THE SIXES IN THE DECK OF CARE ENCOURAGE YOU TO EXPLORE HOW BEING KIND TO OTHERS CAN MEET YOUR OWN NEEDS, AND TO BE CURIOUS ABOUT THE GOOD YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH WHEN YOUR NEEDS AND ANOTHER PERSON’S NEEDS INTERSECT.

Self-care is inherently a selfish endeavor. It requires understanding and meeting our needs to ensure that we’re physically and emotionally well enough to give to the world. It’s about ourselves and how the ways in which we interact with the world impact us.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no space in self-care for helping others or doing good in the world - quite the opposite. Being generous and kind, contributing to our communities, and helping others brings out positive feelings in ourselves and reduces our exposure to negative emotions being experienced by others. By contributing to the wellbeing of others, we can fulfill our needs like community, contribution, purpose, or harmony. By being present and caretaking for others, we can fulfill needs like support, appreciation, or intimacy. A lot of good can be (and is) motivated by selfish motives.

The Sixes encourage you to be curious about and act upon your needs in relation to being good to other people, and provide some concrete acts of kindness as a starting point for that exploration. It’s likely that shame will crop up in this exploration because we’re taught that helping others is corrupted by selfishness - that doing good and being selfish are inherently contradictory. Through mindful, nonjudgmental, and compassionate exploration of our needs to be good to others, we can learn there’s beauty at the intersection of our personal needs and the good we can do in the world. If doing good also meets our needs, that doesn’t negate the good; it just means it was also good for us.

This exploration will also help you to find true selflessness in life. When we recognize what needs we bring to the table, we bring enough awareness to empower ourselves to explore the needs of a second person. We can look for intersections between our needs and others’ (making sure we’re meeting everyone’s needs), or we can choose to engage in truly compassionate, selfless giving to others when they have needs and meeting them won’t satisfy our needs. By recognizing and respecting that we have selfish motives for helping others, we create space for ourselves to explore real selflessness. 

Similarly, we can recognize when we’re labeling our selfish behavior (that motivated by trying to meet our own needs) as selfless (behavior aimed to solely meet the needs of others) which is a critical skill set for intimate relationships. Believing that we’re helping someone else while the other either doesn’t want to be helped or is perceiving it as unhelpful is a recipe for interpersonal conflict and disappointment on both sides. It’s always healthiest when we can intersect our needs with the needs of a second person.

Six of Clubs - Sharing and Generosity

The Six of Clubs encourages you to be generous by sharing something with a friend. Research shows that generosity is good for our health (such as reducing blood pressure), makes us happier by releasing feel-good hormones, and improves the quality of our relationships. Beyond the personal benefits, generosity is also pro-social, meaning that it has a positive effect on the world around us and can improve our broader community. To get the best benefits out of generosity, you’ll want to make it a habit by incorporating it into your daily life. Start small with a friend like the card encourages, and bring mindful curiosity to any “warm glow” you might personally experience because of your generosity.

Six of Spades - Meeting the Needs of Others

The Six of Spades encourages you to empathetically understand a second person and help them in a way that is responsive to their needs. Like generosity, altruistic helping improves our physical health, makes us happier, improves our relationships, and can give us a sense of purpose. It is also pro-social because it has a positive impact on the world around us if done well. The goal of the Six of Spades is to go beyond performative giving to another person to, instead, try to meet a second person exactly where they are and be needs-responsive. 

The skill taught in the Six of Spades is a mirror of the five of clubs (understanding unmet needs) and the nine of hearts (meeting unmet needs). It takes these introspection skills and applies them empathetically to a second person - trying to look below the surface to see what a second person needs. This process usually begins with compassionate listening - a process in which you listen without interrupting and without thinking about how you will respond, just being emotionally present for another person. For someone who has introspection skills, when they’re done, you can ask questions like “How do you feel?” and “What needs of yours are going unmet?” They may be able to tell you directly. 

For someone who doesn’t have the same introspection skills, you will likely need to reflect back what you’re hearing and understanding, using your own feelings and needs vocabulary. The non-violent communication framework is great for this. You state back “I’m hearing that you’re going through [x] situation. It’s leaving you feeling [y] because your need [z] is unmet. Am I understanding correctly?” For example, if a friend is expressing frustration at work, you might say “I’m hearing that work is really busy right now, and that’s leaving you feeling stressed and insecure because your needs for ease and competence aren’t being met. Am I understanding correctly?” It may take a few rounds of this to get to a mutual understanding but you’ll eventually get to a shared understanding of what’s going on.

Once you have a shared understanding of what needs are going unmet, you can explore creatively a way to help. The solutions may not be the ones that seemed obvious at first. If your friend is struggling to juggle multiple commitments, you may end up helping by doing laundry or by writing a message to someone establishing a boundary of some sort. The goal is to find a way to meet another person where they are and help them effectively. Sometimes, just listening empathetically is enough.

When you’ve given in this way to another person, be curious about any “warm glow” or positive feelings you personally have by being fully present for a second person.

Six of Hearts - Expressing Care

The Six of Hearts encourages you to express to others what you like about them. This card is like the Three of Hearts but about a second person. It helps us to hold a more balanced picture of others, and creates new neural pathways to see the good in others. When done effectively, expressions of care can create positive feelings for both people.

Not all statements of care are equal, though. Moralistic judgments, even positive ones like “You’re kind” or “You’re smart,” can be reductive - making the second person just a thing in your perception. Generic compliments like “you look nice” can be so vague as to not give the other person anything meaningful to attach to. Both can also come across as insincere, and can be interpreted as having ulterior motives.

Try to be sincere and specific, acknowledging what about the other person brings you some sort of positive sensation. When it makes sense, let them know what positive feelings (joy, pride, open heartedness, fascination . . . ) those things bring out in you, and what needs (closeness, affection, ease, creativity . . . ) are met by them. Expressing care well is a celebration of the good another person brings into the world.

Six of Diamonds - Expressing Gratitude

The Six of Diamonds encourages you to express gratitude for those who have done something to make your life better. Like the exercises in the Threes, expressing the positive can help us to build new, positive neural pathways and to hold a more balanced picture of the world. In addition, by celebrating the ways in which others have made our lives more wonderful, we can improve relationships with others by allowing them to feel good about what they’ve done, and by helping them to understand why we appreciate it. Healthy expressions of gratitude provide fuel for positive, mutually beneficial relationships, and help to fend off resentment.

Not all forms of gratitude are equal. Moralistic judgments like “You’re kind” or “You’re smart” can be reductive - making the second person just a thing in your perception. Platitudes like “thank you” or “Good job” are so vague as to not give the other person anything meaningful to attach to. Both can also come across as insincere, and can be interpreted as having ulterior motives.

Like with the gratitude practice explored in the Three of Spades, it’s important to be specific and let the other person know exactly what they did that you’re grateful for. Non-violent communication provides a helpful three-step framework for doing this, which you can watch a short primer on here. The first step is to say with specificity what the other person did to make your life more wonderful. The second is to express how it made you feel, and the third is to say which of your needs was met that resulted in you feeling like that. This might sound like “I really appreciate that you picked me up at the airport. I feel happy and relieved because I would have otherwise had to spend several hours on the bus to get home. My needs for ease, support, and love were met because you picked me up.”

This form of communication may feel unnatural but it really helps a second person understand how they helped you, and can allow them to feel more positive emotions when they receive it. Because fully fleshed out expressions of gratitude create more positive emotions for the second person, they will in turn create more positive sensations for you as well.

A Final Thought

Our engagements with others give us another opportunity to practice positive neuroplasticity. Humans naturally engage in two related fallacies: we overestimate the failings of others and underestimate the failings of ourselves. We’re biologically inclined to label unwanted conduct in a second person as morally wrong, but to label the same conduct in ourselves as an exception to our general goodness/above-averageness. These predisposed fallacies may serve an evolutionary purpose, but the two together create a terrible foundation for empathy.

In the same way we can confront our negativity bias by noticing and savoring the good around us, we can do the same with others. We can choose to see the good in others along with their bad so that we hold a more full-balanced view of our community. Over time, choosing to see the good in others with their bad builds new neural pathways, and creates a healthier foundation for your engagement with others.

Be kind, always.