Reversed does not mean opposite
The common shortcut — upright good, reversed bad, meaning flipped — is wrong on all three counts.
Reversal changes intensity and direction, not sign
A turned card is usually one of three things: the force has not started yet, it started and is being blocked, or it has turned inward where only you can feel it.
Take the Tower. Upright, the collapse is outside: a layoff, a relationship ending, one email that tips everything over. Reversed, the collapse is often interior — nobody can see it, but you know something has stopped counting.
A reversed Tower is therefore not a lighter Tower. It is an unwitnessed one.
Some cards get easier upside down
The Ten of Swords upright is bottom reached. Reversed it is often coming up off that bottom — still painful, but pointed the other way.
The Devil reversed is, in many readings, the moment the chain slackens. Read it by the "opposite" rule and you will call it a worsening, which is exactly backwards.
Position and orientation are read together
The same reversed card means different things in the past position and in the possible-outcome position. One says it never finished firing back then; the other says it may not fire at all.
That is why the same card reads differently across sittings. The reader is not moving the goalposts — the position genuinely changed.
You are allowed to skip reversals
Plenty of readers take upright only and let the relationships between cards carry intensity. That is not laziness; it is a different, internally consistent method.
Reversals are on by default here because they give the second appearance of a card something to say: it was reversed last time and it is upright now — what happened in between.