Creative Connections & Client Communications

Sub-texts to guide your Consultation

In our preparation of any horoscope for consultation, we certainly should have three or four “chunks” of surmise, routings that hold together, are well organized, and these chunks themselves should work together holistically throughout the consultation.

Draw Marilyn Monroe’s horoscope: June 01, 1926 at 9:30 AM PST in Los Angeles CA; Asc 13 Leo.

One organization of synthesis would be Southern Hemisphere emphasis, suggesting victimization, exploitation, being pushed around by life circumstances.

The second group would be focused on Saturn-rx phenomenology (quindeciles with Mercury and the Midheaven; square the axis of Neptune-Moon) and its all-pervasive appearance in the life, entering the mind-set (relation with Mercury, the final dispositor). The significance of this is certainly in the direction of depressing experiences.

The third group would certainly be the peregrine condition of Uranus and of Pluto, promising individualistic break-away rebellion energies, through relationships, through people who would support her (Uranus rules the 7th), leaving the desultory home situation behind as much as possible (Pluto rules the 4th). Note that Pluto=Sun/Moon … an eternal haunting by the home situation within adult relationships.

The final group would be the sensibilities focused by the Houses ruled by the planets under tension: certainly the 11th (feeling loved), the 2nd (self-worth), sexuality (the 8th and 5th), and the Midheaven, the clear base of all anxieties. –Overall, there is timidity, weakness –indeed, victimization potential—clearly indicated.

In beginning the consultation conversation with this client, you would certainly make observations of the victimization potential. But stating that alone would be stagnant description and serve no purpose. A sub-text should be running constantly in the astrologer’s mind, leading the conversation forward animatedly: “Why might this be so, to the degree my client is confirming?” … “To what is it connected with?”

Here, the sub-text would lead us to this conversation: “Marilyn, I really appreciate your coming to talk with me; we’re going to have a fine discussion together, I promise! The horoscope portrays patterns in the heavens at the moment of your birth, where you were born, and these patterns have a fascinating relationship to the patterns in life development. –One of the patterns here suggeststhat life circumstances threaten you easily –especially early on in life—potentially victimizing you, making life pretty gray. It’s important for us to understand the cause of all that.”

This would be the beginning of the consultation and it would be most effective. Your client would corroborate this; disclose conditions of the early time in her life when her “unknown” father abandoned the family, when her mother was institutionalized, etc.

Your sub-text is saying, “And this is so hard for the Leo Ascendant, the princess-presence. She felt so unloved, so unlovable.”

And as your client finishes a short reply, the sub-text has led you to your next connective point: “And all of this –the father situation, the mother’s—has built up the deep feeling of being unlovable! Pretty difficult indeed, especially with those feelings of being so dramatically special … those feelings that bubble inside!”

Your client would talk about this with you, and you would learn a lot about the horoscope’s fit to her reality.

Your sub-text would lead you further, “And this is probably going to lead to such difficulties in adult relationships, a difficulty with trust, a difficulty with giving love, never being sure that it is reciprocated. Perhaps the public takes the place of the one-on-one that’s so difficult?”

And that last sub-text lead-in would open the doors to the horoscope wide. What does Marilyn do to prove herself very special? Does it work?

The point is that the sub-text thinking –while your client is talking– makes the conversation connected, significant, valuable. Everything holds together. It is anything BUT static description. It leads to understanding.

And as you are talking about these crucially formative things, your sub-text is leading you into time measurement [although the odds are high that the 9:30 AM birth time is a bit off, perhaps born four minutes later]: “the arcs at 9 include Asc=Neptune and Mars=Uranus,” the time when your client was in innumerable foster homes. “Then at 15, with MH=Saturn,” the time when marrying a neighbor kept her out of the orphanage. … “Then at 30-32, there’s the life-perspective change with Pluto=Asc,” when Marilyn married playwright Arthur Miller.

The sub-text awareness helps the astrologer with involvement in the client’s developmental process. The astrologer is not just “ticking off” items from a laundry list of measurements prepared earlier.

Try it! Talk to yourself … and be holistically relevant!

[Please note in the Archives following this essay, the presentation for May 2001. That presentation shows a related technique that is client-oriented, that helps to modify behavior painlessly!]