Let’s talk about Justice. Not the version in a courthouse, but the archetype that lives in your gut. The one that shows up when life deals you a hand that is technically fair but feels fundamentally wrong.
This isn’t about some pristine, objective concept. It’s about a messy, internal force whose job is to force clarity, not comfort.
The Justice card in the Tarot holds a sword and scales for a reason. They are not decorations. They are weapons. They are tools for navigating reality, not for making your pain look good on a mood board. This work is for those Seekers who learned that healing is not fair and the cause of the pain was not just. It’s for those of you looking for real tools to handle real truth.
Justice: The Archetype Is a Weapon, Not a Verdict
Most people miss the point of the symbols. They see a seated figure and assume it’s about a passive verdict handed down from on high. It’s not. The figure is on a throne because it has authority. The symbols it holds are instructions for how to claim your own.
The Sword Is for Cutting
The sword’s primary function is severance. It is the tool you use to cut through the story you’re telling yourself, the story others are feeding you, and the sentimental bullshit you’ve been clinging to. It gets you to the hard, clean fact of a situation.
The truth it reveals is often brutal. It’s the double-edged blade that frees you with one swing and leaves you bleeding with the other. This isn’t about a gentle “journey” to enlightenment; it’s about the necessary, painful cuts that precede real clarity.
The Scales Are for Weighing
The scales are not for finding perfect, neat balance—that’s a lie sold to us by a wellness industry that wants to package our pain for relatability.
The scales are a tool for developing the capacity to hold two opposing truths at once without collapsing. They force you to weigh your responsibility against what was done to you. They demand you measure your raw intuition against cold data.
Often, the scales don’t balance. The task isn’t to make them level; it’s to build the strength to hold the profound imbalance without breaking. Balance is a fleeting moment, a brief alignment before the world tilts again. The real work is in getting better at the constant, dizzying act of balancing.
The Two Ways Justice Fucks You Over
This is the nuance that people who have lived through trauma or mental illness will recognize immediately. Justice in the real world often shows up in two distinct, maddening ways. Naming them is the first step to disarming them.
The Clean Cut That Bleeds Everyone (Fair but not Just)
This is the application of a rule without context, logic devoid of humanity.
It’s the zero-tolerance policy that expels a good kid for a stupid mistake. It’s the 50/50 asset split in a divorce where one person sacrificed their entire career for the family, leaving them with half the money but zero earning potential. It’s the corporate layoff that treats a 20-year veteran and a new hire as equal lines on a spreadsheet.
In these cases, the sword of logic makes a clean cut that is technically “fair,” but it’s an act of violence that ignores the messy truth being weighed in the scales.
The Consequence That Feels Like a Punishment (Just but not Fair)
This is the universe’s cold law of cause and effect.
You stay in a toxic job for years because you need the security, and your body starts to break down from the chronic stress. This is a direct, logical consequence—a “just” outcome—but it feels profoundly, intimately unfair.
You finally do the hard, right thing and end a destructive relationship, and your “reward” is a year of crushing confusion, hard work, and loneliness.
This is justice without a tidy moral. It’s the universe handing you the bill for your choices, or even for circumstances you were born into, and not giving a damn if you can pay it.
A Framework for When Life Isn’t Just or Fair
This is a set of psychological tools for when you’re in the middle of a situation that feels unjust and you need to get out of the victim-mentality loop. The goal is to snap you back into yourself by finding the small piece of ground you still control.
1. The Sword: Cut the Story
First, forget what you feel. Get brutally factual. What are the absolute, verifiable facts of this situation, stripped of your emotional interpretation? Think of it as a security camera recording:
“He left.”
“The money is gone.”
“I have to find a new place to live.”
Now, identify the story you are layering on top of those facts:
“I was abandoned because I’m unlovable.”
“I’m a failure who will be poor the rest of my life.”
“I should just buy a tent.”
The story is where the pain gets sticky and turns into a narrative of shame.
The facts are where your power is. Use the sword. Cut the story away from the facts so you can see the actual wound instead of the infection of the narrative you’ve built around it.
2. The Scales: Weigh Your Weight
This isn’t about blame; it’s about an honest accounting of responsibility. This is for you, not for them. On one of your internal scales, place everything you did or didn’t do that contributed to this outcome.
Own your percentage. Maybe it’s 10%, maybe it’s 70%. Be honest with yourself, because your denial serves no one.
This is your weight to carry.
On the other scale, place everything that was completely out of your control: the other person’s choices, the economy, systemic bullshit, shitty luck. This is not your weight to carry.
A victim mentality puts 100% of the weight on the second scale. A martyr complex makes you try to carry it all. The work is to see accurately. Acknowledging your part doesn’t excuse them. It gives you your power back by defining the boundaries of your actual influence.
3. The Throne: Take the Chair
The throne is your agency. It might be a kingdom or it might be a single square inch of wreckage, but it is yours. After you’ve cut the story and weighed the responsibility, you must find your throne and act from it.
Given the facts and your actual responsibility, what is the one single action you have the authority to make right now? It doesn’t have to fix everything. It can be deleting a phone number. Paying one bill. Sending one email. Saying “no.”
Authority isn’t about being in control of the outcome. It’s about being in control of your next move. Find the chair, sit in it, and make a decision. That’s it. That’s the entire practice.
Art Exercises for Holding the Tension
For many of us, creativity isn’t a hobby; it’s a survival strategy. These exercises use art as a psychological method to get the truth out of your body and into the world where you can finally see it. The goal is not to create something beautiful, but to create something that doesn’t lie.
The Diptych of Contradiction (2D)
You will need a piece of cardboard from a shipping box, glue, scissors, and a mix of “hard” and “soft” collage materials. For hard materials, use newspaper text, receipts, or junk mail. For soft materials, use fabric scraps, dried leaves, or old tea bags.
- First, draw a hard line down the middle of the cardboard. On the left side, using only the hard materials, construct the logical, factual, “fair but not just” version of your problem. Use straight lines and printed words.
- On the right side, using only the soft materials, build a representation of how the situation feels. Don’t think; use texture and color to show the emotional, “just but not fair” truth.
- Finally, address the line between them. Is it a bridge or a wall? Connect the two sides with a few threads of yarn, or glue down a strip of black fabric to heighten the division.
The piece is finished when it reflects the actual state of your internal conflict, not a desired state of harmony.
Mobile of Imbalance (3D)
For this, you will need a stick, string or thread, and a collection of small found objects with different weights and meanings—a key, a rock, a feather, a screw.
- Tie one end of a string to the stick at its center point; this is the beam of your scales. Tie the other end to something that will let it float in the air.
- Assign an object to represent you, and others to represent the different factors in your challenge: your job, a person, your fear, your anger.
- Hang your “self” object from one side. Now hang another object on the other side. The whole thing will immediately tip. Your job is not to find objects of equal weight. Your job is to slide the strings along the stick, closer or further from the center, until the stick hangs level. Notice how a heavy object hung close to the center can be balanced by a light object hung far out on a limb.
- Keep adding the objects one by one. Each time, the entire system will be thrown off, and you will have to readjust everything to find a new point of equilibrium. The finished mobile is a sculpture of the constant, tense adjustments required to hold multiple, unequal weights at once. It is a physical symbol of the capacity you are building to function under pressure.
Ultimately, this work is not about trying to make life feel fair. It never will be. The universe is not designed to comfort you; it is designed to have consequences. The tools of Justice—the sword to cut through your own bullshit, the scales to hold the impossible weight of contradiction, and the art to give that truth a body—are not for fixing the world. They are for navigating it without disassociating from your own life.
This is not a path to a tidy, balanced and perfectly healed self, because healing and balance are ongoing processes, not an endpoint. This is the hard, repetitive work of building capacity—the capacity to see what is real, to hold what is heavy, and to act from a place of clarity instead of collapse.
The goal isn’t to find a permanent state of balance.
The goal is to be able to stand steady while the world tilts.
If this work resonated with you, start here: The Art of Confidence or 52 Weeks with the Dark. Both are built for Seekers ready to cut through the noise and create something honest.
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