I’ve been self-reading for years with absolutely no problem.
You do have to learn how to do a reading for yourself. Some very different rules to reading for someone else and not really something that your average beginner guidebook is going to cover. Most of the problem is that it’s incredibly hard (especially for beginners) to honestly be objective with themselves. Even when you’ve been doing this for years, you need to carefully check in with yourself all the time and most will use a good Tarot journal so we’re forced to write and track our predictions.
This is one of those tarot superstitions that just floats around. The ‘you can’t read for yourself’ thing is like ‘you can’t buy your own deck’ or ‘you have to wrap your cards in silk.’ None of it really holds up when you look into it.
It comes down to objectivity, seeing what’s actually in front of you rather than what you’re hoping to see. One of her clients stopped coming to her and ended up writing a whole book about self-reading, which says a lot.
Bias is the actual challenge here. Not bad luck. We’re human, we see what we want to see sometimes, and tarot works on intuition, where the answers are open to interpretation. Some readers struggle with their own spreads because they’re too close to the situation. As one source put it, ‘the reader cannot see the wood for the trees.’
Something that helps me, which I picked up somewhere and can’t remember where, is to read the cards as if you’re reading for a friend sitting across from you. Pretend the question is theirs, interpret everything, then apply it back to yourself. It’s a decent mental workaround for keeping bias in check.
Mary K. Greer wrote a whole book in 1984 called Tarot for Your Self, all about using the cards for personal introspection. Self-reading has been a legit and encouraged practice for a long time. Your acquaintance is entitled to her boundaries, but that’s her practice, not a universal rule.