Curious that Juno's temple was dedicated on 10 October and in our modern world, this same date is World Mental Health Day. One treads on shaky ground when trying to discern potentials for mental illness from the natal chart, yet many have noticed enough patterns, aspects between planets, to have reached some conclusions.
I wonder about the asteroid God'dess Juno in her emanation as Juno Sospita - the Preserver - and whether or not her placement in the natal chart is indicative of a potential to develop what is called 'mental illness'. I base my ponderments on the ancient Roman belief that the juno represented the soul of a woman; that bit of the God'dess that a woman embodies.
There Was and There Was Not....
I am a Daughter of Madness; my mother was diagnosed with Manic-Depression a few years before I was born. My father, a strange and enigmatic man, fits the profile of a Borderline Personality, yet he was possibly just a man of his times: a controlling and domineering patriarch who had been raised and conditioned by the mores of another culture. A quintessential Englishman who had emigrated to Australia and struggled with the subtle cultural differences. He never quite got used to being called a "Pommy Bastard", which is considered a term of endearment. In England, such an epithet is considered a great insult - Australia has a social culture that does encourage vulgarity - and my mother being raised in a parochial small country town was conditioned to accept these insults.
My mother was estranged from her family because of her 'mental illness'; my father from his family through the tyranny of distance. I can only assume that my father's relationship with his family had broken down irretrievably, otherwise why put 12,000 miles between him and them if relationships were cordial?
It was into this background I was born. Not a planned child nor a wanted child, as far as my mother was concerned. I suspect my conception came about as a byproduct of a failure in a contraceptive device. My father was reported to have said, years later, that he believed my mother had deliberately gotten pregnant to ensnare him. I wouldn't put that past her. Nevertheless, my father being an honourable man, accepted his responsibility and my parents married when my mother was three months pregnant.
I grew up believing I was born prematurely. A noble lie to cover up the truth that my parents had engaged in pre-marital sex, which is something they didn't want to condone. I was 22-and-a-half when I first noticed the mathematical discrepancy between the September date on the back of my parent's wedding photo, and the date of my birth the following March.
Not premature at all. I was in my bedroom writing a letter to my father's sister - my English aunt - and when the penny dropped, I felt like going into the loungeroom where my parents were plugged into the opium-numbness of TV, waving the photo and declaring: Guess what I've just found out?!!
After the Eureka! surge of discovery ebbed away, I thought that maybe I had better not embarrass my parents. That that if they hadn't made a big deal out of it for all these years, then maybe I better not either. Such was the power of the conditioning I had received to maintain the Cone of Silence, I didn't even know that I had the right to ask my parents why they had maintained this deception. After all: this was MY life as well as theirs.
I regret that I didn't open that line of dialogue then. The next day my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly of a dissecting aneurism of the aorta. He was at work, which was fortunate, because my mother later benefited from a sizeable Worker's Compensation payout. That my father died intestate was proof of just how deeply fear and superstition ruled his life. He believed that if he wrote a Will, he would die - like it would be a jinx. However, a man with a 'mentally ill' wife and an only child, who will be placed in the role of Caregiver upon his death, really needed to be less myopic and fear-filled.
For a long time, decades, I believed that my father was the 'well' parent. As a result of his sudden and unexepcted death at the relatively young age of 63, he became enshrined on the mantelpiece of my memory as the 'well' parent. A protector. The Reliable One.
That father was a figment of my imagination. He was never any of those things
I was a vulnerable and defenceless three-year-old when in 1964 my psychotic suicidal mother, decided to take an overdose and lay down on the bed to die. She gave no thought to the trauma she was inflicting on me. I was locked in the house with her - all day - until my father came home after a hard day's work, to find me unbathed, unfed, and with a dirty loaded nappy curled up asleep on the bed next to my comatose mother.
Cornflakes in the Underworld
Decades later, I would hear the full story. Not from my parents, who were long dead; not from any relatives, who were long dead, but from a friend of the family - a courtesy Aunt. In 2009, she told me that when my mother was found, she had Cornflake crumbs around her mouth, from where I had tried to feed her. Cornflakes were sprinkled all throughout the house. Unable to get a response from my mother, being hungry, I had found the packet of Cornflakes and helped myself.
I used to wonder if my mother had also given me tablets. If in her distorted thinking, she had decided to not only kill herself but to kill me as well. I never asked that question: I didn't want to consider that my mother could be that dark. That disturbed. The Cornflake story told by my courtesy aunt provided me with a lot of answers; was the catalyst for a profound healing process.
Finally, I could connect the dots as to the underlying causative root factor in my having developed Panic Disorder with severe Agoraphobia in 1989. With the family background I have, the sheer emotional, psychic and mental abuse that went on, it's a bloody miracle I am not a psychopath. It's a miracle I am still alive and haven't commited suicide myself, or self-destructed through substance abuse or a reckless lifestyle. I have beaten those odds.
In 1993, I made a full recovery from the external symptoms of Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia and returned to the hectic crazymaking pace of my former life. I had just scraped the surface of the core issues, yet with my widowed Bipolar mother still alive, meeting her narcissistic needs pretty much kept me distracted from engaging in a full excavation of these chthonic issues.
She died in 1994. Less than six weeks after I had had major surgery with post-operative complications and was running on fumes, I was so exhausted and traumatized. She died from massive heart failure and in the midst of a manic episode. After three decades of constantly visiting her in psychiatric hospitals, of being worn-down by her endless health problems, and frustrated by her irresponsibility in taking care of herself: I was glad she was finally dead. A week or so before, my mother had revealed that she didn't consider that she had much of a life worth staying alive for.
In 1994 she still felt the same way that she did in 1963. The message was still the same: I don't consider you to be of any value. I don't consider being a mother, or being a mother to you, a good enough reason to continue living.
It will forever remain an unanswered question as to why my father, in 1963, thought that this woman would ever be a fit mother to me or a decent wife to him. It is a mystery as to where the Child Welfare Services were in those days. My parents emotional and mental incompetency as parents was compounded by the incompetency and failure of the authorities and others to accurately perceive that I was a child-at-risk and needed to be removed.
Saint Albert
We wonder as to how and why people develop 'mental illness'?
It's not that hard.
As the maverick American psychologist Albert Ellis - Saint Albert - once said:
These last 25 years, I have practiced in the holistic arena of the psychospiritual, bodymind, soul-centered healing arts. Now called psychoneuroimmunology - a five-buck word! I no longer view people as having 'mental illnesses'; I see all people as souls on Earth confronting (or avoiding), dealing with (or denying), accepting (or rejecting) the consequences of a reality they have less control over than what certain "New-Age" philosophies would have them believe.
We do not create our reality. We can only create the story we tell ourselves. Most people prefer their tale of woe, to peddle out the same tired old litany of wounds for reasons they may be dimly aware of. It garners them sympathy, attention, maybe even a 'hall pass' from having to be more response-able in their lives.
The foundations of the reality in which we live, were created centuries ago. When you gain an appreciation of the importance of your own insignificance in the broader perspective of the collective history of humankind, you realise that you are a spiritual heir to all of this, and that developing a 'mental illness' is quite a rational and normal response.
Collectively we are all 'suffering' from Post-Christianity Stress Disorder.
And you won't find that in the DSM-V.
Socrates daimon and the archetype of the Advocate
Ultimately, beyond the psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical companies, the neuroscience, the cacophony of philosophies and theories: you have a human being with a family, with a life - with a Soul - having a very personal and confusing experience. There is no one-size-fits-all technique or strategy, there is no quick-fix magic pill, and nobody holds the answers that you need to uncover for yourself.
"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates said that at his trial for heresy. He was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves.
In our 21st Century, we are encouraged to think for ourselves as long as what we think is in alignment to the status quo. If what we think is too different, we are suspected of having an 'abnormal psychology'. Unless you are wealthy and well-connected, in which case you are an 'eccentric genius'.
Whether or not you have what is called 'mental illness', as a human being it is intrinsic to your mental health to know what your rights are and to have the skills to advocate for yourself. The Catch-22 is when you become skilled in advocating for yourself, in asserting your rights, in maintaining your personal boundaries, it places you up against the wall of that conditioning we all received about trusting expert authorities and not questioning their methods. While you may have liberated yourself from such conditioning, you will still have to learn how to deal with other people, groups, government entities that are still 'conditioned' and comfortably so.
...........and the beat goes on!
In regards to the life and times that I shared with my father and mother, I am reminded of the movie "Running with Scissors" and this one line that resonated within me so deeply it was worth exploring:
I wonder about the asteroid God'dess Juno in her emanation as Juno Sospita - the Preserver - and whether or not her placement in the natal chart is indicative of a potential to develop what is called 'mental illness'. I base my ponderments on the ancient Roman belief that the juno represented the soul of a woman; that bit of the God'dess that a woman embodies.
For centuries, cultural institutions in the West, for example, branches of science and our major religions have emphatically taught us to:Psychcentral has hosted a blog carnival with some excellent articles having been submitted by health professionals and stories told by people who are living with 'mental illness'.
- mistrust our inner world of meanings as unreliable sources;
- to discount the value of our own thinking;
- to dismiss the significance of our feelings, and avoid the painful ones.
We're also told who to trust instead. We're conditioned to think we 'must' follow expert authorities, and not queston their methods for truth discover, the doctrines they produce and the cultural stories they teach - crafted intentionally with mind-crippling ideas, by the way - to persuade us to wait for idols or superheroes to rescue and save us from our problems.
~ Dr Athena Staik from Human Nature and the Power of Our Stories.
There Was and There Was Not....
I am a Daughter of Madness; my mother was diagnosed with Manic-Depression a few years before I was born. My father, a strange and enigmatic man, fits the profile of a Borderline Personality, yet he was possibly just a man of his times: a controlling and domineering patriarch who had been raised and conditioned by the mores of another culture. A quintessential Englishman who had emigrated to Australia and struggled with the subtle cultural differences. He never quite got used to being called a "Pommy Bastard", which is considered a term of endearment. In England, such an epithet is considered a great insult - Australia has a social culture that does encourage vulgarity - and my mother being raised in a parochial small country town was conditioned to accept these insults.
My mother was estranged from her family because of her 'mental illness'; my father from his family through the tyranny of distance. I can only assume that my father's relationship with his family had broken down irretrievably, otherwise why put 12,000 miles between him and them if relationships were cordial?
It was into this background I was born. Not a planned child nor a wanted child, as far as my mother was concerned. I suspect my conception came about as a byproduct of a failure in a contraceptive device. My father was reported to have said, years later, that he believed my mother had deliberately gotten pregnant to ensnare him. I wouldn't put that past her. Nevertheless, my father being an honourable man, accepted his responsibility and my parents married when my mother was three months pregnant.
I grew up believing I was born prematurely. A noble lie to cover up the truth that my parents had engaged in pre-marital sex, which is something they didn't want to condone. I was 22-and-a-half when I first noticed the mathematical discrepancy between the September date on the back of my parent's wedding photo, and the date of my birth the following March.
Not premature at all. I was in my bedroom writing a letter to my father's sister - my English aunt - and when the penny dropped, I felt like going into the loungeroom where my parents were plugged into the opium-numbness of TV, waving the photo and declaring: Guess what I've just found out?!!
After the Eureka! surge of discovery ebbed away, I thought that maybe I had better not embarrass my parents. That that if they hadn't made a big deal out of it for all these years, then maybe I better not either. Such was the power of the conditioning I had received to maintain the Cone of Silence, I didn't even know that I had the right to ask my parents why they had maintained this deception. After all: this was MY life as well as theirs.
I regret that I didn't open that line of dialogue then. The next day my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly of a dissecting aneurism of the aorta. He was at work, which was fortunate, because my mother later benefited from a sizeable Worker's Compensation payout. That my father died intestate was proof of just how deeply fear and superstition ruled his life. He believed that if he wrote a Will, he would die - like it would be a jinx. However, a man with a 'mentally ill' wife and an only child, who will be placed in the role of Caregiver upon his death, really needed to be less myopic and fear-filled.
For a long time, decades, I believed that my father was the 'well' parent. As a result of his sudden and unexepcted death at the relatively young age of 63, he became enshrined on the mantelpiece of my memory as the 'well' parent. A protector. The Reliable One.
That father was a figment of my imagination. He was never any of those things
I was a vulnerable and defenceless three-year-old when in 1964 my psychotic suicidal mother, decided to take an overdose and lay down on the bed to die. She gave no thought to the trauma she was inflicting on me. I was locked in the house with her - all day - until my father came home after a hard day's work, to find me unbathed, unfed, and with a dirty loaded nappy curled up asleep on the bed next to my comatose mother.
Cornflakes in the Underworld
Decades later, I would hear the full story. Not from my parents, who were long dead; not from any relatives, who were long dead, but from a friend of the family - a courtesy Aunt. In 2009, she told me that when my mother was found, she had Cornflake crumbs around her mouth, from where I had tried to feed her. Cornflakes were sprinkled all throughout the house. Unable to get a response from my mother, being hungry, I had found the packet of Cornflakes and helped myself.
I used to wonder if my mother had also given me tablets. If in her distorted thinking, she had decided to not only kill herself but to kill me as well. I never asked that question: I didn't want to consider that my mother could be that dark. That disturbed. The Cornflake story told by my courtesy aunt provided me with a lot of answers; was the catalyst for a profound healing process.
Finally, I could connect the dots as to the underlying causative root factor in my having developed Panic Disorder with severe Agoraphobia in 1989. With the family background I have, the sheer emotional, psychic and mental abuse that went on, it's a bloody miracle I am not a psychopath. It's a miracle I am still alive and haven't commited suicide myself, or self-destructed through substance abuse or a reckless lifestyle. I have beaten those odds.
In 1993, I made a full recovery from the external symptoms of Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia and returned to the hectic crazymaking pace of my former life. I had just scraped the surface of the core issues, yet with my widowed Bipolar mother still alive, meeting her narcissistic needs pretty much kept me distracted from engaging in a full excavation of these chthonic issues.
She died in 1994. Less than six weeks after I had had major surgery with post-operative complications and was running on fumes, I was so exhausted and traumatized. She died from massive heart failure and in the midst of a manic episode. After three decades of constantly visiting her in psychiatric hospitals, of being worn-down by her endless health problems, and frustrated by her irresponsibility in taking care of herself: I was glad she was finally dead. A week or so before, my mother had revealed that she didn't consider that she had much of a life worth staying alive for.
In 1994 she still felt the same way that she did in 1963. The message was still the same: I don't consider you to be of any value. I don't consider being a mother, or being a mother to you, a good enough reason to continue living.
It will forever remain an unanswered question as to why my father, in 1963, thought that this woman would ever be a fit mother to me or a decent wife to him. It is a mystery as to where the Child Welfare Services were in those days. My parents emotional and mental incompetency as parents was compounded by the incompetency and failure of the authorities and others to accurately perceive that I was a child-at-risk and needed to be removed.
Saint Albert
We wonder as to how and why people develop 'mental illness'?
It's not that hard.
As the maverick American psychologist Albert Ellis - Saint Albert - once said:
I think that practically the whole human race is out of its goddammed mind and could use therapy. All are biologically prone to think crookedly. All humans are somewhat nutty because they refuse pigheadedly to accept reality and therefore make themselves depressed, anxious and enraged.
These last 25 years, I have practiced in the holistic arena of the psychospiritual, bodymind, soul-centered healing arts. Now called psychoneuroimmunology - a five-buck word! I no longer view people as having 'mental illnesses'; I see all people as souls on Earth confronting (or avoiding), dealing with (or denying), accepting (or rejecting) the consequences of a reality they have less control over than what certain "New-Age" philosophies would have them believe.
We do not create our reality. We can only create the story we tell ourselves. Most people prefer their tale of woe, to peddle out the same tired old litany of wounds for reasons they may be dimly aware of. It garners them sympathy, attention, maybe even a 'hall pass' from having to be more response-able in their lives.
The foundations of the reality in which we live, were created centuries ago. When you gain an appreciation of the importance of your own insignificance in the broader perspective of the collective history of humankind, you realise that you are a spiritual heir to all of this, and that developing a 'mental illness' is quite a rational and normal response.
Collectively we are all 'suffering' from Post-Christianity Stress Disorder.
And you won't find that in the DSM-V.
Socrates daimon and the archetype of the Advocate
Ultimately, beyond the psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical companies, the neuroscience, the cacophony of philosophies and theories: you have a human being with a family, with a life - with a Soul - having a very personal and confusing experience. There is no one-size-fits-all technique or strategy, there is no quick-fix magic pill, and nobody holds the answers that you need to uncover for yourself.
"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates said that at his trial for heresy. He was on trial for encouraging his students to challenge the accepted beliefs of the time and think for themselves.
In our 21st Century, we are encouraged to think for ourselves as long as what we think is in alignment to the status quo. If what we think is too different, we are suspected of having an 'abnormal psychology'. Unless you are wealthy and well-connected, in which case you are an 'eccentric genius'.
Whether or not you have what is called 'mental illness', as a human being it is intrinsic to your mental health to know what your rights are and to have the skills to advocate for yourself. The Catch-22 is when you become skilled in advocating for yourself, in asserting your rights, in maintaining your personal boundaries, it places you up against the wall of that conditioning we all received about trusting expert authorities and not questioning their methods. While you may have liberated yourself from such conditioning, you will still have to learn how to deal with other people, groups, government entities that are still 'conditioned' and comfortably so.
...........and the beat goes on!
In regards to the life and times that I shared with my father and mother, I am reminded of the movie "Running with Scissors" and this one line that resonated within me so deeply it was worth exploring:
"Where would we be without our painful childhoods?"
- Dr Finch
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