People do not usually turn to an astrologer when everything is going well. They come when they are desperate for clarity, when they feel fragile or overwhelmed, or when something in life has become impossible to understand through ordinary explanations.
This was part of what brought me to astrology. There were things in my own life that I could not make sense of despite my best efforts: a relationship that felt completely out of reach, difficult patterns in my family background, and questions for which I could not find a grounded or convincing answer. Being left entirely in the dark can become maddening. When you do not know why something is happening, whether it will change, or what you are supposed to do with it, the lack of structure can become part of the suffering.
Therapy can be invaluable, but the quality and fit of therapy vary. I have also experienced sessions that felt procedural and inattentive, where questions were repeated and the deeper material did not seem to be held in mind. That does not make therapy unhelpful. It showed me that people sometimes need more than a sequence of familiar questions. They may need a language that can connect events, family patterns, inner conflicts, timing, images, and meaning.
For people who respond to symbolic language, astrology and psychology can work extremely well together. Astrology does not replace therapy, but it can add a structure that is difficult to obtain elsewhere: a map of the psyche, a picture of the present period, and a symbolic language for experiences that otherwise feel chaotic or senseless.
Astrology, Jung, and the Psyche
Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, engaged deeply with astrology and applied it in parts of his work with patients as well as in his own self-understanding. Liz Greene documents this history in Jung's Studies in Astrology: Prophecy, Magic, and the Qualities of Time.
Her book The Astrology of Fate is also central to how I think about crisis. It shows how astrology and psychology together can illuminate deep family patterns, compulsions, unconscious conflicts, and the disturbing experience that something larger than ordinary choice is operating in the life.
If astrology has already helped you make sense of something difficult and you want to understand how far psychological astrology can go, these books are excellent places to begin. I also draw from Clare Martin's Mapping the Psyche, Melanie Reinhart's Chiron and the Healing Journey, and the wider psychological tradition associated with Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas.
What This Reading Can Help with
A crisis and turning-points reading can help you understand:
- why a particular period feels unusually heavy, fated, unstable, or impossible to escape
- which parts of the natal chart are being activated
- when the period began and when its pressure may begin to change
- whether Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Chiron, eclipses, retrogrades, or another planetary cycle is involved
- why a relationship, career, family structure, identity, or long-held hope is breaking down
- which unconscious or inherited patterns may be coming to the surface
- what can be changed, what may need time, and what may have to be accepted or grieved
- how to place the past, present, and future into a more coherent structure
- how to find meaning without pretending that the suffering is pleasant, deserved, or self-created
The main focus is the present. We can look backward to understand how the pattern developed and forward to see how the timing changes, but the purpose is not to escape into a hopeful future. It is to understand what is happening now with as much clarity as possible.
A Note on Safety and Scope
This is an astrological consultation. It is symbolic, reflective, and interpretive. It is not licensed psychotherapy, psychiatric care, medical advice, diagnosis, fertility assessment, legal advice, or emergency support.
Astrology cannot diagnose depression, trauma, infertility, or any other medical or psychological condition. A transit may provide symbolic language for a period you experience as heavy, anxious, grief-stricken, or destabilizing, but only a qualified health professional can assess a clinical condition.
If you are in immediate danger, think you may harm yourself or someone else, or feel unable to keep yourself safe, contact emergency services or a crisis service where you live. If you need ongoing psychological or medical support, please work with an appropriately licensed professional.
An astrologer may sometimes suggest that a client consider therapy or a longer-term support plan. Clare Martin and Liz Greene both write from traditions in which astrology and psychological work can sit beside one another. The astrology may help you identify a pattern or open a new perspective; professional care may be needed to help you live through it safely.
My Approach
I begin with the natal chart and look closely at current transits. I may also use progressions, eclipses, Saturn cycles, planetary retrogrades, and recurring planetary or synodic cycles where they clarify the timing.
The main factors may include:
- Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto transits
- eclipses and nodal activations
- Venus and Mars retrograde cycles
- Chiron and, where clearly relevant, other Centaurs
- the lunar nodes
- Dark Moon Lilith as a secondary symbolic point
- dreams, recurring images, and important symbols you want to bring into the consultation
I do not use every factor in every reading. A chart already contains more than enough complexity. The aim is to identify the strongest pattern, understand what it is doing in your actual life, and avoid adding obscure points simply to make the reading sound more dramatic.
Fate, Destiny, and the Feeling of No Exit
Some periods feel fated because ordinary choice no longer seems sufficient. You may feel blocked, denied, exposed, stripped of control, or forced to confront something you avoided for years.
This does not mean that every detail was fixed in advance. It means that the period carries a feeling of necessity. Life will not allow you to continue in quite the same way, even if you do not yet know what has to change.
Liz Greene's work on fate is important here because it takes that experience seriously. Fate is not always romantic or reassuring. It can feel impersonal and absolute. There are moments when the question is no longer “How do I get what I want?” but “What is happening here, and what can no longer continue in its old form?”
Saturn: Limit, Fear, and the Weight of Reality
Saturn is one of the main planets I examine during long periods of pressure.
Saturn can coincide symbolically with fear, anxiety, grief, discouragement, isolation, delay, blockage, responsibility, and the feeling that life has simply said no. Old defenses stop working. Confidence contracts. Something that once seemed possible may become unavailable, or it may demand far more patience and effort than expected.
Saturn spends roughly two and a half years in one sign, so a major Saturn passage involving the Sun, Moon, Ascendant, Midheaven, or another important part of the chart can describe a long chapter rather than a brief mood. The intensity changes as the transit approaches, becomes exact, and separates.
Some people remember these chapters as bleak or depressing. That is an astrological description of their experience, not a diagnosis. Clinical depression has many possible forms, causes, and durations and should be assessed by a qualified professional.
Saturn can feel overpowering because it confronts us with limits that cannot be negotiated away. But it can also show what is unsustainable, what needs structure, and what must be built slowly. It may produce maturity, competence, endurance, and a more realistic understanding of time, although none of that makes the difficult part pleasant while it is happening.
Uranus: Shock, Instability, and Impermanence
Uranus often appears in crises that involve sudden change, instability, rupture, awakening, or behavior that seems to change overnight.
A Uranus transit through the seventh house, for example, may coincide with a period in which relationships become unusually difficult to stabilize. People may arrive suddenly, leave unexpectedly, or reveal priorities that seem completely different from what you believed the day before. The experience can be shocking enough that you begin to wonder whether something is wrong with you.
Astrology can help show that you are moving through a period in which relationship patterns are being disrupted and renegotiated. Uranus may confront you with impermanence, detachment, and the limits of your control over another person. That does not mean every loss was destined or spiritually required. It means the symbolism of the period can help explain why stability has become unusually difficult and when the pattern may begin to change.
Neptune: Dissolution, Confusion, and the Loss of Certainty
Neptune can coincide with periods when boundaries dissolve and certainty becomes difficult to maintain. A dream, relationship, identity, or direction may lose its old shape. You may feel disoriented, exhausted, idealistic, disappointed, unusually sensitive, or unable to tell which possibility is real.
Neptune does not always create a visible catastrophe. Sometimes it slowly removes the meaning from something that once organized the life. The crisis is less about one event and more about not knowing what to believe, where to go, or who you are without the old ideal.
The work with Neptune is not to force certainty where none exists. It is to recognize confusion, protect practical boundaries, and allow a new image of life to emerge without surrendering judgment or ordinary care.
Pluto and Katabasis: the Descent Into the Underworld
Pluto is often involved in the deepest turning points: periods of loss, compulsion, obsession, pressure, betrayal, buried rage, family fate, power struggles, and the collapse of an identity that can no longer hold.
When Pluto conjoins or opposes the Sun, for example, the pressure may feel as though it is demolishing the ego, the sense of purpose, or the person you believed yourself to be. If Saturn is involved at the same time, the experience can feel especially total: one planet strips control while the other closes doors and imposes limits.
The mythic word katabasis means a descent into the underworld. In psychological terms, it describes the period when the surface life no longer works and a person is pulled downward into grief, shadow, fear, obsession, or questions that cannot be answered quickly.
Pluto can feel as if life is denying something completely. It may remove a relationship, ambition, identity, or hope around which the ego had organized itself. The aim of the reading is not to tell you that this destruction is secretly wonderful. It is to identify the descent, place it in time, and help you understand that a descent is a passage rather than a permanent address.
Underworld myths often speak of hidden treasure beneath the earth. Not every loss produces a reward, and suffering should not be romanticized. But people sometimes emerge from these periods with knowledge, maturity, compassion, or strength that could not have been acquired in the same way from a comfortable life. If they later choose to share that knowledge, even the way they live can become valuable to others.
Chiron and the Wound That May Not Be Fixed
Chiron is one of the Centaurs, and it is the one I use most consistently in this work.
Chiron can describe an area where a person feels rejected, inadequate, exiled, helpless, or unable to repair something by force. In the fourth house, for example, the wound may be experienced through family, home, ancestry, or the feeling that one's background did not provide enough safety or competence.
Sometimes Chiron symbolism appears around chronic or unresolved life issues. If infertility, illness, or another medical difficulty is already part of your lived experience, the chart may help explore the emotional meaning of the wound. It cannot diagnose the condition, determine its cause, or predict whether treatment or conception will succeed.
The Chiron question is often not “How do I make this disappear?” but “How do I understand and live with this without allowing it to define my entire worth?” Melanie Reinhart's Chiron and the Healing Journey is especially important to how I approach this symbolism.
The Lunar Nodes and Dark Moon Lilith
The North Node is traditionally imagined as the head of a dragon without a stomach: it keeps consuming but is never filled. In some charts it can describe an area of intense appetite, increase, ambition, or dissatisfaction.
When strongly connected with material houses such as the second, sixth, eighth, or tenth, it may describe a hunger for more income, work, recognition, control, physical security, or material experience. The desire itself is not automatically wrong, but it may be difficult to satisfy because each achievement produces another need.
I may also look at Dark Moon Lilith when the crisis involves rage, refusal, exile, taboo, or the demand for honesty at any cost. I do not use Lilith with the same confidence or priority as the visible planets, but it can sometimes describe the wild part of the psyche that refuses submission and would rather be cast out than live falsely.
These points are secondary. I use them only when they add something clear to the main chart rather than treating them as explanations for everything.
Eclipses, Retrogrades, and Recurring Cycles
Not every crisis belongs to a long Saturn or Pluto passage. Eclipses and planetary retrogrades can mark concentrated turning points, returns, reversals, and periods when unfinished material comes back into view.
Venus retrograde can reopen questions about relationship, attachment, money, beauty, self-worth, and what we genuinely value. Venus returns to a similar relationship with Earth and the Sun over an approximately eight-year pattern, so a Venus retrograde may revive themes from eight years earlier.
The familiar idea of a “seven-year itch” is not an astrological law, and an eight-year Venus cycle does not cause relationships to end. But anniversaries around the Venus cycle can be useful when a relationship is being reassessed, especially if the same part of the natal chart is activated again.
Mars follows its own recurring pattern, with similar Earth-Mars configurations returning over roughly fifteen to seventeen years. I may also consider longer Venus-Mars patterns when a question involves the return of desire, conflict, initiative, or an old relational dynamic.
These cycles provide context. They do not force events, and they are never interpreted without the natal chart and the life history.
Alchemy: Language for Transformation
Crisis often has an alchemical shape. Clare Martin's Alchemy: The Soul of Astrology offers a particularly clear bridge between alchemical symbolism, astrology, Jungian psychology, and the transits of the outer planets.
The old alchemical vocabulary predates modern clinical psychology and serves a very different purpose. Words such as nigredo, calcinatio, solutio, separatio, mortificatio, coagulatio, and coniunctio describe symbolic processes of blackening, burning, dissolving, separating, dying, becoming embodied, and joining what had been divided.
I do not normally frame an entire consultation in this language because it can be difficult and unfamiliar. But the images can still be useful. One month a crisis feels like burning. Another month it feels like drowning or dissolution. Then there may be a period of stillness in which the old life is gone but nothing new has taken shape.
Alchemy does not turn suffering into something glamorous. It gives us a language for processes that are not linear and cannot be completed through positive thinking alone. It sits naturally beside the psychological astrology developed in works such as Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas's The Dynamics of the Unconscious.
Dreams, Symbols, and the Inner Life
Dreams can become unusually vivid during a crisis. If you want to bring them into the consultation, we can look at recurring images, emotional atmosphere, and the way the dream relates to the chart and the period you are living through.
Liz Greene often discusses dreams and client material in The Astrology of Fate. Houses, caves, water, fire, graves, animals, strangers, dead relatives, old partners, babies, storms, doors, and journeys may all give symbolic form to something the conscious mind cannot yet express directly.
I do not treat dreams as coded messages with one fixed meaning. We look at the image in the context of your life. Sometimes the chart helps explain the dream. Sometimes the dream gives us a better way to understand the chart.
What This Reading Can Offer
This reading can help place the crisis in perspective and in time. We can look at when the pattern began, what is strongest now, when the astrology changes, and which themes may continue after the most intense pressure has passed.
That does not mean promising that everything ahead will be easy or that the future will be milk and honey. I do not want to replace present suffering with false hope. The aim is to understand the present, recognize that astrological periods have movement and duration, and see what kind of response may be possible now.
I also avoid the idea that you secretly manifested every terrible thing that happened or chose it before you were born. That language can become another way of blaming someone who is already suffering. The purpose is not to decide whose fault everything is. It is to understand what is happening here and now, which patterns are involved, and what support, boundaries, grief, action, or acceptance may be needed.
Meaning is not the same thing as saying that suffering was deserved or necessary. Sometimes meaning is something we make from an experience afterward. Sometimes it is simply the realization that the period has a shape, that others have survived comparable descents, and that the present state will not remain identical forever.
What You May Leave with
After a crisis and turning-points reading, you should have:
- a clearer understanding of the astrological timing
- language for the kind of crisis or transition you are experiencing
- insight into the strongest planets, cycles, and psychological themes involved
- a clearer sense of what belongs to the past, what is happening now, and what may change later
- an understanding of what can be acted on and what may need time, grief, boundaries, or acceptance
- greater clarity about dreams, repeated patterns, and family or relationship material where relevant
- a realistic view of what astrology can offer and when professional support may also be needed
In short, this reading is for the periods that mark you: the endings, descents, shocks, losses, and irreversible turning points. It does not promise to remove the darkness or explain every event perfectly. It helps place the darkness in time, understand its symbolic and psychological pattern, and listen for what in you is trying to survive, mature, transform, and eventually return.