Is There Really A Cosmic Reason For Everything We Go Through? Yep. Yep. Yep.

PRESENT ... An Astrology Post. 

(Presenting the astrology behind all I just posted the last two weeks. Those not interested in some heavier astrology may wish to skip.)

For some reason, I started looking up yods on the internet again. I had found all this stuff on Ceres and Lilith (scary stuff on Ceres and Lilith, by several somewhat scary people), and that interesting thing on the Weeping Sisters and Saturn Chasing the Moon. I guess I wanted to look and see if there was anything I hadn’t found yet on yods.

Here’s the article by the Yod Queen, my astrologer, the gifted Alice Portman. 

Um, look at this. Here’s Alice, writing about quincunxes:

"The quincunx aspect is almost always present when there is death as death also describes a period of considerable change both for the person who dies and their family and friends.  The quincunx will involve the eighth house or the ruler of the eighth and the house that describes the person who dies.  E.g. if there is a transit of Jupiter in the 4^th house making a quincunx to Venus in the 8^th house, which  in turn rules the sign on the cusp of the 4^th house,  then a parent is likely to be the person who dies."

(And, OMG, look at this. The day my husband died: Transiting Neptune one degree off my descending [that’s the seventh house cusp, the house of marriage], quin my natal sun, and what rules my eighth house? Pisces, which is ruled by Neptune. Nice call, Alice!, So, here’s another way I could have predicted when my husband would die. I did, but not by this method.)

"Home moves also almost always have a quincunx transit, progression or direction as does conception and childbirth.

It can even show up when you meet the love of your life as this is likely to completely change your life."

And, um …

"If you have a natal YOD,  transits, progressions or directions that activate this configuration will indicate important times in the life.  If the YOD involves outer planets, then when that outer planet activates either of the other legs of the YOD  by transit you are likely to have some powerful experiences that can make core changes to your nature and your approach to life."

As I said, Uranus is one of the planets in my yod. Not only that, but when she read both our charts she felt that I was showing up as Uranus in Chi’s. (Apparently he shows up as Uranus in mine also.)

And WHAT did I just have?? Uranus sitting on Saturn, the apex of my yod and the handle of the bucket, making all those godforsaken squares. Now, when she read my chart she told me these things: This yod represents a spiritual test I have set up for myself before I came here to live this life, with great benefits to me if I pass. I am in spiritual graduate school and have done well with whatever situation I am testing myself on in this lifetime, over several lifetimes before. She didn’t think it had anything to do with Chi, or that there would be any adverse effects if I didn’t pass whatever test this is in this lifetime, just that my soul is trying to find out whether I’ve mastered something or not, and that it has to do with relationships and creativity due to the houses and signs involved. Hmm.

But then I found this yod article I had never seen before.

After I read that, I was thinking of what Alice had told me, but also of what I have learned about Saturn in my chart that I didn’t know enough astrology to know about at the time Alice read our charts a couple of years ago.

Now, what else is Saturn in this chart?? All those psychological problems introduced by my parents when I was growing up! So you have to look at the yod as, here are Neptune and Uranus here at the bottom trying to get along, but the thing damming up the works is the Saturn at the tip, the planet of restriction that we know, because of all the squares and what they represent, is all the psychological problems I have from growing up with a BPD mom and an absentee dad. I’m not really sure who “Astromanda” is, but she says that the two issues represented by the two planets at the ends of each long leg on the triangle don’t “see” each other or are blind to each other. 

Makes sense. I’ve been blind to much of what’s represented by the four Saturn squares most of my life. So much is made by astrologers of reading THE WHOLE CHART, and synthesizing THE WHOLE THING. So, instead of looking at this yod and going, “The apex is Saturn in the eighth,” I need to be saying, “The apex is these four emotional problems that growing up in a sick family with a BPD mother, overinvolved grandparents, and an absentee dad left me with.” That it took me 50 years to completely understand. “And they don’t work so well with the Neptune here and the Uranus here.”

If Nep Three is a writing career, that totally makes sense, because what are the Saturn squares? My parents made me think I was stupid, and I spent most of my life trying to succeed with fan fiction because I didn’t think I was smart enough or good enough to come up with my own original stories. My parents absolutely squashed any idea I might have of what I wanted to do in life, so I ended up in a career to please them and have had to work my butt off against student loans and time constraints in order to have the time to work on my own original novel ideas once I finally had them in my early forties. Saturn is holding Neptune back; Neptune is blind because of Saturn. Uranus One: Trying to assert myself in an original way in the world, with a Venus flavor because it’s in the Venus decanate. Saturn is holding Uranus back; Uranus is blind because of Saturn.

Astromanda writes that a yod describes a situation or a relationship that’s kind of off again, on again, and I can’t control how it works. Um, is that happening here?? Yup. And what do I see I have to do in order to avoid a huge lifetime catastrophe for two people? (Just sayin’: I think Alice was wrong about the “no big consequences” thing, here. I say two people because there may be nothing anyone can do about Rory. If she’s determined not to find her emotions, wake up in her marriage, and treat her husband better, there may be nothing anyone can do about those consequences for her. There isn’t a person alive on the planet who can be treated like that in a relationship and be okay with it.)

So look at all this: I’ve read one opinion (haven’t found it in other articles by other astrologers yet) that if Saturn is the highest planet in the chart, the individual will rise to prominence, but it’s a HORRIBLE road getting there. Also (different astrologer), if the chart has a formation like my bucket handle, where there’s ONE planet that contacts almost everything else in the chart, a transit going over that planet activates almost everything else in the chart at once, making it a very focused chart where all the planets are working together toward one goal. Often seen in the charts of prominent people, says this astrologer. I have Neptune in house three: often seen in the charts of prominent writers. AND … Midheaven (the point of career) is on the Weeping Sisters. And what do BOTH our transits say happens after 2023, when Chi leaves Rory and we’re together? Our bad legs: He’s still codependent, doesn’t talk up in the relationship, agrees to things he doesn’t like or want, acts and pretends so I have no idea he isn’t happy, and then …

And then …

And THEN …

Something happens in my career and I become successful, and I have a period where I’m busy, stressed, and worried and have to take my eyes off the relationship for a while. And Chi (who never recovered from codependency and STILL has no self-esteem) goes, “I KNEW I WAS REALLY UNLOVABLE! She doesn’t love me after all!!” attracts another affair, and at the highest point of my life I discover I’ve been cheated on and end up so brokenhearted I feel like my success is all dust and ashes.

Sounds like my career point is on the Weeping Sisters? Yeah. I’m going to end up crying, partially  because of my career.

Now look at Chiron in the eighth house: I keep attracting people who break my heart, let me down, and hurt me. I can react horribly, becoming hideously manipulative and controlling, or I can become very wise. Sound like it? Yeah. BUT: It’s also in Aries. According to one astrologer I’ve read, I blow through childhood emotional wounding with this placement like nobody’s business. (I’ll leave you to decide that.)

Here’s the thing: None of this bad stuff has to happen. He has one good leg in his transits where it doesn’t. (I have to look a little harder at mine.) But the only way for that to happen is for BOTH PEOPLE TO WORK THEIR ASSES OFF AT HEALING, GETTING WELL, AND BEING HONEST.

Right now he isn’t doing that, and I can’t control him into doing that. I can’t control him into leaving Rory. If I do that, I get a sick unhealed codependent and both our bad legs. The Weeping Sisters, all of it.

NOW. Having said all that …

Basically, my entire childhood created the idea that I not only can, but should, control other people and how they develop in life—just the same way Rory’s did her. My entire childhood created in me the powerful idea that I can be God and make someone else choose to heal. And that’s the Saturn that’s going to nix all that good stuff in the Davison and throw everything onto the bad legs. That’s going to give me the Weeping Sisters and a cheating husband and make a tragedy out of the second love of my life.

Now look at what our Davison says: Lots of hard work and tough tests for him, a leap of faith for me. Why a leap of faith for me? Because I can’t control whether he chooses to WORK AND GET WELL or not. The only power I have is to observe whether he is electing to do the work or not, and whether he is making progress or not, and STAY THE FUCK AWAY if he’s not. Even if I’m alone for the rest of my life and I’m heartsick about that. Even if it means the happiest times of my life are over forever, never, ever to return. Because I DO NOT CHOOSE WHETHER HE ELECTS TO WORK OR NOT, HE DOES, and WHETHER WE GET THE GOOD LEG OR THE BAD LEG IS ENTIRELY DEPENDENT ON WHETHER HE ELECTS TO WORK.

And my entire childhood has GEARED me to believe I should and do have control over that. The fact is, I. DO. NOT. And therefore can do nothing, nothing, nothing to control the outcome of this. NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

Read the first part of that second yod article. Really.

Now, I have to remember that Chi is an EXTREMELY SKILLED ACTOR. (And here's Moon Opp Neptune, which--guess what? Chi and Rory have in their composite, too. By now it should be obvious why. We're controlling, and he picks controlling women and then can't speak up for himself, because of a childhood that made him feel like he's inferior and has to grovel for anyone to love him.) 

He’s GREAT at smoking out what other people want him to do and giving it to them on the outside, while the real truth is that he’s seething with the resentment of really not wanting to, feeling overtaxed and overwhelmed and overworked, and the depression of unmet needs on the inside. And if he doesn’t want anybody to know, nobody’s going to know. In most cases, therapists joke that if you really want to know the state of the parent’s marriage, ask the children. These children don’t have a CLUE—STILL—and that’s why they’re bludgeoning Chi back into the marriage. Told you … skilled actor.

Now, look at this. What dooms our relationships? In Rory's and my case, it's because we're controlling. Why are we controlling? In my case, it's because childhood taught me that being controlling in trying to make others heal was doing the right thing! But it isn't, and that is a CENTRAL LESSON OF MY LIFE. If I don't get that lesson, I'm going to keep picking and trying to control sick people who don't want to do their work, and the rest of my life is pretty much screwed as far as relationships with other people go.

(Rory appears to be controlling for other reasons.)

Why is Chi thinking he's inferior and groveling and martyring himself to controlling people? Likewise: CHILDHOOD TAUGHT HIM that was the right way, and HE THINKS HE'S DOING THE RIGHT THING. When really he's dooming his relationships, because he's just soul-murdering himself, demanding that he be other than who he really is, and taking a pile of abuse from other people besides. Then he ends up so crazy with pain--as anyone would!--that he has to escape into an affair. And, BOOM! There goes the relationship, even if it was with someone who was struggling to meet him halfway. Nobody can meet you halfway if you don't like yourself, or trust the other person, enough to communicate honestly about your needs and feelings.

This is how a bad childhood dooms relationships and lives. We go all our lives trying so hard to be good and do the right thing, when the problem is we learned the wrong shit to begin with. What we're believing is the right way is actually the WRONG way, and if we can't get that through our thick skulls, we make the same fucking mistakes over and over and over and the problems get worse and worse and worse.

And if you know how, you can find all this in your horoscope chart, as well as the best self-help books. When your chart and your childhood recovery literature is telling you the same thing, and then you see it play out in your life ... well, maybe you should sit up and pay attention. (Parents: Get thyselves into parenting classes immediately!)

If Chi chooses to ACT and LIE rather than GET WELL, and I’m too needy and controlling, I’ll believe him (Nep Three, square ascendant, Prone to miscommunicate, prone to misunderstand, prone to miscommunicate, prone to misunderstand)… leading to the Weeping Sisters and Disaster.

Anybody can tell you, “Don’t have an affair with a married man,” and, “He’ll just turn around and do the same thing to you.” And you can grit your teeth and obey, but you don’t want to. You haven’t changed in your heart, because you haven’t actually LEARNED ANYTHING.

THIS, IS LEARNING SOMETHING. Learning something BEFORE bad things happen, rather than learning something BECAUSE bad things happened. Something Chi’s never done, and needs to cultivate as soon as possible.

All my life, I’ve dealt with horrible situation after horrible situation, wishing I had known all the facts before I chose what I chose.

This time, my wish is granted, thanks to astrology and to a lifetime of reading that taught me what I needed to know to make sense of the astrology. (And desperation miserable enough to make me buy 25 years of transits.)

LEARNING SOMETHING removes the need to do that bad thing and have the affair.

Without the learning, we grudgingly agree to do something out of a lack of understanding, because “Other people say so.”

WITH the learning, we understand why and how. Now we don’t WANT to do it anymore.

Even if we’re still crying because we miss him.

So: Is this a test? Am I going to pass it?

I think it’s a yes on both counts.

I’m not clear what the great benefits are if I pass, though. I see what the consequences are if I don’t, but if I do … is the great benefit just that I get to spend the rest of my “Chiron return” untroubled by the fear that a codependent husband or significant other is lying to me about our relationship because he believes he is no good? Or is it that we get Chi’s good leg and a great relationship?

And, you know, I already know the answer to that.

The answer is what HE decides to do. And I have NO control over that. Period.

And that's what "Astromanda" says yods are about.

Isn't astrology fascinating? 

Just Because You Know What's Wrong With You, That Still Doesn't Make It Go Away.

Present.

I’m discovering as I learn more that I must have one of the unluckiest natal charts you can get. Not ONLY do I have Saturn square my Sun, Moon, Mars, AND Mercury, but I also was born with my midheaven right on top of the Weeping Sisters, and throughout my entire childhood I experienced a really awful phenomenon called “Saturn Chasing the Moon.” (It didn’t end until I moved out of the house and got away from my BPD mother. Isn’t that appropriate??)

Who the FUCK has all that? Not to mention: Saturn yod with Neptune and Uranus, and Saturn is the highest planet in the chart, the “handle” of a bucket formation.

Hmm.

It is said that the Weeping Sisters guarantee you a life with lots to weep about.

No shit.

Something else just occurred to me. Anne Ortelee, when she looked at my chart, told me I’d have met and married someone else by October 2017. I don’t know what she was looking at—Well, yes, I do. She was looking at Chi! But I looked at the same chart and transits and saw me hearing from Chi again. So did Alice Portman, and when I went to class, my teacher pointed out some additional indicators of something Big and Fateful happening then.

At first I thought, well, I can forgive Anne, she didn’t have both our charts. Then, I remembered: Yes, she did. She told me Chi was eight years old emotionally. (Now, that I can believe.)

I was right, over a big practicing professional Manhattan astrologer.

So I guess I’d better pay attention to what I see now.

Except … (and I’ve been through this once already, so I guess that will help.)

This, like last fall, is where I go: It’s May. Regardless of the accuracy of our charts so far, free will trumps charts every time. Here’s where it doesn’t happen, and I never see him again. And even though I know how horribly dangerous this relationship is, how unhealthy this person is from a bad childhood, and how resistant he is to doing the work required to get well … I’m still hideously depressed. Really, really hurting.

I already know I’m supposed to be grown up. Not needy for relationship, not fused with other people, just taking care of what I have to do every day, humming to myself and in a happy or at least even frame of mind, like everyone else. But something’s just plain wrong with me.

I know that this place where my heart just hurts and hurts is really just that baby and young child from 45 years ago, squashed by sick parents and rejected by cruel schoolmates and let to cry all alone. I know. But I still can’t make it stop, and I still can’t make it go away.

And I really need to get over this, because I see now, from the time my husband died, I was going to be all alone in my life for at least ten years, no matter what, and possibly even longer than that. I may have the power to barge in and change what’s going to happen. If I insist, I don’t have to be all alone for the next ten years. But if I do that, there’s hell to pay. 

Basically, I can choose to be all alone in my life now, or I can put it off until I’m seventy-one. 

I’m wayyyy better off doing it the right way … doing it now. If I grab at the relationship now, because I’m too lonely and weak and sad and scared to just walk away and accept that I might be alone forever and ever more, it’s a sick enmeshed codependent relationship. The same things happen in that relationship that have happened so far in theirs. I’m Rory, and he’s Chi. Nobody learned anything. Nobody got well. And it ends horribly at an age when NOBODY wants their relationship to end horribly.

Clearly, that just can’t take place. So I’m left with:

Scenario One:

He shows up on schedule. He’s still codependent, of course, because he sure as hell wasn’t doing anything with his recovery last fall, and I didn’t see much chance of that happening anytime soon, not with the attitude I was hearing and the people he spends time around. I still have to send him back home, and request once again that he address his own problems, not everyone else’s. We wouldn’t be back in each other’s lives for keeps in any case before 2023 (and there’s more in his chart supporting that.) And maybe Rory wakes up along the way and 2023 never happens. Because if she makes ANY change for the better at ALL, he stays. He doesn’t want to upset his adult children and his family. And that's the way it should be. Iff she wakes up and does better.

Scenario Two:

Something’s happened. He’s too codependent to even try ever getting out of there no matter how miserable he is, or Rory woke up and they fixed their marriage, finally. Summer goes by and he’s just, gone. Even if my transits are right and some relationship shows up in five years—it’s just with someone else—I’m STILL alone for five more years. The only way not to be alone for a total of ten fucking years is to accept an illicit affair with Chi this summer—and that turns out bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Even though we have a Davison with very good potential. As I said, it seems that the reason good Davisons don’t turn out good is: Somebody’s being an asshole.

And what do we usually call people who have an affair with a married person (among other things)?

Although, I have to say: that 2023 relationship is reflected in all three sets of charts and transits. AND progressions. That speaks pretty loudly to me.

Whatever happens, I’m alone for at least five more years, and possibly even longer than that. Alone with the housework, alone with the laundry, alone with the dreariness of life.

It’s not like I haven’t met new people in five years. It’s just that they’ve all had emotional problems, or none of them fit like the relationships I always needed and USED to have.

This is when I go right back to thinking, Those were the good times in my life, and now they’re over and today sucks. There’s no point reminding myself that the company of a stuck, unhealed, self-loathing codependent wouldn’t help. He’d just yes me and resent me, yes me and resent me, then talk about me behind my back and attract another affair instead of risking and showing up and connecting and being authentic and being real, and the relationship would LOOK wonderful and BE fake. (Just like their marriage.)

I know. And it isn’t helping.

Why can’t I just be healed and live life like other people? What is it going to take to change my feelings and get me there?

**************************************************
Shortly after I wrote all that, this thought surfaced ... 

(coming next week ...)

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.

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.

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