WHY the Right Answers Are the Right Answers, Book Three

FUTURE

(includes ANOTHER PREDICTION.)

So we’ve seen that all three of the people in my triangle, Rory, Chi, and me, all didn’t grow up right due to unhealthy parenting, and we’ve all given up on ourselves in some way. We each have the child’s desire to avoid the hard work of growing up by fusing with someone else who will kiss the boo-boos on our knees the way Mommy should have when we were three, and who will take over our problem areas and do them for us.

But we’re not three anymore, and we don’t need Mommy to kiss our boo-boos and take over and do it for us. What we need is to experience our own feelings of strength, and the competence that comes in finding out we can do it ourselves. Rory and I need to do whatever it is we want to do on our own, without somebody super-competent in worldly affairs like Chi there to take over for us in case we can’t. Chi needs to esteem himself appropriately on his own, instead of martyring himself to someone else so we’ll keep telling him he’s okay.

(It doesn’t matter WTF we say anyhow. He doesn’t believe it anyway. His believer is broken, and nobody can fix that but him, under the guidance of a competent therapist.)

Everybody in the triangle needs to grow, heal, and develop so they feel okay on their own, standing as separate people, and don’t smother their significant other, in the event that they do have someone.  I can look back over the past four years, and the entries in this blog, and I think I’ve done most of my work and am about there.

What I saw two and a half years ago was Chi waking up and realizing he needs to get there, because maintaining this infantile fusion state with other people has costs. Yes, they love him, but they don’t love who he really is, because he’s too scared to show them anything they won’t love. So he’s kept the parts of who he really is that will disappoint anyone under wraps, and acted and pretended to be who others wanted and only who others wanted, for forty years. It hurts to be someone else and not yourself all the time, and two and a half years ago Chi noticed it was getting more and more and more and more painful. Especially when you’re with ANOTHER person who also wants fusion because she doesn’t want to grow up, either, and that person’s need for fusion manifests as caustically as Rory’s.

Here’s the sad thing. Looking down the road at Chi’s transits from about 2023 on, if he doesn’t complete growing up emotionally within the next seven years, and he gets paired with someone weaker than Rory, he starts acting just like her! Demanding emotional fusion and caretaking from his next partner—only in a sullen, whiny, needy, complaining way that’s childishly, babyishly demanding and drives his next partner away.

So:

Seeing that this is the problem for all three people—this fear of how tough the world is, that we’re in some way not good enough, that we’ll never be good enough to be loved or to competently take care of ourselves, so we think we need someone else to be Mommy and do it all for us—obviously, growing out of it is good. We all need to grow out of unhealthy Neptune into mature adult beings.

But, there’s only one right way. And, for anyone contemplating an affair out there, that is: Your ASS in the therapy chair—with somebody COMPETENT—finding out what went wrong in your particular childhood. Reading the books, watching the videos, keeping the journal, suffering the pain of remembering what happened to you, crying the tears, listening to what your therapist tells you and doing as you are asked.

That’s what I’ve done the past two and a half years, and that is the process you see reflected in this blog.

Not that that’s the only way to do it. There is another way, and it sounds something like this:

I feel stifled in my relationship. I feel unhappy. This person is treating me badly. I find another person who treats me better. (What’s talking here: the need for growth, the need for health, the need to develop oneself as a whole person.)

But when I try to leave—! Uh, uh-oh, but my son said this. Uh, uh-oh, but my daughter said that. Uh, uh-oh, but my cousin just WON’T approve! Oh, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, but everybody is looking at me funny! Oh, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, but Rory just showed me real emotion (for five minutes out of the past twenty years) and she was angry and she said everything was allmyfaultandI’mabadguy! (What’s speaking up and talking here: Unhealed, unhealthy needs for approval; unhealed, unhealthy needs for fusion with other people.)

So what happens? The person runs to the second partner, feels unlovable for doing something so bad, then runs back to the first one and feels unloved again. Back to Number Two, feels unlovable and bad, back to Number One, feels unloved. Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping! like a pinball in an arcade machine. And unfortunately, in our case, it’s pretty clear that THIS triangle can become stable, last a miserable seven years, and destroy ANYONE’S chances of getting well.

Folks, THIS is why the right things are right. THIS is why we don’t have affairs. THIS is why the better way is working in the therapist’s office to grow ourselves up in a careful, compassionate, thoughtful way. THEN we can decide which relationship is right for us and why, and we can carry that out with a minimum of back-and-forth trauma to everyone. Because when we’re weak, scared, and afraid to do that work, look at what happens. If we just give up the ping-ponging and sit ourselves down in the therapy office and do some damn work on our damn childhood, we can see it if we’re being slaughtered in our primary relationship and we really have to leave someone, and we can do it in a growth-promoting way, with as little damage to ourselves and other people as humanly possible.

And this is why all three charts in my case are in perfect agreement that a stable triangle starts in the next month and wreaks TERRIBLE havoc, and why I’m getting all this advice no matter what oracle I consult, NOT to enter it. Why the tarot says that right about now, either ORDERLY STEPS are taken to SOLVE THE PROBLEM or an unhappy family situation ensues, and the person who decides that outcome is the most feminine knight in the deck, riding slowly and carefully along: ME.

I have to put my foot down and not allow this person to run from pain and try to solve his childhood wounding in a way that won’t solve it: an affair.

All I can say is, thank fuck for all that Saturn I wrote about earlier, all those difficult circumstances that made my life hell for so long. At every horrible mess I fell into, I always wished I had had access to all the facts BEFORE I made the decision to do something, because if I had, I would never have made the choice that I did.

Well, now, thanks to that horrible childhood that made me read all that psychology, and those enchanting four months, the loss of which drove me to astrology, I had the capacity to do the work to see all this ahead of time, so I can heal the right way and insist that others do, too. If I didn’t know then what I know now, I’d be so scared of losing Chi again that I’d hang on and refuse to let go this time.

When the truth is, if he will not get himself into the therapy chair and heal from his childhood at the hands of alcoholic and woefully incompetent parents, he will always live his life dishonestly, and he’ll never have a relationship that does not end in disaster.

And it’s important that both he, and I, know that.

And now that I DO know that, there is NO EXCUSE for ANY unhealthful behavior on my part over the coming months. (Should the occasion, in fact, arise.)

Folks, there really is only one right way.

Go to therapy, not your affair.

WHY the Right Answers Are the Right Answers, Book Two

PRESENT

I said my main complaint with the “Just Forget It And Move On” approach is, You don’t learn anything.

And for many moons I have had something I very much wished to learn.

Chi’s, Rory’s, and my horoscopes are all chock full of Neptune, Neptune, Neptune. And that is said to be a double-edged sword. It CAN work out well, but oftentimes it turns into a motherfucking nightmare in which one person, either criminally or with the best of intentions, deceives and hurts the other one. Or worse, in different ways, they deceive and hurt each other. Seeing how this has played out in the Chi/Rory marriage, and in the almost-dissolution of the Chi/Rory marriage two years ago, I have always wanted to know more. How? Why? How do we stop it?

And searching for the answers has been maddening. There are many answers in the codependency books, and in the ACoA books, but one word keeps cropping up with Neptune in astrology that made no sense. It is: Redemption. Redemption, redemption, redemption.

Like Jesus on the cross? WTF?? In a relationship? WTF is “redemption” supposed to mean?

I now have an answer to that question, and whether you believe in astrology or not, this answer has a LOT to do with the reason some affairs happen and a lot of relationships don’t go well. If you’re in one or you’re contemplating an affair, you might want to read this.

I’m getting this from the Neptune Queen herself, Liz Greene. Please note that Liz Greene is also a practicing therapist, or at least, used to be one (I think she is about seventy years old now), so this has a grain of truth either way. Unfortunately, most well-known astrologers have a tendency to be long-winded. Liz Greene takes you through every myth involving any kind of Neptune imagery that there ever was, with a whole lot of highfaluting mumbo-jumbo. You don’t need to slog through her whole book on Neptune to figure out what she means by “redemption.” Condensing several chapters down into several paragraphs, what is meant by this idea of Neptune and the need for “redemption” is this:

I think we’re no stranger to the fact that life is hard. Life is gut-wrenchingly, horribly terrible at times. When life is too hard—especially when life is too hard too young—human beings give up and start to falter at the difficulty, the pain, the struggle of it all. Human beings begin to think that they are too weak. Human beings begin to believe that they are too stupid, too repulsive, too unlovable, too incapable to make it on their own. And then they start to get lazy. And then they start not to try. Whatever it is that they are after—true love in a good relationship, the capacity to get out there and work and earn and provide enough for themselves on their own, the ability to esteem themselves properly on their own without someone else there to provide constant, constant cheerleading: “Attaboy, attagirl, attaboy, attagirl! Good boy, good girl! Good boy, good girl!”—they believe it is beyond their capacity. And that they are suffering so terribly without whatever it is they need that they think they can never be happy.

This is where Liz Greene discusses the old idea of the “hysterical” personality, exemplified in Victorian times by women who just kind of flipped out and went nuts, and for whom getting married and having sex was invariably prescribed. WTF?? This I never understood, and always wondered what the term “hysteria” actually meant. The above, this person who’s given up on themselves and believes they are too weak, too bad, or too deficient in some way to ever make something essential in life work for them, is in grave danger of becoming “the hysterical personality.”

The hysterical personality starts to pose as someone sick in some way, too defective to achieve whatever essential life skill they believe they are too deficient to ever achieve. Then they start to cover themselves over with an excuse of some kind of illness as a way to get out gracefully, to be excused for not making it, and to elicit caretaking from another person. Bad, bad things have happened, often when this person was very, very little. Life feels so hard, so miserable, so awful, so terrible, so painful to these people that they often experience a wish that they weren’t even alive, or weren’t even born, or to be a baby again, to go back to that blissful time in childhood when they were too little to do anything and Mother swathed them, cuddled them, soothed them, nursed them, made everything okay for them, and took care of their every need. So in adulthood they develop some kind of way to interface with another person in order to elicit this kind of caretaking from them and achieve this wish for perfect fusion in blissful wholeness with someone else, instead of reaching courageously deep inside and achieving wholeness within themselves as a separate person. And they don’t want to risk telling their truth if it might anger or upset someone else, because they want that blissful caretaking, which requires fusion of who they are with who someone else is, and disagreement threatens that fusion. If I disagree she won’t love me anymore. And I need her to love me, because I believe that I am bad, and she believes that I am good for me. And she tells me and tells me and tells me and tells me, and if we disagree she might not say that anymore.

This is where I’m reminded of myself, having panic attacks every time I felt too alone in my life. This is where I’m reminded of Rory, artfully arranging everything in her life so that she only has to work one day a week, and spends most of her time in creative work and in close communion with other people of like interests, with Chi to handle all financial and practical matters and to cling close while accepting the emotional distance that feels safe to her. And this is where I’m reminded of Chi, who’s told me he’s always felt repulsive and unlovable, and who’s spent his whole life letting the important decisions be made by other people. Tappity-tappity-tap dancing right up to the age of sixty, performing for other people’s approval and then exclaiming in despair, “Things look good and everybody else is happy. How come I am not? What’s wrong with me?”

It’s this: We’re all hysterical personalities. We’ve all given up on ourselves in some essential area of life that all humans are supposed to master, and we want someone else to fix our feelings of distress at how hard and sad life is, instead of digging deep and fixing those feelings ourselves.

Which is too bad, because NO ONE ELSE CAN FIX OUR FEELINGS. Fixing our feelings of distress at how hard it is to achieve in our particular problem area is AN ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILL. When we plant our two front feet like a mule and absolutely refuse to master that life skill, because we’re afraid we’re no good or we’re afraid of the pain of facing our pasts and how we were treated by sick parents who couldn’t love us, we begin to do terrible things in our relationships. We make our significant other into the one who’s supposed to fix the feelings we won’t fix, to make the money we won’t make, to make us feel secure when we won’t develop our own security. And Liz Greene sums this up in one word: Redemption. We’re looking for someone else to save us, BECAUSE WE ARE REFUSING TO MASTER THE ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILL OF SAVING OUR OWN SELVES.

The sick people I know are all manifesting this same core weakness, just in different ways. My ninety-four-year-old great aunt: Left at an impressionable age by a father who found another woman in an era where you just did NOT get divorced, unable to have children of her own, she responded by adopting a special needs child who would never outgrow her need for her, and doting that child into a monster who now has mood control problems and hits people. My mother: Sexually molested by my grandfather, unable to handle it as a teenager and then sexually molesting her sister, she grew up feeling dirty, repulsive, horrible, stupid, and absolutely unlovable. Instead of challenging herself to grow, get an education, get a job, provide for herself, she has attached herself to two different men who provided for her while she descended into BPD tantrums and helplessness, blamed other people for not taking care of her and making her feel better, and pretty much alienated every close relationship she ever had.

Me: Growing up with a mentally ill mother and absent father, with parents who whipped me into being the hero overachiever without ever helping me to do anything, encouraging me, showing me any  support unless I reflected well on them, and expected me to emotionally caretake my mother and be just like her, I grew up thankful I could make good grades because I sure was stupid otherwise. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right, and that there must be something deeply wrong with me because everyone hated me. I grew up longing for the loving family I never had and willing to sacrifice everything I wanted if it looked like I could get that. And when my husband died and I lost that, I floundered for four years, sure I could never be happy on my own, and that I would descend into poverty somehow unless and until I had someone to help me handle life’s vicissitudes and provide me with companionship and happy times. I had weird GERD symptoms and was terrified I would have a heart attack because I didn’t have money until recently to see a doctor or afford any kind of therapy. And I started to strongarm someone into caretaking me, even as he was asking me to caretake him.

Unhealthy. Very, very unhealthy. Headed for disaster. Time to turn the Titanic around, BEFORE it hits the ice.

Chi: Raised by an alcoholic mom and a limp-dick dishrag dad, he grew up feeling like there must be something deeply wrong with him because his parents wouldn’t love and take care of him and his brother the way all little children need to be loved, esteemed, and cared for. Then a series of tragedies made him even more sure it was all just him, that the universe had it in for him because he was just born no good. He joined a religious cult, decided there was no God, left the cult, then met Rory, the first woman who showed any interest in him, and submitted to becoming her financial caretaker and everything else she wanted, trying to earn her love. And when she turned out to be an emotional distancer, domineering, caustic, and controlling, he assumed once more that it must be him, or that all marriage must be this way. Then he met me, discovered otherwise, but ran back to her because she showed him real emotion for the first time in twenty years, got angry, and blamed him, telling him all the problems in the marriage were his fault. How did that turn out? Tune in next…

Rory: (And I have to speculate here, because I have this from reading about her personality type and searching her horoscope, with only a little independent corroboration.) Raised in a strict, authoritarian family with little warmth for children, she had an absent father because he died in her early teens. Left to work and raise three young children on her own, Rory’s mother became an emotional tyrant who hurt her sensitive daughter very deeply. Rather than risk that kind of intruding suffocation ever again, Rory buried her feelings so deeply even she couldn’t reach them anymore, and looked for someone she could be close to without being hurt. Someone who would satisfy her every need and not need too much from her himself. See how Chi fits perfectly there?

Each person has their fantasy redeemer. My aunt, who never wanted to lose love again, picked out my cousin, her adopted daughter, and look what she did to that relationship. My mother, feeling both completely incapable in the world and also completely unlovable, picked out my father and stepfather and me, and look how those relationships went (badly.) Rory, feeling deeply insecure in life and also afraid of close relationships, picked out someone gifted enough to provide and low enough in himself to accept being henpecked and distanced at the same time, and look what she did to that relationship. Chi, feeling absolutely repulsive and unlovable, accepted someone domineering and controlling. (Who else would look for a guy who had so little self, except someone who needed to effect a full takeover of someone else?)

And me. Little ole me. I worked my ass off at understanding what happened in my family of origin, but I still felt stupid and incapable no matter how much I achieved. It took nursing my husband to his end with a brain tumor while still excelling at my job to convince me that I could hold my own in life, and still I felt like I needed a parentlike relationship to dandle me on its knee all the time. Like my dreams were worthless, and I had better have a close relationship, because there wasn’t anything in life really worthwhile without one. And Chi and I looked at each other, and look at what we were starting to do! In four months! I intimated I needed him to do this, this, and that, and I would love him in return, and he said yes, yes, and yes. Until Rory guilted him and he couldn’t do it anymore.

How would that relationship have turned out? Without a LOT of consciousness and work…disaster.

Because we are ALL supposed to master our OWN life skills, instead of strongarming someone else into fixing our upset feelings for us. WE are supposed to become healthy and whole people, no matter how that got derailed in childhood, and no one else can do that work FOR us. Instead of longing for a fantasy redeemer, someone who will magically make us feel better, we need to get ourselves in that therapy chair and make OURSELVES feel better. Instead of trying to BE someone else’s fantasy redeemer—so we can prove how good we are or so that person will help us do things we think we can’t do ourselves, WE are supposed work this all out and become our OWN fantasy redeemer—our OWN whole person. Or we destroy another potentially good relationship.

And that’s what “Moon opp Neptune” is warning Chi and me about.

“I love you,” does not mean, “because you fix my upset feelings and make me feel better about myself,” or, “because you take care of me so I do not have to work to become competent myself, at properly esteeming myself or properly taking care of myself.” That shit, for shit it truly is, is falling off the knife-blade edge Neptune warns us about, into the trash dump.

“I love you,” means “I love you as the human being that you are,” or it means nothing at all. That means seeing the other realistically and loving the best that’s in them and having compassion for the worst; without stepping on their side of the line to fix it for them because you wanna be A Good Guy. If you can manage that, you are stepping carefully off the knife-blade edge Neptune warns us about, into a safe, mature, and happy home.

Whether anyone else happens to live there with you, or not.

A Flash From The Past...

PAST


I wrote this back in May of 2016.

I went back and looked at my current horoscope transits, trying to find the answer to this yod. What AM I being tested on? How DO I pass?

I’ve read these things only about a jillion times and only now are they beginning to make sense. They say, in brief, that something horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible has happened/is happening in my life. That I’m taking it, and myself, so seriously that I’m able to be extremely creative. That I have foresight right now and can recognize opportunities. That there’s a danger I may behave ruthlessly and hurt other people very badly. That this is so bad I’m struggling to survive psychologically, but that something about this works in my favor…eventually.

That I’m horribly, painfully lonely. That I finally see that I really haven’t had a good life overall, and that I’m expecting just compensation as if this were a courtroom, that I’ve been expecting it like a little child expecting to go to Disneyland one day. That I finally see that life never works this way, and I decide to give this fantasy up for good. 

That I need to give up the ideas that I’ll get what I think I deserve, that there will always be someone to love me, and that perfect love or lasting happiness can or should occur. That I need to give up believing that love and relationships will support me and that support from other people will always be there to make me happy. That I am an adult, not a child, and I am now alone to fend for myself. That I need to stop being this emotional child and grow up now and take care of myself on my own, or this will just happen all over again. (In 2020-2021, when I have The. Worst. Horoscope. Ever. Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson.)

That I feel so desperate I don’t make good decisions. That I have this deep, deep need for life and circumstances to treat me very, very well, and I need this so badly I might do anything, and that’s bad. That I just want to go back to the kind of relationship I had with Simon, and that’s not going to be available to me any time soon. That I need to find a project to hunker down and work on, don’t get into drugs, don’t start drinking, and don’t fall for another relationship where it looks like “everything’s perfect.” As long as I need that, I’m going to be miserable.

Life is tough and cold for a good long time, and I’m going to be alone in it. Happily or unhappily is up to me.

I also read that something is coming up in September that’s going to upset me, but I’m finding some way to look at life so these things don’t slaughter me anymore. This aspect of it is good. And whatever it is that happens, not to get upset, fly off the handle, and do something stupid, because what I do helps shape what happens next. That all I can do to help things is just sit tight and try to see the deeper reason it’s all happening.

That something life-shakingly horrible has happened to my entire world view. (And yeah, I can really see this.) That I’m reacting very painfully and dramatically, either becoming horribly depressed or trying to control other people. That I’m supposed to use this time to take care of myself and understand myself, and to control myself, not other people. That I’m supposed to honor my feelings but DO NOT strike out at anyone. 

I’m supposed to be learning about myself and about the worse aspects of human nature, achieve deep insight, and become strong enough to cope with this. These things happen to the best people, and I’m just supposed to toughen up and deal with it. That there’s no easy answer to this, I’m in a situation I don’t morally agree with, and this is the challenge. That I’m supposed to be strong and behave with integrity. NO power trips, NO manipulation. That this is an extremely important time and how I choose to handle it is important. (Sounds like my yod, right?) That this is just a really, really bad time and I’m supposed to be developing myself and my character. That I’m supposed to be learning detachment and self-sufficiency. That I’m supposed to become absolutely and fully able to handle anything life dishes out, all by myself and all alone. 

This has a lot to do with what comes next...