rewrite and elaborate on:

Natal Saturn in the 4th house: The Bearer of All Weight
Saturn in the 4th house typically finds childhood, home and family to be heavy topics. Tangible or intangible adult responsibilities may have been heaped onto you during childhood, and many people with natal 4th house Saturn feel like they were never really a child but more like an adult stuck in a child’s body. Saturn in the 4th house is the quintessential ‘late bloomer’ placement. Saturn in the 4th house is a person who, in a sense, ages in reverse, beginning life feeling older than their body and often feeling much freer later in life.

Saturn in the 4th house feels like trying to grow an apple tree in a room with no windows. What should be a warm womb often feels more like a cold prison or a heavy weight. Where there should be a mountain spring, there is a desert. Where there should be a home, there is only a house, or perhaps just a tumbleweed blowing in the wind.

Natal Saturn in the 4th house for some people is as simple as having parents who were hard on you, had high standards or expectations for you, or were cautionary tales themselves – fuck-ups who acted as symbolic (or literal) reminders of what can happen to you if you do not achieve and do your best. For others, 4th house Saturn shows up as all kinds of family issues; deep psychological issues, fears and anxieties; having to grow up fast; having to carry a ton of responsibility at a young age (in tangible or intangible ways); or parents who were unkind (or worse), overprotective, did not trust you, or who you could not trust. Trust is a big topic for people with Saturn in the 4th house.

4th house Saturn is rarely an easy placement. There is no “good” place to have Saturn – it’s heavy! But with all of the difficult parts of this placement, it can manifest in more positive ways too, especially if there are more positive planets (Venus and Jupiter in particular) in the 4th house as well. Despite its more challenging qualities, Saturn can also be beautifully protective, practical, and sturdy, so while maybe there were some challenging emotional components to childhood, perhaps your basic needs were always provided for, or maybe your family struggled with money, but there was always plenty of love, etc.

Saturn in the 4th house people were very often molded into adults, one way or another, through overt expectation or by silent force or necessity, before their small body could catch up, and made to carry responsibility that no child could ever successfully carry. This can really fuck up a person’s ability to trust themselves, to take initiative, and to lead; in one way or another, it can feel like you were set up to fail. This has to be recognized, accepted, and healed from. You never could have been asked to carry what you were told or felt you had to, and that should not have been a problem.

Natal Saturn in the 4th house also has a tendency to feel very, very ashamed of their failures. That shame must be eradicated or it has the potential to run your life. One of the best ways to do so is to talk to your “inner child” (I know you’re likely rolling your eyes because you have never felt like a child, but there is a small child inside of you somewhere, no matter how early on in life they were silenced and hidden away) out loud in ways that are gentle, nurturing, and supportive. A “You are safe now, and I’ll always be here to love you and keep you safe. You have nothing to fear because I will always be here. You don’t have to hide your imperfections in the closet under the stairs. You are allowed to be both seen and flawed at the same time. You’re allowed to try” sort of thing.


The next step in the process may be to actively try to humanize yourself, to allow other people to see that you are actually flawed, in order to reprogram the part of your mind that says “your failures are hideously shameful and must be hidden” to see that, actually, you may be loved for your very human nature, not in spite of it. You do not have to be good at everything right off the bat. You are allowed to try, and not do everything perfect the first time, and it may even be safe to do this out in public, despite what your inner Saturn may say.


People with Saturn in the 4th house typically have an unconscious sense that they are solely responsible for and to blame for everything. This is likely because you had to carry so much emotional/psychological weight as a child, because you had to act like an adult when you should have been able to play, and/or because you want to feel like you are always in control.


4th house Saturn comes with a lot of self-control. You may have learned early on that you had to be in control because the people around you proved again and again that they could not be trusted to run things properly. Or maybe you didn’t have any say over your own life growing up and now you desperately want the autonomy, control and respect that you never had before. Whatever the cause, it is important to recognize the value of self-control, but also to free yourself from the cage you learned to see as home. Is it possible that there is life outside of it, and that it may even be safe to venture out into the world? Can you develop a sense of trust in yourself or in the world? Do you truly need to be caged in order to be safe?