Mirror Mirror On My Therapist Wall: Captain Hook
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Tarot, Trauma, and the Shadow Self: Healing Through Haunting and Hunting Adeline
“The monsters aren’t just under the bed—they’re inside us.”
If you’ve read H.D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline, you know this truth intimately. These books aren’t just dark—they’re emotionally brutal, psychologically raw, and painfully honest. They take you into the deepest recesses of the human psyche: where trauma lingers, where healing dares to tread, and where fantasy collides with shadow.
Now imagine laying Tarot cards over this story. Not to romanticize it—but to decode it.
Tarot is the language of the subconscious. Each card holds a mirror to emotion, memory, and transformation. When we place Adeline’s journey next to the Tarot, we get a powerful, symbolic map of trauma, survival, and reclamation.
Let’s walk that path together—through the cards and the carnage.
Adeline’s Parallel: The moment Zade enters her world. The moment control disappears.
The Tower represents sudden, violent upheaval—the collapse of everything safe or known. For Adeline, this begins with the stalking. What starts as discomfort quickly spirals into fear, psychological invasion, and destruction of autonomy.
Trauma often begins when your internal world no longer matches your external reality. You’re not safe, but you’re expected to carry on.
Healing Lesson:
The Tower is painful—but it clears the ground. What rises after is no longer built on illusion.
Adeline’s Parallel: Living with secrets. Questioning what’s real. Experiencing terror wrapped in desire.
The Moon card governs the unconscious mind. It reveals what’s hidden—shame, confusion, longing. For trauma survivors, this card embodies dissociation. The fog. The surrealness of surviving but not really living.
Adeline’s trauma is amplified by secrecy, by the fact that her pain feels both real and unreal.
Healing Lesson:
When you feel lost in the dark, stop looking for clarity. Look for what wants to be acknowledged.
Adeline’s Parallel: After captivity. After rape. After breaking.
Death in Tarot is not physical—it’s energetic transformation. The old self dies. The new self doesn’t rise right away. There’s a void. A numbness. Adeline isn’t who she was—and she doesn’t yet know who she is becoming.
Survival itself is an initiation. It’s not clean. It’s not linear. And it’s not a return to “normal.”
Healing Lesson:
Letting go of the person you were is part of healing. Grieve her. But don’t rush the rebirth.
Adeline’s Parallel: PTSD. Nightmares. Flashbacks. Shame.
This card represents the mind as a battlefield. Guilt, self-blame, the reliving of trauma—it lives in the Nine of Swords. For Adeline, the physical captivity may have ended, but the emotional and mental captivity lives on. “Why didn’t I fight harder?” “Why does part of me still want him?”
These are not shameful questions. They’re trauma responses. Real. Valid. Human.
Healing Lesson:
Pain doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your body is still trying to understand what happened.
Adeline’s Parallel: Her slow, reluctant trust. Her first moment of softness. Her choice to stay.
The Star follows the Tower. It’s a return to light—not through denial, but through integration. The Star whispers, “You’re allowed to feel joy again.” For Adeline, this is painstaking. Her body isn’t used to softness. But she reaches for it anyway.
Healing isn’t about forgetting. It’s about finding moments of peace inside the pain.
Healing Lesson:
Joy isn’t a betrayal of trauma. It’s a reclamation of aliveness.
Adeline’s Parallel: The moment she stops trying to “get over it” and starts tending to herself with fierce gentleness.
Strength in Tarot isn’t dominance. It’s inner courage. The ability to sit with pain without becoming it. The willingness to feel without numbing. For Adeline, this comes later. But when it arrives, she begins to own her voice again.
Trauma silences us. Strength says: You don’t have to scream to be powerful.
Healing Lesson:
Softness with yourself is radical. Self-compassion is a survival tool.
Adeline’s Parallel: Zade and Adeline’s bond—a mix of violence, passion, coercion, obsession, and… care?
The Lovers card is not just about romance. It’s about choice, mirror work, and the paradox of shadow and desire. In this story, Zade embodies both savior and predator. For many readers, that’s deeply triggering—and yet deeply compelling.
This is where trauma intersects with fantasy. And where we must differentiate what feels empowering from what is safe.
Healing Lesson:
You are allowed to explore your desires. But only when you have the power to choose them.
Tarot won’t heal your trauma. But it will help you:
Name what’s happening in your body, mind, and emotions
Track your healing through symbols rather than diagnoses
Normalize duality—you can be hurting and growing, angry and soft
Reclaim intuition—a voice trauma often silences
The Tower – What part of me broke that needs space to grieve?
The Moon – What unspoken fear or truth am I avoiding?
Death – What version of me am I releasing?
Nine of Swords – What pain needs gentleness instead of judgment?
The Star – Where is light beginning to return?
Strength – What part of me deserves fierce protection and compassion?
The Lovers – What shadow is asking to be integrated, not rejected?
Haunting and Hunting Adeline aren’t about “getting better.”
They’re about surviving the unspeakable—and somehow, in the blood and broken glass, finding a heartbeat again.
Tarot gives us a way to hold these truths without trying to fix them.
It gives us symbols when words fail.
It reminds us that healing is not a staircase—it’s a spiral. A dance. A scream. A whisper.
So if you find yourself drawn to stories like Adeline’s, know this:
You’re not twisted. You’re seeking understanding in the dark.
And the dark doesn’t make you broken. It makes you human.
Ready to explore shadow work, Tarot, or trauma healing in a way that honors your whole self? Book a session—this is your space to be seen, heard, and healed.
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