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.

What You Need in Order to Do Well in Therapy

I love Family Tree Brand Life Coaches.



From therapist Mark Smith, here is his list of how he can pick out which clients are going to do well and which aren't.

1.)    Highly motivated to change (yourself, not somebody else. And may I also add, change, not complain.)

2.)    Teachable

3.)    Be able to feel and embrace the emotional pain from family of origin

4.)    Ability to trust the therapist

5.)    Will do homework…read books, watch videos, do a 12 step program, etc.

6.)    (I just thought of this one myself.) If you find yourself in a therapeutic environment that isn’t helping you make progress, you can recognize that and look for a program that has what you need.


Also from my man Mark:

Effective Therapists:

1.) Don't lord it over you with a "Me Doctor, You Patient" attitude. They speak from their own experience too and "keep it real."

2.) They have done their own family of origin work.

3.) Works with the here and now issues going on with the therapist in the therapy room. (Especially if dealing with borderline personality disorder.)

 4.) Offers unconditional positive regard, but will confront you if you need it.

5.) Consults with other therapists when needed. (Especially when treating personality disorders.)


Lots of people can do well, they just need to connect with the right therapist and do the work.

Avoid the Below-Average Therapist

PAST...

I still remember, and you might, too, the times last summer and fall when I was on here shaking in my size 8 shoes, wondering if Chi would be back when the astrology said he would and if I was just plumb crazy.

I thought, just because I turned out to be right and he DID show up again, that would be the end of my worries. Right?

Wrong.

There turned out to be quite a big difference between what I had expected, through everything I had been reading, and what actually turned out to have happened.

To explain: What was I reading? (And, more to the point, what was I watching? I spent a lot of time on You Tube, watching the fabulous videos put together by Family Tree Life Coaches . Although, I have to say, for codependency, life coach Lisa Romano is quickly becoming a fave.)

I was reading a bunch of stuff by therapists, about all these relevant issues. And the thing is, it's usually the BEST therapists who get books published and put free videos out online. So I was sort of living in a dream world where, wherever Chi and Rory went, they would be getting that caliber help.

It doesn't sound like it, to put it mildly.

I was reading books like Should I Stay or Should I Go? How a Controlled Separation Can Save Your Marriage 

and

The White Knight Syndrome: Rescuing Yourself from the Need to Rescue Others

and

Facing Love Addiction: Giving Yourself the Power to Change the Way You Love

That last one really mislead me, in a way. Not that I didn't see a whole lot of truth in it about me, Chi, and Rory, but from what I was reading there, I at least expected Chi and Rory to reconnect. In that book, the pattern described is: the love addict moves out, and when that person gives up and tries to end the relationship, the love avoidant turns around and tries to pursue the love addict, and for a while things look good. The love addict is happy to be wanted, the love avoidant is happy to have the love addict back again, and they're close again for a while until things get too close for the love avoidant again and the love addict gets too clingy and needy again and well...

...it all falls apart.

I was also, of course, reading the astrology.

Rory certainly had the transits where she could have knuckled down and done some hard work on herself to save her marriage. I saw when they were, and looking up at the above, thinking they were getting that caliber of help, and seeing only what I could see on their Facebooks, it certainly looked like it.

I expected either that they would be fine, or, if they weren't and he came back, it would be because they had a moment of reconnection and relapsed. I thought if he showed up again, it would be my relationship with Chi vs. Rory's relationship with Chi, not my relationship with Chi vs. a total nonstarter and the opinions of family and friends.

Then Chi actually showed up again, and I got the report of what really HAD happened.

Good grief.

Imagine my surprise and dismay when I heard what their therapy experiences had really been like. Imagine my surprise and dismay when I heard that Rory, after attacking Chi with the news that ALL the problems were his fault and she was angry he didn't even want to go to marriage counseling, sort of sleepwalked through it and acted like she really didn't want to be there herself. I thought when Chi left our club meetings and didn't come back, it was because they reconnected and he moved back home.

Well...he'd moved back home, all right. The reconnection bit...not so much. He lived in the father-in-law suite for several months and is in the process of halfway moving back in there again.

Jesus.

I thought I would be peeking back in on a situation in which the participants had done at least SOME work and made at least SOME progress. Not so!

Rory is just as cold and self-centered and emotionally vague and constipated as ever. Chi, instead of working on his own codependency and low self worth--which were the things I talked to him about that day, lo, THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO when I convinced him to go for help, went right back to focusing on other people and other people's problems, and through a combination of family issues, health issues, and therapists I believe were downright incompetent, pretty much hasn't moved an INCH since I last spoke to him.

This is bad. Really bad.

For those reading this, there are a lot of bad therapists out there. If you go to therapy for a marital issue, especially a midlife one, what you need to be seeing and hearing when you start is some assessment of your childhood home and family environment. This is because most marital issues start in childhood, and we all bring any wounding done to us by parents and family on into the present unless and until we sit ourselves down and do some very serious WORK on it.

If your therapist isn't requiring that you do this, you may be spending your money on a rather expensive Band-Aid. Go check out the videos I mention and you will see the kind of approach I mean.

I spent my childhood watching a stuck parent not take advantage of therapeutic materials around her and continue ruining her own and everyone else's life.

I hate to say it, but it kind of looks like I am watching it again.

And that's sad, because what if Chi ever did leave Rory? He's still as sick as a goddamn dog. Now I inherit the problems, and this person has shown little motivation to work on them. Let any family member anywhere in the northern hemisphere wave one of their own problems at him, and...oh...whoops! There he goes...up...up...and AWAY to solve all their problems for them, and then complain three years later how he's taking care of all these other people again.

That's codependency.

And I could kick, I really could kick, this therapist of his all over town for putting him in group therapy only after a measly eight weeks, and not insisting on ATTACKING THE CODEPENDENCY AND LOW SELF ESTEEM. Head on. With serious intensive work. BEFORE marital therapy!

Look how much work I've done in three years and look how sad this situation is.

Ai, ai, ai.

Anyway, don't end up like this. Check those links out, and avoid the below-average therapist.

A Funny Thing...

PRESENT

After I finished writing all that, I felt happy. I felt like I had had a happy day I was satisfied with.

I actually felt like my old self for the first time in over four years.