Photo: Pavel Danilyuk, Blazenka Babic | Canva
Astrology can be practical lens to start viewing the tough truths about yourself.
By P.D. Reader
Last updated on Sep 17, 2023
There I was, unceremoniously dumped. My heart was shattered, lacerated, ripped into a million pieces.
The person who dumped me was married. However, he’d moved out, consulted a divorce lawyer, and told me the marriage was over. From what he told me about the way she was behaving and had behaved for the past twenty years, I could see why he was seeking a divorce.
For four months, he’d described an emotionally cold and distant marriage with a woman who alternately bossed and belittled him. It was clear why he’d taken this long to finally move out. He was an adult child of an alcoholic, and I knew everything that meant.
I knew we were going to be happy together. Then… POOF! He was gone.
Here is the accidental way astrology solved all my relationship problems.
1. Desperately seeking answers.
Most of us are familiar with those horrible feelings of desperation, those times we’d do anything, and I mean anything, to get our old love back. So, the desperate turn to astrology.
I didn't know a thing about astrology. I had surfed the free parts of Astro.com and had even bought some of their Liz Greene yearly transit reports on occasion. Yet, I had no idea what those little symbols scribbled in the margins meant, or how on earth Saturn could "trine" Jupiter. Much less how Pluto could ever "trine" itself!
I’d never bought more than one transit report at a time because they aren't exactly cheap, and my money had always been tight.
Now, in the midst of a huge personal crisis, I was at least doing better at work. So I could afford more than one yearly transit report at a time. I started snooping. Everything I knew about me, him, her, and their marriage told me it wouldn't last. He’d have to come back to me; I just knew it.
2. The education of a budding astrologer begins.
A "transit" refers to where the planets in the heavens are now in relation to where they were at the moment of a person's birth. Every time a planet is in the exact angle with another planet, which they both occupied at the moment of your birth, it reflects a mood, feeling, and quality of time in your life.
A crack professional astrologer who reads thousands of charts a year will notice repeating themes, and will be able to tell you, "Typically when I see this aspect come up in someone’s transits, these kinds of events are what’s been happening in the people’s lives."
When you’re consulting a professional astrologer or you’re buying a computerized transit report, this is the information you’re purchasing.
I continued to buy transit reports for myself, him, and his wife for the next few years. Then, I began to read.
3. A glimpse at the future.
The first thing I noticed was everything that appeared in one chart reflected in the other two. That gave me the creeps. Then, as I read on… it happened! Reflected in all three charts was his leaving her and returning to me. In about three years!
Overjoyed, I bought one more set for three years from the last date I’d read. I expected to see that he’d left her for good, and we were happy ever after.
Um…not so.
Instead, I saw myself left again. Even though the marriage was still rotten and her behavior had not improved at all, there he was, back home again. She looked supremely happy and the two of us were miserable. If I thought my heart was broken now, apparently it was nothing compared to what I’d experience the second time.
What?
Of course, I had to keep on reading. In his future transits, he was still unhappy at home! Surely, surely he’d be back! In the charts two years on, he’d finally had enough. Our transits reflected a joyous reunion, and hers, frankly, didn't know what had happened despite decades of questionable behavior.
Yay! I mean, normally I feel sorry for the wife, but in this case…well... this had to mean we’d live happily ever after, right?
I wanted the wonderful confirmation, so I bought one more set of transits, three years farther ahead. And received one nasty surprise.
4. Happily never after.
We wouldn't be happy. We would have significant problems. Only I would be largely unaware of them because of my childhood.
Here’s where astrology has given me its greatest gift. I was raised by a parent with borderline personality disorder. For those who don’t know, BPD is a serious mental illness that wreaks havoc not only on the sufferer, but on any children being raised in the home.
Because my relationship with my mother was so difficult, I spent a good portion of my 20's and 30's reading self-help books, relationship books, and adult-child-of books. Because of this, I know a great deal about co-dependency. Enough to recognize it when I see it described in a horoscope transit.
I reading the phrases in his report.
"If you have allowed your need for closeness with others to obstruct your need to be a separate individual, you may be challenged to assert your own values and ideals with greater honesty and openness. External conflicts and relationship issues may highlight the fact that you need to achieve a new and more creative balance between these two sides of yourself."
"Try not to turn your back on opportunities just because you don't want to upset others or are afraid of seeming selfish in their eyes."
"But somehow what you want may not be communicated properly to those who could help or support you; and you may feel very angry, frustrated, aggrieved or victimized. You are not wrong in pushing for change and better opportunities. You may also need to define yourself as an individual more directly within your personal relationships, and this could involve friction with family members. But you may first have to consider the ways in which you are asking for what you want, and recognize that you yourself have created or accepted the role you are now playing, and others have assumed this is who you are."
"Huh?" I thought, "This is codependency! What the heck? Hasn't this person been in therapy for years already? How could he leave her to be with me and still be codependent?"
This utterly confused me. I pondered it on and off for several days and as I considered it, one solid fact emerged.
5. We were codependent when we met.
We would still codependent years in the future when we finally got back together. He’s with me, he’s with her, he’s with her, he’s with me, the family is all upset, the adult children are involved — years and years of drama is what lay ahead of us.
During all those years of drama coming, what would be missing? This much-adored man of mine applying himself to his core problems of codependency and low self-worth, studying and healing and getting well, that was what would be missing! Look at all the progress he could have made over those five years! But he wouldn't.
What would he do instead? Have an affair with me.
Then I started to recall phrases from my transit reports, about being too needy and anxious, about the need to stay out of power and control. I hadn't known what to make of those. Me, how could I be domineering and over-controlling? That was his wife, not me!
Apparently, that wasn't quite true.
6. The truth was in the transits.
What I finally understood — after months of poring over these transit reports — was even though I recognized him as codependent from the beginning, I was the one who insisted he started therapy.
If I elected to pursue an affair with this man, I would be the person keeping him from what he most desperately needed to do, which was to apply himself in therapy to his own problems — not everyone else’s — study healthy relationships, what went wrong in his family of origin, and heal and work to get well.
Keeping him from healing is a heck of a way to treat someone you say you love.
It was about this time I figured I should start studying astrology and learn how to read this stuff for myself, instead of relying on a computer to do it for me or hiring an expensive professional I didn't know.
Since then, I’ve become a good enough astrologer to cast all our relationships and natal charts, and I can pick out the aspects of ours that reflect the issues I’ve described here.
Most importantly, I’ve learned so much about myself. It turned out my charts and transits were pointing out aspects of my unhealed childhood traumas I would never have suspected still needed my attention. Astrology has proven to be an invaluable resource to help direct me in my therapy.
I used to doubt astrology, but after this experience, I see what an important and useful tool it can be. If you’re searching for answers in your own relationship, it’s certainly worth a look.
More for You:
P.D. Reader is a level one student in the NCGR School of Astrology, but her work focuses on spirituality, lifestyle, and relationship topics. She runs Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship Medium.
This article was originally published at The Thinking Other Woman. Reprinted with permission from the author.