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2009 March Astrology Reading On My Emotions
Transcribed from tape of telephone consultation
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POTENTIAL AND PSYCHOLOGY
What I wanted to bring up, have you ever looked at the life of Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? [Me: I think I saw the movie, laughs.] Well, basically this person was another Moon conjunct Pluto person. And the reason I bring him up is that what he did with his magnificent great compositions he could not have done so if he didn’t have this extremely rich emotional life. As difficult as it is for you to deal with in the world that we live in, that Moon conjunct Pluto has given you a very, a wealth to draw upon. And, you know, obviously I’m not saying that Moon conjunct Pluto means that you should go compose music, but the point being that Pluto in mythology, one aspect of him was that he was the god of buried riches.
And what it comes down to is that Moon – Pluto has probably some of the greatest potential for you to tap. [end tape side one]
The key to putting all this together in my mind, the key to trying to make sense of all this and to get all the different parts of your chart together, is to first of all you need to clear out the lies that were buried along with everything else in your unconsciousness. And the number one lie that comes with an abuse situation is that there’s something wrong with you.
OK. Now. Anything that is wrong with you was because something was imposed on you by external. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing inherently wrong with you. You are not a defective piece of merchandise. When you were born there was absolutely nothing wrong with you. And what it comes down to is there is a part of you that still believes or accepts that lie that you’re defective, that there’s something wrong with you. And as long as you keep letting that dictate to you then you’re not going to be able to overcome this feeling of separateness, separation. And you’re, again, going to need to feel like withdrawing into a cave whenever you can to get away.
So the way that I see this, and the way that I see the progression that you need to do in order to be able to deal with everything is (1) you’ve got to, no matter how you have to do it, you have to convince yourself of the truth that there’s nothing wrong with YOU. You’re not defective.
You may have learned, and when I say learned I don’t mean you personally took it upon yourself to learn, I mean there are things you may have learned defective social skills because of that environment.
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[10-2009 Linda note: It is at this point in the reading that my internal ‘radar’ begins to detect a so-called ‘psychological’ rather than strictly astrological bent to the reading takes place. I know from my own research and understanding that because the pervasive and severe abuse I experienced began at birth, these experiences literally physically built themselves into my growing and developing body-brain-mind That’s an entirely different level and kind of ‘learning’..
It then becomes an entirely different kind of process to change anything about who we are coming from those kinds of early abuse experiences. Zane goes on to talk about his abuse experiences with his father. It sounds like the experiences that harmed him were not with his mother. It is particularly when the MOTHER harms the developing tiny child that the permanent and physiological changes take place, and recovering from them is much, much, much different and more difficult than it is to recover from ‘later’ abuse that does not involve the earliest primary caregiver’s abuse.
In general I prefer astrological readings that do not take this turn toward the psychological, but I understand the intention of the reader is the same – to be of helpful assistance, and I appreciate that. I just hear and think about the psychological information with a huge “grain of salt”. While those of us who were ‘changed’ by early attachment deprivations and malevolent treatment are not ‘defective,’ we are different and we are changed. There’s a fine and extremely critical line here. So-called ‘social skills’ are built directly into the structure and operation of an infant’s right, emotional, social limbic brain, and those changes are permanent. We can come to understand what those changes are and how they affect us so that we can find ways to become more ‘ordinary’ in our actions, but our brains will never, themselves, magically turn into ‘ordinary’ brains. In many ways I consider these changes to create dis-abilities for us as we grow up to live in a world that is dominated by ‘ordinary’ safe and securely attached people. These issues HAVE to be considered in recovery. It becomes a sort of sorting out process for us to honestly try to understand what our earliest attachment relationships were like so that we can understand what they did to us.
Zane is not addressing these issues in the rest of the reading, which would leave me inwardly very confused and chasing ‘dead ends’ of useless information if I didn’t already know what I know about myself, my early abuse in particular, and what it did to alter my body-brain-mind. These changes I experiences cannot simply be identified and ‘pulled out and discarded’ on any level. They are built into the physiological operation of who I am in this body, with this brain. I can make changes, yes, but only realistically possible ones based upon the truth and the facts.]
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But the person who has those skills is not defective.
[Me: yes – but – changed. I ended up being an evolutionarily altered person from my early abuse, especially. Zane did not. For those of us raised with abuse from birth it is critical that we understand that while we are not ‘defective’ we are ‘different’ in ways that people who did NOT experience early caregiver abuse probably can never understand or grasp – especially if they are not willing to listen to us tell them what our experience is really like.]
You’ve got to separate the “I am” from “what I do.”
[Me: Again, yes – but – what the early abuse did to me changed how my “I am” developed from the start.]
You’ve got to learn how to basically give the person inside of you acceptance and love, you have to have that child inside you feel loved.
[Me: Again, yes – but – what the early abuse did to me changed the ‘person inside of’ me from the start. Yes, acceptance and love is required, but we have to be discerning here. I have NEVER bought the idea that there’s any kind of a ‘child inside’ of me. That is, to me, a ridiculous concept. My body-brain developed from childhood onward, and the adult me I am today is IT. There’s no ‘child’ inside of me unless it’s a dissociated part of my self that unfortunately remained isolated and cut-off from the rest of me – which IS exactly what has been happening my whole entire life.]
Learn that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve got to teach yourself that.
[Me: Again, yes – but – what the early abuse did to me changed how my “I” developed from the start. Without the abuse, “I” would be different than I now am. We cannot assume that the kind of early abuse that changes a person can magically be reversed in adulthood so that we can magically BE as we would have been had the abuse never happened at all.]
Then along with that you need to also progress to an “I see everybody else is also in the same boat.”
[Me: Again, yes – but – what the early abuse does to some of us is NOT the same as what happens to ‘everybody else’. We are changed, and are not the same as they are. THEY assume that we are. THEY have always assumed that everyone is the same. That is because THEY had early experiences that are meant to be ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’. It is time to understand that there are a lot of us that never had that advantage from the start.]
So that’s how you’ve got to get these pieces to come together. Now once you can say to yourself, “You know, there is nothing wrong with me.” And you can actually say it, it’s not just words but you can actually believe it, you are going to find that exponentially everything starts falling into place.
[Me: Again, yes – but – early abuse DID change me. I need to know that piece, also, and understand that while the changes and adaptations that my body-brain-mind DID make were required for my survival. They are, therefore, a good thing because these changes were useful. But I have to know how a ‘malevolent childhood’ brain IS – what happened to me to make me not WRONG but DIFFERENT. I refuse any longer to accept well-intentioned but erroneous information about WHO and HOW I am in the world. No matter how well-intentioned, the wrong information will not help me in the end to achieve a better quality of life and increased well-being.]
You’re going to, there’s lots of different ways to do this. One of my favorite psychologists [me: see, he is identifying ‘psychology’ here. Psychology is different that ‘pure’ astrology. The former uses human concepts in an attempt to understand while astrology uses what appears in the actual charts to describe what the influences are on a person in their life from the bigger picture’s point of view.] was a gentleman by the name of Fritz Perls. And he developed something called Transactional Analysis [TA].
One of the tools of Transactional Analysis is to set up two chairs. You sit in one, face the other one and imagine whoever it was that was the cause of abuse, putting that person in the other chair. And then basically telling them off. I mean, telling them exactly how you feel. The amount of anger and hurt you have, it’s scary. It’s almost like you’re afraid that if you let it loose it can be the equivalent of a nuclear explosion and destroy everything in your path, and I understand that. But if this person is in the chair and they are not really there, then you can let the full, let it all out. You can tell them exactly how you feel. You can just release as though they were there and even if it was enough to kill the real person there’s nobody really there. It’s a virtual person.
So this is one technique to actually let the person or people who, you know, caused you the abuse, to let them have it, speak your mind, to vent, to tell them everything that you would have liked to have said, tell them how they made you feel. Just – I’m getting emotional just thinking about it.
So, that’s something you MAY want to do. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you may actually want to consider seeking a counselor of some kind to help you to deal with the – [I interjected: “I’ve done that over the years and I’ve reached a point where you can help me far more than they can.]
[10-2009 Linda note: I would never recommend that anyone try what Zane is suggesting without the wisdom of using extreme caution – or consulting a professional if severe abuse is in your history.]
OK.
[me: “I need to ask a question. I think I told you in the beginning the particular for my mother’s psychosis took, and I suspect that somewhere in the chart, or certainly it’s supported for whatever reason because we were dying in childbirth she thought the devil sent me to kill her, and because we survived it her psychosis was that I was not human and that I was the devil’s child. So, from birth everything about me came from that place.”]
Yeah, and you’re basically, you’re feelings of being defective, of there being something wrong with you, that’s obvious that is where it comes from. Anyways, go ahead….
[me: “Well, that’s sort of the whole foundation so I don’t know how good and evil, I don’t understand good and evil, but how that plays out — I mean, Pluto isn’t anything to do with evil even though he’s somewhat connected to the underworld, right?”]
All right. It’s not that Pluto is evil in any shape or form. It is that Pluto is connected to the dark side, it’s all the stuff that we bury. It’s all the stuff that we don’t feel comfortable dealing with. It’s all the stuff that we don’t bring out in the light of day because we’re afraid it might be too ugly to look at. Pluto is that stuff that we have difficulty dealing with consciously, so it’s pushed down.
[me: “Yeah, that’s what her psychosis really was, that kind of projection in her very, very damaged mind that took everything that she had somehow understood about herself in childhood was bad and put it, projected it onto me, so it had to be a Pluto thing between my mom and I.”]
Yeah, right, and you know short of doing your mother’s chart, which that would be a whole other thing, but the point being that your mother’s bent way of looking at things gave you a bent self image.
[10-2009 Linda note: Yes. It did, and I can attempt to ‘work on’ improving that – along with using the ‘changed body-brain-mind-self’ information, as well.]
But while we can never remove the wounds we can heal from their control over us. You – OK – Intellectually you know about your mother’s problems. Intellectually you know that you’re not the devil’s child. What you need to do is you need to get the child inside of you to accept that. The part of you that’s still recoiling in terror from your mother, the part of you that still reacts to any kind of buttons that get pushed. You’re not going to have any kind of, obviously, you know this kind of – considering you’ve spent a lifetime trying to deal with this – you know no matter what I say there’s not going to be an over night change.
But, you need to be able to like yourself. And you can’t like yourself as long as there’s a part of you that’s cowering in terror with that mother in your head.
[10-2009 Linda note: My interactions with the ‘mother in my head’ formed the way my brain and my nervous system operate. Terror, fear, like all emotions, actually connects to our nervous system, the ‘set point’ for our internal states of equilibrium and dysequilibrium – we need to understand that the level of ‘problems’ that Zane is referring to became reflected in actual, very real, physiological changes in my little developing body that will affect me for the rest of my life. That does not mean that I can’t work to change – on the ‘tip of the iceberg’ level, some of what Zane is talking about. These ‘tip of the iceberg’ changes can and will have a ‘trickle down’ affect on my physiological body – but true reality for those of us severely abused especially by Mean Mothers must be fully taken into account for our recovery to make sense and be a positive experience of applied effort. If we want miracles, let’s be clear about that….]
Because you carry her around with you, unless you give that inner child the strokes that it needs and the comfort that it needs, you can keep that mother with you – you know – is your mother still alive? [me: no] – OK, I mean she’s had such an impact on you that she’s with you every waking moment and probably your sleeping moments. And she’s already passed on. So it’s her legacy that she left you, but it’s in your head.
[10-2009 Linda note: RIGHT, it’s in my head! We can never believe that just because an infant pops out of its mother’s body her influence and impact on its further development out of the womb, during the first critical body and brain developmental stages of an infant, is not equally as profound and permanent as are the developmental influences that mother had on her infant while it was inside of her body!! OF COURSE the impact of a mother’s treatment of her infant remains with her offspring ever waking and sleeping moment of its entire life!]
She’s not there any more.
[10-2009 Linda note: Yes, she is. All early infant caregivers leave their big adult footprint in the body-brain of the infant that has been under their care during its critical developmental stages. That’s what happens in early development! Our early development, including the expression of our genetic potential and the creation of our brain and nervous system, is an interactional event.]
That’s one of the reasons why I suggested the idea of you know actually — because when you allow that little child within you to speak through your mouth and tell that woman without fear of repercussion exactly how you’re feeling – it empowers you. It will give you more strength that you can imagine because that child of you has never really had the opportunity to do that.
[10-2009 Linda note: Part of what happened to my developing brain as a result of my mother’s early and continued severe abuse of me was the establishment of dissociational patterns in the way my brain-mind-nervous system operates. When I went into intensive therapy in 1983 specifically to deal with my severe abuse, at one point my therapist did try this ‘putting people in the chair’ routine. What happened was not healing. What happened was that I experienced very clearly and profoundly how my dissociational patterns operate in my brain. I have never forgotten THAT part of the experience, but I know enough to believe that a person has to be extremely careful of this kind of technique if they have any POSSIBLE history of severe early abuse. It can be dangerous to our well-being.
What Zane goes on to describe to me next was his own experience with this technique regarding his father. I see that as being an entirely different kind of process for someone whose early maternal caregiver experiences allowed them to form a body-brain-mind under far more ‘ordinary’ conditions than did mine.]
I had a slightly different type of abusive situation.
[10-2009 Linda note: Read “very different,” not “slightly different.”]
But I understand just to give you a parallel, my father had his Pluto at 26 degrees Gemini. I have my Sun at 26 Gemini. So I spent my entire life with my father’s Pluto on my Sun.
I did not start getting out from under his influence until after he died and I finally had the courage to tell him off. Different situations but it’s the same…..
[10-2009 Linda note: No, not the “same” for reasons described above.]
Basically, you’ve got to take charge and you’ve got to stop having her control you. In one way or another, you’re the same age as I am basically, and at your age it’s time for you to kick your mother out. [again, see above]. Basically.
We have a strange situation because everything in our society, for example in religion, we’re trained to honor your mother and father. OK? And so you have this thing going against you and it says if you dishonor your mother then you’re a bad person. That would be all well and good if the mother was a person that was worthy of being honored. But you’ve got a situation where honoring your mother is in effect dishonoring yourself.
It’s just very hard without the proper encouragement for people to really accept the truth about their parents sometimes on a conscious level and on an emotional level. You can give it lip service but there’s a part of you that, “No, I can’t go there. I’ll be a bad person if I go there.” That’s not true…..
I reached a point where I realized that there were a couple of qualities that my father had that I am glad I inherited, but they were not his behavior. They were abilities that my father had that I inherited genetically. So, I can’t think of a single quality that I got from my father that I’m glad I got from his bent perspective. But I’m glad I got some of his genes.
I look in the mirror and I say, “You know, OK, so this is what my mother saw, huh?” My mother fell head over heels for my father on sight the day she saw him for the first time, and I’ve grown to be like him, so, OK, so maybe my father wasn’t all bad. Maybe he was handsome.
Is there anything more specific that you’d like to ask me?
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Return to *Age 57 – March 2009 (whole text) Astrological Reading About My Emotions
Or refer to individual sections:
MY FEELING DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PEOPLE
MY MARS AND JUPITER: BEING A TEACHER
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Stop the Storm 