What is Justice?

Jan 21

As many of you know, twice a year I open up my calendarfor tarot readings. And while it’s a pretty popular offering that I do, it’s just one piece of how I work with folks. Speaking coaching, shadow work, tarot readings… those are the big 3.

My tarot book is closed now until June (want to hear first about when I open up again? Click here to get in the know), but I’ve been fulfilling a lot of tarot orders lately and one of the cards that keeps popping up is Justice.

And I struggle with it. But I think I’ve come up with something that helped me wrap my head around it, and I want to share that with you. It’s not a scholarly exploration by any stretch, but it’s one of the things that can happen with tarot work - where you explore the archetypes and symbolism and begin to develop certain takes that open up old paradigms.

I worked in a law school for 11 years, and so the idea of “justice” came up.. you know, a lot. And also during that time, completely unrelated, I had to record a statement about something that had happened several years ago for a trial. And the statement lead to a guilty plea. And so “justice” was served.

But… it didn’t feel like that. It felt pretty hollow. I didn’t feel like my wrong had been made right.

Complexity

The other day I was reading for a client, and again, Justice came up, so I started to talk about my issues with it and what I’d been discovering (I’ll get to that), and she told me afterward that she had studied Justice for her Masters degree.

It’s a complex topic, and has several different meanings depending on if you’re talking strictly about the law, or about karma, or about balancing some kind of universal scale.

There’s “an eye for an eye” kind of justice, or the famous “Quality of Mercy” speech from Portia from The Merchant of Venice (which I what I used to get into theatre school many moons ago).

But it all stems from the idea of a wrong, and then of being owed something. A pound of flesh.

A debt.

Victim Mentality

Let me be the first to own the fact that most of my life, I’ve had a victim mentality. This can have so many negative connotations. “Stop playing the victim!” “Don’t be such a victim.”

People don’t seem to like it when you are vocal about having been wronged. They also don’t like martyrs. Usually our frustration creates discomfort for folks, so they throw around these bullshit phrases, and make people feel guilty for having feelings about what happened to them, because their pain is uncomfortable. But let’s take a deeper look.

I was bullied pretty extensively as a kid. I’ve talked about this ad nauseum - literally to the point where I’m sick of it. But it shaped me in many ways.

I expected to be hurt, because I was.
I expected folks to turn on me, because they did.
I barely remember much about grades 7 and 8 because I had nearly daily panic attacks (undiagnosed at the time).
My stress mode triggers were always on high alert, so I had big reactions to things quickly, before I had a chance to think about them.

In grade 5 I recall telling a friend that it was weird for me to trust new friends because I was accustomed to having them turn on me and he said (IN GRADE 5) “Stop using that as a crutch.”

Umm.

So. Let’s assume that if we have had a “victim complex” it’s because we were…victims! The folks on the other end of hurt! People who’d been wronged!

And on the other end of that is the expectation that this wrong will somehow be righted. That we are owed something. And we often think of that thing as “justice”.

Because that’s what we’re told will happen. Justice prevails.

Out of Balance

So I don’t know if any of this is resonating with you, but I walked around with this feeling that I was out of balance. That I was owed something for my pain. That I would be receiving something in return. Some kind of balancing of the scales.

I could talk for hours about all of the things people had done to me. I felt, all the time, that I wasn’t good enough to be somebody’s first. I was always losing out… for auditions, for boyfriends.

And it didn’t make me feel great about myself.

But it was my story. It was my suffering. And if people could see that, then they would feel for me and believe me that my pain was valid.

Because my pain hadn’t been validated. My suffering was annoying. My complaining was irritating. Instead of listening ears, I got advice about what I was doing wrong. So I spent the next couple of decades chasing the idea of being seen. Of being understood.

And even though I’m feeling a bit cringe going over all of this again, I know this will resonate with some, and you might be stuck in the same loops as I was.

Victim Mentality and Public Speaking

And this vicious cycle of being wronged, of not having that wrong been validated, of feeling like we’re annoying people… it creates a story we tell ourselves that bad things happen to us because we’re not worthwhile. So we expect it. We believe we’re not worthy of being listened to.

And then we feel uncomfortable speaking in front of others.

Anybody relating?

Often, when we’re younger, we create our sense of self from the people around us. If parents/teachers/friends get irritated with us, or don’t understand what we’re going through, or find our ways of reacting to things difficult… we come to understand that we’re not worthy of being seen.

And then we shape our sense of self, that becomes a neural pathway, and suddenly in adulthood we wonder why we can’t get up in front of a group of our peers without having a panic attack.

Shadow Work

Here’s an extremely annoying truth. If you find yourself getting irritated with somebody who is constantly giving you “excuses” for their behaviour, or talking about their difficulties… I hate to break it to you, but that’s on you.

And it’s likely because the same thing happened to you, and you are mirroring how you were treated.

Is your mind blown?

Mine was.

That was part of my gateway into shadow work. I’ve written about shadow work here, and here, and here. I’ve created a free shadow work workbook and I use it myself every day.

And in case there’s a misconception, I’m not doing hard inner work every day. Not at all. It comes and goes in waves, and I definitely don’t force it when it’s not there. What I DO do is check in with myself every day through my journal, and I pull a shadow card from my tarot deck to see what needs to be maintained. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s nothing. And I trust my intuition to be my guide.

The quickest route to your own shadow is observing what drives you nuts about other people. (UGH it’s the worst, honestly. Here we are feeling sooooo righteous in our anger and irritation, and then we have the goddamn revelation that it’s our OWN bad behaviour being mirrored in others. Talk about annoying.)

Back to Justice

So wtf can we do about this? It’s not our fault that all this muck happened. (Well, most of the time it’s not our fault.) And then when we finally get what is objectively observed as “justice” (the person who wronged you having something bad happen to them, or they have legal ramifications), it feels empty. And that’s if there’s some kind of recompense.