asks for what they really want with their initial enquiry. You have to probe to get to the heart of the matter. They'll ask for a phone book, when what they really want is to contact a relative they lost touch with 20 years ago. They just don't know where to start or what to ask. I'm not a reader, but I can only imagine that a sitter is similar, and that a reading would be so much deeper and better if the query you end up reading is the real query that the sitter wants answered. Of course, sometimes the library customer doesn't know exactly what they want, and it could be that a sitter is often in the same boat.

This is like what doctors call "hand on door syndrome" - by which so many patients ask about - maybe a hangnail, get advice and maybe some cream or something - and as they leave, they turn and say "Oh, by the way, doctor, I wonder if it's significant that..." and that is always what they really came for but were afraid to ask.

Exactly - and you never ever ignore the 'hand on the door' question.

And what Carla said!

Was a time back when, that I worked in a call-center. Folks called and asked questions (about products and their uses).

What they thought they needed, or what they thought was 'the problem' never was (very rarely at least). So you'd have to question (without 'not answering' the question) to figure out where they really were in the product interface, not where they thought they were.

When I moved onto corporate training, that was a huge part of the training. Don't "just answer the question", figure out - find out - what the client really needed (not what they wanted). We’d role play scenarios for hours, they’d spend days listening to other reps on live calls…just to learn how to correctly question in non-linear terms – and develop rapport so that when a solutions is proffered, that to the client seems to be not-addressing their needs, they are receptive and understand that they need to do A before B.

We lack Tarot reading classes. Classes are all about 'card meanings'. Dan Pelletier talked briefly about this in his Lunch & Learn lecture at Readers Studio 2010.

Reading...in the opening of a reading session, there are so many opportunities to develop judgment free rapport - that to ignore them and move onto 'reading the cards' is counterproductive.

What I'm saying is that odds are, based on past experience with sitters, we think we know what they're thinking, but in reality, not being omniscient, we can't really know for sure. I don't see how anybody can disagree with that.

And Alta, I'm not talking about turning it all off all the time. I don't even think by a stretch I said that. Obviously I'm talking about when a sitter is sitting in front of us for a reading, then we put that all aside. What part of what I said was construable as something else, like turning it off all the time?

Personally, if I let my reading be colored by thinking I know what this person is "really" asking or why they're asking when I'm doing the reading, then I'm tainting that reading. And I do contend that doing that is letting ego enter into it.

Umbrae said:

What they thought they needed, or what they thought was 'the problem' never was (very rarely at least). So you'd have to question (without 'not answering' the question) to figure out where they really were in the product interface, not where they thought they were.

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Yes! But that's different than just assuming you already know. You ask them to figure it out. There's a difference between that and just assuming you already know.

Coming back to respond to what Sophie said. I do agree with that, but that wasn't how I read 214's question. But feeling what we suspect a sitter may mean and then doing a little fishing around to find out if that's the real thing, is different than just assuming it's lies in the first place. What Sophie has said and what 214 seems to have asked are two different things, it appears to me.

Yes, with experience, the law of averages will point to the probability that if a sitter asks a certain question, then if a great number of times in the past we may have found that to mean a certain thing, this sitter is more likely to mean that than something else. However, that doesn't mean it IS what this particular sitter means, just because we jump to that conclusion and choose to see them as having told a "white lie".

See what I mean?

We can all suspect that MAYBE this is the case, but we can't KNOW that and therefore shouldn't just assume they're lying because many others have "lied" about that particular thing in that particular way. You know, it's real possible that the sitter means exactly what they asked about and we can't know positively anything else.