discovery! birth trauma affecting life

Hi all. I recently joined and posted my chart up asking advice regarding my life's conflict of having lots of passion and ideas but somehow being blocked in bringing them into the world or into a career. I have been struggling with this conflict for most of my adult life (im 33) and particularly since my Saturn return whereupon I began to feel confused and paralysed in my ability to function in the world. I get very passionate about certain pursuits researching them with vigour, but as soon as its time to implement them in the world, something in me becomes paralysed and I give up. Ive done a million courses in a million subjects that I lose interest in just before I finish them.

This subject has been bothering me compulsively lately, and last night before bed, I asked my guides to please give me an answer as to why I can never stick to anything or find a fullfiling career. In that state between asleep and awake in big capital letters came the phrase 'THE TRAUMA OF CHILDBIRTH MUST BE HONOURED' in my mind. I pieced it all together and finally realized the significance of the trauma my mother endured while she was pregnant to me. My brother nearly got burnt alive while she was about 4months pregnant with me, and the next few months were spent by his bedsit terrified that he would die (my Saturn in the 8th house of birth).

It dawned on me that since my Saturn return when this trauma was trigerred, I have never felt life to be 'safe' - I since suffered from panic attacks and terrors in the night that somehow I am in danger. It makes sense that in the womb there would have been a sense of 'life out there isn't safe' and a sense of wanting to keep my being safe and not to be born to 'out there' (3 planets including Sun in the 12th house - the womb). MOre importantly this could explain my problems in bringing out who I am into the world (first house of beginnings). So every time I would decide on a career the thought of getting out into the real world triggered off a sense of terror - of 'being born' and I immediately retreated back into my shell. I am a talented intelligent woman of 33 and have never really held down a job. THis has been very traumatising to my self esteem and my Capricorn asc so you can imagine my relief and getting some insight into why I am like that.

I think the reason why all this is rising to consciousness is because Pluto is making a transit into my ascendant as we speak - forcing my birth into the world so to speak. Im thinking of doing one of those rebirthing workshops - perhaps it will help heal the wound. My asc is in capricorn a very ambitious sign - to be blocked in succeeding in my goals has been rather difficult to take. Also transiting Saturn has just hit my natal Pluto in my chart (itself squaring transiting Pluto on my AC).

I can see how Pluto is forcing the removal of everything from my life which has been holding me back in the 12th house and preventing me from being born into the world properly with identy intact. My Venus is in the first house currently conjunct transiting Pluto. This makes sense since the main way in which I have avoided going into the world has been through relationship with someone for 10 years who has the same fears - we formed our own private world together giving eachother excuses as to why the world wasnt worth entering. I can feel in my heart that this relationship is going to have to come to an end. Painful and scary.

Anyway, I hope this insight has helped anyone with similar story. I think wherever Saturn is will show where limitations have blocked a persons authentic expression in life (mine in 8th house of birth and death) and the house it rules (my asc/1st house of beginnings or self expression) is where they have the most debilitating effect but where work needs to be done to achieve success.

queeny

I have looked into rebirthing but have found that there are "rebirthers" and there are "rebirthers" I would carefully assess their credentials as well as recommendations from clients. I have heard of people going into psychological trauma over an umbilical cord wrapped around the neck & the practitioner being ill eqipped to deal with this emergency. Also the holotropic-type breathwork may not be advised if you have certain health issues too so best to be honest about any of your medical history with your healer. I do understand your predicament, prenatal trauma can be the worst affecting an infant so much so a psychologist I knew meditated during the entire pregnancy she had with her first child. I wish you all the best but protect yourself from not fully qualified practitioners that may not protect your true interest.

Mmm thanks - definately food for thought. I will look into it carefully. Also the story about the woman meditating through the childbirth makes sense. Despite my intense love and overprotectiveness of children, the thought of having them has always been something I have rejected utterly. Women who are pregnant have often brought up feelings of anger within me that are completely out of my control. Ive have 'felt' it to be a violent act. I had an abortion once and I've never been so emotionally detached in my life. In fact I felt like I was doing the child a favour. if anyone reading this has trustworthy contacts with a rebirther, please do let me know. thanks so much for your thoughts ps just realized I am at the age mum was when she was pregnant to me...no wonder Im so emotional about it all. i cant stop crying. guess thats a good thing

strangely I feel the same way about my career path. I also get very excited and passionate about certain things, research it like crazy and then lose interest. I also have saturn in my 8th house but I was born 2 weeks late, without any birth trauma according to my mother.

queeny, I have the sense that given you have been able to access this information yourself, you may be able to process/heal it yourself also. Given you have Cap Rising you can do this, but you also may not want to. It is hard work, and may take some time.

I have Capr Rising with Saturn also in the 8th!! My birth was difficult - induced, forceps delivery, much trauma to my mother (which I suspect was behind her aggressive behaviour towards me throughout my childhood) I also `know' that my mother believed that life itself was not safe, and this was conveyed to me in utero. I have spent my whole life putting up walls and keeping the world at a distance. I have never followed through on any of my life goals. I am so afraid that to `declare' myself may be fatal. Irrational, but true in my own personal universe.

Whilst I have known all this for some time, Pluto's passage through my 12th house is stirring all this up - as it obviously is for you also - and essentially Pluto's message is : "Enough of this, already. It is time to move beyond these limitations. You have much more to do." I think that having Saturn in the 8th house makes us very, very private and self-protective, with a reluctance for letting go - something the 8th house requires of us. The time has come.......

I did extensive rebirthing in the early 90's, and that just gave me insights, but no real deep-seated healing. I am currently seeing a well-respected, gifted and recommended kinesiologist in my city. She is also a qualified astrologer, so this really helps. But I am the one having to do the work - her sessions just prepare my body to do what it has to do. Her sessions work in tandem with some quite full-on `work' of my own. I believe that you also, queeny, are capable of doing this `work'.

You mention:

queeny said:

'life out there isn't safe'

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I believe that I also believed this from the time I was born, and so I have created a life which has reflected this belief. That is, what I have had to acknowledge in the first instance is the power we as individuals have to create the very circumstances we fear may be so. Like you, I sabotage every creative effort, and while in the workforce I struggled to work for 5 consecutive years before I had to take time off. I totally relate to what you say. The key to working with this stuff, and getting beyond it is to acknowledge that the life we create for ourselves is created by us from a set of beliefs & limitations which may be quite irrational. The beliefs are that which needs to be changed.

I am beginning to get somewhere with working with this, but given my age, it is slow-going. Trauma gets locked in the cells of the body, and a good kinesiologist can work with you. A very skilled masseuse may also be helpful................ but if you choose any sort of bodyworker, or healer, you have to find one who has worked with trauma in the body, because it is very specific, and you can end up running and hiding away again if someone makes a poor decision or the wrong move.

Feel free to PM me.

Skillcoil said:

I have Saturn, and Uranus conjunct Moon in the 10th house. I don't get along with my family. I've had difficulties with social anxiety, and I haven't figured out what career path to pursue yet either. I try to be optimistic about it though, I just plan on trying different jobs and seeing if I could figure something out through that.
Edit - I have Sun, Mercury, and Pluto in the 8th house.

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Hey thanks for sharing. I'd like to have a look at your whole chart if you have it. couldnt find it in your profile. would be good to see the sign on your MC and where the ruler is. Sounds like the parental figures have had quite an intense affect on you. queeny

R4VEN said:

I also `know' that my mother believed that life itself was not safe, and this was conveyed to me in utero. I have spent my whole life putting up walls and keeping the world at a distance. I have never followed through on any of my life goals. I am so afraid that to `declare' myself may be fatal. Irrational, but true in my own personal universe.

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Dear Raven, thank you for sharing your insights and for sharing your experiences. I can totally relate. I have been fascinated with how family issues show up in the chart of late - the things our parents were never able to deal with and that have been passed onto us to 'break the curse' so to speak. Like you, my mother did not feel the world to be a safe place. She is a loving woman but when it comes to her own demons she closes up so tight and I cant get much out of her. She has had the night terrors and fear of life all her life and i believe they've been passed on in utero. I got enough out of her to realize that she had a drunk abusive father and she feared for her own and in particular her mothers life when she was little. I think something traumatic happened about 8yrs old that she has not processed (her eyes glaze over when i ask her about her dad) and I think that experiece got triggered when my brother was 8 and caught fire (while I was in the womb). We all seem to be part of the chain..this is my feeling anyway. Its this world view that is the pattern of my family. I understand what you mean about doing the work yourself, and for me its a daily process of looking inwards. My panics have already started to subside just by me becoming more of aware of this and releasing it emotionally. Now, when I get scared of something in the world, I sit and feel the fear completely and relate it to the time in the womb in my mind. It burns off and I feel different afterwords. Step by step. I feel deeply that as I heal, the issues in my mother are also being healed automatically. I send her love while I do the work in myself. Its hard to not feel overwhelming compassion for every human when you realize how deep traumas affect ones reactions to life. Everyone is just doing their best - they just dont know how to become conscious or are too afraid to face the pain that comes with healing. As for feeling that 'declaring myself can be fatal' - tell me about it! My real name isnt even queeny - that's how deeply ingraned my fear of showing myself is. Ive never wanted to give out my phone number or home address to anyone with a deep fear of being in danger. Anyway, with awareness it is healing and slowly those projections are falling away. Thanks again for sharing. I have decided to see an energy healer about it who I have seen before. She's fantastic.

queeny said:

My panics have already started to subside just by me becoming more of aware of this and releasing it emotionally. Now, when I get scared of something in the world, I sit and feel the fear completely and relate it to the time in the womb in my mind. It burns off and I feel different afterwords.

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Yes, having a conscious knowledge of the whole web of it from generation to generation is powerful.

I'm finding Bach's Rescue Remedy useful for the moments of panic. Panic is always irrational.

My oldest brother died from a deep head injury when I was 13 and he was 21. 18 years later I had a major car accident in which my youngest child received a minor head injury requiring a few stitches. I now know that `something' (quite unconscious) inside me made a connection between my brother's death and my 3-yr-old's head injury, and so I became overly protective of my son, to the point where every time I'd hear of a death on the roads, I'd convince myself it was he. Bringing this `connection' into the conscious has been necessary so that he doesn't pass on this fear of life to his own small son.

queeny said:

My real name isnt even queeny - that's how deeply ingraned my fear of showing myself is.

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I'm sure you're not alone there! My name isn't R4VEN either (but I rather wish it was!!!)

R4VEN said:

My oldest brother died from a deep head injury when I was 13 and he was 21. 18 years later I had a major car accident in which my youngest child received a minor head injury requiring a few stitches. I now know that `something' (quite unconscious) inside me made a connection between my brother's death and my 3-yr-old's head injury, and so I became overly protective of my son, to the point where every time I'd hear of a death on the roads, I'd convince myself it was he. Bringing this `connection' into the conscious has been necessary so that he doesn't pass on this fear of life to his own small son.

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Wow how wonderful that you have made that connection! Truly touched

Skillcoil said:

Thanks for making this post.

About names, I don't like telling others my name either, but it's the opposite feeling of showing myself, I feel like it's showing a fake version of myself.

My name has cultural associations with being pretty, which is uncomfortable since most people who have considered me unattractive were from the culture I was born into. I don't like telling people my name, I feel as if whenever I do, a bit of them knowing who I really am is taken away. I plan to have my name changed one day.

(Before anyone reading this potentially makes a false assumption, I think there are decent and not so decent people in every culture, I just happened to have met more indecent ones from the cultural group I was born into. I don't dislike people or traditions from this culture either, I know what I've seen/experienced was just human nature).

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Hi there, thanks for the chart. it sounds like youre sick and tired of your relatives and cultural group labeling you as someone you know you are not. looking at your chart, I am not suprised you dont get along with your family. the aspects are so difficult and it would seem that your expression of your self in every way was disrupted and repressed in childhood. Considering youre an innovating aquarius rising with a fiesty mars in the first, it must have been hard expressing yourself with spontaneity without some internal anger and frustration. If i am in the ball park, i can relate. I come from a big greek family and im the only girl. I was allowed to shine so long as i wasnt disagreeing with them. When my opinions went against them, i was squashed like a bug. It took me years of healing and therapy to reclaim my right to exist as a unique human being. THere can also be an intense build up of fear and anger around the feeling that we cant just express ourselves creatively or love ourselves exactly for who we are without all these monstrous expectations being put onto us. I reckon this is what makes finding a career difficult. My only tip - at the risk of me being out of line, is to watch a tendency to rationalise anger at those who have wronged you as just being 'human nature'. While this may be true, the anger that has been trigerred by them (and which is probably mirroring a much earlier situation) needs to be acknowledged and felt otherwise it just takes over all the time.

This is an interesting subject I think. I have been searching about my birth and childhood and family traumas for 2 years. My astrologer has told me that I must have a birth trauma because I have Pluto in my first house. Also for the traumas of the family, she looks the 4th house which is involved about family roots. And for the first time in my life I asked my mother how was my birth. I learned some interesting things. My mum was living far along from her family and alone in the city(perhaps feeling alone most of the time) But she decided to give birth to me in her hometown. So I was born in her hometown. But she told me that she couldn' give birth to me and doctors have to take with something like vacuum maybe I don't know. At last, the reality is my mum was not ready for birth mentally. Maybe she's afraid I don't know. Vacuum can make a feeling of being forced to be separated from mother.

Now I know I have some feelings that I can easily connect with these affairs but I don't know if they are really connected. I always feel alone in my whole life even if there are lots of people around me. I have a feeling that my home is at somewhere else and I constantly want to live or immigrate to some other place. And there is one more thing maybe can be interesting...If mum was afraid to give birth to me, she must try to keep me inside her. And since my childhood-especially in my childhood- I had an obsession of keeping things inside me which has to go out!(like not going to toilet etc.) And I have to say that this idea comes to me mind now! While I'm writing these) But I'm not sure as I have said above...because of Pluto, I was a child which always want to have control on her own and do something when I want and this toilet problems can be about it, too.

And you have to search about family roots, too. For example I don't have much boyfriends in my life, I'm like cursed to be unloved. I have Venus-Saturn-Jupiter hard aspects which Jupiter is in 4th house. Also North Node is with Venus and squares Jupiter 4th house. All of the people in my mother's side except my mother divorced or not ever married and now they are all alone. Especially women don't marry. In my father's side, men are ok but women has a very miserable life about love and marriage. So it's like this issue is given to me for being solved. But I don't know how to do...
I have more interesting stories about family roots but I feel like I write really long and seems boring to me now, it's too long. I'm sorry.
But I told all of these for you to search about your family's problems, too. Especially unusual events.

Best Wishes...

Otto Rank developed a theory about neurosis caused by birth trauma.

midnight sun said:

But I'm not sure as I have said above...because of Pluto, I was a child which always want to have control on her own and do something when I want and this toilet problems can be about it, too.

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midnight sun, I would not give Pluto in the 1st house credit for birth trauma. Not unless it was within a few degrees of your Asc.

However, you mentioned the need/desire to have control over your life as a child - and that is Pluto in the 1st. Alternately, Pluto in the 1st may describe others trying to control the person in extreme ways.

Time magazine has a really interesting article out which talks about how the fetus is affected during the 9 months in utero and how it carries out later in life, not only genetically but emotionally and physically as well. Not only the mothers exposure to chemicals, infection, etc, but also how much stress she indured while pregnant. Like the baby starts to sense whether the world being born into is hostile, peaceful, etc. I haven't finished it yet, but it is very interesting so far!

Time magazine has a really interesting article out which talks about how the fetus is affected during the 9 months in utero and how it carries out later in life, not only genetically but emotionally and physically as well. Not only the mothers exposure to chemicals, infection, etc, but also how much stress she indured while pregnant. Like the baby starts to sense whether the world being born into is hostile, peaceful, etc. I haven't finished it yet, but it is very interesting so far!

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Is this a recent article? Is it available online to read?

EDIT: Is this article the one you're referring to? How the First Nine Months Shape the Rest of Your Life Unfortunately, it's only the abridged version...

Arian Maverick

I don't know.about online but it is the most recent issue. Hard to miss with a pregnant woman on the cover Demi Moore style, lol.