Creative Connections & Client Communications

Therapeutic Images

Everything we know in astrology eventually comes down to communication in the consultation. Without communication skill, our knowledge goes nowhere except into the static state of objective description. We must bring our knowledge into the client’s reality, illuminatingly, constructively, strategically, helpfully.

If we pay attention to our speech -using proper grammar, caring about word choice, modulating sound and inflection-the massage, as we make creative connections in the dialogue with our client, will be able to carry the message more powerfully. Just think how you listen to your doctor (how fulfilled or disappointed you are about the dynamics of that communication), your minister, your best friend, your spouse! What about the style of their communication hits home Ö or doesn’t?

Something to think about Chances are high that the elements of communication style that “give us something to think about” are the most important ones. -In fact, we find ourselves saying or we hear most gratifyingly and fulfillingly from someone else (the client), “Well! THAT’s really something to think about. Thank you.” Or “I hear you loud and clear; thank you.” ÖWhat creates that evaluation?

What is most effective in a consultation is that which is memorable. Some therapeutic word-image the client can take home, recall forever, and gain benefit from in the process of recall and study. Your doctor will give you numerical parameters for your PSA or cholesterol profile, tips to affect either, etc.

A client I saw yesterday had a major homelife disturbance in her development: her mother had committed suicide, her grandmother had committed suicide, both at the same age. This had affected my client so deeply that for the next thirty years of her life, in and out of therapy, she had done everything possible to eradicate the “suicide gene” as she called it: she had altered her life to avoid any similarity with her female lineage. She was calling me one year after the suicide age her motherS had shared. While she had “beaten” the supposed genetic sentence, she had dried up her life.

We had an open, productive discussion about this. Clearly this woman had lived a long long long time in the past. I said, “You’ve been talking about this for THIRTY years, living it, agonizing over it. I should think the subject would bore you now; it probably has bored everyone around you!”

This was startling for her to hear. She gave a nervous laugh and then she agreed.
I felt that something had been freed up within her; or at least started into the direction.

I then repeated the observation this way: “I would like to suggest to you that much of psychotherapy is having you tell the same story and feelings over and over and over again until you ARE bored with it all; ‘Oh, doctor, let’s get on with something else; I’ve had enough of this.’ Then the doctor says, ‘You’re cured!'”

My client laughed and laughed. I had hit a chord indeed. The point was made. -Then we got down to business:She had been defining her identity in terms of her motherS and in terms of irrational genetic fear for a whole generation! Who was she within all of this? Now, especially since the dateline she had set up from her motherS’ experiences had passed, who was she?

The consultation went extremely well, I believe. I know my client left with strength and fresh air and a new outlook, especially with her rejuvenation linked to some strong challenge-to-advance measurements in the near future (accumulated semisquare Solar Arc, etc.), the period I like to call ‘second adolescence.’

But I had had a case like this before, just recently! It was so similar. I remember thinking during the case yesterday, “Well, I’m all ‘warmed up’ with thoughts about this subject; let’s dive in!”

With the previous client, I had spoken one phrase that, for that client’s mentality -had keyed itself instinctively into the mode of our conversation-had been very, very powerful. I had paused, looked at her, and said so simply, “It just isn’t safe, wise, or helpful Ö in any way to try to stay afloat in troubled waters. To save your life, you leave those waters behind.”

This therapeutic image carried enormous impact to my client. Her mind worked with it extremely well. There was a long moment of silence as she processed it, then she said, “That is so right; thank you. Just get out of the Ö. the troubled waters. Just get out.”

–You’ve done as much as you can with them. Get out!

–Right. Get out. Who needs them?

Our next step was, “And how do you think you can get out of those waters, finally!?

I was so happy for her. I could feel her mind leaving the awful swirling pool and going elsewhere, etc. She came up with things to do for herself, for her future. [There are many techniques suggested and dramatized in The Creative Astrologer that take this process further.] She had objectified the past and put it behind her.

–We astrologers are mediums. We reflect from the client back to the client. Doing that with care and attention to style and effect is extremely important Ö and fulfilling for the client Ö and for the astrologer too. In your next consultation, listen to yourself.