Energetic demands and your sanity

As the owner of a 7th house Pluto and some other special bells and whistles in my own chart, who *often* finds herself accidentally plunked in the middle of some interpersonal drama, I will tell you that most of your hangups with other people consist of you wanting them to give you something they either don't want to or can't, or the reverse. We also tend to assemble a chorus of people around ourselves who validate that yes, the other person is wrong for not giving us what we want. Some people internalize that they themselves must be the problem because the other person can't give them what they want, and other people decide the other person is the problem (and their past history is littered with a variety of other people who are problems--just listen to people talk and you'll figure out which category they're in), but here's the part I want you to pay attention to: as long as one of you wants something from the other, it keeps the connection between the two of you alive. It keeps things unresolved. And I greatly suspect (at risk of sounding like I'm off the deep end if you don't believe in reincarnation) that the energy vortex this creates means you'll have to meet up again in another life to resolve all of this energy between your two souls, because it's a lot of energy when someone's constantly pulling on another person to give them something, even if they never bother to say what they want out loud (😡).

Usually the problems are enormous when it's someone in your life with a title: mom, dad, child, husband/wife who won't give you the thing you want, and it's shit that cuts real deep. I'll give you an example: a person wants her mom to accept she's marrying someone of a different race and her mom wants her daughter to marry someone of her own race. Both sides want something they're unlikely to get, at least right now. The mom needs to grow and the daughter needs to get rid of her mom's rejecting voice in her head, and they'll both have the same argument in their own heads or with each other without making any headway. It's not an overnight thing to drop your energetic demand, but if you'd like to get out of patterns of cyclical despair, I recommend working on being okay with not getting the thing you think the other person needs to give you and figure out how to provide it to yourself.

Hint: first make the decision you are willing to stop needing the thing. Decide that every day until you find you mean it more. If you can't decide you're willing, you'll usually hear an argument in your own head. Listen to that for clues on what to work on first before you can get to the willingness*.

This is a lonely road sometimes. But realizing other people don't actually owe you anything past a certain point will help you in a lot of ways. Sure: when you're a kid your parents should feed you and bathe you and clothe you and validate you (and not scream at you), but not all parents are equipped to do that. Sure: you and your spouse might have made vows with the best of intentions, but we as humans aren't the best at super-permanent long-range decisions. Relationships (romantic, platonic, familial) are daily negotiations rather than "you promised that one time!!" deals. Circumstances change. People have limitations. In a lot of cases, they can't be pushed past them, as much as you'd like them to move. You re-empower yourself by deciding that, given the circumstances, you can make your own choices. They might not be awesome options, but they ARE options.

My own past is littered with what probably looks to outsiders like strange riddles: the stuff I asked for from other people was not that difficult, and in a lot of cases should have happened, but didn't. My Pluto's in Libra, it's conjunct Saturn in Scorpio, and that fits my chart. I had a lot of tantrums toward other people that basically consisted of "you had ONE job!" because nope, they couldn't (fucking) do the one thing I asked for. We're not talking big ticket items, either. They were things like not cheating on me, or supporting me emotionally rather than automatically deciding I was at fault. One time I asked someone to not have a big-ass tantrum and dismiss me in a cloud of insults, because he'd done it once before, and he did it a second time, so I told him to never speak to me again. Then I had to remind him about that when he inevitably came back.

You know what I wanted from these people? An apology: to be told I was right and they were wrong (in the cheating case I knew but couldn't prove it), some kind of validation that I didn't do anything to deserve the shitty treatment, because it was really shitty in all cases (once again, very typical with someone with a similar chart to mine). The real lesson was to learning a sense of my own standards: what to tolerate and what to walk away from rather than putting up with endless garbage. And how to untangle myself from people who seem to think I owe them something. I can't really do anything about them feeling that I owe them a thing. It's annoying. But I can decide they don't owe me anything and I don't owe them anything and keep things as clean as possible on my end.

IT'S HARD. But you can release yourself from a lot of feelings of extreme frustration (Saturn-Pluto once again) this way.

I wrote this and then realized my bias: I am very rarely in the position where I *actually* owe someone something, because I'm pretty careful about what I promise people I will do. In most cases, I've paid more than my share to make people and things go away. And I don't have any custody issues or legal agreements that mandate I give someone something, so I'm fortunate that that area of my life is pretty clean.  If you literally do owe people things, clean that shit up, and THEN wash your hands of it.

*Shoutout to my mentor Tom for these ideas.