Yes, Astrology Really Can Help You Progress In Therapy
By: A. Nonymous
Tags: Psychology, Opinion, Self Improvement, Culture, Astrology

Yes, Astrology Really Can Help You Progress In Therapy

(Whether you believe in it or not.)

Photo by Josh Rangel on Unsplash

I once had a brief flirtation with a married man after losing my husband to brain cancer.

Then, I was dumped. I was destroyed. I couldn’t get over it.

This is when the desperate (and, on Medium, many say the weak-minded) turn to astrology.

Most people who post about astrology here (even the editors) find themselves the brunt of rude comments. Even when we point out that disciplines such as astrology and tarot are making their way into people’s therapy sessions, sometimes with helpful results.

I count myself among that number, so I’ve decided to take it upon myself to diagram exactly what I studied and how it helped.

Stage 1: There’s a Message Here

I’m sure we’re all acquainted with the feeling, after a painful breakup, of longing for the person back again and looking for any sign that this could happen. I had been in the habit, now and then, of buying a summary of yearly horoscope transits and what they mean off of a website called astro.com.

I was making a bit more money at that time, and these weren’t too expensive, so I purchased one for the next three years.

I noticed something. These reports made a big deal out of playing up my controlling tendencies. I found a site online that did free tarot readings, and much to my distress, the tarot was saying the same thing, in a pretty harsh way.

I didn’t think of myself as “controlling.” I thought the woman I got dumped for was the controlling one! But, as I received these suggestions over and over, and I got more and more upset about them, I had to ask myself:

Am I really a controlling person?

That made me look honestly at my behavior in the relationship. Turns out, I was controlling, always seeking to get this guy to give me the kind of life and the kind of support I wanted … and I really needed to see that. And tell myself the awful truth about it.

Who cares whether astrology is “correct” or not? The point is, I had to ask myself honestly about this aspect of my character.

And, sad to say, it turned out there was a reason I kept getting the message, “Stay out of power and control.”

Stage Two: How My Chart Diagrams the Nuts and Bolts of My Therapy

Now that I saw that message, I wondered if there might be more to find.

I’ll skip some of what happened in between and go straight to where I become intensely interested in the following pattern in my chart, outlined by the triangle with two long green sides and the short blue bottom:

Generated for free on astro.com.

This long skinny triangle, shaped like a witch’s hat, is called a “yod.” (As it turns out, they don’t call it the “Finger of God” for nothing.) The little character at the long end, the cross with the curlicue, is Saturn.

As I read more about Saturn, I felt worried, because Saturn is known in astrology as the planet of hard knocks. It’s the planet of restriction, trial, and painful lessons.

I felt like I’d had just about enough of those.

As it turned out, this yod explained pretty clearly why I was in therapy and what I was going to have to accomplish there. I’m still struggling with some of it, but the comforting thing is, at least I know why now and I have a little bit of hope.

At the bottom of my yod, you see Neptune (it looks like a trident) in House Three, in the sign of Scorpio. This tends to reflect creativity (Neptune) in a deep, penetrating way, digging up truths one perhaps doesn’t want to see (Scorpio), in the area of knowledge, writing, art, and communication (House Three).

It’s connected to Uranus, the little character with arms and a little round head, upside down, in House One — House of the Self — in Virgo, the sign of service.

Uranus is original and independent. It’s associated with events that break up old patterns in your life because you really needed a change. My reading of it always includes the phrase: “I gotta be me.”

So I really gotta be me, according to this chart, and I want to do it in a way that serves other people.

At the base of a yod, the two planets at the bottom shake hands and want to help each other out. Would it surprise you to learn that after a childhood with a BPD mother, I want to write novels and articles around the theme of mental illness and emotional problems, with an eye toward reaching and helping others?

Yep, so far this chart sounds like me.

But, it’s a classic yod. In astrology, the planet at the far angle of the yod represents something that’s keeping the two bottom planets from their goal.

Saturn Is Standing In The Way. (Booga! Booga! Booga!)

So, since at this point in my life, my writing career is moving at the speed of a dying snail, am I interested to find out what this Saturn, in the lingo of astrology, is supposed to represent?

You betcha. To help out, I compiled these:

Bailey’s Postulates for Understanding the Astrological Yod

(You’re going to need these to understand how my chart helped me.)

1.) The yod appears to be a description of a problem, issue, or conundrum in the life. The two bottom planets seem to want to do something, but the apex planet reflects something that keeps getting in the way. (Every astrologer says this much.)

2.) (Several astrologers have written articles about this one.) If another planet sits in between the two sextile planets, this planet makes the yod a “boomerang yod,” and the “boomerang” planet describes what to do to solve the dilemma described by the yod.

(What that would look like, is if a fourth planet sat exactly in between Uranus and Neptune, up there. Not present … until you place the chart of the guy who dumped me directly over mine. He has a yod that’s right over mine, facing in the opposite direction. Therefore, the apex of my yod forms the boomerang of his and vice versa. That’s a whole different topic right there.)

3.) Any planet passing by transit or progression over the apex of the yod reflects a time in life when circumstances cause the issues described by the yod to come to the forefront in life. (All astrologers agree on this one. We’re coming back to it at the end.)

4.) Anything attached in a stressful aspect to the apex of the yod is commenting on how the problem came to be in the first place. (This, I haven’t seen any astrologer write up yet, but it appears to me to be the case.)

4a.) If you’re having trouble figuring this out in a chart, look up where the asteroid Chiron is by house and sign. Many times it will clarify things a lot.

It turns out that some of the most helpful astrology books are written by counseling therapists who also have an interest in astrology.

I learned the most from Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil. Author Liz Greene’s first career was as a counseling therapist. She holds doctorate degrees in psychology and history and is a qualified Jungian analyst.

She also holds a diploma in counseling from the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London, and a diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, of which she is a lifetime patron. The following points are taken from this book.

You need to look at the drawing again to see what I’m talking about. So that you don’t have to scroll up, here it is once more:

Again, astro.com.

Attached to Saturn by red lines, all the way at the top, are the Sun (astrology draws that as a bull’s eye), the Moon (obvious), Mars (the “male” symbol), and Mercury (the character that looks like it has horns), all at a ninety-degree angle from Saturn.

This is known as a “square.” Squares are known to be stressful in astrology, hence the red lines. These are the planets we’re talking about. Let’s look at what they symbolize in my chart, and how they tell us my yod situation arose.

In order to process all this, I had to take a good hard look at my childhood, including some things I always believed didn’t affect me much, which, as we all know, any therapist worth their salt would want you to do.

After I finished this, I emailed it to mine as part of my therapy homework. My therapist was pretty pleased with it.

All professional astrologers tell you you have to read The Whole Chart. (This is why those who only read sun signs in the newspaper believe astrology has to be crap.)

In my case, this is easy, as every damn thing is connected to Saturn, usually by a stressful aspect. (Lucky me.) The astrologer Alice Portman read my chart and told me this big yod with Saturn at the long end creates a feeling of “What’s the use?” in my life.

So, what does Saturn mean in a horoscope chart?

According to Liz Greene, Saturn:

— Reflects your struggle to build an ego and protect yourself.

— Indicates an area of the personality where the person remains childlike (or childish!) because they didn’t get what they needed in childhood for that area to develop into mature adult understandings, attitudes, and behavior. It’s necessary for the person to grow up in these areas. (So, basically, as we’ll see, my entire personality is infantile and childish. Great news.)

— When studied in-depth, Saturn offers a detailed picture of what you don’t want to see about yourself.

— Saturn is a measuring stick of the individual’s power of self-determination; it reflects solutions that, if you find them, can become a permanent part of your conscious self, through self-motivated effort.

— You’re closed off from things you want or need in life until you get these specific tasks done. (Sounds like the reason Saturn is the apex of my yod.)

— Saturn denotes areas where you’re supposed to become a good parent to yourself first. Then you can help other people. (Which sounds like the bottom of the yod, right?)

So, the stuff attached by squares to the yod’s apex — Saturn, in my case — describes how the problems came to be that are preventing me from achieving this thing, helping others through writing, that the bottom of my yod reflects that I passionately want to do.

So, what about these squared planets?

Astrology holds that the Sun represents a person’s sense of who he is. If Saturn squares your Sun in your birth chart, it’s commenting that you didn’t have much help in discovering your own identity. You have problems with creativity because you didn’t have a dad behind you to encourage you. Life as a child is really tough, and you didn’t grow up in a sense of trust that things will go well.

Saturn square Sun people are either intensely ambitious, or we have no ambitions because we’re afraid of the pain of not making them come true. Greene writes that we’re offered the opportunity to become masters of our fates. If we don’t take the opportunity, we become very sad people.

The Moon discusses feelings, what a person needs to feel happy, the atmosphere of their early home life and the relationship with the female parent, and any instinctive habit patterns.

A Saturn square here often reflects a person who wasn’t able to express themselves emotionally in childhood. This person had to control their feelings all the time as a child, and their mother let the child down in some way.

The person is lonely and needy because they never had an emotionally loving family, even though it looked like it from the outside. The child experienced a lot of harshness and duty and rules, and not a lot of warmth and love. Because of all this, the person has to become strong in isolation.

Mercury talks about knowledge and communication, and how competent a person feels at these things. And Saturn is the planet of frustration, difficulty, and delay, so if you have a tough Mercury-Saturn aspect, writes Greene, your parents may have treated you like you couldn’t think for yourself because you were a child. Or they stifled you if you had any thought or idea that conflicted with theirs.

A Saturn square Mercury feels very self-defeating. You end up sure you’re stupid because you’ve been punished so much for making mistakes. You work so slowly, out of fear, that you really do look stupid. Then people make fun of you because you look stupid, and you feel and look yet more stupid.

Mars describes self-assertion and any aggressive impulses, and a Saturn square describes a person who feels frustrated, weak, and powerless. Basically, the individual had overly controlling parents and possibly physically abusive parents.

The person feels like their will is ineffectual because it’s been thwarted so often, and feels like they have no control over themselves or their life. Therefore, they’re likely to pick out a weaker person, someone they can control, and use the person like tongs to interface with the world for them and provide what they think they can’t do for themselves.

Um … what did I start this article writing about? Controlling tendencies.

Sheesh.

When I read all this, my first thought was: Gee, I guess I didn’t grow up at all. That felt pretty depressing at first, but before we even test whether all of this is accurate or not, let me emphasize this point:

The important thing isn’t the accuracy of the chart. The important thing is your process of testing the accuracy of the chart.

Having this chart, looking up all this information, and thinking about it forced me to do the kind of deep thinking we all need to do in therapy to heal.

I could have disagreed as well, and decided all astrology is bunk.

The important thing is, I would have thought about these issues and presented my thinking to my therapist. We would have talked (as we did) about why I agreed or disagreed, and how I feel about all of it now.

As it turned out, I did find all of this to be very accurate. It led me down a garden path lined with several new books my therapist has on her shelf now and recommends to other clients.

I really couldn’t express myself in childhood because my BPD mother needed validation and insisted I be just like her. I had to be her instead of me.

I did have an awful childhood, with a lot of hazing at school, no dad, and a mentally ill mother. Therefore, I have no trust in life because things didn’t go well in childhood. Nobody encouraged who I was, so I’ve had a hard time believing in myself; and I do feel like life’s been too hard and I can never relax.

I was the only kid I knew who had to come home from school and clean half the house every Friday night and then get up and get right to homework on Saturday morning.

My mother would inspect everything I cleaned and then, rather than teaching me how she wanted it done in the first place, she would scream at me and spank me. Using trial and error, I had to vary my routine until I found the magic formula that didn’t result in a scream-and-spank session.

I became what my family wanted me to be. I didn’t even know what would make me happy to become when I was a kid. I thought Mom’s likes and dislikes were my likes and dislikes; I believed her dreams were my own.

Even now that I do know what I want, I have an awfully hard time drawing it out of myself.

I watched my late husband, a critically acclaimed, national award-level author, struggle with book sales for years. I do think that even if I finished a novel and offered it to the world, it’s highly unlikely it would be successful.

I don’t want to be crushed by that (since I’ve already been crushed by so much else.)

Yeah. It all sounds like me.

How many years do some people have to spend in therapy before they figure all this out? I saw all this in a couple of weeks once I started studying Saturn and this yod.

And I realized that the absence of my dad, which I never thought affected me much, might have left me with a big piece of my personality missing: my ability to believe in and motivate myself. That was a revelation, indeed.

I still struggle with depression and motivation, but insight is not something I have difficulty with anymore. My therapist believes that this sort of work had value for me because of the deep processing I had to do to accomplish it.

Nonetheless, this chart does diagram what that Saturn drag is that’s keeping Uranus and Neptune, so happily shaking hands down there, from writing and promoting a novel that could have legs. So I’m going to…

(Saturn square Mars) latch on to someone else —someone else’s husband— who appears successful at all the things I’m not, and try to get him to take care of me.

Which I did.

4a.) When having trouble figuring out how a yod happened, take a look at Chiron.

My Chiron isn’t shown in that simplified drawing above, but it’s in Aries, House Eight, close to Saturn.

Astrologer Aria Gmitter says about an eighth house Chiron: “Consider that the purpose of Aries is to identify with itself. It is ‘I am,’ and the ruling planet is Mars (ambition, drive, and determination).

“Chiron is the wounded healer, so it’s a wound that heals for the purpose of a lesson in growth. So, I think it’s an attack early on in a person’s life towards their identity and character. It can lead the individual to feel a loss of self-identity.

“This can mean they don’t have a voice because they don’t know who they are. They may not be able to speak up for their injustices, or they could have been taught early on that they don’t matter. There’s a lack of place in the world. As the healer, I think that it’s a powerful placement for an Aries because should the person master their wound, they will learn not to delegate their identity out to others.

“They will have found that they have participated in their own self sabotaging behaviors after leaving their family of origin, and not severing ties so that they can discover themselves. It will also mean learning to be comfortable in their own skin with their imperfections, and going from a selfish view of the world to one that encompasses others, with boundaries.”

And that’s what I’ve been working on in therapy.

Astrology claims to be able to predict events. Whether or not it’s true, using the chart in this way can still teach you something.

Stage Three: The Timing Of Events

Now we can talk about Point 3, how transits show something important happening in the yod. That will be our final step in this dissection of how astrology has helped me progress in therapy.

When I hired Alice Portman to review my chart, she predicted that I would hear from this man again in October 2017. (And I had learned enough astrology by then to concur; although when I teased apart the indicators that this would happen, we were looking at different things. So, there were many different significators for this event.)

As I dealt with all this heartbreak, where Uranus was in the sky hovered back and forth over this yod position that Saturn was in when I was born.

Ridiculous, I know, but astrology holds that when a planet, from our perspective on the Earth, moves back and forth over an important point like this, Something Important Happens.

And it did. Here he was; he was back, and I had to make a difficult decision about the relationship.

I’m reading a book by another therapist who’s also an astrologer: Counseling for Astrologers.

One helpful hint I’m receiving here is: If you see an important formation in a chart being triggered by a transiting planet, go back to the last time in the life a planet triggered that formation and ask the client what was going on in their life then. You may learn something important.

So, I did that for myself.

Before Uranus, the last time this yod got triggered by anything was by Mars in 2009.

What happened in 2009?

In 2009, a couple of long-lost, handicapped relatives called me out of the clear blue.

My eighty-six-year-old great aunt and her handicapped adopted daughter, developmentally delayed, had dropped out of my life eight years before, when my aunt went into a full-blown bipolar episode and got placed in a psychiatric facility.

Long lost relatives many states south swooped in, moved my relatives to South Carolina, and sold their farm.

No one in our family was in contact with these relatives. I missed my aunt, but no one knew where she was. Now, they had moved back to their old neighborhood again, and they were calling me.

I was overjoyed. I had a happy marriage, but I had finally cut off my BPD mom and most of my family with her. It was sort of a lonely life.

Maybe I could have some of my family back again! Maybe I could finally feel like I had a normal life.

Before I knew it, I was signed on the dotted line as their power of attorney, and then my aunt stopped taking her medication, had more bipolar breakdowns, and I had to move them to assisted living.

Then it turned out that my cousin was physically abusive to my aunt, and I had a real mess on my hands. These people took up all my time, and I had to abandon the novel I was writing.

My husband, who was starting his fourth novel, comforted me through floods of tears as I regretfully put aside the one original novel idea I had ever had to handle these folks’ affairs.

Looking at that Mars transit in 2009 and linking it up to what was happening in my life at the time, this was when the final light came on.

That Saturn at the tip of the yod isn’t just the emotional problems I have as leftovers from a painful childhood. It’s the enmeshed, caretaking relationships I keep getting embroiled in because of those emotional problems.

I’m so needy for family and relationships, I really am a sucker. I didn’t realize how much of a problem getting into the wrong relationships was in terms of achieving my goals in life. It’s a central issue.

Codependent relationships derail me from writing every time I get into one. (Along with the self-doubt and the fear that I’m too stupid to succeed.)

However, whether transits are right or wrong isn’t the important thing here. What is important is that it got me looking at my issues in a new way.

As I stared at the charts and looked up aspect meanings, letting ones that confused me rattle around in my brain — sometimes for months — I’d connect things in a new way, in sudden flashes of insight.

Like that one about Saturn symbolizing my relationships, that I just wrote.

I’d read that in codependency books, sure, but seeing it jump out in my chart this way, when I went back to 2009 as this counselor/astrologer suggested, I finally got it.

“Omigosh, this really IS what I’m doing! Here it is, right here! If I don’t like this scenario, what can I do about it?”

That is the basis of a lot of psychological insight. That moment is when you sit up and connect something you’ve read a jillion times, to you.

Then, when you see a possible warning about your future, you can think creatively about it.

I will forever be thankful I learned to read enough astrology to do this … even if you do think I am a kook.

Studying astrology for therapy is a lot like staring at the scattered pieces of a puzzle. When you figure out how to put them together with your assigned reading, you get a mosaic: An instructive picture of your life that can jolt you into a new awareness.