Current conditions in the collective as well as conditions in my family in the past, I am lately exploring in therapy are teaching me things about empowerment and disempowerment… Seeing my older sister not only cut down in the prime of her life but not actively helped in the ways she could have been has shown me that its our interactions with others that often affect for good or ill how powerful we feel or what right we even feel we have to exist.
I was told by a body work therapist many years ago that she felt, as woman I should have been more angry and not crying as much, as often women or oppressed people cry out of sheer frustration and fail to take assertive action when it is needed. This goes kind of ‘learned helplessness” goes along with learning you could only collapse, fawn or play dead in childhood to sidestep abuse or harsh punitive treatment, failing all that you tried to be good and people please to throw off negative attention. Anger and assertive impulses then become repressed and burst out sideways in addiction or via other channels.
On a collective level, what we are seeing in America at the moment, is an up rising of desire for power and agency, an anger at the oppression and devaluing and projections of fear as a result of hundreds of years of enslavement.
In my own family I saw my sister actively cut off from relationship with certain sectors of the family, and I saw her needs and desires thwarted at times too. I saw a similar cutting down happen to my other sister who ended up with a diagnosis and undertook a suicide attempt after being given shock treatment for a condition that should never have been treated in that way… I saw her disparaged at times and being made an object of contempt by members of her own immediate family, all at a time she was most vulnerable.
I just want to say about the above.. coming to feel we are broken or not good enough may be something that is not objectively real only projected onto and into us by others who were even more ‘broken’ or damaged.
We see a feeling of anguish, frustration and powerlessness in any kind of situation of oppression. The power of people is stolen by those in power and those people in power hold all the cards and when the oppressed person start to get ‘mad’ (aka angry, frustrated, enraged, thwarted and anguished as a result) then the oppressor uses every weapon or projection in his or her arsenal to stop the relay or reclamation of power.
At the moment many are recognising that frustration may come out is sideways forms such as looting and yet more violence, all attempts to gain back power or express some of the pain, then to have this punished will just keep the cycle of retaliation and outcry going on ad infinitum.
This weekend and in therapy today I began to recognise where I gave my own power over in years gone by in an attempt to stay bonded. I also remained as a small child in situations where I could have grasped the nettle, at the same time I longed for a support that was so often absent so all in all it was a catch 22 situation… I see more now of how I contributed towards my own disempowerment and sometimes reacting in an angry way with abusers or those invested in turning a deaf ear and taking delight in that or using it as evidence of how it could then justify them writing me off only made things worse…
Over the past two days I allowed myself to feel the anger and rage over it all and to recognise that in earlier times I was only as powerless as I believed myself to be.. this is not necessarily the case for black minorities whose very colour opens them to prejudice or harsh treatment at the hands of those wanting to enact their own contempt upon a people who already struggle for equality and an equal balance in the share of and enacting of personal freedom, agency and power.
Feeling that anything can happen to you at any time should the whim of a person bring them to with to enact oppression or harm would indeed make living feel so precarious and unsafe. I have an idea of that as growing up when you live with an unpredictable parent who may and can fly off the handle at any time and damage you actively or through neglect, living also becomes wearysome and challenging as you learn to walk on eggshells and become hypervigilant at all times.. Fear flight or fight kicks in and this starts to be transferred onto each new situation in which you find yourself.
I notice more and more African American persons sharing about these kind of situations on social media in the past week, people coming out with stories of how they were detained or questioned or held accountable for things or actions they did not do. It is interesting to me that this is happening as Mars planet of assertion moves closer and closer to an exact conjunction or meeting with the planet Neptune while the Sun also moves on to square transiting Neptune at 20 degrees of Pisces this week. Pisces often relates to what is nebulous, unformed, difficult to express, it has to do with dissolution of power, self negation and undoing of a Self. Neptune is in many ways an opposite energy to Mars which seeks action, separation and forward movement… Its interesting to me that the civil rights movement occurred when Chiron was placed in Pisces during the 1960s while opposing Pluto ; planet of stolen or hidden power, power struggles and generational struggle.
I just did a google search on astrology of the civil rights movement and came upon this article concerning Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech of 1964..
interesting to note that MLK had his Sun at Capricorn 25 degrees and that Pluto is now transiting those degrees and Saturn passed them earlier in the year and will backtrack upon them as the current movement of the planet retrograde continues.
Even more interesting to note is that with his Moon at 19 degrees of Pisces were MLK alive he would have currently Mars and Neptune activating his Moon and Neptune relates to visions, imagination and dreams.
The killer of MLK James Earl Ray had his Sun sitting exactly on Dr Kings Moon at 20 degrees Pisces.
Another transit of interest : MLKs Mars at 21 Gemini has recently been transited by Venus and the Sun will cross it in less than a week.. while both Mars and Neptune square it.
MLK’s progressed Sun was in Pisces when he was shot on 4 April 1968… by my calculations was at that point around 3 degrees.
Neptune and Pisces also are deeply associated with the energy of self sacrifice.. MLK opened himself to become a target by fighting against oppression….the oppression struggle goes on to this day for people of colour. I have a strong Neptune energy in my own chart and with Chiron in Pisces the frustrations of oppression resonate with me, sadly a lot of my repression has been about internalised voices.. not real living forces such as African American individuals face every single day… Never the less I like to speak for understanding of the right of protest and the valid expression of rage and anger channelled into direct action… A need to reclaim power can not be given to us, we have do all we can to grasp the nettle and not allow voices and personal expression of frustration to be silenced.
Emerging From The Dark Night 