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:            Molly, welcome to the podcast with your amazing cat mask. What would you like a reading about?

Molly:             Well, I'm very excited to be here. Let me pull up my question real quick. Despite having done a lot of work to not be ruled by shame at my core, I continue to be haunted by feelings of guilt that make me uncomfortable taking up space, that leave me thinking every off-values thing that I've said is just horrible. And it can make it really hard for me to tell what I actually feel or want or need. So I'm wondering, what does my chart say about this guilt that I just can't seem to shake? And how do I let go of it so I can be more fully who I want to be and, I guess, who I'm meant to be?

Jessica:            Yeah. So, first of all, I'm sorry. That is really shitty. And tell me, how hard do you fuck with astrology? Are you a student of astrology? Are you more of an enjoyer of astrology?

Molly:             I am an enjoyer of people who know about astrology, I think, is probably the—

Jessica:            That's great. That's perfect.

Molly:             —most accurate way to say that.

Jessica:            Before we even look at your chart, I'm going to just give you this context because as an astrologer, I'm always listening to the language people use to describe themselves because it's the language of the planets that they're describing or the placements they're describing. Shame is always Pluto, and guilt is Saturn. So, when I read your question, I was like, "Okay. I'm going to pull up this chart, and I expect to see Saturn/Pluto doing some shit."

                        There's something else you said in your question, which is about your thinking. It's not just about feelings; it's your mind returning to the scene of theoretical crime that may have actually been just literally not a big deal, I'm assuming—

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            —and your mind having a meaningful component to that. So, when we're looking at thoughts and the mind, we're looking at Mercury. Now, Uranus is your neurological system. That's a different thing. So we're looking, kind of, for Mercury, Saturn, and Pluto. I want to just give you that context. And then let's pull up your chart.

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            So you were born sometime in September—we're not saying the exact date, but 1982 in Fort Worth, Texas. And there are so many things I want to say about your chart and that we can talk about with your chart, but immediately I want to say you've got a Saturn/Pluto conjunction, and you have a Mercury/Saturn conjunction. So Mercury is not on top of Pluto, but it's on top of Saturn. So it's kind of like Mercury and Pluto are two slices of bread in a Saturn sandwich—

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            —which astrology nerds will know is not a good-tasting sandwich all the time. So Saturn/Pluto conjunction—and I'm going to start with a hard astrology read, and then we're going to get in, okay?

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            Saturn/Pluto conjunction generally indicates that there was some sort of loss in your early developmental experience, so anywhere from a year before birth until seven years old. Yeah. That—

Molly:             Ding, ding, ding.

Jessica:            They did, right?

Molly:             100 percent. Yes.

Jessica:            And it gives you this very intense feeling that stability and security, that survival and being approved of, is completely not something in your control. And so it gives you this drive to do everything in your power to achieve those things.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And because Saturn speaks to responsibility, accountability, maturity, and guilt and that Sisyphean pushing the ball up the hill kind of thing, it weighs down into the survival mechanisms of Pluto, which governs shame. They govern healing and transformation. So none of it's all bad, right? But it's certainly not easy or chill.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And then we have Mercury. Mercury is not just your mind; it's how your mind functions. It's how you listen. It's what you think about. It's how you verbalize. It's how you process data. And your sweet, little Mercury is in Libra. So you just want everything to be nice. You want everyone to get along.

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            You want everything to be pleasant. You don't want to be too much. You don't want to be intense. You don't want to be negative. You don't want to be a burden.

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And because—I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

Molly:             Uh-huh.

Jessica:            And then, because your Mercury is sitting on top of Saturn, you're fucking watching. You're clocking. You're tracking. You're tracking, you're tracking, you're tracking, you're tracking. You feel that it's your responsibility to make sure everything you said was above board and that it impacted people in a way that felt good to them, even though that's literally impossible.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            You feel that it's your responsibility to try. And because Pluto's proximity to Saturn—you have a compulsive and obsessive fixating approach to this task.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            This tracks, I'm assuming. Yeah?

Molly:             Yes. Uh-huh.

Jessica:            It doesn't tend to be like subtle things where you're like, "I don't know if that makes sense for me." And so, unfortunately, guilt and shame can be really motivating for you because you don't allow yourself peace because there is this fear that peace will come at the cost of survival on some level that can be applied to pretty much any situation.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            That's the bad news. Okay. But there's good news. This placement is also really good at giving you a powerful drive to participate—to participate in your own healing journey, whatever that means, to make sense of things, like to figure things out and get to the bottom of them—and to not just get to the bottom of them and get overwhelmed by data, but to organize that data in a way that is like other people can hear; other people can digest. Yeah?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So, I mean, my guess is you're probably really, really smart, and you're a good student. And you're a very efficient communicator. Does that track?

Molly:             Some of that does. I'm not very concise. And so efficient communicator—I've been working on it, but I would say that's not necessarily a total forte.

Jessica:            Okay. That's fair. And this is where we get into complexity of the birth chart. You have Neptune in the first house, and your Neptune in the first house is square to your Sun and your Midheaven. And so, when things start to crystallize into a form, something inside of you is like, "Poof. Where did that go? Wait. What?" And so metaphor comes in and visuals come in, and yeah, maybe that, but not this.

                        So, even though your system processes sharp lines, tight edges, when it comes to self-expression—getting it out—that Neptune comes online and is just like, "Let's just file those down and let the dust become its own thing." That's all that does. And so you have different parts, right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            But in your relationship to yourself, your capacity to cut to the quick is actually, I would say, very strong. Maybe your capacity to emotionally stay with that—eh, not so much. But your capacity to cut to the quick is strong. And this is a gift, but it can be a burden because you can sit here and think about, "Well, seven years ago, when I knew this person, I said this thing when we were hanging out over tea. And now I learned something, and now I have a different perspective. And so I realize that the thing I said was off; it wasn't right. I am accountable to that thing"—

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            —and then, again, drill down on yourself on it. Right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So your capacity to have succinct clarity—you do have it. You just don't use it to make your life better. I mean, sorry. And that doesn't mean you can't and you don't in any way, but I would say that in that regard, you're great. You're great. I mean, no notes, right? You can be tracking things that were said when you were 12 years old and still feel accountable to them, drill down on specificity within them.

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So we can talk about the behavior. The behavior is—and you might think of it as an emotional issue. I would actually posit that it's a behavioral issue. And the behavior is negative fixation, self-surveillance, self-policing—perfectionism, basically. Right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So these are behaviors, and they are driven by feelings that, at this moment, are too hard to feel, or you just haven't cultivated the tools for navigating them. The behavior is the symptom of a problem. It is actually not the problem. I mean, it's a problem. It's obviously a problem, right? But it's not—if all you do is try to fix your thinking or change your relationship to how you process shame and accountability, you're going to find that you are talking in circles in therapy, that you're beating your head against a wall because you technically know better but you don't necessarily know how to do better.

Molly:             Yeah. There's something then that gets into, like, being scared about letting myself off the hook too easily.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Molly:             It's like sometimes I can tell my reaction is not right sized. And I guess some of it, yeah, is the thinking stuff, but some of it really feels like that sort of, "Ugh, I just feel— I don't know how to not feel so bad about it."

Jessica:            Yeah. If this feels safe—and if it doesn't, we don't have to do it. But what do you think of you picking up something that is an example of this?

Molly:             Okay. I do actually have a recent small example.

Jessica:            Great. That's what I was hoping for. Okay. Great.

Molly:             Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I go to a gym, and we were doing some pair work. And this person I had met before, but it had been a bit. And so I was like, "Oh, wait, remind me of your name." She said her name, and then she's like, "Oh, you're"—blank. She was like, "Is that your name?" And that was not my name. It was the name of someone who's lovely but 15 years older than me.

And so, instead of just being like, "Oh, no, my name is Molly," I was like, "Oh, I'm not that old." And I was like, "Oh." As soon as I said that, I was like, "That was fucking rude. I didn't need to throw this other"—you know what I mean? The other lady wasn't there. It's not like she was going to get hurt. But I was like, "That was fucking—God, that was shitty. I didn't have to say that."

Jessica:            Okay. And obviously, it's like, "Grr, grr, grr," you, right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And this is where I'm clocking it. It's here, right? Your solar plexus?

Molly:             Yeah. Tummy, tummy knots.

Jessica:            Tummy. Tummy. Okay. Yeah. First, I want to acknowledge that your coping mechanism is activated. You're confused. You got spacey just now, yeah?

Molly:             Yes. Uh-huh.

Jessica:            Okay. So I could feel that. And this is a coping mechanism. The feelings were too hard to stay with, so you just left your body. And it doesn't feel like, "Oh, I'm choosing to do this." It's a reflex at this point.

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            But this confusion, this spaciness—like all of a sudden you're an airhead. You're not. I mean, there's nothing wrong with being an airhead, but you're not—is a symptom that there was an emotion that you couldn't handle. And because you couldn't handle it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means you have a need that you don't know how to tend to. I wish I could tattoo that somewhere on your wrist so you could look down at it, okay?

Molly:             Not a bad idea.

Jessica:            Because that Saturn/Pluto conjunction makes you feel like, "If I have a need that I can't tend to myself, then there's something wrong with me."

Molly:             Yeah. And some part of me now sort of believes or knows that's not true. And also, yeah, I mean, that is really hard to shake, and that can definitely be a place where guilt and shame come up.

Jessica:            Yep. Totally. And then, if a relationship dynamic goes too far, then it flips the other way and it's like then you feel resentful at everything, because how dare they make you do everything?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            I mean, the problem is Pluto is all about the extreme, so it's all the lights are off in the room or all the lights are on.

Molly:             Goddamnit.

Jessica:            Yeah. And they're both uncomfortable.

Molly:             I feel that so strongly.

Jessica:            Yeah. Of course.

Molly:             It's like, yeah, okay, I just gotta bing-bong between the [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of like your cat mask. It's like black and white.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's that classic Plutonian energy. And so I want you to notice that you got back in because we were chitchatting and we were pulled away from the intensity around the emotion you hold around that event. And as I'm saying that, it's kind of coming back, your thing. But I want to just acknowledge that analyzing things is a coping mechanism that—it's like a high-functioning coping mechanism that works for you.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            This is why I would say, if you are in any kind of therapy, somatic process would probably be your best bet because you can talk your way around anything, but your body is where it's at. Your body is holding all of this for you.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Now, coming back to the example, there's two things happening at the same time, and they're both really challenging. One thing is the emotions and the sensations in your body are so overwhelming and so difficult to tolerate that you have a very human response of, "I must get away." It feels like drowning. It feels like quicksand. It feels like falling apart or being meaningfully threatened. So you gotta get away from the emotions.

                        And so, to practice noticing how it feels, like noticing where it feels, how it feels—like, okay, so it's in your stomach. I called it solar plexus because I'm a little woo, but whatever. It's in there. Can you breathe into it? And if you breathe into it, does it kind of go into your chest? Does it kind of go into your head? Just keep on breathing into, without analyzing or fixing, but just being like, "Okay. I'm bearing witness to my feelings and breathing into them," because what we do when we feel like shit is we pull away. We literally deny the body breath, and we pull away. And that, unfortunately for you, is a reenactment of trauma because what you're doing is you're abandoning yourself for being too much.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And so the injury that caused the pain can't be the injury that solves the problem.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And the problem isn't being like, "Oh, wow. That—I said something not aligned. That's great. Okay. I said something not aligned." And we'll get to that part in a minute. But it's more that, "I did something bad; therefore, I am bad." That's the problem, right?

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And it goes into very young kinds of thinking. It's like the thinking of a toddler, the thinking of a little kid. It's a very young survival mechanism. And so you can't reason with it or explain it away. You can't explain to yourself, "Why? It's not that big a deal. Okay. You can just do better next time," because you're not dealing with the part of you—the part of you that's driving this is so young that it can only be nurtured into evolution. It can't be reasoned into evolution.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Here's the other part. Did you realize in the moment, "Oh shit. That was not what I wanted to say," or was it afterwards?

Molly:             It was more afterwards that I was like, "Oh, that was a shitty thing to say. There was no need for that."

Jessica:            There's no need for that. Great. Totally. And I mean, I get what you're saying because I'm assuming for the same reasons of just you don't want to throw another woman under the bus and be like, "You're old."

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            I get that. And also, you're in your early to mid-40s. It's okay that you're a little sensey. You didn't say anything about this person's age. I'm assuming they're in their 30s or 20s.

Molly:             Yeah, that person is— I don't know how old she is, but she's not in her 40s, for sure.

Jessica:            She's young. She's young.

Molly:             Yeah, [crosstalk].

Jessica:            So it was a trigger.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Get ready and get used to it. It's never going to go away. You're just going to get older, right?

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So it's okay that you were triggered around age. And as I say that, I can see you don't agree. You might technically agree, but emotionally—

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah, I guess I—it feels like such a value that getting old is like a privilege. And I hate it when women are like, "You don't look your age." It's like, well, okay, great. I mean, what's wrong with looking—

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also, everybody who's an age looks their age. I mean—

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Bottom line, right?

Molly:             Exactly. Yeah.

Jessica:            I agree with you completely.

Molly:             So I think there was embarrassment. Yeah.

Jessica:            So here's the problem with what you're saying, because I agree with you 100 percent. Same words come out of my mouth. You are being perfectionistic about your values. So that's the problem, is instead of holding—

Molly:             What?

Jessica:            Sorry. Sorry. It's annoying because you already knew that, right? You already knew that. So I don't know if you've heard me talk about this before, but I see ideals and values—which is Neptune and Venus—in this way that I'm going to describe. Ideals, a.k.a. Neptune, are like the stars. They guide the night sky. They light up the night sky. You look up to them, but you never reach them, even if you're a fucking tech billionaire asshole. You just don't reach them, right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Similarly, lampposts light the night sky, right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            That's Venus. That's your values. The difference is you can reach a lamppost. You can get a big-ass ladder. You can climb. You can change out the light bulb. It's not easy to reach your values, to attain your values. But it is attainable. Ideals are not attainable; they're ideal. They're purity, perfection, idealization, whereas Venus is purpose, ethics, values. That is achievable. We cannot achieve it perfectly because, at 25, the thoughts that you had around beauty and the way people talked about your body and your age would be radically different than they will be at 45 because—obviously, because the world changed, because you changed.

                        So, in the practice of living in accordance with your values, there has to be the ability—there doesn't have to be anything. I'm being perfectionistic with the way I say it. But I want to encourage you to explore, "Can I recognize I said something out of alignment? It was a reflection of my insecurities instead of a reflection of my values."

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you can't correct it until you first give yourself permission to be human and to have spoken out of alignment, to have mixed feelings, because I don't know about you—I mean, I'm in my 50s, but—I'm in my early 50s, I should say. But I don't know about you, but sometimes, I'm like, "Oh no, the lines. Oh no, the hair. Oh no, the thing, the thing, the thing. I'm aging." And it feels bad, and I let pedophile culture influence my desire to look young. And it feels bad.

                        And then sometimes I'm like the way I just said, where I'm all tough about it and I have a political lens. It's okay to "and also." It's okay to falter. And if it's not okay for you to do it, then that means it's not okay for me to do it. And I know you believe it's okay for me to do it.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            That's the fucked-up part, right?

Molly:             Literally.

Jessica:            Literally. Yeah. Literally. Literally. You've organized your life around this, I'm guessing, right—

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            —that it's okay for people to have a learning curve and to evolve and to—

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            —sometimes walk the path, and they're just like, "Birds. Squirrels. Roots. I didn't trip," and then other times to miss all the nature and trip on all the roots. Right?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            There's just different times. And when you have an experience like you did the other day, it reveals something to you about yourself.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            I'm going to tell you what it revealed. That woman triggered you.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Something about her personality, actually, not just about her youth. I can see it. Sorry. I can see it psychically very easily. She is a little bit of a, "Ooh," kind of like she's kind of triggered something for you. Okay. Not to shit-talk her, but it's okay to be triggered by people. That's okay.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So that's one thing that it revealed about you, like, "Oh, I don't feel secure in myself around this person." That's great information for you to have. That means you need better boundaries with them, with her, not that there's something wrong with you.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And you don't have to impugn there being something wrong with her in order to not like her—Mercury in Libra.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah, because there is a part of you that thinks, "If I don't like somebody, that means there's something wrong," whereas some people are just not your cup of tea.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So that's one thing. The other thing is you were triggered around age.

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            That's a great thing for you to know. And you're 44. That's fair. I don't know a lot of women at 44 who aren't triggered around age sometimes. Another thing is it wasn't that deep in the moment. You thought about it, and it became really deep and you realized that it reflected something deep. But in the moment, you were just like, "Yeah." Right? It was just shit that came out of your mouth.

Molly:             Yeah, and then sort of a tightening of, like, "Jeez, do you think I look—do you think I'm 60?" I don't mind that I look in my 40s, but—

Jessica:            Yeah. 60 is a big shift. It's a big shift. There's nothing wrong with you feeling that way.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Like, literally.

Molly:             I don't even think, actually, that's what she—I think she just was like, "Oh, all these people and names."

Jessica:            Totally.

Molly:             But also, maybe she was like, "Oh, these are the old people."

Jessica:            Right. "These are the old people in the group, and I mixed up their names."

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            Or it could be a million different things that have nothing to do with anything, right?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            The point is she, if she has a chart like yours, may be obsessing on how she got someone's name wrong and got their age wrong and made them feel bad.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            She might not. She might never think about it again. We don't know.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            But what's important for you in this is the energy with which you police yourself—you would go out of your way to articulate empathy and care and patience for someone else. You wouldn't be like, "Yeah, that's how you be accountable, by beating yourself up," right?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You wouldn't call that accountability. You would call that self-harm.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So what is accountability in this situation? Accountability, I would say, is a number of things. It's being accountable to the ways in which you parent yourself that are cruel because Saturn—we're talking about Saturn. We're talking about self-parenting. And the way you're parenting yourself is not uncommon for somebody with this placement. You're overdoing it because you're like, "Either I'm negligent or I'm strict. There's nothing in between." Right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            All this, all that. And so part of what you're learning is that, okay, so your self-parenting could use a little softening. And you have great ambiguity about where the boundaries between accountability and policing live. You don't have ambiguity about it intellectually.

Molly:             The fear is so deep that I'm going to go easy on myself and let something bad slide or justify—I'm going to be like, "Oh, I'm just human," and I did something super shitty that's, like—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Molly:             —you know. And even when I'm kind of like, "Okay, I guess it wasn't that"—it's just—I don't know, man. It's really fucking hard to right-size it, even when I'm like, "I think this is off."  I don't know how to—

Jessica:            Okay. So there's a number of things, and I want to say you're a xennial, right? You're late Pluto in Libra. Do you identify as xennial?

Molly:             Yeah, or like—I don't know—older millennial—

Jessica:            Older millennial? Yeah.

Molly:             —or—I don't know.

Jessica:            Yeah. Your generation has this problem because you came up on the internet, and unlike Gen Z, who came up with internet critique, you just came up on the internet. And so this policing as a way to perform accountability—we can point to any number of things, but ultimately, it is like a cultural struggle of your generation.

Molly:             I believe that.

Jessica:            And you do a really good job of it. You're excellent at it.

Molly:             I should also probably tell you that I was raised evangelical and also have a lot of like, you know, "Oh, even thoughts are bad," you know, this sort of like, "There's so much that can be bad and harmful," that's just—now I'm like, that's so blown out of proportion.

Jessica:            So you went from evangelical to progressive, yeah?

Molly:             Yes, and even that was like a weird—when I first came into social justice awareness, it was through this very intense evangelical lens that was also like, "Well, then you should not have anything. You should be very poor," and yeah, so—

Jessica:            And when you date, do you date men or women? Both? Something in between? What's the pronouns I should use for your dates?

Molly:             I have a partner, he/him, but I like a lot of genders.

Jessica:            Okay. You like a lot of genders, but right now you're dating a male person.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Okay. And are you in contact with your family?

Molly:             I am.

Jessica:            Okay. And so they're not queerly challenged in—

Molly:             Oh, I am not out to my family as a—

Jessica:            Okay. That's what I was trying to get at. That's what I was trying to get at. Okay. So non-heterosexual conduct is not their business at this time.

Molly:             Right. I think they have their suspicions and their concerns, but I've had the same partner for 16 years, and so that's like a—

Jessica:            Oh my God, so many years.

Molly:             Yeah, so many years.

Jessica:            And so the two of you met in the church and then evolved out of the church?

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            Okay.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So I want to just name you have that tightening happening inside of you because you have fucked-up feelings about where you've come from and your journey.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And at core, it's guilt and shame. It's what you contacted me for, right? It's like good news. You keep on bringing it back.

Molly:             It's still there.

Jessica:            [crosstalk].

Molly:             [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. And it is really helpful that you shared the evangelical piece because I know that that spiritual values system and the culture around it is you are punished for bad thoughts and bad deeds, you are rewarded for purity, and you should tattle on everyone, and that everyone is evil that doesn't think and do like you should be thinking and doing. Right? [crosstalk]—

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Yeah, and also, everything about you is bad and garbage except for what God/Jesus has done for you. And that's the only thing good about you. Left to your own devices, you're just—it's like worm theology or whatever, like [crosstalk].

Jessica:            I mean, yeah. Yeah. And I will say it's actually come up in a few readings recently, and this thing of how going from evangelical to progressive—how easy it is to find yourself performing before you've emotionally evolved into some of the values that you hold.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And so that can get in there, right? It gets in there in your chest. And I want to just say this. You, my friend, can have no beginning but the beginning you had.

Molly:             Yep.

Jessica:            You can have no childhood but the childhood you had.

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            The people who raised you, the shit you went through, the thoughts you thought, the feelings you felt—can't change them.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You can lament. You can resent. You can feel guilty. You are entitled to do all of those things, and it's impossible to not do them a little bit at least. But recognizing that those feelings and those habits are a symptom of not accepting—so accepting doesn't mean consenting. It simply means being like, "Okay. I have lots of feelings. I'm not settled. That's where I am about where I was or what I did."

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's really disarmingly simple but very hard to remember to choose to do and to stay with the practice.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And the truth of the matter is no one can promise you or assure you for sure that you're not going to end up in everlasting hell. That's another fucking scary part of all of this—the micromanaging and the perfectionism—

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —even if you don't really believe in hell anymore, it's in the machine, right? It's in the noodle. Here's a question that I know you know what the right answer is, but I want to ask you for the truth. The only way for you to find the truth is to take a minute. Take a breath and notice how you feel in your body when I ask you the question, okay?

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            Can you not forgive yourself, but accept that you said what you said to the girlie in the gym?

Molly:             Yeah. I feel like I can mostly say yes to that.

Jessica:            Okay. The "mostly"—I want to just—I want to lean on the "mostly" for a minute—

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            —because before you said "yeah," I was like, "You are not accepting it." What I saw you doing was sitting down next to it. What I saw you do was make a truce. There is a difference between a truce and acceptance.

Molly:             So the way I want to internalize is like, "Okay. I said that thing. It was kind of shitty. If I had that moment to do over again, I would just say, 'Oh, no, that's not my name. This is my name,' and kept it moving."

Jessica:            Totally. Yeah.

Molly:             And maybe tried to allow myself to have my feels and be like, "Well, that kind of hurt my feelings that she thinks I'm significantly older than I am."

Jessica:            Because what I see is that it would be very easy for you, this time tomorrow, to go into a shame spiral about it again. And I don't want you to feel criticized.

Molly:             No.

Jessica:            It's not good or bad. Yeah.

Molly:             No, I didn't—yeah.

Jessica:            It's not good or bad.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            It's about recognizing that it is really hard to accept that it already happened, right?

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            Even when you gave me—you were like, "Yes, I can accept"—you had to explain the situation because you do deeply fear that accepting that it happened is the same thing as taking yourself off the hook.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And I think a lot of people associate acceptance with consent, like I am saying to myself, "Free pass. It's fine. I accept." Right? But what acceptance is is kind of letting it settle down instead of doing what you're doing, which is kind of like tenting up so it doesn't settle down. So I can right now feel a little bit of an anxiety through that part of your torso. Are you experiencing that?

Molly:             Yeah, although when you were saying letting it settle down, I feel like I was like, "Okay." [crosstalk] like—

Jessica:            She settled a little.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            You are in a rush, my Sagittarius Rising friend. You're in a rush. You're in a rush to get through this, right? You're in a rush to—not in this moment with me, although in this moment with me. This is your process. Your process is, "I'm going to figure out what needs to be done, and then I need to just do it, and it needs to just work."

Molly:             You know, it's funny because when I was like, "I'm not that into astrology"—because sometimes when I read things, I'm like, "I don't know. That's not me." But then sometimes when I hear you say things, I'm like, "What the fuck are you doing? Yes. That's me." There are so many ways that the rushing comes out.

Jessica:            You're like—yeah. And I'll just—quick aside. General astrology horoscopes and paragraphs about placements is not really what astrology is.

Molly:             That's fair.

Jessica:            It's like how you teach astrology to people who don't have a comprehensive knowledge of astrology. So it makes sense that that doesn't vibe and an actual reading does, right?

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And we can link this to trauma. We can link this to your evangelical roots. We can link this to perfectionist society. We can link it to white supremacy. We can link it to lots of things. But let's just say we're both very intelligent. We both share a lot of values. So we're linking. That's not what I want you to focus on.

It's more that, "Oh, wow. Okay. I have a tendency towards shame—shame spirals and guilt. And I don't know how to not rush myself past uncomfortable feelings, whether it's the discomfort of I can't completely accept that I said that and I'd rather revisit it and beat myself up about it than just accept that it happened"—because you want to notice that I have not yet come to, well, what could you do as repair? Because when we try to repair without acceptance, it's a performance of reparation.

Molly:             I think about it in terms of forgiveness—I know you were careful not to use the word "forgiveness," but that forgiveness without really reckoning with what the cost has been ends up being kind of spiritual-bypassy.

Jessica:            Yes. Listen. This is a great example you've given me because it's not the worst thing in the world, right? We could probably have come up with much more triggering topics. So it's a good one that you've chosen because it's so obvious that it's your issues as opposed to having perpetrated harm or done something vastly egregious towards your ethics, your values, or any people.

                        That said, you say all the right words. You have all the right analysis. But the reason why you're stuck in the compulsions and in the feelings is because you're rushing to take that insight and that awareness and rush it into a product. And that product is peace. That product is accountability. That product is not feeling like fucking trash on fire, because I know that Saturn/Pluto conjunction can feel like, "Oh my God. I am a trashcan, and I'm burning." It's just like it makes everything feel terrible and on fire.

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So, all of that said, being able to hang out with the messiness—this is—now I'm going to get to homework. Whenever you think about this situation or anything else that triggers you in this particular way, my advice to you is to hang out with and breathe into the feelings and say to yourself, "I will figure out how to be accountable after I've figured out how to take care of myself." Now, I'm not giving you this advice if you hit someone with your car. I'm not giving you this advice if you—

Molly:             God. Yes.

Jessica:            You know what I mean? This is the advice I'm giving you for thinking about things in the past. It's about, really, the thing that you're asking me about. It's like you said some stupid shit. You acted in ways that were not fully aligned, not you acted in ways that perpetrated real harm. The practice for you is recognizing that the way you talk to yourself is like a restrictive, cruel parent, probably a very religious one—one of them or both of them were very religious?

Molly:             Well, they both are very religious, but one was—

Jessica:            Which one was punishing?

Molly:             My dad can be rather harsh. My mom can be very—can feel very aghast and very much like, "Oh, that's so disappointing."

Jessica:            So this is your mom. I'm talking about your mom—

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            —because it's a form of abandonment, of, "I thought I was on your side, but I can't be." That's the trauma that's active here, okay?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            And so what you're doing is that interjected perpetrator where you're saying to yourself, "I can't believe I said that. That was so terrible. I am aghast at myself." This is a cause for reparenting, and so asking yourself, "How can I say that differently to myself? How can I hold accountability differently?" You can't start there, though, because if you—there's a reason why I didn't start there in our conversation, because if you start there, it's just words.

What has to be the first step for real change to eventually occur is practicing hanging out with the feelings and say, like a nurturing adult would to a child, "Yeah, this feels bad. And it's okay that it feels bad. I'm not sure what to do." Do you have children, human children?

Molly: (shakes head)

Jessica:            Okay. But have you been around children?

Molly: Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Children.

Molly: Children.

Jessica:            When they cry—and we're talking about little kids, right, because this part of you is young. It's little. When they cry about something, they become inconsolable, blubbering. They make no sense, and you cannot reason with them. What you can do is maybe set a boundary. Give them a big hug. Let them cry it out. Wait for them to shift past the heightened emotion so that you can then start to assess, "Okay. Do we need to just move on?" or, "Okay. Do we need to figure this out?" You hit your friend and you want to say, "Sorry. I didn't mean to hit you." Right?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            But when we rush our children past that stage of nurturance—it's okay to have big emotions; it's okay to be overwhelmed—we actually perpetrate harm. And you are the one who's pressing your inner child to get past big emotions and perpetrating the harm to yourself.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So the work is to really think—and this is ultimately puppy talk rules. If you've been listening to me for a while, you've heard me talk about puppy talk rules. But for you, I almost wonder if it's like cute, little toddler rules, like Cabbage Patch Kid rules. It's okay if you're an asshole to yourself, as long as you recognize, "Oh shit. I just spent the last week talking to myself in terrible tones of voice, saying really mean things to myself, holding myself to a perfectionistic standard about x. And even if the thing I did was wrong, that's not how we talk to people. That's not how we treat people we care about." And I know I spoke in plurals, but I am actually a believer in we have many parts.

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            And it's okay to talk to our parts, right?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So I'm going to shut up, and I'm going to see, do you have any questions or anything that you want to name or have me speak to?

Molly:             Yeah, I guess I do have a question, which is kind of a sharp turn. There's a lot of conflict right now with my brother and between my brother and my parents, and now it's spilling over to me. And it then affects my relationship with my niblings, who are deeply important. I guess I have a question about—there's all these different sort of versions of my brother that I feel like I'm trying to bring together, and I don't know kind of what to believe about him.

Jessica:            Are your parents asking you to take sides?

Molly:             Kind of, but I really—I mean, I think that my brother's really done some fucked-up stuff. I guess my assumption right now is that this rupture is just going to be as big as it is and that I'm just going to have to wait a long time. But I don't know if there's anything else that I can do. I feel like my brother is really kind of just not leaving space for anything else.

Jessica:            So you have Saturn opposite Mercury. The transit is active at this time. And what will often happen is a major crisis or blowout with either friends—Mercury—or your sibling—Mercury. So it's not shocking for me to hear you say that you're dealing with a confrontation with your brother. And that confrontation—the roots of it might be found seven years ago, approximately.

Molly:             Parts of it, yeah. It feels like there are so many different roots, but parts of it is like, yeah, a work relationship between my brother and my dad in particular that started approximately seven years ago.

Jessica:            Approximately seven—that'll do it. Yeah, that'll do it. Saturn is pretty easy to track in that way.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            So here's the thing. Your parents demand—not require—your obedience and that you perceive reality the way they do. I'm not saying your brother is not accountable or at fault. But I am saying I can't tell that it's necessary that you take on this conflict.

Molly:             Yeah, and I've tried to not, but now my brother sent me this message that was basically, I think, saying he wants to also cut off relationship with me as well as my parents. And I was kind of like, "What the fuck did I"—I have stayed at, like—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Molly:             I mean, [crosstalk].

Jessica:            So staying out of it is taking sides, because your parents are the power. So it's not the same thing as taking your parents' side, but staying out of it means you haven't sided with him.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            I mean, imagine if you were in your own situation with your parents and your brother didn't take sides. You would know that he wasn't going out of his way to side with you. And so maybe that's the case. Maybe you actually side with your parents on this one. Maybe you can't side with your brother. Or maybe you haven't wanted to get involved because you don't like drama and you think they're both wrong. That's probably closer to what happened, right? They're both accountable in their ways? Yeah.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And so then the question becomes, what's your primary goal? Because if your primary goal is those damn niblings, then there is a value in saying, "Hey, brother, I've tried to stay out of this because it seems really messy, but I realized based on your text that me staying out of it seemed like I was siding with them. I'm not siding with them. And if you want to talk about the situation, I can. But more than anything, I just love you and I hope our relationship can stay good." You can say something like that. I don't know it that would be true. Would that be true if you said something like that?

Molly:             To some extent. I think—yeah, I think there's harm on both sides. And I really don't see you, brother, being willing to be accountable.

Jessica:            So, if you say that to your brother, then he's not talking to you anymore.

Molly:             Probably. But I don't know—but I have held back for years because he really wants to be the victims, just completely. And I'm like, "Yeah, there are ways you've been victimized, 100 percent." But I find it very upsetting that there's—well, speaking of accountability and how important it is to me, it drives me nuts that—

Jessica:            Yes. It's the same topic, really. Yeah.

Molly:             Yes. [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            So let me just say this. You have a tendency towards vigorous honesty, right? You're just like, "I'm going to say nothing"—

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            —"or I'm going to say everything, and I'm going to let everyone know all the parts." So there is a wisdom in that, and that is a skill. And it's not bad or good. However, you are not friends with your brother. He's not a person you would choose as your friend. He's just not a person you would choose as your friend. He's your brother. And again, he has those niblings. And so you have decisions to make about what's in alignment for you.

                        Is it important to tell him what you think when you know damn well he will not hear it; it won't change anything at the time? It might change something down the line; nobody knows. But he's not going to change because of your opinion. That's been established, right? You're both adults. But if your primary ambition is to deepen and strengthen the bond between you and your brother, then that vigorous honesty is required.

                        If, by contrast, you don't actually believe that you can have a vigorously honest relationship with your brother and that you can deepen the relationship with him, if you were to accept him for who he is, not who you think he could be, then you might have other motivations to center, like staying in the kids' life because you like the kids. Not having conflict with your brother may mean telling him a little bit more of what he wants to hear and a little bit less of your truth because you have other ambitions.

                        And that's okay. I wouldn't say that that's cruel or manipulating. I think that's—again, it comes back to acceptance because your brother is just as much a product of your parents and your childhood as you are, without therapy. It's just like he's the version without therapy. So when those of us who do lots and lots of therapy and work really hard on our healing journey try to force other people to meet us where we're at, it doesn't go well. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Maybe it's actually your best move. But I want to just introduce another way of thinking about it.

Molly:             Yeah. I don't think he actually wants to hear the complicatedness that I [crosstalk].

Jessica:            [crosstalk]. I agree.

Molly:             I think he wants it to be a simple poor, poor, poor him.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's, "You're either on my side or you're not on my side."

Molly:             Yeah, and I can't—

Jessica:            There's a for me and against me. But let me just slow this down a minute because he does to you what you do to you and what your mom did to you. Everybody's doing the same shit, okay? You're not doing—

Molly:             Yeah. We're a mess.

Jessica:            Yeah. Well, you're people. You're people. And the way that you treat other people is not the way your mother treated you or your brother treats everyone. But you're right that having a relationship with your brother that you would have with any other adult is unrealistic because he's your family; he's not your friend. I can't imagine you choosing him at a party to just be like, "Hey, let's chat." You know? You guys wouldn't vibe that way.

                        That's okay. But he does want you to just be on his side. And it is possible for you to say, "I've stayed out of this because it's all too triggering. But you know I'm there for you, and you know I believe in you." And you can mean all of those words. You do believe in him. I mean, you believe he's messed up, but you believe. You believe that he's capable, maybe more than he wants to be. Again, I am not convicted that—I'm not giving you advice. You know I love to give advice and tell people what to do.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            That's not exactly what I'm doing here.  But I am concerned, because Saturn is currently opposing your Mercury or coming for your Mercury, that you're going to, in effect, unintentionally advocate for your parents with your brother—

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            —which is how you're pitted against each other to behave.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            This is not the first time the two of you have been kind of pitted against each other. And I know that's not technically what your brother or your parents think they're doing, but they're just messy.

Molly:             Yeah. And I feel that sort of old pattern haunting all of this.

Jessica:            All of it. All of it.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And sometimes, when children are involved, the best thing to do is make nice so you can keep the niblings close at hand, right, so that you can stay connected?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            And sometimes that's not the best thing to do, you know?

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            But I think it's important to be realistic. Processing with your brother is screaming into the void. And maybe you need to process with your brother for your own peace of mind, but that's why you'd be doing it, not for him or the relationship—

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            —if you were to accept that he is the man he's grown into being.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Is he older?

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            Okay. Yeah, because he feels like a grown-ass adult.

Molly:             Oh yeah.

Jessica:            People can change. He's not taking steps to change, so there's no reason to expect him to change. He certainly hasn't yet. And I would recommend you write three separate letters to your brother. Send none of them, for the record. The first one is—you say everything on your goddamn mind. You tell him all the things you haven't said over all the years about his lack of accountability and his victimhood and all the things. You just say it. You put your most analytic, perfectionistic, petty mind at use.

This is good to do. I know it might kick up some shame feelings, but it's good to release it, to get it out. And then don't burn it. Don't rip it up. Write another letter, a letter where you blow smoke up his ass and tell him exactly what he wants to hear. Write a third letter, something that's more in between, more like what I said of, you know, "I believe in you. I care about you. I just didn't want to be in the middle. I have my own things going on. Sorry if you didn't feel like I was there for you," where you're not saying anything, but you're kind of saying what he needs to hear so that you can stay in relationship.

If you want to write a fourth letter, write a fourth letter. You see this is going to take time. You can't do this all too swiftly. That's part of the assignment, is to slow down. And so write these letters, and then when you've flushed out a lot of your different thoughts, a lot of things that you're struggling with, something is going to rise to the surface.

Molly: Yeah.

Jessica:            And then you can do that. When we don't allow ourselves to have our messy thoughts, they just get louder, and they get more twisted up.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            So this is what I would recommend. And again, anything with your parents—that includes the manipulation. I mean, they could be like, "Come over. We made pie." There's something—there's something. There's something. It's not just pie, you know?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            I'm not saying that they're bad people. They may or may not be, but I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that's how they know how to organize relationships with other people and intimacy.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Therefore, it's really important that you go into interactions with them with the awareness of, "Okay. I'm going to be easily triggered, and they probably want something that they may or may not be aware of. I just keep that in mind when I talk to myself when I process my emotions, when I think about what to say or how to get involved or whether or not to get involved, because what I'm really encouraging you to do is accept them without judgment. And that doesn't mean you don't have discernment. Have discernment. You're a Virgo. Have discernment. But the process of acceptance happens without judgment. It's not acceptance if you're also judging.

Molly:             Yeah. Okay.

Jessica:            That's going to be my advice. Does that answer your question?

Molly:             Yeah. I mean, I think if we had all day, I would have like 25 more. But this is—

Jessica:            Absolutely.

Molly:             —wonderful.

Jessica:            Good. Okay. Great. So can I ask you a question before we close up?

Molly:             Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Are your anxieties a little activated right now?

Molly:             Yeah. Talking about all the stuff with my brother and my family is just—it's been really painful, and it stirs up a lot in a lot of directions.

Jessica:            I'm sorry. So do you know where you're feeling the anxiety in your body?

Molly:             I kind of feel it in my tummy, but I'm also really hungry.

Jessica:            Okay. So it could be a little bit of—

Molly:             So it's a little—

Jessica:            A little bit of both, right? And do you feel it in your chest at all?

Molly: Maybe a little bit.

Jessica:            Okay. Can I just have you, for a second, breathe into your tummy or wherever the emotions might be moving around your body, the sadness and a little bit of anxiety around the family stuff? When you breathe into it, do you feel like you're breathing into a wall, or do you feel like you're breathing into space?

Molly:             I don't know. What I'm trying to imagine is sending breath and space around it or just sort of like—

Jessica:            Around it. Okay.

Molly:             —gentle holding for whatever's there.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. So that makes sense with what I'm seeing when you're doing it.

Molly:             Okay.

Jessica:            What you just described is breath around it. So it's a rock, and there's air around the rock. You're not breathing into the rock because you have a coping mechanism that is a rock. It is impenetrable. And so even rocks are organisms, and they have life. So, if you can kind of visualize wherever your anxiety or your blocks are, not breathing your human breath, but somehow air particles just filling up that space—did that work for you? Were you able to do that?

Molly:             I think so. It's definitely a different sort of thing I'm inviting, and it feels nice.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Molly:             Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah, it looked like you did it right away. And I want to invite you into that practice because you can put popcorn and unicorns and breath around your issues, but you want them to permeate into, so that breath into the rock. And Saturn/Pluto will often feel like a mountain of lava, of molten lava, like dark, impenetrable, solid. So inviting universal breath or air particles into it can help to invigorate something that is really shut down or inaccessible. And it might sound counterintuitive, but that will minimize your anxiety.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah. No, that feels true. Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to give you the homework, for the rest of the night, every time that feeling of anxiety comes up—which may be 700 times, right? It comes up quick and easy for you. Try to breathe into it, and/or ask yourself, "Is it okay if I feel a little anxious right now?" And if the answer is no, say, "Okay. I'm allowed to have a tantrum." And if the answer is yes, say, "Okay. Then I'm going to give myself that permission." That's it.

                        I want to really encourage you to have a more active, conscious conversation with yourself that is nurturing and supportive because that's what will empower you to be more accountable to your own boundaries and needs and convictions because you're not going to be burning yourself out and destroying yourself over things that are nor proportionately worth that.

And then you can destroy yourself and burn yourself out, if you want, about terrible things you do. You know what I mean? You want to reserve your energy for when it's needed. So, I mean, hopefully they're not needed, but just in case, you know? I'm in calamity train with you. I'll go there, too. You know what I mean? We can do that.

                        But some of what's happening with your family, I would name, is not yours. And so better boundaries will help you to be like, "Oh, wow. This sucks for them, and it's activating for me. And I'm just going to put it in a nice, solid bubble," you know? Something like that.

Molly:             Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            So, my dear, we wrap up. You have your homework.

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            You have your reparenting assignment—

Molly:             Yes.

Jessica:            —which is a long-term project. And I really wish you well with this. I know it's a thorny path.

Molly:             It's a long road.

Jessica:            But it's one worth traveling. It's a long, thorny path. And there's nettles. There's nettles around. Do you know what I mean?

Molly:             I know.

Jessica:            Stinging, just stinging.

Molly:             Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            But I feel like it's worth it.

Molly:             Yeah. Thank you so much.

Jessica:            So my pleasure.