On Fusion.

PRESENT

I don’t know how far I was into Rebuilding When Your Relationship Ends when I realized what is really wrong with me.

My entire life, I’ve been searching for a family that was actually healthy. I remember being despondent in my teens and twenties, sure I was so fat no one would ever love me, that my legs were too thick and bunchy and didn’t look “beautiful” enough, that my butt was too big. I remember substituting daydreams for love instead, and having this odd sensation: Wasn’t this actually supposed to happen to me sometime, here? Where is it??

And then I found it! I met Simon, and we dated almost four years and had a wonderful marriage.

And I was happy.

It never even so much as occurred to me that this wasn’t the natural state of man, what we all look for and what we all need to be happy. I mean, look at all this literature about relatedness and connection, and how people are unhealthy without it, and how society is the worse for it. Disconnection and people feeling unloved is the root of most social ills. Even Mother Theresa said it.

This information is all over the place! You’re nobody til somebody loves you. So many social scientists wring their hands over the problems of aloneness and disconnection in this country that there’s just got to be something really wrong with aloneness and disconnection!

I never, ever imagined that they’re actually normal. That we’re all supposed to grow strong enough in ourselves to be happy all by ourselves, with no one and nobody else. Maybe the cosmic reason our society is so disconnected and so many people are all alone is because we came into this life in order to do just that.

Relationship, relationship, relationship, relationship. It’s supposed to make the world go around.

So of course as soon as I was absolutely alone, I mourned the absence of relationship. I’d never have anybody close in my life again. I’m old, and I’m not young, sexy, or pretty anymore, so no one was going to want me! (Certainly nobody else like Simon, who was my perfect match. They broke the mold when they made him.)

What was going to happen to me, as I grew old alone? What would happen to me when I was in trouble? If I got sick or had an accident and couldn’t work? If I woke up in the middle of the night having a heart attack and I was all alone? When I got my first cancer diagnosis? No one in this entire world gives a shit about me, and I’d be left to struggle all alone.

Always I was looking back, back, back, back to when I had someone to be with all the time, and I was happy just knowing he was there to come home to. Waking up and living my days with someone as happy, optimistic, and fun as Simon made everything worthwhile, no matter what I had to give up in terms of time and my old dreams. And as his illness progressed, that turned out to be quite a lot.

If I had him, I was fine. It didn’t matter anymore that I was never going to be a real writer. Those were just silly dreams; they never happen to people anyway.

That’s what we do. When we’re in a relationship, if it’s a good one, we get so happy and comfortable there that our personalities twine all around the relationship, and—*POOF!* We’ve changed. We’re not our old selves anymore.

Maybe we’re not even who we were supposed to be anymore.

But we don’t know that. We think that all of human existence is nothing but Relationship. And we have to have at least one with somebody, or life is no good and we’re not safe.

There’s no doubt that my relationship with Simon was the happiest time of my entire life. I doubt very seriously that I will ever be that happy again. And, when you find a person and a relationship and a time like that, perhaps it’s right that your personality deforms to accommodate it. That relationship was a precious eleven years for me. It will never happen again.

But sometimes, when you deform your personality to live in relationship with someone, you do something wrong. You do something to your personality that you should not have done, and then your relationship becomes unhealthy and then it breaks up. You stopped changing. You stopped learning. You stopped growing in order to be in your relationship. Or maybe you just stopped being yourself.

Then your relationship ends, and you have this horrible, miserable transformation you have to undergo, in order to find out what your mistake was, and how you need to unkink your personality again and grow back in the direction you should have been going. You have to be alone for a long, long time in order to do that, because if you reform another relationship before you do that, it’s just unhealthy in the same way and it will break up.

The whole trick in relationship is being your real self in the relationship while accommodating to living with another person. Too much your way or too much their way, and somebody gets stifled to death and the relationship ends.

I’m thinking of Chi and Rory here. If there was ever a textbook example of someone stifling themselves to death in order to accommodate themselves to a relationship, that was it.

But I’m also thinking of myself. As happy as I was with Simon, part of the reason was that I finally felt secure. I felt secure because I finally had someone with me who was big and strong and knowledgeable and adult in the ways I wasn’t. Someone who had always done well at work and owned his own business for twenty-five years. Emotionally, I was still a child who felt “too little” to handle big things in life like buying a car or an air conditioning system or big travel arrangements or washing the windows. I had Simon for that, thank God! And I was definitely the junior partner in the relationship. The sicker Simon got, the more the awesome and frightening responsibility I had to shoulder. I definitely didn’t feel ready for any of it, and I was better at some aspects of the job than others. It was something I would never, ever have willingly taken on, and I think one of the reasons he died while I was still so young was to show me that I could do it.

There are some healthy reasons to wrap our personalities all around a relationship.

Then, there are the UNhealthy ones. Yeah…the ones I’ve spent the last four and a half miserable years learning all about.

What I’m talking about up there, accommodating ourselves too much to the relationship, is codependent and a way we try to fuse emotionally with someone else. And I got that; on some level, I understood that.

What I didn’t understand is that this is normal in childhood. I found this in this book in a way I’d never seen it spelled out anywhere else.

I mean, think about it. When we’re little, ideally, Mom and Dad are right there all the time. Are you okay, honey? How did school go today? Do you need help with your homework? Why are you crying? Oh, it’s so wonderful that you did that! I’m so proud of you! Look how big and beautiful and talented you’re growing! You can be anything you want to be! Here, let’s pop a big bowl of popcorn and cuddle in bed together and watch Harry Potter movies! I love you, honey. Maybe we can order a pizza! We’re emotionally fused with Mom and Dad, and emotionally fused into this hand-holdy, sing-songy, fluffy-warm and safe and cuddly relationship that makes us feel good inside and okay. Oh, those images of Mom making us eggs and hot chocolate before school on a cold snowy morning! (That, I never got, because my mom didn’t want to get up for us, bitched and screamed about how slow we were the entire time, put out bowls of cereal, then went, “You’re so slow I don’t want to stay up and yell at you! I’m going back to bed!”) That not-so-lovely scene in the parentheses excluded, isn’t the preceding paragraph just your warm, fuzzy picture of ideal family life?

When we’re little kids, when we’re one and two and five and seven and nine, we need this absolutely. When we don’t get it, or if we only get it if Mom wants something from us, when she threatens to withhold it or punish us if we aren’t the children she wants us to be, when she uses this warm, loving quality of time to reward us only when we act like the children she wants us to be, that’s what makes us codependent.

Little kids can’t find their own sense of warmth and safety and OK-ness. Little kids need to get that from Mom and Dad, and they need it in order to grow up healthy emotionally.

Where most of us have gotten hung up is, we think we’re supposed to have this as adults all the time, and we think we can’t live without it.

Which is one reason I’m so unhappy. After eighteen-plus years of that kind of a mother, eighteen years of rejection from cruel schoolmates, and thirty-two years of believing, truly believing, I’d never even have sex ever in my life because I was too fat and men would think me repulsive (Fuck, man. Is it any wonder Fifty Shades and Twilight are our cultural ideals of romance, when most people are raised like this?), Simon and I got together and I finally had this kind of experience of love in my life!!

And then he died. And then he was gone. And then it was over. After not even seven years of marriage.

And I stumbled into the sunlight blinking, rubbing my eyes, thinking, That was it? That’s all? It’s all over? That’s all I get?? Ever, ever again? Really??

I still need to be emotionally fused to someone in order to feel okay. But, what we’re supposed to do in this life is grow ourselves up emotionally so we’re able to feel okay whether that’s present in our lives for us or not.

Yes, it’s true that as we become elderly, we get old and frail and we aren’t able to cook and do for ourselves anymore. It’s also true that if I had a car accident tonight and I was laid up and not able to work for six weeks, I would fall behind in the bills and I would most certainly need help! The same goes if we have heart attacks or cancer.

But if none of these things are true, we’re supposed to be able to feel okay without a warm-fuzzy, hand-holdy, sing-songy relationship in our lives all the time. We really are!

The trouble is, our society does not recognize this fact. And neither the fuck did I.

And inside, I’m still six years old, missing emotional fusion in my life, looking for it, longing for it, trying to make Chi fit the bill whether he actually does or not.

I mean, look at this. Because my mother had BPD, and used me as her emotional confidante literally ALL THE TIME, I spent all my life on this planet up until Simon died emotionally fused with someone. (Up until now, I always had at least one close friend.)

I didn’t have that emotionally warm mother who got up and made hot chocolate and pancakes and eggs, but I did have a mother who was emotionally up in my business every hour of every day, asking me every single picky little detail of who I sat with in school and what I said and what they said and whatIsaidandwhattheysaidandwhatIsaidandwhattheysaid on and on and on until I wanted to run away from home. Sharing every single picky little detail of every single little problem she had with another person (and demanding I agree with her view of things), and since she had BPD her life was nothing BUT problems with other people. And, you know, come to think of it ... that was the only way we kids were important to our mom. When we were tending to her needs. So now my brother is twice divorced and whining on Facebook all the time about how nobody wants a nice guy and he's so lonely and can't find anyone.

(What went wrong in those marriages, anyway? Anyone care to take any guesses?)

I have spent my entire life emotionally fused with other people’s lives, and for the first time in forty-five years, there was nobody there. I was utterly alone.

No wonder I don’t know how to be emotionally independent of other people, and why I’m longing back, back into the past, when somebody was there all the time.

This isn’t healthy. I’ve been left alone in my life so I could grow out of this. And that’s the job I was supposed to have accomplished by now, or I’d be so desperate I’d take Chi back no matter what—and he hasn’t done any emotional health work on himself. He’s still hideously codependent, and life with someone hideously codependent guarantees you won’t be treated well.

You’ll think you are, as the other person contorts himself to please you because he believes he’s unlovable, killing himself in the process—and then it will all blow apart, when the other person can’t stand the pain anymore and cheats on you.

(Codependents are known for cheating, y’all. This is why.)

I was supposed to have grown out of this need for emotional fusion with another person by now, so I wouldn’t do this to him or me. My job is to stand my ground and insist he get well, and walk away unless and until he does.

Only I don’t know how to live without emotional fusion. I’m still looking back, back, back into the past, to that golden time when I was happy. (That ended after barely seven years.)

A fine mess, huh?

I keep falling back into that trance, of looking wistfully back to those happy times I had with Simon, and a few with Chi, thinking those were the times I was really happy and that the present moment sucks. That I’ll never be happy again. That what’s the point?

I do better when I remember that that’s a child’s way of being in the world, a child’s way of looking at life, and that I’m supposed to just be me and focus on me and focus on developing my talents. There’s nobody healthy within a one hundred mile radius, and, as the incident with Jane just demonstrated, if you dandle unhealthy people on your knee and show them endless patience while hoping they’ll finally begin to treat you better … all they do is kick you in the teeth.

I hate to say it, but currently Chi falls into this category.

Anyone who hurts themselves that much is eventually going to explode and hurt everyone else. You can’t treat other people any better than you treat yourself, because treating yourself and other people truly well always involves HONESTY, and it NEVER involves acting. Acting is NEVER kind, because THE TRUTH ALWAYS COMES OUT, and the longer it takes, the more it hurts.

I’m tired of the sick people like my mother and Jane who have serious emotional problems and only want to look at others’ problems and never apply themselves to real, serious work on their own.

I don’t treat other people that way. I work hard so I don’t hurt myself and others, and that’s what love is. I need and deserve someone who will do the same for me.

Chi has one more opportunity to elect to be that person who will apply himself to the work it takes—on HIMSELF, not other people—to be healthy.

I don’t want to be so backward and so stuck in childhood that I’ll accept another Mom or another Jane. Because when it’s your husband or your significant other, being treated like that is the longest, cruelest, ugliest cut of all.

I just need to keep reminding myself: This is a child’s way of being. And I’m supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up…supposed to grow up. That means focusing on my talents, developing me, and forgetting about other people.

At the moment, there aren’t any healthy ones out there.

---

The Rory Post I Promised...About the Different Outcomes In Your Life Showing Up In Your Transits.

PRESENT...An Astrology Post.

So, here's how I discovered this. I'm walking through Rory's transits for the next six months, and I see a lot of what I expect given mine and Chi's, and also given the fact that she is still in the position I saw her getting promoted to in her transits this time last year. 

There's something about a sudden freedom from a restriction of some sort...that she may experience the arrival of a person into her life who's going to teach her something...that she's experiencing a time of good social relations with other people...more about confronting inhibitions and restrictions placed upon her by herself and other people...a need to break away from an established order...that she's inappropriately idealizing important relationships in her life...more about receiving a spiritual teacher or guide figure...the need to work very hard to accomplish a task. All of which I expected to see, given what I see in my transits and Chi's over the next two years.

And then...right there in the middle of this mostly ominous stuff...here I find a find a great big ol' Saturn trine Venus. Right smack dab in the middle of what is at great risk of becoming Chi's affair year.

(Some background: I recognized the Saturn trine Venus right away because it was part of the reason I so badly misjudged what was going to happen with Chi and me three years ago. I had this, which often augurs the advent of a very successful and happy relationship, plus a number of other very pleasant transits that promised the same. And, at the same time, I saw several that made me blink and think, Huh? That sounds like he's with Rory! I didn't know what to think. But, Chi asked me to trust him, and I loved him and promised to, and all three therapists believed the marriage was likely to end. So, I had three pieces of evidence leading me to believe the wrong thing. I've wondered about that for three years. What were both sets of transits doing there?)

Now, when I've heard from Chi again right when Alice Portman, several important transits, and my astrology teacher saw that I would, and in the middle of a shitpile of transits suggesting we end up in a real affair...Rory has a Saturn trine Venus.

WTF? Why is that there? What am I supposed to make of that?

I pondered this for several days, and suddenly it all made sense.

Remember several posts back, when I remarked that around two years ago Rory had all these transits telling her it was a good time to dig into her childhood problems and do some very deep and cutting psychological work? That it was a very good time to straighten out some problems that were keeping her from living the way she really wanted to?

She had them, I saw them then, and I knew he was in therapy and they were in marriage counseling. Naturally, I thought they were getting top-notch help (see Avoid the Below-Average Therapist), and I assumed they would both work hard and make real progress. She had these good work transits when she needed them. I assumed she would make good use of them. Therefore, I expected they'd save their marriage (as most marrieds in this situation eventually do). I'd lose Chi forever, and I was correspondingly depressed.

Then I heard from Chi again, and I heard what had actually happened.

Rory did NOT make good use of those transits. Here where she could have entered individual therapy herself, made progress herself, and saved her marriage...she elected not to make use of this opportunity.

Now it hits me--if she had, this is where the marriage would have started to work out! This is where things should be getting easier, and where they'd start to be happier and recommitted to one another on a healthier and more honest basis.  If that had happened, she'd be living that Saturn trine Venus in her marriage right about now!


But she didn't...and I'm living all the UNhappy ones instead. The ones that are talking about the need for deep psychological work and introspection, and the need for me to stay out of power and control. The ones coming up in the next few months that are calling me a control freak and telling Rory she's about to receive a spiritual teacher in the form of an enemy whose controlling nature is going to wreak havoc in her life.

THERE REALLY ARE TWO TIMELINES DEPICTED IN HERE FOR EACH PERSON.

Holy toledo!!!

The reason this is of extreme importance in the coming eighteen months or so:

ALL of those good psychological work transits Rory just finished with, are now coming up in Chi's chart.

Now he's getting them! HE now has the opportunity to work out unresolved childhood issues that Rory just had and elected not to pursue.

And I know, from reading ahead in his transits and mine--confirmed by everything I know about codependency and enmeshment in relationships--what happens if he does not do the work, and I've already detailed it before in this blog. He stays hideously codependent, flip-flops between two women for some FIVE YEARS (tearing the living shit out of everyone involved), as I detailed in The Missing Piece One and Two. He finally leaves the marriage, but his next relationship (unfortunately reflected in my transits) is unhealthy. He begins codependent behavior almost immediately, and in a few short years finds that, once again, he's agreed to things in the relationship that he doesn't really like, and once again is afraid to speak up for himself.

Then crisis hits the relationship. His relationship partner has something going on in her career that takes her eyes off the relationship for a time. Chi, being emotionally fused and still codependent, goes into a tailspin. "I KNEW I wasn't lovable!" He finds someone else and has another affair, and the relationship is never the same, and ends HORRIBLY about ten years later, when we're 71 and 81.

IF you follow his leg of bad transits.

In actuality, starting right about now and picking up steam after 2019, there's a good leg of transits, showing a person who uses the opportunity coming up in the work transits this year I've just told you about. This leg shows a person who works hard and makes a good recovery, and whose life goes much, much better from then on.

Now, what makes the difference between Bad Leg One, and Good Leg Two? In Bad Leg One, why doesn't Chi take advantage of those good work transits, dig in, do the work required, and get the fuck well??
 
Because he's having an affair with me instead.

Because I didn't put all this together, didn't get over my childish need for emotional fusion with someone else (see the post that's coming next week for details), and didn't hold off, hold his feet to the fire, and absolutely refuse to be with him if he doesn't take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to free himself of codependency and low self worth, work his little ass off, and HEAL.

Because I was afraid I'd lose him if I did that, and decided to have the affair and see if I could tempt him away from Rory.

I wasn't farsighted enough to see that if I did that, all I'd get was a very sick, STUCK codependent who would turn around and hurt me the way he does himself (and, eventually, everyone else.) Just like my mother. Just like Jane. I didn't fucking learn anything, and turned around and picked yet another one...when I could have put my foot down, and maybe he'd have worked and gotten well!

And, whaddya know?? Look at MY transits right now!

Another split!

Out of six big transits going over the next six months:

One talks about being noticed in a career.

One talks about having big ideas tempered with common sense, and knowing what I can and can't do.

Here's Robert Hand writing about the third one on the good leg:

Pluto trine Pluto: Up to you 

Beginning of February 2018 until mid-December 2019: This is a period of stability, in which very deep and perseverant energies lend themselves to you. Whether you make use of them or not is completely up to you. However, if you do decide to use them, there will be potential for inner growth. From this position you can gain deep insights into the functioning of your psyche which might have shocked you at other times. This is a time for simplification and for finding out what is really meaningful to you. It is a period when you are not only able to, but should, make changes. It is a time when you are able to eliminate the old and outworn elements of your life with relative ease because there will be little in the way. It may even seem so easy that you are not aware of its being an issue, but you should not rest on your laurels. Take an inventory of your life, your friendships, your possessions and other attachments and involvements. See which of these support you and at the minimum allow you to grow. These should be preserved. But do not struggle to preserve anything that does not serve you, especially if it seems to want to pass away. This is most important, because whatever you do not eliminate from your life now that does not serve you could become a cause of difficulty during more stressful times that may come along later.
 

And the last three, the bad leg, is talking about a spiritual teacher that will come into my life, who doesn't look like a spiritual teacher, and a transient, bad relationship that's very challenging and likely to end fairly soon. Right through the middle of 2020, which is when Rory's transits sound like Chi is back, and mine sound like I've been very painfully dumped, and more brokenhearted than I've ever been.

(And considering the last four years I've spent, that's really saying something.)

Now: Astrologers typically read only two or three years of transits at a time. If I had done that, I would never have been able to make sense out of all of this. To make sense out of all of this, I needed all three charts, and I needed to look at ALL the transits over a period of some twenty-five years!

But now that I have, look what I've learned!

And, I hate to point this out, but everything in everyone's bad transit legs has happened so far, right on schedule, from 2014 up until October of last year.

Will it happen again?

Stay tuned...

Yep. I think there really is something to the idea of doing a Whole Life Progression. There really is. 

Years ago, when I didn't know crap about astrology, and used to scrimp and save to buy one yearly transit report off astro.com at a time, I used to notice that half my transits always sounded lovely and half sounded bad. That I always lived the bad ones, and never the good ones. It got to where, if I saw a transit that sounded wonderful, I knew that one wouldn't happen. And I always wondered why.

It happens because we're unconscious, we're fucking SLEEPWALKERS, and we don't fucking LEARN. A classmate said it in the last class I took: "Astrology is only predictive when we don't learn anything. Astrology is only predictive because people do the same things over and over."

After this, you can't tell me astrology is bunk, or that it's not useful!

How I Used Astrology To Figure Out My Relationship

PAST


Note: Sorry if this post seems redundant. YourTango has a large astrology section, and this post is sort of an "audition piece" for them.

I promised y'all a Rory post--about seeing the outcomes of major decisions as two different timelines in your horoscope transits. That one IS coming...next week.

Three years ago, I found myself unceremoniously dumped.

My heart was shattered, lacerated, ripped into a million pieces. I didn’t think I’d live. Worse, I didn’t want to.

The person in question was married; however, he’d moved out, consulted a divorce lawyer, and told me the marriage was over. From what he told me about the way she was behaving, and had behaved for the past twenty years, I could see why. For the past four months, he’d described an emotionally cold and distant marriage, with a woman who alternately bossed and belittled him. It was clear why he’d taken this long to finally move out: he was darling, but he was an adult child of an alcoholic, and I knew everything that meant. (See my article on YourTango, 13 Signs You’re An Adult Child Of An Alcoholic, for more information.)

It was one of those situations where you just know you’re going to be happy together, just like when I got together with my late husband. And then … and then …

*POOF!* He was gone.

Most of us are familiar with those horrible feelings of desperation, those times we’d do anything, and I mean anything, to get our old love back. This is when the desperate turn to astrology.

I didn’t know a thing about astrology. I had surfed the free parts of astro.com, and I had even bought some of their Liz Greene yearly transit reports on occasion. But I had no idea what those little symbols scribbled in the margins meant, or how on earth Saturn could “trine” Jupiter, much less how Pluto could ever “trine” itself! And I’d never bought more than one at a time, because they aren’t exactly cheap, and my money had always been tight.

But now, in the midst of this huge personal crisis, I was at least doing better at work. With that came the ability to buy more than one yearly transit report at a time, and for multiple people. I started snooping. Everything I knew about me, him, her, and their marriage told me it wouldn’t last. He’d have to come back to me; I just knew it. 

Thus began the education of this budding astrologer, courtesy of astro.com.

For those who are as bewildered now as I was then, “transits” refer to where the planets in the heavens are now, in relation to where they were at the moment of your birth. Every time a planet makes an exact angle with the position it or another planet occupied at the moment of your birth, it reflects a mood, a feeling, a quality of time in your life. A crack professional astrologer who reads literally thousands of charts a year notices repeating themes, and will be able to tell you, “Typically when I see this aspect come up in someone’s transits, these kinds of events are what’s been happening in these people’s lives.” When you’re consulting a professional astrologer, or you’re buying a computerized transit report, this is what you’re paying for.

I bought transit reports for myself, him, and his wife for the next few years, buying dates three years apart to save money, as I’d noted that many of the transits spanned over one year and they overlapped one another. I began to read. The first thing I noticed was that everything that appeared in one chart reflected in the other two. That gave me the creeps. Then, as I read on … it happened! Reflected in all three charts was his leaving her and returning to me. In about three years!

Overjoyed, I bought one more set for three years from the last date I’d read. I expected to see that he’d left her for good, and we were happy ever after. 

Um … not so.

Instead, I saw myself left again. Even though the marriage was still rotten, and her behavior had improved not at all, there he was, back home again. She looked supremely happy, and the two of us were miserable. If I thought my heart was broken now, apparently it was nothing compared to what I’d experience then.

What … the … hell?

Of course, after that I had to keep on reading. He was still unhappy at home! Surely, surely he’d be back! And there, two years on, he’d finally had enough, and he was. Our transits reflected a joyous reunion, and hers, frankly, didn’t know what had hit her, despite decades of questionable behavior.

Yey! I mean, normally I feel sorry for the wife, but in this case … well …. 

This had to mean we’d live happily ever after, right? I just wanted that wonderful confirmation, and so I bought one more set, three years farther ahead. And received one nasty surprise.

We weren’t happy. We were having significant problems. Only I was largely unaware of them, because … what?

Here’s where astrology has given me its greatest gift. I was raised by a parent with borderline personality disorder. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a serious mental illness that wreaks havoc not only on the sufferer, but on any minor children being raised in the home. Because my relationship with my mother was so difficult, I had spent a good portion of my twenties and thirties reading self-help books, relationship books, and adult-child-of books, and because of this, I know a great deal about codependency. Enough to recognize it when I see it described in a horoscope transit.

Astrologers are a poetic lot. Anxious not to antagonize the client, they excel at presenting clinical signs with sympathy and from the client’s point of view. Especially if they’re Liz Greene and their previous career was as a counseling therapist. 

I was reading phrases in his report such as: “If you have allowed your need for closeness with others to obstruct your need to be a separate individual, you may be challenged to assert your own values and ideals with greater honesty and openness. External conflicts and relationship issues may highlight the fact that you need to achieve a new and more creative balance between these two sides of yourself.” “Try not to turn your back on opportunities just because you don't want to upset others or are afraid of seeming selfish in their eyes.” “But somehow what you want may not be communicated properly to those who could help or support you; and you may feel very angry, frustrated, aggrieved or victimised.  You are not wrong in pushing for change and better opportunities.  You may also need to define yourself as an individual more directly within your personal relationships, and this could involve friction with family members.  But you may first have to consider the ways in which you are asking for what you want, and recognise that you yourself have created or accepted the role you are now playing, and others have assumed this is who you are.”

Huh? I thought. This is codependency! What the hell? Hasn’t this person been in therapy for years already? How could he leave her to be with me, and still be codependent?

This utterly confused me. I pondered it on and off for several days, and as I considered it, one solid fact emerged.

Codependent when we met; codependent years later when we finally get together. He’s with me, he’s with her, he’s with her, he’s with me, the family is all upset, the adult children are involved … years and years of drama, this is! 

But during all those years of drama, what was missing? This much-adored man of mine applying himself to his core problems of codependency and low self-worth, studying and healing and getting well—that was what! Look at all the progress he could have made over those five years! But he didn’t. What was he doing instead?

Having an affair with me.

Then I started to recall phrases from my transit reports, about being too needy and anxious, about the need to stay out of power and control. I hadn’t known what to make of those. Me, domineering and overcontrolling? Why, that was his wife, not me!

Apparently not.

What I finally understood, after months of poring over these transit reports, was that, even though I recognized him as codependent from the beginning—I was the one who insisted he start therapy—if I elected to pursue an affair with this man, I would be the person keeping him from what he most desperately needed to do:

Apply himself in therapy to his own problems—not everyone else’s—study healthy relationships, what went wrong in his family of origin, and heal and work and get well.

And that’s a hell of a way to treat someone you say you love.

It was about that time I figured I had better start studying astrology, and learn how to read this stuff for myself, instead of relying on a computer to do it for me, or hiring an expensive professional I know nothing about. Since then, I’ve become a good enough astrologer to cast all our relationship and natal charts, and I can pick out the aspects in ours that reflect the issues I’ve just described here.

This is only the beginning of my story. I plan to post more about it here, from time to time. I’ve predicted events in all three of our lives that actually happened. Last October, there were a number of signs that I would indeed hear from this man after three years apart. It happened. (Only this time, I was ready.)

Most important, I’ve learned so much about myself. It turned out that my charts and transits were pointing out aspects of my unhealed childhood that I never would have suspected still needed my attention, and that’s proven to be an invaluable resource to direct me in my own therapy.

I used to doubt astrology, but after this experience, I see what an important and useful tool it can be. If you’re searching for answers in your own relationship, it’s certainly worth a look.