REFUSE TO FUSE.

PRESENT

So, I’ve become so interested in astrology as a way to help decode my problems and my future that I took over an orphaned astrology beginner’s group that was in danger of disbanding because the organizer stepped down. We're in the middle of the planets, and I took Saturn because I know so much about it. (And I can give soooo many good examples!)

This was sort of like a rehash of this post. In short,

Saturn square Sun—Your dark side is supposed to help you find your true potential. Urgent for you to integrate the two but also more difficult. Sun= the desire for recognition and self-expression. Your entire psyche is bent on achieving completeness and self-determination. You find at an early age that you have to work hard for everything. You feel like you have to guard yourself against life so you don’t get a blow that will flatten you. Too responsible. Never had the chance to be a child, so you never got to relax and just have something effortlessly go well for you in life. A lot of duty in childhood so you feel guilty for relaxing or having fun. Can be an extreme failure or an extreme success. Basically, your father let you down in some way and didn’t provide the encouragement of self a child needs, so you have to learn to do that all on your own. You get NO outside help discovering your own identity. An opportunity to explore conscious initiative and creative endeavor.

Saturn square Moon—Moon=link with childhood and suggests the area where need for emotional security and a sense of continuity with the past is expressed. The Moon is what your parents, especially Mom, were and the longing for emotional rapport and an instinctual closeness with someone that works like the parental relationship. Difficult childhood either financially or emotionally because your mother let you down in some way. Your mother made you feel rejected, isolated, and inadequate. You had to learn to control your feelings as a child and now you’re brooding, lonely, and aloof. You need the close healthy family you never had because your family was high on rules and low on real love for the child you actually were. “Business before pleasure” early home life. Parents were a burden or a disappointment to the child. You have to develop your sense of emotional security all on your own because you don’t have any happy memories from childhood, and you can’t find that kind of healthy relationship to nest in in adult life. Moon-Saturn aspects in chart suggest that it’s time for you to become a conscious, thinking entity. Mom was a big, bad deal in your life that has to be dealt with.

Saturn square Mercury—Mercury=the instrument of communication of the birth chart’s potential to the environment and the instrument of assimilating data from the environment. If a bad aspect, the child didn’t get good feedback, encouragement, or help in this area, so has to develop this all on his own. Parents had the attitude that the child couldn’t think for himself because he was a child and therefore any thought the child had that conflicted with the opinions of elders got stifled. So the child grew up thinking he was stupid and feeling afraid to do anything because he was sure he would mess up. So he was afraid to do anything, was so slow and hesitant that he looked stupid to other people, was treated as stupid, so got confirmation that he was stupid and got even slower and more scared. Saturn-Mercury has to learn everything by their own effort. Suggests the opportunity for self-education in a deeper sense. Reflects urge to discover the truth and meaning in any experience. The native is not getting his opinions from other people but from himself.

Saturn square Mars—Worse for men than women. Can reflect cruelty suffered at the hands of others.  Recklessness, accidents, conflict with authority, attracting ill-will from other people. Not the only expression of this however. Inner frustration and feelings of weakness and powerlessness, so you’re acting out on other people. You’re trying to defend yourself because you’ve been treated so cruelly. OR, the same thing happened but you folded under pressure from other people and now you can’t assert yourself and get taken advantage of. You can’t say no and then you just SNAP! Authoritarian parents who just squashed you. Can be physical abuse in childhood. All this can get played out in the sexual arena (it’s Mars.) Opportunity in this life is for  deeper understanding of your personal will and the nature of power and control, that you don’t need to dominate others to prove yourself.

ALL of this is true for me. In short, I had parents who were wholly inadequate, and I grew up believing that I was weak and powerless and couldn't defend myself, and that I was stupid; and I grew up longing for the warm, close healthy fusion with loving, healthy caregivers that every child needs. And I grew up with no encouragement to be the real me, and had to learn to do that all on my own.

A child has needs that have to be met by the caregivers in order to develop and grow up healthy. Physical needs, of course, but emotional needs, too, and these were the ones I didn't get. And one thing a child will do is try its very hardest to get the caregiver to meet its needs so it can grow up healthy and develop its full potential to be uniquely its very own, special self.

I also had the Vertex to research and explain, and my examples for that can also be found in here and have to do with this relationship with Chi. As I talked and people asked questions, I realized several things:

When we don't get what we need as children, we try to stay children, crying and demanding from other people what we needed from our parents in order to emerge emotionally and physically healthy into adulthood.

Neither Chi nor I got that. Chi got worthlessness messages from parents who wouldn't take care of the children because they were drinking and codependent, so he's spent his whole life bending over backwards and sacrificing his entire being to please family, trying to get out of them the messages of worth that parents didn't give him growing up. And because I think I'm weak, powerless, stupid (and therefore incapable of success enough to support myself throughout all stages of the life cycle), and received no encouragement from these Godlike beings who should have done that if I were really good enough, I'm looking for someone to do those things for me.

Here's the corker: According to everything I've been told about her, and everything her chart tells me, so was Rory! We have identical experiences in childhood, and we're seeking the exact same kinds of caretaking from our mate!

SEE how these two sets of needs and behavior dovetail with one another and then destroy one another?

We see how it's worked out with Chi and Rory. He completely negated his own self to bend over backwards for her and take care of all of her needs, looking for her to show behavior that says, "You are a worthy being." Not only didn't he get it, now he's in so much pain that he's about to bolt right into another relationship exactly like that one, still looking for the same thing!

Only I woke up.

When we got together, this was e-x-a-c-t-l-y what I was about to do. I have to be honest and admit it; this is what was going to happen. And he wouldn't have been honest about how I was hurting him as I exacted my demands, just like he hasn't been at home; so I wouldn't have understood that I was hurting him. Just as the people in his life now don't understand it, and now that he's struggling to express it, they think he's "crazy" and bad, and are exerting all the pressure they can to make him show up the way he always used to show up.

Whereas I ...

Can see where all this unhealthy fusion I'm trying to do came from.

I don't know how a preverbal child can absorb so well what its parent wants in order to feel disposed to behave warmly toward the child and take care of the child, but I did. I remember being on the school bus at five and falling in love with the bus driver. I remember scratching her back as the bus went down the road, thinking if I was nice to her somehow, she'd like me.

Only five years old, and I already had my mother down cold. Somehow, I absorbed that my mother thought if others just fused enough with her pain and her bad feelings about herself, she could finally feel better. My mother just never accepted it: SHE HAD TO WORK ON HER OWN PROBLEMS TO FEEL BETTER. 

My mother never wanted to work at anything. At eleven or twelve, I had to come home from school on Friday nights and clean half the house, all the dusting, all the vacuuming, and both bathrooms, before I was allowed to do anything else. My mother was making me do household chores at seven or eight, not by showing me exactly what she wanted me to do, but by telling me to do it, and then screaming at me when I didn't know what to do and left something out. (Who would have thought the "back of the toilet" meant the space behind the lid, not the top of the tank? How many times did I get screamed at and spanked before she actually showed me what she meant? Even though I was supposed to feel sorry for her because Grandma and Grandad did the exact same thing?) 

My mother felt simultaneously too stupid to hold a job and too entitled to. "I was incested as a child and my life's been bad enough! I shouldn't have to work! My husband is supposed to take care of me." Eventually that extended to cooking dinner. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, the owners of my mother and stepfather's favorite restaurant once commented that my mother never cooked. They ate out practically every night, because she "got treated so badly" and her "life's been so terrible, I shouldn't have to cook! I feel so bad I don't even want to cook anymore! Why should I have to cook for him?"
 
What a child my mother was!

And the real children in any family realize that when the parent feels right, then the parent will take care of the children.

So I spent thirty-eight years of my life in unhealthy fusion, sure that if I just fused with my mother enough--identifying with her pain, understanding how she felt, adopting every thought and every bad feeling as my own--that would make her feel better and fix her and then she would give me what I needed.

So what was I trying to do with Chi? (And I'm sure this is exactly what Rory was trying to do when she met him, too. When they first started dating, he'd experienced two horrible tragedies in his life, on top of the tragedy of his awful childhood.) We both thought that if we just fused with him sympathetically enough, he would accept a sense of worth, and then he would be ... SO grateful.

He's going, If I please these people they'll make me feel worthy (like my parents failed to do), and we're going, If we love him up and make him feel worthy, he'll encourage us and take care of us since we don't feel smart enough to take care of ourselves (like our parents failed to do). Neptune in a natal chart symbolizes all the things our childhood made us believe we're just hopeless to ever be able to do for ourselves, the things we look for another to do for us, and there's why Chi shows up as Neptune in both charts. (Moon Opp Neptune. UGH.)

We're trying to stay children, still handing the responsibility for the development of these areas of our personalities over to other people, the way they rightfully belonged to our parents while we were still little.

But we aren't supposed to stay children. Astrology tells us that we are powerful beings, much more powerful than even we know, and our job on the planet, when our parents neglect all these responsibilities in our growing up, is to take command and do them all by ourselves, without them.

And none of us wants to do that.

I'm sitting there in the meeting today, and Brittany says, "It's like you're trying to supply self-worth to your parent or to him, to prove you have worth. So they'll see how worthy you are. And I've done that, and it doesn't work. So, you can see that, so just stop doing it."

Exactly.

Because you can't do someone else's work for them. We pair up romantically trying to get someone else to do our unfinished growing-up work for us, when the truth is that it's impossible.

I'm not supposed to rely on someone else to know I'm smart and capable for me, I'm supposed to know that for myself. I'm not supposed to rope someone into providing financially for me, I'm supposed to provide financially for myself. I'm not supposed to marry someone who succeeds in the world, I'm supposed to succeed in the world. I'm not supposed to have a close person to lean on; I'm supposed to depend on myself.

And Chi isn't supposed to bend over backwards for other people because he's totally dependent on that steady drip-drip-drip of approval from other people in order to feel worthy for the next ten minutes before he needs someone else to approve of him again.

That's why it's called, self-worth.

We have missing pieces in our childhood because we're supposed to take command, find strength, and do those missing pieces all alone.

When we don't, the result is a Jane--who clearly didn't get enough attention from parents and now demands it from everyone at the table the entire time she's seated there--and simply cannot assimilate that she's being rude and driving everyone else away no matter how I dandle her on my knee, baby her ego, and try to be gentle as I attempt to get this through her thick skull. When I attempt to baby her, all I get is kicked in the teeth.

Do I want this kind of person to live with the rest of my life?

No. I spent thirty-eight years in this same dynamic with my mother, and that's long enough.

No more fusing with other people, feeling their pain as if it's my own, thinking if I just baby them enough, they'll get it and finally feel better about themselves and then everything will be great. When you baby people, all they do is stay immature and expect more babying.

The only way we acquire what our parents didn't help us develop is OUR OWN HARD WORK.

If the other person isn't doing that hard work, it's a lost cause, and the outcome of the relationship is horrible.

So, there's no relationship here. As far as I know, this person is not yet doing his own hard work.

I guess that means I run a good risk, at my age, of never having another relationship, healthy or otherwise, ever again. I certainly haven't met any healthy candidates in almost five years a widow.

Oh, well. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Too bad.

Anything is better than my mom again, or twenty years with another Jane.

Where we get in trouble is when we don't realize that, or we keep deluding ourselves about it.