Management of Measurement Constructs
Our Vulnerability to the Negative
We want our work with every client to be maximally helpful; we want to see our clients fulfilling themselves and developing in league with their strategies, hopes, and dreams. We want to support, illuminate, and build on that process of positive development. We want to make our clients happy, to send them off to success, development, and change.
Our astrology reveals the personality portrait vividly. This establishes much authority for the horoscope and for the astrologer, and this authority, this impression of certitude, extends itself into the prediction process. Astrologer and client work to believe that projections in time will come about.
Astrology’s timeframes from the client’s horoscope are proved in the discussion about the client’s developments in the past and those timeframes accumulate high reliability to be extended into the future. But the environment must cooperate.
How will our client’s horoscope projections traffic with the horoscope projections of others, for example … beginning with the spouse and extending to the employer, to the innumerable others on their developmental paths and the client’s own path? Will a frustration, a denial take place on the interactive path of development and thwart our client’s progress specifically? Might an employer change her/his mind within the week ahead before a very special appointment, anticipated by the horoscope, by client and astrologer? Might the employer have an accident, be fired, be moved to a different Department? Might your client lose out on the financing needed to go on to special schooling, even though we know it is essentially the best things for him to do, and the horoscope attests to that? Might another client accumulate indecisiveness and anxiety about where to go with her big new ideas, lose confidence, decide to hibernate and write a book instead, extending her developmental process even further into what we thought is the wrong direction? Will someone encounter relapse out of a new identity because he or she is alone with the idea, without support, even though the horoscope has depicted change all so vividly?
A sobering thought: How many times in practically everyone’s life are there stretches of 5, 10, even 15 years when absolutely nothing noteworthy develops in relation to what one ideally would project for oneself? Day after day, year after year are basically the same. So often we can search the horoscope projection for Angular, Solar, or Lunar arcs or transits of strength and find none in the immediate future. Or they have been there and simply not manifested? What can we say to the client? There has been no major development in the past three years, and those kinds of fallow conditions seem to prevail in the time ahead? –The more we do not recognize this norm, the more we can stretch astrology out of shape in projecting the impossible for the client.
Difficult, when we are determined … and our work is so designed … to reinforce our clients, raise their spirits, and register light ahead.
Even cursory discussions of well-being may uncover the common-sense need to have a physical check-up, and then that check-up may reveal nothing at all. Yet, while this in itself is a positive occurrence, there is the thought that detecting the disease and having it confirmed would have been the triumph. The negative occurrence easily works to prove astrology rather than the positive occurrence paying tribute to perceptive caution.
Every astrologer knows the thrill and happiness of a client call confirming a projection, a prediction that has happened just as anticipated. Every astrologer knows that myriad clients leave the astrologer behind when they are “out there” on their own, living the projections; they do not share the development victory with the astrologer. Every astrologer knows the occasional client call blaming the astrologer for not seeing frustration and loss, not predicting it and sending the client off unaware of downfall. “What you said about my getting that job didn’t pan out!” The time was right; the intent was genuine; the environment simply did not cooperate … and no astrologer can claim to see this eventuation all the time. –How does the doctor feel about a patient’s problem that evaded diagnosis ahead of time?
On the other hand, the astrologer learns to communicate the difficult, the “bad news” situation (of a Saturn-Pluto arc contact, for example) in circumspect terms, fitting loss on the one hand with gain on the other. It is not a difficult thing to do strategically, the client can be shown the benefit within that realistic assessment; it is difficult for the astrologer emotionally.
The astrologer is vulnerable to the negative, to the sense and reality of underachievement. The astrologer is too alone with the work. On the other hand, our support is in our knowledge, our ever-growing grasp of astrological technique, our learning of the machinations of human behavior and interaction, and our communication skills. With dedication and experience we polish those gifts indeed. –If we don’t, we are letting our art and everyone involved with it … down.