posted June 19, 2016 09:49 AM            

To add to this: natally, my moon is in my 8th, Saturn 4th, lots of squares (inc. moon square mercury). When I was born Pluto had just started transiting my 4th house. It didn’t leave til I was 15. I felt incredibly controlled and restricted as a child by my mother. I remember at times feeling like an alien in my own home (Aquarius 4th house cusp), and being told my mom that things were good before I came along. I honestly feel like my childhood came an inch away from driving me crazy, and it’s a miracle I’m not currently languishing in some asylum.

We’ve had it all – overdoses, drugs, secrets, lies, childhood violence, grief, domestic adult violence, backstabbing, alcoholism, running away, tragic deaths, suicide attempts, affairs, telepathy, psychic mediums, séances, homelessness, poverty, chronic mental illness (dementia, schizophrenia, depression, psychosis), grudges, prison. All spanning 3 generations.
If there was a soap opera, and the families were all based on the different houses, mine would be the 12th. The best way to describe us is to say we don't feel comfortable with each other. We have never felt comfortable and relaxed the same way other families do.

The weird thing is, from the outside no one would ever expect this from us. I don’t believe in profiling, but we really do come across as the perfect family – friendly, well-adjusted etc. All of these secrets are, in true Neptune style, hidden beneath the surface. While my mom was beating me up as a kid my friends were saying how cool she was because she brought them candy bars, how they wished they had a mom like mine. She walked around with a ‘save the children’ badge pin on her jacket; a cause which she genuinely believed in. As an adult, the one time I confronted her about what she did, she acted like I was insane and told me – in her best concerned voice – that she was thinking of having me sectioned if I ‘carried on with these lies’. The self-delusion is stunning, which I guess could be a 12th house thing.

I’m mentally stable and happy these days, living 4000 miles away in the UK with my fiancé. I don’t speak to anyone in my family anymore except my cousin. We are the only 2 that consistently get along with each other.

The thing is, I heard that – assuming reincarnation exists – the reason people are reincarnated together again is because they were tested in a past life and failed. I’ve tried hard with my family in this life,i really believe there’s nothing more I could’ve done. I don’t want to be incarnated again, and it worries me that this bad family history could mean we’ve somehow failed and there’ll be no choice but to come back.

Do you think this could be true? From a spiritual/astrological point of view; why is it that some families have such challenging synastry? Did things go wrong in a past life? Did I do the right thing by cutting contact with them? It worries me sometimes that I may have set our karma back further.

The only possibility I can come up with is that maybe I was supposed to learn a lesson from all of this? I can say that my family have taught me to be a kind, honest, trustworthy person – basically through fear of being like them.