Am I worthy? Reflections on the current Mars retrograde station and self expression/worth/family inheritance issues.

I posted some key symptoms of having suffered neglect or abuse last week, one of them was about fearing conflict.. This is something that is huge for me and together with a lack of strong self esteem, as well as a realistic sense of my own value has often left me foundering a lot and often falling into fawn responses as well as people pleasing. Lately I tend to shed a lot of tears over the fact I always settled for less, because I did not think I was worth more. I feel a sense of shame and guilt too for times when I really do believe I should have challenged authority and did not, but then often I was shamed for ‘daring’ to take that initiative, this is not a thing to let happen if you want to be assertively healthy and the painful point may be being driven home more now as Mars slows down to turn direct in about 15 days.

There were times too when I betrayed gut instincts, times my inner self was telling me not to travel along a certain pathway and yet I kept on doing that thing. That sense of self betrayal is not something a baby feels, a baby when it is born has not yet learned to measure its worth or meaning or value around how others respond to it and its natural organic reactions to life, a baby just is itself and stays tuned to its reactions, until due to a lack of a helpful or assisting response it learns to shut those down.

I noticed for the past few years how often my own self of low self worth makes me spin my wheels, how it makes me hypervigilant to cues and makes me also run around a lot in flight or fight reactions. Looking back with hindsight now that so much trauma has passed I see that after moving back ‘home’ in 2011, my sense of panic steadily grew, perhaps that I was aligning myself with a sinking ship and yet these people were my family and I felt I had no place to go, did not want to go on alone but now I see other people do, they go through just as much and are often far braver than me.. That is when the sense of shame can kick in.

When I think back to how my Mum was growing up she was often in flight and fight. As I look back to our conditioning both parents were always working and so we as kids did not get played with much. We did not learn how to relax and just ‘be’. This I also believe is part of the reason I so often drove myself relentlessly out of fear and stress and still do.. I am also so in love with life in many ways but I fear it too, this is the profound combination of feelings that gets all mixed up and is a huge part of the dichotomy of surviving trauma.

In reaction to the way Mum could be, my father often would just check out for the sake of peace, he would withdraw as my brother does at times and as my sister is now doing in aged care. For me the times I fought I was often told that was the problem but as my second cousin and I shared on Saturday that sense of fighting was the only thing at times keeping us alive, that said to be constantly living in flight or fight means we are often trapped in Complex PTSD reactions, rather than peacefully fronting up to life in a healthily assertive way. The killing off of our healthy drive to be and express as the true self in something I have shared about in other posts. That healthy drive (Mars) is supposed to serve our true self (Sun) and our values (Venus placement) but when we get turned against it, then a host of other problems follows. We may then turn against this drive actually fearing our own sense of power and there may be a profound collective historical aspect to this fear when we consider what so often happened to those who rebelled, saw a larger vision or were different in some way. Often forces put them to death.

Living around all of that intensity also made the real world and even this human body so often feel like a place of threat.. This may, I believe, be one of the reasons I feared by own body and came to live inside a life of nearly constant panic or anxiety reactions.. Only lately have I been able to truly develop any insight into the truth of how difficult it felt when the tendency to over run and over ruminated slowly began to dominate me the more traumas I saw go down with both my mother and sisters after moving back home here 12 years ago in 2011. The second suicide attempt by my second sister rocked all of us to the core and left profound ripple affects that still continue to affect me as I try to be there but also battle with being there.

Lately I am trying to do the practice of asking myself what it is that I really need in any given day.. It seems for so long cming out of my own brand of emotional neglect I did not feel I had the right to need or want anything, or if my inner self expressed a want anotheer part of me may critique or negate or second guess that need. In an attempt to over compensate I threw my energy out there onto relationships asking them to complete me which was not the best order of change to heal what ailed me.. In truth the answer to my neglect and self betrayal issues the truth never really lay ‘out there’ at all, but deep inside of me. But when my conditioning acted to split me off from my true self and to fear it as a kind of death if I expressed it, then I became truly divided, truly lost and deeply spun out running as fast as I could to keep up to the beat of a drum that was not mine and had nothing to do with marking time to beat of my own particular individual heart rhythm.

There is often a building anxiety that we can feel as Mars starts to slow down in preparation to turn direct. This building anxiety may span a 6 week period, three weeks either side of the direct station. Mars went retrograde on the 30th of October at 25 degrees of Gemini. Today it sits at 10 degrees, prior to turning direct on the 12th of January it will form an inconjunct 150 degree aspect to the Sun that is building now as the Sun sits at 5 degrees of Capricorn, so really we are currently feeling that wonky table leg energy associated with inconjuncts.. How it usually works is that at the bi annual Sun Mars opposition Mars issues seem to come to a head but we do not yet have clarity.. At the inconjunct there may be a lot of tension and then it will take about 10 days from then for Mars to ‘turn around’ its not actually turning around its building in an aspect of tension and that will be carried inwardly. I have noticed this and since Mars relates to the body and movement of libidinal energy and feeling things can get stormy.

My own Mars sits with the Moon which shows Mum was driven, then Saturn also sits on it.. I noticed on the day I felt so sad about the exclusion from family the Moon was smack bang on my natal Saturn. I was crying a lot and feeling a lot of bodily pressure, then as it moved onto the South Node in Aquarius opposing the North and my Leo ascendant I started to question where it is I really belong in relationships, if birth family dont seem to want me around because I say things they dont like or point out things that may be a bit toxic in our family. In the heat of this I posted on Facebook yesterday how much I was struggling and the best friend of my older sister who died who knew her in the years leading up to her aneurysm called. He said that following my accident I was trying to bring attention to a lot of this in family seeing how we overworked, at that point my older sister agreed but it was too late for her to step it down. He also shared he saw my sister using smoking a lot to control her emotions and this is something my father did, because growing up in Holland they were toughened up to smoke at about 8 years of age. That generation of men with Neptune in Leo and Chiron in Aries had to hide the fire of emotions coming back from all kinds of super stress, they were also the generation of fathers who lost their own fathers or saw them obliterated by the First World War, not speaking of anything they buried it all and then it came out sideways or in the descendants.

After taking this call the second son of my older sister, the family feeling carrier and scapegoat called to say how upset he get at the issues around wealth and money in our family. That side of the family struggled so much after my sister’s aneurysm and a few years ago when he asked for help to move back and be closer to my sister my brother’s wife shut it all down.. Them being here would have helped not only my mother and older sister (who soon after this died) but me as well. Sadly my brother keeps a tight hold on money and is always trying to earn more.. its really not a healthy thing but then if I start to turn critical it might seem a lot to be like biting the hand that feeds me since he controls so much of Mum’s inheritance. Money issues can most certainly be so complex in families. I also know he loves his work but being born the same year as Gabor Mate and having survived the war and post war period overseas in Indonesia from about the age of 3 he would have absorbed a lot. Lately he denied that unlike some of his classmates who were beaten with a leather strap with metal in it, he was not affected.. When I told my nephew it he could not believe it. Denial is not a river in Egypt as they say but believing we are not vulnerable does not allow us to let others be that way and this man’s wife eschews all emotions at times perhaps due to the significant loss and traumas in her own life. God knows Mars issues in family can be complex. Our has a lot of Mars Saturn and Mercury Saturn issues.

Anyway for readers who want to track their own Mars issues, I would be interested to read how the current stations are affecting you.. I know I probably won’t get a lot of comments but Mars is such an important and beleagured force in our society. Coming out from under the repression of Mars (and related Solar/self expression) issues is never easy. We have to do all that we can to keep our wits about us under the circumstances especially over the next 6 weeks as tensions run high.. There is a shadow period of any retrograde which begins as Mars hits the degree it will station forward at at the end of the long retrograde.

Here is some information on that

Unlike Mercury’s shadow period which begins only a couple of weeks before turning retrograde, Mars begins its pre-retrograde shadow phase approximately two months before it officially turns.  

For your information this degree was 8 Gemini and Mars hit it on 6 September 2022. It took another six weeks or so to transit forward to the 25th degree of the sign where it stationed retrograde on 30 October 2022. Those with planets between 0 Gemini and 0 Cancer will be being affected by the Mars retrograde, but bear in mind it does affect all of us as we all have the Mars drive living inside of us and compromised, triggered or challenged. There is a link below that I am providing here than you can use to learn more about the Mars retrograde as well as its shadow period.

https://www.yourtango.com/zodiac/mars-retrograde-shadow-period