Willingness.

Present.

Since the time for the predictions is rolling around, and I haven't seen hide nor hair of Chi, this is the time I'm starting to get worried. To the point of upset, to the point of obsessed.

And that isn't okay. Obsession is painful. Obsession obscures everything else that might have been good in my life. Obsession increases the chance of doing something DUMB. Obsession means I won't be happy with anything other than the outcome I wanted. And that outcome, as far as my eyes can see, isn't happening.

Astrology. What a double-edged sword. What I've discovered helped me feel better, in that I saw that stepping into this in the first place did something beneficial in this person's life--at least in terms of showing him that what he was dealing with wasn't normal and that he could actually have a relationship in which he was treated differently. I once had an hour-long panic attack because of my ethical qualms in doing this. AND I have seen, thanks to last October, that I don't have to hate myself for what is normally a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to do. He needed it. It was beneficial for him...although it did usher in a period of, um, change in their relationship. In that sense, being able to read charts has been helpful.

BUT...unfortunately for me, I could also see the best possible outcome of our relationship. And it was one that I would have been very happy with. This has been unfortunate for me, because now I want that and I'm anxious about it.

I keep going around and around about this. Right about now, Rory has some pretty big transits showing she's being borderline abusive to Chi again. (Nothing she hasn't done before, sad to say.) And this was to be the occasion of her entire next year, which I took a look at this week and found...shocking.

She has exactly one out of twenty-four transits that talks about happiness in her intimate relationship. ONE. A couple more talk about being of retirement age, and about happiness in things she's doing in the outside world. The rest, and I mean ALL the rest, are talking about great unhappiness in her intimate relationship, the fault mainly of Rory herself, and fully twelve out of twenty-four transits and progressions talk about somebody in the relationship having an affair. (Three guesses who that is.)

Correspondingly, only three of twenty-two transits and progressions he has speak of any kind of peace in his intimate relationship. ALL of the rest describe great unhappiness, and five specifically point to an affair starting.

Of mine, half are talking about being the third party in an affair, cautioning me to watch my behavior and stay out of power and control. In the other half, I'm all alone, and half of those, I'm sinking into ennui and despair about it. The other half of the alone ones show me finding a creative purpose for my life and being content with just that.

That last is, well, a happy enough ending, I guess. Things, as you can see, could be a hell of a lot worse.

But, thanks to astrology, I have our Davison, which shows me that the happiest of endings here was indeed possible (once possible?) and of course when you meet someone you are that compatible with and love this much, you want that ending. (At least, I do.)

This is the bad side of being able to read for yourself. Now I sit here and point at that happiest of endings, and go, "But how do I get there?"

Here is where I start to second-guess myself. What if I had said yes last October?? Well, if I had, I would have virtually guaranteed the affair starting right around now, because we would have been speaking regularly and in contact.

But I said no. I had the chance to say yes, and I said no. 

Does that mean I can never be with this person now, because I heard from him again and I said no?? Was that my only window, and now it's over and that's the end, because I could have said yes then and I didn't??

In that case, am I sorry I said no?

Yes, because I love and want this person and that may have been it, my last chance!

But...wait a minute...

WHY did I say no?

I said no because I saw in the astrology, and I knew from the past, that if he had me to complain to and fantasize about, he wouldn't W-O-R-K ON HIS CODEPENDENCY. He wouldn't engage with his problems. He'd simply use me as an escape and as a complaining outlet, and he wouldn't get better. Clearly, that would not be the best outcome for him, so I bit the bullet and did what I knew was right. I did what I knew would be best for him.

Besides, I knew that there would only be one reason I would have said yes to that. Because I saw that he was sniffing around again, and I was trying to tempt him away from Rory once again. In other words, an unhealthy exercise of power and control, which I am expressly advised NOT to do, and which I completely see the wisdom of. 

These two VERY good reasons were why I said no last October. AND ALSO...

Looking ahead to this year, I could see that I stood an excellent chance of getting him back again no matter what I did, so I bet big. I placed a BIG bet that if I did the right thing, I would get him back anyway...which made doing the right thing a whole lot easier. If I really believed then that if I did the right thing, I'd lose him forever...I'm not so sure I could have done the right thing.

So now I've done the right thing...and I'm doomed to lose him forever no matter HOW shitty Rory acts from here on in??

Wow. Life IS unfair.

(Again.)

So now I find myself in a tailspin. When was I supposed to see this person again, anyhow?? The last time was pretty easy to extrapolate. The markers I used last time were clearly obvious to me. I'm trying to pin down how my teachers did it, and I'm afraid I'm just not good enough to be able to pin anything down to any specific month. Some of the same kinds of things are active again, but that's over a period of time and I don't know how to pin anything down any better. All I know is, if it's March 1st and he's still gone, he's probably gone forever at that point.

And I keep doing this to myself and it's miserable. Why do I want someone who puts me through this???

I had to think long and hard about that. 

One answer, and this one I know. (Besides that, it's also clearly spelled out in the astrology.) And that is, I DO NOT HAVE CONTROL.

I've been over this before. I. HAVE. NO. CONTROL. OVER. THE. OUTCOME. OF. THIS. SITUATION.

Just like I have no control over what my mother did and whether she got well and ever treated me better or not, I have no control over Chi and whether he will ever get well and treat me better or not. As with all problematic love relationships, this one mimics, absolutely perfectly, the old childhood struggle to get my mother to act better and treat me, a tender, vulnerable young child, the way I needed and deserved for her to treat me.

(So does Chi's with Rory and Rory's with Chi, come to think of it. That's why we're in the triangle to begin with.)

I have one and only one legitimate area of control: If the relationship shows up again, look to see if it appears healthy or not. If not, say no. (That's what I did last October.)

Last year I accepted that. This year, I have to bring myself back to the fence and accept it all over again. Because I lived a childhood that taught not only that it was GOOD for me to try to control other people's decisions to heal or not heal, but that I COULD control other people's decisions to heal or not heal.

And I can't.

The only person who can decide to heal is Chi. And if Rory does, too, I lose.

(At least two of us would be happy that way. An almost acceptable outcome.)

The other problem I see is one of willingness.

In order to accept the outcome that Chi and Rory grow together and become happy again, and I never see him again, or they don't, but he just doesn't respect himself enough to leave because he still feels as if everyone else's feelings are more important than his own (this is unhealed codependency, folks), I have to be willing for that outcome to happen.

And I'm not.

I want my fairytale, goddamnit!!!

No, I don't want everyone else's lives ruined. But, I don't want to be the instrument of ruin, either. Then, I simply have to accept that the only way I get my outcome is if, A.) Rory continues to be the same old Rory--she sure was last October--and, B.) Chi gets healthy enough that leaving looks like the only option.

And I have ZERO control over either of those. Zero, zero, zero.

So I might as well stop scanning those horoscopes and overthinking last October. This has already been decided for me.

All I have to do is accept it, and be willing to live another outcome than the outcome I wanted.

Because it very well may be that next spring rolls around, and I'm still living here in the outcome I didn't want. This outcome I'm not happy in.

And there won't be any recourse then, just like there isn't any now.

How can I make myself stop hurting, and make myself willing to live the rest of my life just the way things are now?

Do I even get a consolation prize for doing the right thing? Like, do I get someone else?? Not that I can see. Not 'til I'm sixty-five, if then.

Clearly, I'm supposed to become happy without Chi, without any romantic male partnership ever, ever again. I'm supposed to be willing for that to happen, I'm supposed to learn to be happy with that.

Man.

That is a very tall order.

But it kind of looks like that's the way it's going to be.

And I'm very sad. That's just the way it is for me. I am very sad.

Because of our Davison--correct in the case of me and my husband, correct in the case of Chi and Rory--I see that we really could have been very happy together. If we BOTH were willing to do the work.

And I hope one day I won't feel this way about it anymore. I am too sad.

I have learned a lot, and I have become wise from this experience. I'm just so, so sorry I had to lose this man in order to do it. The price of wisdom is just too high, sometimes.

I would have been SO much happier the other way. Provided the guy actually got healthy enough to be in a relationship with me, and I felt solid enough in that knowledge.

But I don't control that. Chi does.

What I control is, do I get well from this or not? Can I become happy again, no matter what happens?

And HOW THE FUCK DO I DO THAT????

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.

Interesting post about the "Chiron Return"

ChironTransits

 

(I didn't get the Rory one done yet. Sorry, y'all. It's fucking TAX TIME. Until I get it done, here's this...)

Transiting Chiron conjuncting, paralleling, contra-paralleling natal Chiron

 

Otherwise known as the Chiron Return, when Chiron has completed a full cycle of the zodiac and returned to its natal position in our charts.This is the culmination of the journey of Healing and the evolution of consciousness up to the age of 50-51. (Right about now for me.)

 

Its effect will lie somewhere between two extremes, depending on our level of attention and conscious work on the themes of Healing and evolution of consciousness in our lives to date.In all cases, our original Wounds and their attendant issues will surface again.Whether we respond with Love or with fear, guilt, remorse, anger and resentment will depend on our previous work.

If we have not attended to our Wounds and issues during our lives and have not worked towards Healing and higher consciousness, ultimately aspiring to Unconditional Love, we will be thrust back into the thicket of our Woundedness.In this case, our core Wounds and issues will surface again, demanding attention, Healing and resolution. In a sense, we are required to repeat a grade of school. However, the likelihood of truly beginning in-depth work on our subsequent Healing and evolution of consciousness definitely diminishes with time.This is due to our age, to the general level of crystallization of our personality and to associated emotional habits, masks, protective mechanisms and ingrained escape routes.This is not to say that it is impossible.It simply becomes more difficult over time and we become less inclined to bother with it. (Sad to say, this was almost ten years ago for Chi.)

 

In this case, the Chiron Return can be, paradoxically, a time that we hardly notice due to the success of our long-standing patterns of avoidance and evasion.Conversely, it can be a time of monumental regret.The Chiron Return can open the Pandora's Box of our core Wounds and long-standing unresolved issues.Unable to deal with or answer the tortured callings that arise from our fragmented consciousness, we go into crisis or, alternatively, even deeper into retreat.Only in the final moments of death, maybe many years later, will we have an opportunity to feel Healing and sense the Truth of the Love around us and in us.It is only then that the stranglehold of our personality mechanisms finally relaxes with the weakening of our physical vehicle.I venture to suggest that, if you are reading this book and have gotten this far in it, you will not have to fear the aforementioned scenario!

 

If, however, we have attended, to a greater or lesser degree, to our Wounds and issues during our lives, the best we can look forward to is a deep sense of completion and peace during this transit.Although our core Wounds and issues will arise again during this time, our previous work will help us to appreciate and finally Love these Voids that have given us our core Values and, ultimately, our Divine Design.

 

It will be a time when we can move into another octave of Healing and evolution of consciousness.The cycle repeats, but on another finer energetic level, i.e. another octave.We are given an opportunity to move to deeper levels of Healing and higher levels of consciousness, forever expanding to the limits of the solar system and, simultaneously, approaching the focused consciousness of the Sun.Increasingly, Love is our guide rather than fear and guilt.

 

In Truth, the effect of the Chiron Return lies somewhere between these two extremes.Some issues - those that we have fully worked through - we will transcend, moving into a new energetic level of Healing and a new cycle.Others we will have to recapitulate in the next Chiron Cycle, striving for more understanding, higher consciousness pertaining to the issues themselves and deeper Healing of old Wounds.Still others will be deeper Wounds only just uncovered by the previous cycle and representing our next lessons.

 

The Uranus/natal Uranus opposition (half-return) and the Chiron Return work hand in hand to align us with and connect us to the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.It can be a spiritual coming-of-age if we are ready.If we are not, then the destructive forces of Pluto will accelerate our decay, seeking to spade us in, so to speak, in preparation for our physical death and rebirth in a new cycle, i.e. a new incarnation.