I said my main complaint with the “Just Forget It And Move
On” approach is, You don’t learn anything.
And for many moons I have had something I very much wished
to learn.
Chi’s, Rory’s, and my horoscopes are all chock full of
Neptune, Neptune, Neptune. And that is said to be a double-edged sword. It CAN
work out well, but oftentimes it turns into a motherfucking nightmare in which
one person, either criminally or with the best of intentions, deceives and
hurts the other one. Or worse, in different ways, they deceive and hurt each
other. Seeing how this has played out in the Chi/Rory marriage, and in the almost-dissolution
of the Chi/Rory marriage two years ago, I have always wanted to know more. How?
Why? How do we stop it?
And searching for the answers has been maddening. There are
many answers in the codependency books, and in the ACoA books, but one word
keeps cropping up with Neptune in astrology that made no sense. It is:
Redemption. Redemption, redemption, redemption.
Like Jesus on the cross? WTF?? In a relationship? WTF is
“redemption” supposed to mean?
I now have an answer to that question, and whether you
believe in astrology or not, this answer has a LOT to do with the reason some
affairs happen and a lot of relationships don’t go well. If you’re in one or
you’re contemplating an affair, you might want to read this.
I’m getting this from the Neptune Queen herself, Liz Greene.
Please note that Liz Greene is also a practicing therapist, or at least, used
to be one (I think she is about seventy years old now), so this has a grain of
truth either way. Unfortunately, most well-known astrologers have a tendency to
be long-winded. Liz Greene takes you through every myth involving any kind of
Neptune imagery that there ever was, with a whole lot of highfaluting
mumbo-jumbo. You don’t need to slog through her whole book on Neptune to figure
out what she means by “redemption.” Condensing several chapters down into
several paragraphs, what is meant by this idea of Neptune and the need for
“redemption” is this:
I think we’re no stranger to the fact that life is hard.
Life is gut-wrenchingly, horribly terrible at times. When life is too
hard—especially when life is too hard too young—human beings give up and start
to falter at the difficulty, the pain, the struggle of it all. Human beings
begin to think that they are too weak. Human beings begin to believe that they
are too stupid, too repulsive, too unlovable, too incapable to make it on their
own. And then they start to get lazy. And then they start not to try. Whatever
it is that they are after—true love in a good relationship, the capacity to get
out there and work and earn and provide enough for themselves on their own, the
ability to esteem themselves properly on their own without someone else there
to provide constant, constant cheerleading: “Attaboy, attagirl, attaboy,
attagirl! Good boy, good girl! Good boy, good girl!”—they believe it is beyond
their capacity. And that they are suffering so terribly without whatever it is
they need that they think they can never be happy.
This is where Liz Greene discusses the old idea of the
“hysterical” personality, exemplified in Victorian times by women who just kind
of flipped out and went nuts, and for whom getting married and having sex was
invariably prescribed. WTF?? This I never understood, and always wondered what the
term “hysteria” actually meant. The above, this person who’s given up on
themselves and believes they are too weak, too bad, or too deficient in some
way to ever make something essential in life work for them, is in grave danger
of becoming “the hysterical personality.”
The hysterical personality starts to pose as someone sick in
some way, too defective to achieve whatever essential life skill they believe
they are too deficient to ever achieve. Then they start to cover themselves
over with an excuse of some kind of illness as a way to get out gracefully, to
be excused for not making it, and to elicit caretaking from another person. Bad,
bad things have happened, often when this person was very, very little. Life
feels so hard, so miserable, so awful, so terrible, so painful to these people
that they often experience a wish that they weren’t even alive, or weren’t even
born, or to be a baby again, to go back to that blissful time in childhood when
they were too little to do anything and Mother swathed them, cuddled them,
soothed them, nursed them, made everything okay for them, and took care of
their every need. So in adulthood they develop some kind of way to interface
with another person in order to elicit this kind of caretaking from them and
achieve this wish for perfect fusion in blissful wholeness with someone else,
instead of reaching courageously deep inside and achieving wholeness within
themselves as a separate person. And they don’t want to risk telling their
truth if it might anger or upset someone else, because they want that blissful
caretaking, which requires fusion of who they are with who someone else is, and
disagreement threatens that fusion. If I
disagree she won’t love me anymore. And I need her to love me, because I
believe that I am bad, and she believes that I am good for me. And she tells me and tells me and tells
me and tells me, and if we disagree she might not say that anymore.
This is where I’m reminded of myself, having panic attacks
every time I felt too alone in my life. This is where I’m reminded of Rory,
artfully arranging everything in her life so that she only has to work one day
a week, and spends most of her time in creative work and in close communion
with other people of like interests, with Chi to handle all financial and
practical matters and to cling close while accepting the emotional distance
that feels safe to her. And this is where I’m reminded of Chi, who’s told me
he’s always felt repulsive and unlovable, and who’s spent his whole life
letting the important decisions be made by other people. Tappity-tappity-tap
dancing right up to the age of sixty, performing for other people’s approval
and then exclaiming in despair, “Things look good and everybody else is happy. How
come I am not? What’s wrong with me?”
It’s this: We’re all hysterical personalities. We’ve all
given up on ourselves in some essential area of life that all humans are
supposed to master, and we want someone else to fix our feelings of distress at
how hard and sad life is, instead of digging deep and fixing those feelings
ourselves.
Which is too bad, because NO ONE ELSE CAN FIX OUR FEELINGS.
Fixing our feelings of distress at how hard it is to achieve in our particular
problem area is AN ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILL. When we plant our two front feet like
a mule and absolutely refuse to master that life skill, because we’re afraid
we’re no good or we’re afraid of the pain of facing our pasts and how we were
treated by sick parents who couldn’t love us, we begin to do terrible things in
our relationships. We make our significant other into the one who’s supposed to
fix the feelings we won’t fix, to make the money we won’t make, to make us feel
secure when we won’t develop our own security. And Liz Greene sums this up in
one word: Redemption. We’re looking for someone else to save us, BECAUSE WE ARE
REFUSING TO MASTER THE ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILL OF SAVING OUR OWN SELVES.
The sick people I know are all manifesting this same core
weakness, just in different ways. My ninety-four-year-old great aunt: Left at
an impressionable age by a father who found another woman in an era where you
just did NOT get divorced, unable to have children of her own, she responded by
adopting a special needs child who would never outgrow her need for her, and
doting that child into a monster who now has mood control problems and hits
people. My mother: Sexually molested by my grandfather, unable to handle it as
a teenager and then sexually molesting her sister, she grew up feeling dirty, repulsive,
horrible, stupid, and absolutely unlovable. Instead of challenging herself to grow,
get an education, get a job, provide for herself, she has attached herself to
two different men who provided for her while she descended into BPD tantrums
and helplessness, blamed other people for not taking care of her and making her
feel better, and pretty much alienated every close relationship she ever had.
Me: Growing up with a mentally ill mother and absent father,
with parents who whipped me into being the hero overachiever without ever
helping me to do anything, encouraging me, showing me any support unless I reflected well on them, and
expected me to emotionally caretake my mother and be just like her, I grew up
thankful I could make good grades because I sure was stupid otherwise. I felt
like I couldn’t do anything right, and that there must be something deeply
wrong with me because everyone hated me. I grew up longing for the loving
family I never had and willing to sacrifice everything I wanted if it looked
like I could get that. And when my husband died and I lost that, I floundered
for four years, sure I could never be happy on my own, and that I would descend
into poverty somehow unless and until I had someone to help me handle life’s
vicissitudes and provide me with companionship and happy times. I had weird
GERD symptoms and was terrified I would have a heart attack because I didn’t
have money until recently to see a doctor or afford any kind of therapy. And I
started to strongarm someone into caretaking me, even as he was asking me to
caretake him.
Unhealthy. Very, very unhealthy. Headed for disaster. Time
to turn the Titanic around, BEFORE it hits the ice.
Chi: Raised by an alcoholic mom and a limp-dick dishrag dad,
he grew up feeling like there must be something deeply wrong with him because
his parents wouldn’t love and take care of him and his brother the way all
little children need to be loved, esteemed, and cared for. Then a series of
tragedies made him even more sure it was all just him, that the universe had it
in for him because he was just born no good. He joined a religious cult, decided
there was no God, left the cult, then met Rory, the first woman who showed any
interest in him, and submitted to becoming her financial caretaker and
everything else she wanted, trying to earn her love. And when she turned out to
be an emotional distancer, domineering, caustic, and controlling, he assumed
once more that it must be him, or that all marriage must be this way. Then he
met me, discovered otherwise, but ran back to her because she showed him real
emotion for the first time in twenty years, got angry, and blamed him, telling
him all the problems in the marriage were his fault. How did that turn out?
Tune in next…
Rory: (And I have to speculate here, because I have this
from reading about her personality type and searching her horoscope, with only
a little independent corroboration.) Raised in a strict, authoritarian family
with little warmth for children, she had an absent father because he died in
her early teens. Left to work and raise three young children on her own, Rory’s
mother became an emotional tyrant who hurt her sensitive daughter very deeply.
Rather than risk that kind of intruding suffocation ever again, Rory buried her
feelings so deeply even she couldn’t reach them anymore, and looked for someone
she could be close to without being hurt. Someone who would satisfy her every
need and not need too much from her himself. See how Chi fits perfectly there?
Each person has their fantasy redeemer. My aunt, who never
wanted to lose love again, picked out my cousin, her adopted daughter, and look
what she did to that relationship. My mother, feeling both completely incapable
in the world and also completely unlovable, picked out my father and stepfather
and me, and look how those relationships went (badly.) Rory, feeling deeply
insecure in life and also afraid of close relationships, picked out someone
gifted enough to provide and low enough in himself to accept being henpecked
and distanced at the same time, and look what she did to that relationship.
Chi, feeling absolutely repulsive and unlovable, accepted someone domineering
and controlling. (Who else would look for a guy who had so little self, except
someone who needed to effect a full takeover of someone else?)
And me. Little ole me. I worked my ass off at understanding
what happened in my family of origin, but I still felt stupid and incapable no
matter how much I achieved. It took nursing my husband to his end with a brain
tumor while still excelling at my job to convince me that I could hold my own
in life, and still I felt like I needed a parentlike relationship to dandle me
on its knee all the time. Like my dreams were worthless, and I had better have
a close relationship, because there wasn’t anything in life really worthwhile
without one. And Chi and I looked at each other, and look at what we were
starting to do! In four months! I intimated I needed him to do this, this, and
that, and I would love him in return, and he said yes, yes, and yes. Until Rory
guilted him and he couldn’t do it anymore.
How would that relationship have turned out? Without a LOT
of consciousness and work…disaster.
Because we are ALL supposed to master our OWN life skills,
instead of strongarming someone else into fixing our upset feelings for us. WE
are supposed to become healthy and whole people, no matter how that got
derailed in childhood, and no one else can do that work FOR us. Instead of
longing for a fantasy redeemer, someone who will magically make us feel better,
we need to get ourselves in that therapy chair and make OURSELVES feel better.
Instead of trying to BE someone else’s fantasy redeemer—so we can prove how
good we are or so that person will help us do things we think we can’t do
ourselves, WE are supposed work this all out and become our OWN fantasy
redeemer—our OWN whole person. Or we destroy another potentially good
relationship.
And that’s what “Moon opp Neptune” is warning Chi and me
about.
“I love you,” does not mean, “because you fix my upset
feelings and make me feel better about myself,” or, “because you take care of
me so I do not have to work to become competent myself, at properly esteeming
myself or properly taking care of myself.” That shit, for shit it truly is, is
falling off the knife-blade edge Neptune warns us about, into the trash dump.
“I love you,” means “I love you as the human being that you
are,” or it means nothing at all. That means seeing the other realistically and
loving the best that’s in them and having compassion for the worst; without
stepping on their side of the line to fix it for them because you wanna be A
Good Guy. If you can manage that, you are stepping carefully off the
knife-blade edge Neptune warns us about, into a safe, mature, and happy home.
Whether anyone else happens to live there with you, or not.
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