Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Ginko, welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Ginko:             I'm just going to go ahead and read my question. "Hi, Jessica. Saying no inside of my relationships is a big growth edge for me. Often, I say no too late or with too much caution. And yet I have gotten feedback from some family that I'm stubborn, intractable, and approach relationships like it's my way or the highway. How can both things be true? How do I process this feedback that I'm too inflexible and respond to it sincerely while also tending to the parts of me that are, in many cases, overly amenable? Your support on this would be much appreciated. Thank you for your heart and your honesty and your clarity."

Jessica:            Aww, sweet. Okay. Let's pull up your chart and dig right in. You know I'm going to ask you questions, but hold on now.

Ginko:             Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Jessica:            You were born October 31st, 1992, in California—people don't need every fucking detail—at 2:06 a.m. local time. And we are looking at your chart together. So let's unpack your question a little bit. Family—when you say family, do you mean only your family of origin give you the feedback that you're inflexible and stubborn, or also your dates and your closest friends?

Ginko:             I would say I've gotten that feedback the most from my family of origin, primarily from them. And I haven't really so much gotten it from friends, or maybe like ten percent of the time, it'll come from friends or partners or something like that.

Jessica:            And have you been in relationships?

Ginko:             Yes.

Jessica:            You have?

Ginko:             Uh-huh. Is that a surprise?

Jessica:            No, no, no, no, no. I'm building up. My tone of voice is building up to make a case, actually.

Ginko:             Okay. Okay.

Jessica:            So you've been in relationships that have lasted more than a year?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. And the people who you've dated have not experienced you as inflexible and stubborn?

Ginko:             Well, okay. Maybe I should take some of that back.

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             I feel like probably the person who I was with for five years would say that I can be inflexible, probably.

Jessica:            Okay. But just the one person that you dated for a really long time?

Ginko:             I think so.

Jessica:            Okay. Let's hang out there. Let's let that be what that is.

Ginko:             Okay. I have a caveat. The caveat is just that I've struggled with people who I've dated, including that person who I was with for five years, around COVID measures. And that's one place where I think I've been named as being inflexible and stubborn.

Jessica:            Is it because you're inflexible and stubborn because you want to mask and you want other people to mask?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Woo. Sorry. I was celebrating your inflexibility and your stubbornness.

Ginko:             Oh. Thank you. I couldn't see you.

Jessica:            Yeah. No, I know. I just want you to know I was throwing up hands in a fun way.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            Okay. I have a lot of things I want to say.

Ginko:             Cool.

Jessica:            So, first of all, just based on the data that your family of origin are the only people who experience you as rigid, stubborn, inflexible, given the context that you are in lots of different kinds of relationships and you've even had long-term adult romantic and platonic relationships, that's important data straight out of the gate because if your adult self navigating through your adult relationships is not one in which you are stubborn and inflexible, then that's really important information, because part of what that's telling me—separate from astrology, separate from anything else—is that you have a dynamic with your family of origin. And we'll unpack that in a moment, what that is.

                        But I do want to say that when your family of origin has a completely different take on you than the people in your life, that speaks to your childhood dynamic as opposed to who you are as adult self. Does that make sense?

Ginko:             Yeah. That makes sense.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm going to throw one more thing in, and then we're going to get into astrology.

Ginko:             Cool.

Jessica:            I think every single one of us who take COVID mitigations in 2025 are called stubborn or—I mean, there's lots of different words that people use for us, but I think that it requires a certain amount of tenacity to maintain COVID care for most people. And I think that that's really uncomfortable for some people. And I want to just hold space for, regardless of your birth chart and the specifics of your situation, I think all of us who are still masking and being COVID-cautious can identify with being told that we're being too much or rigid in some way by wanting to take care of our bodies or the public health in a particular way.

                        So I want to just name that and hold space because, as much as you're sharing something that's really hard, there's a part of me that's like, "Oh, you go through that, too. That's really nice for me to hear," because as somebody who still masks, it's a pain in the ass to navigate with people, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So okay. Holding space for these things, let's talk about your birth chart, okay?

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            And we are looking at your birth chart together. Can you read the symbols? Do you have that skill set with astrology?

Ginko:             Oh, kind of.

Jessica:            Ish. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. I ask because you have a Virgo Rising, so I was like, well, you know, do you want all the details?

Ginko:             Yeah. I do.

Jessica:            You do want the details. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. You're a Scorpio, Capricorn Moon, Virgo Rising. Lovely. The picture of flexibility? No, not the picture of flexibility. That's fine, though. I want to just be really clear. You don't have to be flexible. Not everyone is flexible. You are open-minded. You've got that beautiful Mercury in Sagittarius—so open-minded. But once you are clear about the right way to do things, yeah, it's pretty hard for people to change your mind. Truth or falseness?

Ginko:             True.

Jessica:            True.

Ginko:             True.

Jessica:            Great.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Cool.

Ginko:             Once I feel something in my body, I feel like, well, this feels right for me, and I feel clear about that.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So let's acknowledge that you hold some judgment or defensiveness around the idea that once you know what's right, it's what's right. That's just how you hold it. You hold it as, "I know this is right, and therefore, this is what I will do. This is how I will be." And those standards you hold for yourself, but of course, they get extended to the people around you because that's how relationship works, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So we have that. Now, we also have your beautiful little Mars in Cancer. Your beautiful little Mars in Cancer just sits there in the eleventh house, being like, "Can't we all be friends? Can't we all agree? Can't we just break bread together? Can't it be nice?" But your Mars sits opposite your Moon and Neptune. And so, when people accuse you of being selfish or stubborn or self-interested, of not taking care of them, of not seeing things from their perspective, it's really like—it feels bad. It feels bad to you. You are not cavalier about that accusation.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And then, additionally, Mars is opposite your Moon. You're also fucking annoyed. When that happens, you're fucking annoyed because Mars opposite the Moon is easily annoyed. It's like, "Are you fucking kidding me? I am asking you for something simple that's actually in your best interest and in mine. What? We're fighting about this?"

                        So you, inside of your body, inside of your psyche, inside of your spirit—you deeply care and have a hard time holding boundaries and not centering and prioritizing other people's point of  view, while at the exact same time, when you feel like baby's been pushed in a corner—you were born in 1992, but do you get the reference? It's Dirty Dancing.

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Cool, cool, cool.

Ginko:             I got you.

Jessica:            Great. So, when baby's been pushed in a corner, you want to come out dance-fighting. You do not like feeling fucking sidelined, and you don't like when people try to bully you or deny your rights. And so both of these things are happening at the same time. It's not an either/or. It's actually coming from Mars. It's all coming from Mars.

Ginko:             Yeah. It makes sense. I think the "either/or" is where I started, partly because I—if someone is telling me, for instance, that I'm being—I don't know—defensive or that I'm not seeing their point of view completely or as empathetically as I can, it's like I feel like I take myself away, and I do a really deep dive into their POV. And then I come back, and I feel like if I've done that work, it's like I did my piece, and I don't want to keep being—yeah. And then maybe I do start to—the dance-fighting thing somehow really resonates.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Ginko:             I once tried capoeira, and I was like, "Oh my God."

Jessica:            That's made for you.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It is made for you.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Dance-fighting is your vibe.

Ginko:             Yeah. Okay.

Jessica:            So let me hop in and speak to this because the way astrology works is it allows us to kind of objectify parts of you, right? But in actual human experience, it's not like you have one part being like, "I disagree," and the other part being like, "Your opinion is important to me." You're actually just a single person. And so you have warring impulses and warring needs.

And what happens with humans is we develop coping mechanisms, usually based on our family of origin. And one of the coping mechanisms that you would have developed in your family is, "I have to take care of you. I have to take care of you. Oh, wait a minute. Now you're taking advantage of me taking care of you. Now I have to defend myself. Now I have to defend myself."

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, now that you're in your early 30s, there's this well-worn groove in this coping mechanism. First, you center my needs and my perspective, abandoning yourself. And then the bottom drops, and you're like, "I fucking abandoned myself for you, and you're not even meeting me in the middle, and you're not even recognizing my efforts. And now jes suis pissed." That's French for "I'm mad." And so that's where the dance-fighting comes in, right?

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so I want to just—I know I'm talking fast, but I want to slow it down to acknowledge your family expects you to get defensive, and they're waiting for it. They're kind of waiting for it. And so you've got it set up with your family of origin—that is a setup, basically. It's a setup. And this is like a very deep thing that we can talk about, but I want to pull back to say, in your life in general—so not specifically with your family. Let's decenter your family of origin for a moment. In your life in general, it looks like the way that you navigate self-care and you navigate this habit of abandoning yourself but then also defending yourself—right?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            It's like these two warring things. Okay. Hand in face, I'm guessing, means you resonate with that.

Ginko:             Yes. Yeah. Continue. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Okay. Just checking. Just checking—is by scurrying off and being alone. So you lick your paws, hide under the covers, go in a hidey-hole cave, I'm guessing. Yeah?

Ginko:             Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. And it works. It works. It buys some time. It allows some of your hotter parts—and by hot, I mean reactive arts—to gnash their teeth and pull their hair a little bit. And then they calm down, and so does whatever kind of devotional, "I have to center the other person. I don't have a right to even feel my feelings," thing. So they both kind of—

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —cool down. And the reason why this happens is because we're talking about Mars. And Mars is driving. It's not being parked. Mars governs the car in general, but it's not about being parked. It's about, how do you navigate the roads? I'm guessing sometimes you're actually pretty—an aggressive driver. Sometimes you're a pretty defensive driver. Some people tend to be one or the other. I wouldn't be surprised if you're both.

                        And similarly, the way that Mars functions inside of you is your belly is hot. It's hot. It's hot in you with reactions. And then, once that heat cools down, your sweet, little Virgo Rising, your expansive little Mercury in Sadge—you're very pragmatic, thinking of the long term of this relationship. Moon and Capricorn come online. And you can resource yourself better. But date somebody for five years, go back into your parents' house or hang out with any other person in your family of origin, and this way that you know how to take care of yourself by pulling yourself out of dynamic doesn't work because those relationships move too fast, and the grooves of how we cope are too deep.

Ginko:             Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so, with your family of origin—no. With everybody. Here's the fix. I'm just going to jump to the fix, okay? We're like 15 minutes in, but here's the fix, okay? I got a fix for you. The fix is develop a relationship with yourself in which you give yourself permission to have your own nature. Your nature is you both really are good at abandoning yourself and also getting into a defensive mode. You're actually equally good at both of those things. And if you allow space for your emotions to crash in and make a lot of noise, then they recede, and you can figure out what you actually think is right.

                        If you can accept your nature, you can work with your nature. And what ultimately being able to notice your feelings in your body without abandoning yourself or checking out—if you can practice doing that, then you can get to the fix, which is, "What are my boundaries here?" Not, "How do I need to express my boundaries?" Not, "How are my boundaries going to affect other people?" It's, "What can I do in a healthy way, and what's out of alignment? Where is my yes and where is my no? What are the limitations of my capacity?" Not that you can always work with those things, right? We all do shit outside of our capacity and outside of what is in our best interests all the time.

                        But if you're making clear choices, then that Moon/Mars opposition doesn't need to kick in and get really defensive and entitled, and then maybe a little bit heavy-handed or rigid. That heavy-handed or rigid thing comes up because you've abandoned yourself, and now you feel entitled, or you've let somebody else take up too much space for you, and so now you feel like you have to fight back in order to regain space.

                        So it comes down to boundaries. So I'm going to have you take a minute. Let me know if you have any questions. And also, I'm just going to put in your head that I want to ask you, is this an active dynamic with someone in your life, like with friend, date, or family member?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. So we can come to that relationship in a moment.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            But first, do you have any questions for me about anything I'm saying?

Ginko:             Yeah, I do. And I'm not totally sure if I'm going to be able to articulate it right now. I'm feeling a lot of clarity about the piece where I self-abandon and then cut in and do the dance-fight and be like—and then I do a big back-off dance, and then I'm rigid, and then I'm in the issue.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Ginko:             But it's like I'm not feeling clear around, for instance—okay. When I go into my hidey-hole and I cool off and I come back out, I feel like I am presenting like, "Okay, this is what I can do and how I can show up and still be in my own integrity." And I feel like that's actually when I'm receiving the "You're being rigid" feedback.

Jessica:            Okay. So let me speak to that. So there's a couple things happening why you're getting that feedback when you come back. It looks like when you pull back into your hidey-hole, there's a little bit of a punishing vibe behind it. That's not your intention. You're not thinking, "Oh, I want to be punishing to this person." You're not thinking, "I am abandoning this person." But what happens is you come in, and you center then, and you're there emotionally. You're part of the family. And then, when you go in your hidey-hole, it's like a Faraday bag. Do you know what a Faraday bag is?

Ginko:             No.

Jessica:            A Faraday bag—everybody should know what a Faraday bag is. It's not the only—I think it's a brand, so I think there's other brands. But if you take your phone and you put it in a Faraday bag, it's not trackable.

Ginko:             Oh.

Jessica:            Somebody's going to hear me say this and be like, "Jessica, you got it wrong." But broadly speaking, your phone isn't being tracked anymore.

Ginko:             Got it.

Jessica:            It's like going dark. You're going dark, right? You are untraceable.

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So you go from being—

Ginko:             It's how I like it.

Jessica:            Yeah. Completely. That's how you like it. You go from being present—maybe not just present, but almost martyred, like, "Your feelings are my feelings. Our issue is your issue"—to being like, "You can't find me. You can't locate me. My energy is completely inaccessible to you." And then you come back, and you're like, "I'm willing to be reasonable now. I'm willing to meet you in the middle." And they're like, "Are you kidding me? You fucking left me. You just"—and so, if anyone has even the tiniest little abandonment issue, now they're defensive.

If anyone has the tiniest need to—oh, I don't know—process in relationship, they feel abandoned. They feel like you're coming back with a controlling agenda instead of what you and I have called it, which is you go into your hidey-hole, your little human Faraday bag, and you find yourself. You find your truth. And then you come back, and it's prepackaged—good Capricorn Moon—prepackaged. "I have it for you. I've got tabbies. I've got labels. This is what it is." And to you, it feels like, "Well, I was being chaotic, and now I'm being clear. I was not sure about what I needed, and now I'm really clear about what I need and what I can offer."

And here's the fun thing. And when I say fun, I'm being sarcastic. It's not fun. The fun thing is just because you feel like, "Oh, I've gone into my Faraday bag, and I've come out, and now I have clarity," they're like, "We were having a conversation, and then you left me, and then you came back with rules or with a plan. And we didn't come up with it together. You came up with it." So now they feel that Mars poof, right? They feel that Mars—like you're coming in, and you don't feel like you're dance-fighting anymore, but that's just because you've choreographed what you believe to be a peaceful dance-fight.

Ginko:             Okay. I—okay. I have a few things to say.

Jessica:            I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

Ginko:             One, my dance fights are beautiful.

Jessica:            They're beautiful. They're gorgeous. Did you see my hand motions? They were trying to—

Ginko:             No, I can't see you.

Jessica:            You can't see me at all? Okay. Well, I just want you to know I'm definitely hand-motioning a beautiful, graceful dance.

Ginko:             Yeah. Okay. Thanks. I want everyone to know for the record that it's a beautiful, graceful dance.

Jessica:            Beautiful.

Ginko:             Secondly, I want to say that I don't know if this is clear to you. It probably is, so maybe I'm saying it for myself. But a part of going into the hidey-hole is that sometimes being person-to-person with someone who—and again, especially if I've accidentally co-created this dynamic in which I've been sort of emotionally—not absented, exactly, but not voicing my feelings as fully and as honestly as I would like to be—when I'm face-to-face with this person and they're like, "Ahh, I need you to feel what I'm feeling," and I'm like, "Ahh, I'm constantly feeling what you're feeling"—and then I feel like it's so hard for me inside of this space to feel myself. I literally don't know what else to do other than to step back. It's like I have to step back out of the orb, our shared orb of energy. I think that's sort of what you're saying—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Ginko:             —like go offline. Yeah. It's like  I don't know how else to feel my own self. And then, when I come back, it's like I think a part of the piece where it feels really intense for other people is that I'm trying really hard to bring my energy back into the shared relational space and not leave myself behind. And so I feel like I have my nails in myself, being like, "Okay, Ginko, stay here with me," looking at this person, saying how I'm feeling. And yeah. Obviously, I don't mean it to be as predetermined or something, but—

Jessica:            But it's the way that you know how right now, right? Let's just hold space for what you're sharing because, right now, that's the skill set you have. And with friends that aren't super close friends or dates that you haven't been with for too many years, you can get away with it. You can get away with it, and it'll work. Family of origin, somebody who's been in your life intimately for many years, you're not going to be able to get away with that as much because they're going to say to you, "What you're doing is, first, you're acting in ways that I don't understand. Then you're going away, and you're coming back, and you're telling me there's this one way I'm going to act and it's the only way I can act."

                        And so their perspective—reasonable. Your perspective—equally reasonable. So let's talk about what's functional because what you're doing is glorious Capricorn Moon shit, okay? Glorious. As a Capricorn Moon, respect. Been there. But what it is is you're like, "I am going to take care of myself in this one way. I will pour myself into this glass. And when I pour myself into this glass, I then will hold the glass. Do you see what's in the glass? Okay. Cool. That's my glass." And that is essentially—you're coming up with rules to protect yourself. There's a rigidity in it.

Boundaries are adaptive, and rules are more rigid. Boundaries are yours to uphold and embody. Rules are enforced, and there are punishments. There's consequences for breaking rules. Listen. There's consequences for breaking boundaries, too. But in the context of how this is coming up in your family, people are feeling—and listen. I want to be clear. Just because this is how they're feeling doesn't mean that's what you're doing. But because you're pointing me towards specific relationships, this is what I'm seeing.

They're feeling like you're really emotional, and then you go away, and you come back and you're rigid. This is how you self-medicate. You're feeling out of control in a situation. And it works, except for that it doesn't work with people. It works in you. You're trying to hold on to yourself by pouring yourself into a glass. And it technically works, right? You come back, and you're like, "This is my boundary. This is what I can do. This is what I can't do. This is how we're going to move forward." Right? Technically, it works.

But if you want to be in relationship with someone else, here's the problem. You're not in dynamic with them. Give me an example of a recent time this shit has happened.

Ginko:             Yeah. Okay. I wrote this question right after having a conversation with my brother—

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             —who I told I'm going to have this conversation with you.

Jessica:            Great.

Ginko:             So it's all above board.

Jessica:            Thank you.

Ginko:             We were on the phone. It was right around my birthday. And he was telling me that he would call more, but I'm really hard to talk to. And he was like, "It just feels like it's a lot of effort and work to talk to you, and I'm tired."

Jessica:            Did you ask him why he said that? Did you say, "Okay. How do you mean that? Why?" Or did you just accept it and listen?

Ginko:             I just accepted it and listened.

Jessica:            Okay. So let me just slow you down. That's a great place for us to acknowledge you abandoning yourself, because if somebody said to me, "You're really hard to talk to," I'd be like, "What? Why?" That would inspire a lot of curiosity because how could you possibly feel if somebody's saying to you—that couldn't have made you feel good.

Ginko:             No, of course not. I think where I was at was that I was just following his thread, you know.

Jessica:            Okay. So let me slow you down again.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            The cycle is, in your relationship with me, you center everything I feel and I need until it's your turn. And then you center everything you feel and you need, right? Very Mars opposite Moon—very. Right? You're doing an opposition. You're like, "My turn, your turn." This is not dynamic.

So, if I call you up and I'm like, "Hey, I would have called you last week, but you're really hard to talk to," I hope, 100 percent of the time, you say, "What? What do you mean? Ouch." Like, "Oh, I want to hear what you mean, but ouch. Can you please explain? That's kind of a heavy thing to lay on me," because you're present in the relationship you and I are having in this moment, and I've just said something that is a literal sucker punch, right? Because that's a sucker-punch statement, agreed? Do you know about boxing?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah?

Ginko:             Yeah, agreed.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay.

Ginko:             Yeah. I mean, he said it in an extremely casual way. But yeah.

Jessica:            Sure. Sure. That's your family's way, though; is it not? Woo, you're fine, right? Woo, you're fine, right? This is not the first time someone in your family has sucker-punched you and been like, "What?"

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So just because he's casual doesn't mean you're casual.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You are allowed—not just allowed. I want to say it's your responsibility to yourself, when somebody punches you in the gut, to be like, "You just punched me in my here guts. Can I ask you why? Because I want you to know this hurts. This is a hurt."

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you're allowed also, within that, to be like, "I don't trust my brother. My brother is not a person I would ever tell that he's hurt my feelings because I don't trust him like that." I'm not saying that's how you feel about him, but let's say you don't trust him. So you don't have to say to him, "Oh, that hurt my feelings." You can say, "Can you clarify that statement? That's kind of an intense thing to hear."

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So, if you don't trust him enough to say, "That makes me feel sad or bad," you certainly can say, "The fuck?" in some way or not, okay?

Ginko:             Yeah, yeah. No, I hear you.

Jessica:            So I know I interrupted you, but this is really good that we're talking about this example because, immediately, the premise of this conversation is him sucker-punching you and you abandoning yourself in efforts to center his perspective that punching you in the guts is not a big deal, and you should be cool with it; in fact, you should take care of his feelings because he finds it hard to call you. What? If my brother said that to me, I just want you to know it would have been fighting words. I mean, fighting words, and I don't have a Mars opposition.

Ginko:             Okay, but that's the exact thing, though, is that I think a part of why he's saying that is that he thinks I pick a fight with him, like that I'll pick at him—

Jessica:            Sure.

Ginko:             —and thus be difficult to talk to. And so it's like, yeah, I'm trying to not do this thing that makes me so difficult, and—

Jessica:            Okay. This is a setup. Can you do me a favor? Can you say to me, "Jessica"—exactly what your brother said to you? Tell me what your brother told you.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            Do it.

Ginko:             Just go ahead?

Jessica:            Yeah. Just do it. Just tell me. You would have called me, but—

Ginko:             Well, I would have called you, but I just find you really difficult to talk to.

Jessica:            Okay. So who's the high-maintenance aggressor in this dynamic? Did it not feel crazy to say that a little bit?

Ginko:             I mean, it felt crazy for a lot of reasons.

Jessica:            Okay, okay, okay. That's fair, that's fair, that's fair. Okay. But hopefully, you got a little inkling of, like—

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So the setup in your family is you're defensive all the time, so if he calls and he's like, "Hey, you're just really hard to talk to," now you're not allowed to be like, "The fuck?"—because that's mean, and it's aggressive, and it's blaming, and it's shaming. So he would have called you, except you're just inherently something wrong, and therefore it's not his fault that he didn't call you. That's insane. It's wild, right? I just want to be really clear.

Ginko:             Yeah. I appreciate you.

Jessica:            You're welcome. Literally, if somebody said that to me, I cannot imagine the circumstance where I wouldn't be like, "The fuck did you say to me? What is that about?"

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And I'm not criticizing you. I’m just saying this is the dynamic, right? We all came to have the charts we have because of family shit. So, in your family, clearly, you're the person who's supposed to not be intense, and then they can criticize you or be mean to you. And if you fight back or you defend yourself, then you're the bad guy, obvi—this feels very obvious based on our conversation. So I just want to say we're off to a really rough start in this conversation. I know I've cut you off, but this is good. We're locating the inherent unfairness of this dynamic with you and your brother, right? The role that he feels confident for you to play, and also where, in the first 30 seconds of a phone call, you abandoned yourself and your needs because he was like, "Here's some shit. Would you like to eat it?" and you were like, "Well, let's just see where this is going," which is not the right reaction, ideally speaking, right?

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             I mean, that's very much what I said and how I felt. Yeah. I mean—

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. You were just like, "Maybe this is going somewhere. Maybe he wants me to eat shit because of a good reason." No. Never. No. And I think it's okay to take a moment and be like, "Oh, was that a sucker punch?" And if it takes you five minutes in the conversation to be like, "That was actually a sucker punch. That was a sucker punch," you can be like, "I just have to stop you there for a second and just be like, I don't even know how to have a conversation with somebody that tells me what you told me. Can you please rewind and explain this?" And if he's like, "I knew it. You're so fucking intense. I knew it. I knew I couldn't tell you anything," you can say, "Yeah, that's how you feel, and I get that. And I feel like what you said was mean. But let's still have a conversation. Let's have our feelings and still have a conversation"—if you want. If you want.

                        Okay. I know I interrupted. He served you shit on a plate. You were like, "Let's see where this goes." What happens next?

Ginko:             Okay. Then we kind of went back to a few months ago where he reminded me that—and last year, I had top surgery. And before top surgery, I reached out to my brothers and I said, "Hey. The first time I had surgery, neither of you guys visited me, and I was in a lot of pain. And I was really sad that neither of you came to support me," especially since we lived blocks away from each other.

Jessica:            Oh my God.

Ginko:             We live in the same city.

Jessica:            Oh.

Ginko:             This is when I got injured. And I was like, "That rip was really painful. And I would love for you to be here for me now that this is a surgery that's planned way in advance, and if you could come visit me, I would appreciate that." In advance of this, I had this whole idea, and I was like, "Okay"—and maybe this is me being a lot, but I was like, "Okay, I have this idea. We all don't really relate as adults. We still kind of relate as kids. It'd be so fun for us all to get together before I have my surgery and have a reintroduction ceremony where we all reintroduce ourselves to each other as adults, and maybe we can spend just a few days doing this. Let's plan." And we started to plan.

Jessica:            Wait. So they said, "Yes, that sounds fun"?

Ginko:             Originally, they said, "Yes, that sounds fun. That sounds great."

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             Both of them were like, "Two thumbs up."

Jessica:            Wow.

Ginko:             And then we started to plan, and then one of my brothers, the one who has served me shit on the phone, was like, "You know, actually, I can't take three days off. Can we do two days?" And then my other brother was like, "I actually can't do those two days. Can we do a day and a half?" And I was like, "Listen. We haven't seen each other in six years. We're all water signs. Every time we get together, it's like someone is weeping within definitely the first 24 hours of being together. I feel really worried about getting together and having it be really emotionally tumultuous and then splitting and not seeing each other again for six years. That's not how I want to do this."

                        And we got into this argument where they were like, "Why are you so rigid and inflexible?" The two brothers were like, "We would do anything. We would just fly to see you for five hours if that's what it takes." And then I was like, "That's just not—it's not what I want to do." And I was especially confused because my brother who lives closer takes, sometimes, a month off for a vacation, two months off, to leave the country or something. And so I was like, "I don't understand why taking three days is such a huge deal."

                        And so he just kind of—we were brought back to that, and he was just like, "I feel like you won't just do what it takes to connect, and that really hurts me." And I shared with him, "I want to hear your feedback, but I feel like inside of our family unit, me and my mom were so—there's such a big gender divide, and we were cast in these characters as taking emotional care of everyone. And I feel worried that it's not really that I'm being rigid so much as I have a need. And because you're not used to me or my mom standing up for our needs, we're being cast as rigid assholes or something."

                        And then he was like, "Is that really what you think of me?" And then it became this thing, as if it would be so horrible for me to think this of him, you know?

Jessica:            So you've insulted him. So he called you, told you you were too intense to talk about. And then, when you were like, "Here, these are my worries," he's like, "You've insulted my honor."

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             And then he was like, "And now I feel bad."

Jessica:            Cool.

Ginko:             It's like, okay.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So there's layers here. There's layers here. He felt bad before he called you. He set you up. I'm going to call it a fact. Okay? I'm just going to say it's a fact. He set you up because the way he started that conversation—how was that supposed to go? And to your point about your brothers expecting you to kind of mommy them, yeah, you can—I guess, as a ten-year-old can say to their mom, "You're mean, and you make me mad," and then Mom says, "I'm sorry you feel that way. Come here. Let me give you a hug. You're fine. Go off"—and he's kind of expecting some of that from you. So he's in an emotionally immature state with you. I don't know if he's emotionally immature as a person. That's not the point. But that's not surprising, because most people slip back into childhood behaviors with their family of origin.

                        There's a couple layers. I want to speak to one layer. On the surface you were like, "Hey, I have this fucking crazy idea. Let's do this fucking thing." And they were like, "Yeah, crazy. Let's go." That's cool. And then they were like, "Actually, I need to adapt this." And you were like, "No. It's either this way, or it's no way." And it's okay that you had that preference and that need. "I only want to do it in this beautiful way that we agreed was awesome. I don't want to do what you're suggesting, because what you're suggesting is not what I suggested. What I suggested is we reconnect, and what you're suggesting is you just show up for the surgery, basically. You just basically show up for a minute."

                        And I want to just hold space for, separate from what sounds slightly to me like a little bit of a tragedy of communication that happens with that brother, is, okay, it's fair that you were like, "I just want to do it the way we agreed." And it's also fair that they were like, "That's not working for me with work," or that it's like, "The more I sit on it, the more nervous I am about it." It doesn't sound like they were direct with that, but that might have been—that's the problem, is there's not a clear dynamic of honesty in this family, it sounds like. So you're both guessing around the person's motives based on their behavior.

                        I don't get a clear sense that either of your brothers—it's unclear to me. Was it really about work, or were they just getting nervous about the trip, or what was it? I don't know. But I do want to hold space for it's reasonable that they were like, "I can only do what I can do." And it's reasonable that they were disappointed that you were like, "If we can't do it the perfect way, we're not doing it at all." Those things are actually okay. And it's also okay—your perspective is also perfectly reasonable and okay.

                        The problem here is that instead of it being like, "We're not in agreement. We're not aligned. We're not holding this the same way," all parties are instead personalizing it. "What does this mean? Why are you not letting me do what I want?" There's a reactivity that's happening in this dynamic.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. And so there's two levels. The one level is you needed it to go one way; they needed it to go another way. And there was rigidity there. Is that bad? I don't know. I don't think it's inherently bad. It's not like anyone's harming the other person with being like, "This is what I prefer, and this is what I need." But this is an adult thing between three adult siblings. And then, immediately, what happens is you all become your childhood selves.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you get scapegoated, and your brother gets blaming, and your other brother looks like he just gets avoidant, and everybody's in their old shit. Am I seeing that right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. So—

Ginko:             My other brother is like, "I see everyone's point of view."

Jessica:            Yeah. Like, "Everything's fine. It's not my fault, right? It's not my fault. I'm not your enemy. I'm not his enemy. We're fine." He's just like, "I want to get away from this shit." Is he the middle sibling or something?

Ginko:             No. That's the oldest.

Jessica:            That's the oldest. He is just trying to not have a problem. And sure enough, you do blame the other brother more than him.

Ginko:             Yeah, I do.

Jessica:            Everyone's role is established. And it's valuable for you to see that you are participating in this, but you're still treating the one brother like you're nervous about the shit brother. I’m calling him the—can we use a different name, the shit plate brother? He's the middle brother? The youngest brother?

Ginko:             Yeah, you can call him the Pisces.

Jessica:            Okay. So there's the oldest and the Pisces.

Ginko:             The oldest is a Cancer.

Jessica:            Okay. Oh gosh. Okay. So, with the Pisces, the two of you are in this sticky, messy dynamic. And with the Cancer, he's just like, "As long as your problem isn't with me, everything's fine for me."

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And you're letting it be—you're participating as much as they are, for whatever it's worth. When you abandoned yourself when he shit-plated you—which is an expression I just made up, but I think you know what it means—you were playing your role. You were like, "Yeah, I'm too much. Yeah, I should just try to not be so much," which, of course, is wrong and bullshit. But by trying to center Pisces's needs above your own—think of it this way. Every time you put somebody else's needs above your own—like, you abandon yourself—it's like you hold your breath, and you go underwater. But there's only so long you can exist without breathing. So you pop up, and when you pop up, you pop up swinging.

                        And so, if the dynamic wasn't exactly as it was, and if the dynamic wasn't so triggering, you might have said, "This is super disappointing. It's not what I want. Will you guys come visit, and then can we plan this for three days another time?" It's what you would have done with your friends, right?

Ginko:             That's true. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Yeah. You would have been like, "Bummer. Sad face. Okay. Let's do that. How about in June? How about we meet in fucking New Orleans or whatever?" You would have been creative because you are creative—not with your family, but in general, you are creative. And so recognizing that you all are playing out your role—

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And your role is you get the sucker punches, and then people get mad at you for fighting back. That's your role. It's a shitty role, but you are playing it. You're not doing it consciously. So the place to start interrupting that role is when you abandon yourself. And the problem with my advice—you cannot control how other people feel. All you can do is behave differently. Asking questions, being like, "I really want to hear about this, but somebody is at my door right now. I gotta get off the phone," and then going off and figuring out how the fuck you want to respond to that shitty thing he said, and then calling him when you can—that's also an option.

                        The point is to interrupt your habit. It's really hard to develop a brand-new habit when you're actively being triggered, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            But if you interrupt that habit, it can help. Will you say the Pisces's name for me real quick?

Ginko:             Yeah. [redacted].

Jessica:            He's so intense. He's so intense. He's so entitled, right? I mean as a person, not just with you. Am I seeing him correctly?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Intense and entitled.

Ginko:             I just want to say that I don't feel like I really know him as a person in the adult world. But yeah.

Jessica:            That's fair. So you don't know him as a person in the adult world. Have you ever met one of his dates?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            He dates women, yeah?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And how does he treat women that he dates? A little intense, a little entitled?

Ginko:             I'm not sure. I mean, I feel literally extremely scattered when you ask me that.

Jessica:            Fascinating.

Ginko:             Yeah. I feel like suddenly I have no memory of him, really—

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             —I mean, other than him relating to my mom.

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. So you feel scattered in response to me asking that question. This is such important information. You often feel scattered—this is the Mars opposition to Neptune. You often feel scattered when confronted with the instruction to betray someone. Now, I asked you, how does he treat his girlfriends? How does your brother treat his girlfriends? What kind of betrayal would you possibly be perpetrating unless you have had a negative assessment, but you don't want to see him negatively, or your assessment is different than the assessment of your brother himself or your family in general? We're not talking about your brother. Don't let me confuse you about your brother.

                        Let me just stay here. That feeling of, "I can't even remember what this person is like," is a feeling that you know. It's not the first time you've felt it, right?

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And this is what happens when you're scared of being mean, and so you self-abandon.

Ginko:             Yeah. I know that.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. This is really good.

Ginko:             I knew that this was underneath the question.

Jessica:            Yes. Good. Good. So okay. Here's what's really important. Something in your system says, "I have the ability to see him clearly, but it's not safe to see him clearly." You tell yourself, "I don't even know who this man is as an adult," but you've seen him behave in ways nobody remembers with girlfriends. Nobody remembers, and there's no suggestion in the fact that you can't remember. Zero. We're just going to let it be floopy-doopy, okay? We're just going to let that be floopy. So this is good information for you because it comes up with friends and dates and family, right?

Ginko:             Yeah, a lot.

Jessica:            Yeah. If you and I are friends for the last six years, and I just have let you know that I am an easygoing person—I'm so easygoing—and you know me, and you're like, "This bitch is not easygoing. She has a sense of humor, but she's not fucking easygoing"—right? And then somebody asks you or I ask you to justify, "Tell me how easygoing I am," you might be like, "Oh my God. I can't even remember a goddamn thing. What happened to my mind?"

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's because, on some level, you feel like you have to lie.

Ginko:             Well, listen.

Jessica:            I’m listening. We're listening. What is it? Tell us.

Ginko:             I just feel like I was dragged as a kid for saying what I saw.

Jessica:            Yeah, you were. Yeah.

Ginko:             And I guess it's similar to the thing where, if my brother were to call me and say, "You're so hard to talk to," and I don't want to contradict him because I don't want to prove him right or something.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Ginko:             There is a feeling where I know that, also, part of my role or story or whatever is saying what wasn't meant to be said out loud, and then again, you're not supposed to talk about your family in public. You're dragging everyone, or why are you talking about our mom? And I feel gagged. I feel gagged.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Not in a fun, Gay way, but in a restrictive way.

Ginko:             Not in a Gay way.

Jessica:            Yeah. You don't mean, like, "I feel gagged." You mean—

Ginko:             Oh, no. Oh my God. Not at all.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Sorry. I'm just making sure I understand. You just mean literally like—

Ginko:             No. Thank you for clarifying because that would be a horrible mistake if people thought—

Jessica:            It's like, "I feel gagged." No. It's, "I feel gagged." Okay.

Ginko:             No. Yes. And I feel like my memory is wiped, and then—

Jessica:            Yeah. That's right. Okay. Okay.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So here's the thing. There's a couple things here. But if you allow your brother to be the person who defines you, who validates you or rejects you, then you have to continue doing what you're doing. You have to. If your parents have that power, then you have to continue to stop being like you were when you were eight years old in your fucking 30s. But if you belong to you—I'm going to repeat that. If you belong to you, then it is not your job to be constantly proving to your family of origin that you're not the way you were when you were eight years old.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Then, instead, you can allow your brother to have a relationship to you—the Pisces, right—

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —to have a relationship to you where he is scared of offending you, and he offends you a lot, and you don't like it, and you tell him. That would be the healthiest relationship for you to have with that guy. You know why? Because he's fucking offensive a lot of the time. For instance—no, I won't repeat it. You know.

Ginko:             He's going to hate to hear this.

Jessica:            Of course he is. He's a Pisces. Sure. But that doesn't make him a bad guy. Listen.

Ginko:             No. Yeah.

Jessica:            He says shit from a—I mean, I think it's fair to say that you all three do this in your own ways. You definitely do this in your own way. You say shit, and you think it's perfectly reasonable because you've been obsessing on it for a long time. And then the other person hears it, and they're like, "The fuck am I supposed to do with that?" Right?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Even you being like, "It has to be three days or it's got to be nothing"—they were probably like, "The fuck? You told us you were sad we didn't come at all. Now we want to come, and you're going to say no." Right? That's fair. It's fair that they have those feelings. Those feelings are not a reflection on your intelligence, on your motives, on anything other than their feelings in response to your behavior.

                        This is the problem, is that in your family, none of you belong to yourselves completely, so there's a lot of defensiveness. "This is mine. Oh, wait. Wait. No. It's yours. It's yours. It's yours. This is mine. No. It's yours. It's yours." Right? That's this dynamic that happens. And if you can hold permission—and I see you do this with your friends. If you can hold permission for your—let's say your friends, not your brothers—your friends to be messy, complicated, fucked-up people who make the best choices that they know how to make, and sometimes those choices are fucking inspired and sometimes they're ridiculous—and everything in between, right? You hold space for that with your friends, yeah?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Not without boundaries. Not without limits. Not without consequences or emotions. But you have that adaptability in your thinking. In your family, because you're defending yourself, because you get scapegoated, it's so much harder to hold that for them, because they don't hold that for you. And so it ends up looking and feeling like self-abandonment. And out of fear, you do self-abandon, and then again pop up from the water swinging.

                        Now, I haven't told you this. You're going through a bunch of transits to your Mercury right now. Mercury governs your friendships and your siblings. So it's perfect that we're doing this reading about your siblings, in part. Uranus is opposite your Mercury. Pluto is sextile your Mercury. And Neptune is trine your Mercury. So your relationships with your brothers are changing, period. The question is, are they changing laterally, or are they getting worse, or are they getting better? Because there's no guarantee.

                        You're meant to be in a confronting dynamic with your siblings. And you are. Congratulations. It's ripe with change. Have you ever done any gardening?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. So you know if you want to repot something or dig something up and move it somewhere else in the garden, you've got to literally dig it up, and then you gotta take the roots in your hands and loosen them, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You gotta move them up, which—the thing that always freaks me out when I'm repotting something is that I'm always scared I'm going to break the roots and harm the growth.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            But that's the only way to repot something.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You all are needing that right now.

Ginko:             Yeah. I can feel that.

Jessica:            Yeah. And luckily, I think you all agree. I think you all agree.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            I'm just going to be quiet again. I want you to take a moment and check in with yourself and see, do you have any questions? Is anything kind of pulling on you?

Ginko:             I mean, I came into this reading hoping to touch on how to feel more uninhibited in my sharing.

Jessica:            With your brothers?

Ginko:             With everyone. Absolutely with my brothers. Something that I've really noticed is that when I'm feeling angry—and it's not necessarily like I want to take out my anger on them so much as I want to say something to them that I know it's going to hurt because it's a painful truth. I really work myself up to be like, "Okay. I'm going to do it." And then I get on the phone, and I have this horrible opposite response where I say it so gently that I almost hurt myself. You know?

Jessica:            Yeah. So okay. Let me speak to this because some of what you're wanting—you're wanting to feel a particular way in relationship to others, and you're thinking about it as, "How can I be different in this dynamic?" That's not going to work. It's, how can you be different in yourself? That's what will work because you're hooking into other people's energy too much. You're abandoning yourself. So in dynamic with—and in particular, you want to say something to the Cancer about that difficult thing with the—is that correct?

Ginko:             That's the person who I was trying to—yeah. I mean, honestly, both of them, but yeah, with the Cancer.

Jessica:            But I'm seeing something, right? I'm seeing something.

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. So what happens is you work yourself up. You think about it way too much. It's thinking. You're not writing down notes about what you want to say, right? You're just thinking about it.

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So you're too up in the fucking ethers. And then you get on the phone, and you didn't anticipate their mood, or you didn't anticipate what they were going to say, and it just changes things ever so slightly. And you haven't grounded into yourself, and so you start chasing their energy and their approval as a way to anchor into yourself, which will, 99.9 percent of the time, fail for you. Right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So I'm going to give you functional homework.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            Okay?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Next time you think about something you want to say to somebody, think about it. And then, on a piece of paper or in the notes of your phone, bullet-point out the points you want to make sure you communicate. And then, if you really want to be contemplative, you can make another list. Again, bullet-point notes. You have Mercury in Sadge, so it could be a fucking novella. We're not talking about that. We're talking about bullet-point notes because we want to access that Capricorn Moon, okay?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            The next list, if you want to do this one, is what you want the other person to hear because if your little Pisces brother had thought, "What do I want my sibling to hear?" instead of, "What do I want to say to my sibling?" then he would have said, "I love you, and I want to be close to you. And I'm not sure how to do it. We need to figure this out. I agree." But instead, he said, "I would have called you, but you're fucking difficult," which is a terrible, awful thing to say to a person.

                        And just because you can get what he was trying to do doesn't mean you should accept the shit plate. That's important. And that goes in the reverse. Sometimes the way that you communicate with your siblings or with your family members, there's no way they could know what you were talking about. There's no way that they know what was really going on for you because you're not actually communicating it.

Ginko:             Yeah. No.

Jessica:            And it's not about fault. It's about, in order to create new relationships out of old ones—which is what family of origin requires from adults—you have to be accountable to your shit. And so taking it from the ethers down into some bullet-point notes of things I want to say, and then maybe separately, "What is it that I want this person to hear?"—because you might not think, "What I want to say to my Cancer brother is, 'I love you and I miss you.'" That's actually not what you were thinking about saying to him at all. But I see that's what you want him to hear. You do actually want him to hear, "Part of why I'm pushing back at you is because I'm invested in being in relationship with you, and I love you."

Ginko:             Right. Yeah.

Jessica:            It wouldn't occur to you to say that, because to you, it's so in what you feel, and all the care that you put into thinking about what you're going to say is a labor of love for you. It's true for your Pisces brother, too. But again, I critique how he did it. And so being able to hold space for, sometimes, what we want people to hear we don't even think about saying out loud.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And that's a good practice to kind of notice so that you have better choices, right? And here's a fun fact. None of this guarantees that it will go well. So you can't do any of this because you want it to go well. You do this so that when you hang up the phone or when you go home after hanging out, you don't hate yourself. That's the goal. The goal is to not lose alignment. The goal can't be to make the other person feel good in your presence, because that requires self-abandonment and lying—lots of different kinds of lying. And you're a terrible liar. So you'll lie to people, and you'll be like, "Everything's fine," and then 15 minutes later, you're fight-dancing your way back into the conversation, and it's not good. Right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's a good problem. Being a shitty liar is great. It's great. But it means that you need to practice prioritizing being authentic and dynamic, which requires practicing not anchoring your welfare and the feedback on whether or not you're a good person in other people. It has to get anchored in yourself, which is part of why writing a couple notes about what you actually want to say to a person will help ground you in the moment.

So, when you get on the call and you were thinking the conversation was going to go one way, but they complain about work and you feel bad for them, and you're like, "Oh, they're having a shitty day. I can't drop this on them," you can be like, "Hey, do you have space to talk about this thing I've been thinking about?" You can just ask them. You would ask a friend. You're good at that, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It just never occurs to you with family because you're eight years old with your family perpetually. It's not your fault. It's just being a person. I want to hammer it into you to have empathy for where you're coming from and how you got here, because if you do have empathy for yourself, then it'll be easier for you to show up. And if you have empathy for yourself, then you can have empathy for your brothers or your parents or whatever.

And having empathy for people doesn't mean getting along with them, and it doesn't mean agreeing with them, and it doesn't mean that it goes well. It just means being able to hold space for, "Pisces brother did not call me to start shit and fuck with me. And he called me, and he started shit, and he fucked with me. And also, I can do the labor and the gymnastics to hear what he was saying, and I can hold that mess. I don't want to eat it, but I can hold it. I can hear it. And I can figure out what I want to do with that."

                        What has been driving you too hard is the desire to prove that you're not bad or wrong. Proving that, working to prove that, puts you on your back foot. I don't know why I'm using so many sports metaphors. I'm not a sportsy person. But do you know what I mean by that?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Are you a sportsy person?

Ginko:             I have been historically.

Jessica:            Okay. That's why I'm like, where are these coming from? Okay. But it's putting you on your back foot. As soon as I try to defend myself—I'm not obnoxious. I don't want you to think I'm obnoxious. I'm not obnoxious. All of a sudden, don't I seem like I secretly think I'm obnoxious? I know I'm obnoxious. I'm not defending it. That's why I used that as an example. Is it my best quality? No. Is it funny sometimes? Yes. I'm not defending it. I recognize there's good and there's bad. I'm able to sit with it. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable sitting with it. Sometimes I feel good about it.

                        Being able to be like, "Yeah. This is a messy thing about me"—you have messy things. I have messy things. Your brothers—everybody has messy things.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And I want to say to you, Capricorn Moon to Capricorn Moon, in my early 30s I couldn't hold this. This is a practice to build towards. You all are very young, because your eldest brother is still early 30s, mid-30s?

Ginko:             Yeah. He's four years older than me. So I'm 33.

Jessica:            So he's like 36, 37, something like that.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. I mean, at this point, most of your lives, you were kids together, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So it's okay that you haven't perfectly managed to figure out who you are as adults and how you can be that way with each other. I have to ask you something. That five-year relationship—when did it end?

Ginko:             Like two years ago now.

Jessica:            And are you in relationship with someone else?

Ginko:             No.

Jessica:            Are you friends with the ex?

Ginko:             No.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. This feels like a real pain point to me, this relationship. And I wonder if that's coming up for me—and you tell me if this is accurate or not, but because some of the dynamic with your family reiterated with this partner, and it fucked with you for that reason. Does that feel right or wrong?

Ginko:             Well, I guess it depends on what part of the dynamic with my brothers or with my family that you're referring to.

Jessica:            I don't know. I'm not really looking at it too deep because I don't feel like you want me to.

Ginko:             Really?

Jessica:            Mm-hmm.

Ginko:             This is the one relationship I had with a man. I mostly date Trans people. I'm Gay. I had a relationship with a man.

Jessica:            Like, a cis man. A cis man. Okay.

Ginko:             Cis man.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm.

Ginko:             He was, like, Gay, but he was a cis man. And so it brought up stuff with my dad. It just brought up stuff that doesn't come up relationally for me otherwise.

Jessica:            That makes sense.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            He feels like he has family triggers to me.

Ginko:             Well, I guess—okay. If I think about it, I would say he's like—you know, the men in my family are like these charismatic leaders kind of vibe. And my ex also sort of was this charismatic leader who had addiction issues. His outside life and inside life—really different, so different that it's like I got lost in the abyss between these two worlds—

Jessica:            Okay. That tracks.

Ginko:             —if that makes sense.

Jessica:            That does. It does. Again, him seeming a lot like your family members would be the trigger because the trigger with your family of origin is you abandon yourself to meet them.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So you already do that with your other relationships, but I imagine with him more than with other people you've been with.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And I see you are still recovering from this, from the ways in which you abandoned yourself to meet him and his version of reality.

Ginko:             Yeah. I see where you're going.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you haven't yet come to—and you don't ever have to come here, but you haven't yet come to the place where you're like, "Oh. Anyone who requires me to abandon my sense of self and my understanding of my reality is just a bad match for me, even if I love them and they love me back." But that is a bad match for you. It's familiar but in the wrong ways. There's lots of things in your family of origin that could be familiar to you in a partnership that would be wonderful. But this not one of those things.

                        And that is what happened a lot in that relationship. And again, this would be a much larger conversation, but it is connected to COVID, the timing of it, and all that, you know?

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            I mean, I don't know that you would have gotten so deep if it hadn't happened when it happened.

Ginko:             Yeah. I don't think we would have.

Jessica:            Yeah. But again, it was an extreme circumstance, and that's part of your family trigger. Extreme feelings, extreme moments trigger you to be like, "I'm not the bad guy. I'm not the bad guy." And so you go out of your way to prove it to the other person. "I'm not the bad guy. I'm not the problem."

Ginko:             Oh my God.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. So you know what I'm talking about. Yes.

Ginko:             I know what you're talking about now.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Right? It's a very intense trigger for you. But whenever you catch yourself thinking, "I don't want to be the bad guy. I'm not the bad guy. How do I prove I'm not the bad guy? How do I defend myself from somebody else thinking I'm the bad guy?"—whenever any of that kind of thinking gets triggered in you, know that you are in a state of childhood trauma activation—period, actually. And that means that you want to allow yourself to have that fire rage inside of you, but don't feed it.

                        So, in astrology, air is like Mercury. Air is thinking. Air is ideas. And when you add air to fire—takes over. Forest fire. Right? Burn the whole block down. So we don't want to feed ideas to emotions that are burning hot, unless they're the kind of emotions burning hot you want to feed ideas to. You know what I mean? But in this conversation and in this context, you don't. So the next time you catch yourself in this, "I don't want to be the bad guy. I have to prove I'm not the bad guy. This person thinks I'm the bad guy," know that this is not a reliable train of thought.

                        Let the feelings be felt without justifying and figuring out and exploring the ideas because the chances that that's what's happening are very small. You don't have to play that game. You might be the bad guy in a situation. In fact, for sure, you're the bad guy in some situations because everybody is. The biggest martyr who never says or does anything wrong is the bad guy in situations. Has anyone ever made you make all the decisions when you're picking a restaurant and ordering? Bad guy, right? When you don't want to be the one making the decisions. We all—it doesn't matter if you're too much or not enough.

                        The goal isn't to never upset people. The goal is to make your own mistakes. Don't make mistakes by behaving in ways you think I want you to behave. Be true to yourself. And within that, you've heard of the sandwich, right? You've heard of the sandwich? Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement? Have you heard of this?

Ginko:             Oh, just feedback? How to give feedback?

Jessica:            How to give feedback. The toast, the bread, is positive reinforcement. So, "Pisces, I love you, and I cherish our relationship." Negative feedback, "When you called me and you sucker-punched me, I immediately stopped being able to listen because that was just a mean thing to say that hurt my feelings and felt like a setup." Bread, "I know you weren't trying to do that, so I want to actually just ask questions about what you were trying to communicate to me."

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Positive, negative, positive. You're a Capricorn Moon. If you slow your thinking down, if you organize your thinking a little bit, you can totally communicate that way, in a slightly more organized way. It will be easier for your emotional nature if you do this. So I'm not saying do this in all interactions. I'm talking about emotionally engaged interactions. This is where your triggers are, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Will you say your full name out loud for me? Again, we're going to beep it out.

Ginko:             [redacted].

Jessica:            Do you ever cry?

Ginko:             Oh yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Ginko:             I cry a lot.

Jessica:            Okay. I mean, I'm seeing it, and I was just like, "Why am I seeing it?" Okay. Just because you cry a lot. Okay.

Ginko:             I cry all the time.

Jessica:            Okay. It really came up. It really came up. Okay. Okay. Hold on. There's something in here. Hold on. You're just so hard on yourself, and that constriction, that rigidity that people are seeing in you or naming—yeah, I do see it. But from your lived experience, it's, "I am just fucking trying to give you what you want and also not disappear." That is literally your motivation, right? And the feedback you're getting that it comes across as rigid is true. It is rigid. But the problem is it's not your behavior that's rigid; it's your behavior towards yourself that's rigid.

                        And because you're so rigid with yourself, no matter how gently you hold it, by extension, what you're kind of putting out there is rigid because you're trying to hold yourself so tightly because you're so terrified that they are right, that you are too much, that you are dramatic, that you—whatever the fuck bullshit it is that they believe. What are the three adjectives? What do they describe you as, your family of origin? What are the three words?

Ginko:             I don't know, probably that I abandon them, that I'm mean, and that I'm scary.

Jessica:            Okay. I have a question. Are you mean? Honestly.

Ginko:             I mean, sometimes I think really mean things. Sometimes I wish I could be more mean. I'd like to be mean, I think, sometimes. I think I'd like to be more mean.

Jessica:            These are all very theoretical, in-your-head answers. I'm asking you, is your behavior with your family mean?

Ginko:             Sometimes, maybe.

Jessica:            That's correct. Sometimes. That's correct. That was the right answer. Good job. Okay. Sometimes you're mean. You're not abusive. You're not cruel. But sometimes you're mean. Are your two brothers sometimes mean?

Ginko:             Yes.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Is your mother sometimes mean?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Is your father sometimes mean?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Everybody is sometimes mean. Moving on. Are you sometimes scary? Or are you scary overall? Are you, as a descriptive, scary?

Ginko:             To them, I don't know.

Jessica:            That's right. To them.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Sometimes you're scary to them. You're not scary to your friends. Am I right?

Ginko:             I don't think so.

Jessica:            I don't either.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-mm. In your world, the parts of you that are scary to your family are not scary to the people in your world.

Ginko:             Yeah. That's true.

Jessica:            Yeah. Is it okay that your family of origin finds you scary sometimes?

Ginko:             Yeah, it's okay.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's also—is it okay if they find you mean sometimes?

Ginko:             I guess so.

Jessica:            You don't like these things, but I just want to acknowledge that what they do is a character assassination. "You are mean. You are abandoner." Right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And the truth is sometimes you're mean. Sometimes you abandon. Sometimes you're scary. True. Sure. Me too. Literally everybody is sometimes something shitty, okay?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            I just want you to allow yourself to explore, is the character assassination of these words—mean, scary, abandoner—are they true? They're not true. They're not true. They're sometimes true. And is it okay for your family to sometimes feel abandoned by you when you go off in your fucking hidey-hole, when you are consumed by your life? You're going to have to get to a place where you either change your behavior or let them have their fucking feelings. Even if they mean it as a character assassination—which they do, not just to you, but that's how they are, right?

                        But you can let them be people who they are, who make these broad and sweeping fucking assessments. "You're mean. You're hard to talk to." That's a shitty thing to say to a person, even if it's true. So, if you can let them be who they are, imperfect people who remember—I keep on seeing eight, nine, ten, like this is your period of your life that you are forever being held up against. You were intense at eight, nine, ten years old. You were loud. You were a lot. You were all the things. Sure. And then they just never let you change in your eyes. They've always said that you were that, even though you have spent your whole life since then trying to fix this thing that isn't even broken.

                        Sometimes you get set up, and it's true. Sometimes it isn't. But if you give yourself permission to be a person who is imperfect and trying, then when you are on the phone with Cancer and you can feel that he's like, "You're being mean," or, "I'm scared of what you're going to say," you can take a moment, take a breath, and be like, "He's actually allowed to have those feelings, and they don't define me."

                        And also, it's information. "He's intimidated by things I say sometimes. He doesn't know how to respond to the things I care about all the time." So it's both information about him and information about him. It's both information about him. The information about you is how you hold it, the power you give it, and how you do or don't abandon yourself and decenter yourself in the presence of somebody else's critical thoughts or feelings.

                        Now, I have loaded you with a ton of information. And I did look at my cards again, and what my cards said is, okay, we've hit our max capacity for how much data you can take in and still be here. And I want to just name that partially because it's good for you to know that's what I think, and partially because you are entitled to having a max capacity. It's healthy to know what it feels like, because can you feel what I'm talking about?

Ginko:             Yeah. I felt it. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. It just came in, right?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Great. It's good to notice that. It's so good to notice that. And I want to give you the idea that when you start to notice your capacity just starting to drown you a little bit with your brothers, with your family, with whoever, there's so much value in giving yourself permission to just be like, "Oh. This is what it feels like when I'm starting to hit my maximum capacity," because after maximum capacity, you floop away, right? You know what I'm saying?

Ginko:             What I'm thinking right now is, how do I integrate all of this info? I'm literally like—no idea.

Jessica:            And that's the thing. You don't have to integrate it at all. You don't want to pressure yourself to turn ideas and feelings into outcomes and behaviors immediately. This is not an IKEA set with instructions, okay? You're not building furniture now. This is more about hanging out with it, noticing in regular conversations with strangers and friends and family members where you abandon yourself, where your maximum capacity is and what you do in reaction to it.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Right? Because even the thought of, "What do I do with all this?"—that's—we have gone past your maximum capacity thought because now you're scrambling to make it work instead of being present with yourself. Great. Good information. This is why we're hanging out here, because here, at this—I'm seeing a backflow valve. As soon as you allow yourself to go past where you have flow inside of yourself, then your maladjusted coping mechanisms come online. And those make you miserable, just like everybody else's does.

                        And I want you to know—I don't want you to not feel special, but I keep on saying "just like everybody else" because your family lore is like, "There's something so greatly terrible and frightening about you."

Ginko:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            But no. That's just like every family has a scapegoat. Is it because every family is full of terrible people? No. It's just because it's the way we fucking organize in groups. I can go on about patriarchy and stuff like that, and I feel like we would just agree on agreeing. But you get where I'm going with this, right? So you don't have to immediately apply or do anything. You can just let it—okay. We're back to plants. When you repot a plant, it looks like it's dying at first, right?

Ginko:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Droopsy.

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you just keep on talking to it, giving it light, giving it water, and let its roots find its new space. Let yourself be the plant. We just fucked with your roots a little.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            You can be droopy now. It's okay. Let yourself have that.

Ginko:             Okay.

Jessica:            Okay?

Ginko:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. I feel like we did a lot. Don't pressure yourself. We did a lot. We did a lot.

Ginko:             We did do a lot.

Jessica:            We did a lot. We did a lot. And I really hope it does whatever it needs to do in your system.

Ginko:             Thank you, Jessica.

Jessica:            My pleasure. My pleasure. Take really good care.