Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Pea, welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Pea:                 Jessica, thank you so much for having me. I am so gagged to be here. So I wrote in a question that I do not have at hand, but I wrote in to you to ask if I should break up with my therapist. I've been seeing this person for a while, about four years. She's a Black woman like me, which in my town is next to impossible. And I've been feeling for a while like she holds me very well in certain ways and like she doesn't hold me well in other ways. And I've essentially been wondering whether the parts of me that want to break up with her are the survival mechanism parts of me that say, "Go," and have a really hard time being in relationship shit with people.

Jessica:            Okay. So we're not going to share your birth data because you're private, and we respect privacy on Ghost of a Podcast.

Pea:                 Yes. Yes. Thank you.

Jessica:            My pleasure.

Pea:                 Thank you. Thank you.

Jessica:            So I have some contextual questions for you. You've been in therapy with this woman for four years.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            There are things that you don't feel really well held around.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            What are those things?

Pea:                 Okay. I'm just going to name the topics that I've received therapy—

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 Is that okay?

Jessica:            Yes. That's perfect. Yeah.

Pea:                 Stuff around my father was something that I—not necessarily didn't feel held around, but maybe not quite seen in the ways that I wanted to be seen. And—

Jessica:            Did you tell her?

Pea:                 No.

Jessica:            Have you told her that you're having any of these problems?

Pea:                 No. No.

Jessica:            Okay. I'm going to stop you there. Let's stop right there. I'm going to come back to your list.

Pea:                 I have a therapy session tomorrow.

Jessica:            Okay. Good. This is perfect. We're going to stop you right there. We'll come back to the topics if it feels helpful. But let me say—

Pea:                 I would love to come back to the topics.

Jessica:            We're going to come back to the topics.

Pea:                 [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Let me say this. Let me say this. There's a lot of reasons why a lot of people go to therapy, and there's a lot of different kinds of therapy. I'm assuming you just have regular talk therapy.

Pea:                 Regular talk therapy, and it's over telehealth because we're not in the same town. And that's another thing.

Jessica:            Okay. So you're not on Zoom, but you're on a video call?

Pea:                 Yeah. Exactly.

Jessica:            Okay. So here's the fucked-up thing about therapy. You are in charge of therapy. I said it was fucked up, but I was just kind of, like, rubbing you in. It's not really fucked up. It's the thing that most of us struggle with. We have this idea that it's like, "My doctor, my therapist—they're supposed to give me advice. They're supposed to get it." And the truth of the matter—and I do find this, as a person who has a therapist, to be annoying—is that at a certain point, if you're going to have a long-term relationship with a therapist, your relationship issues are going to come up in therapy with therapist.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, if you are feeling like, "Oh, there's this specific thing where I don't feel like you really are understanding me," unless you tell her, how is she to know? There's something else. If there is a dynamic—right? So I haven't let you give me your list yet, but if there's a dynamic of them—I don't know—somehow, their body language is agitating for you because it's on video chat, or there's some consistent thing that's not completely reactive to something you said, but something they're doing, I hate to say this, but it's your responsibility to let her know.

                        I had a therapist who would have little snacks at the beginning of our sessions because, clearly, I felt like—my projection was she wasn't creating enough time between clients, and so she was hungry, so she needed to eat during our sessions. And it drove me fucking nuts, and I was like, "Is it my trauma? Is it my this? Is it my that?" And then, eventually, I was like, "Hey, listen. This actually really bothers me, it makes me feel like you're distracted." And she was like, "Oh, sorry." She had no idea. It would never have occurred to her that that was how I felt. So I had to tell her, and then sometimes she did it anyways. It wasn't because she wasn't listening to me. It's because her motivation and her position was different than my position.

                        But advocating for oneself in a relationship is the whole point of therapy, so that you can get to that point where you can tell someone you trust, "Hey, I trust you, but this isn't making me feel good." So part of me is like, "Okay. That's it. We fixed it. That's the answer." But we won't stop there. Don't worry. But I think that that's, like—in a way, is kind of the most important thing I can say to you, is that unless you advocate for yourself and ask for what you need with your therapist—I mean, even if they were a psychic, you can't expect them to know everything, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And your therapist is not a psychic.

Pea:                 No, she's not a psychic.

Jessica:            All to say I am, right now in this moment, 50/50 with you. Part of me is like, "Okay. Let's go back to your list," and part of me is like, "Let's talk about fucking verbalizing boundaries." And I don't know what is actually more important, but I'm kind of thinking it's the verbalizing boundaries because I'm nervous about getting into your narrative. Let me tell you why for a quick minute.

                        You have a real clustered chart. You've got your Sun and Mercury sitting on top of each other in Aquarius. You've got your Saturn and Mercury sitting on top of the Midheaven and Saturn all in Aquarius. That's a butt-ton of Aquarius, very heady energy. So, for you, not only are you dealing with the fixed energy of Aquarius, but Saturn is there. And so you develop a narrative, and it's detailed and nuanced, and you pick up on patterns really well. And it's also your narrative.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so you can justify not advocating for yourself, not communicating clearly, not saying, "Hey, you're eating a snack, and it actually makes me feel like you're not paying attention to what I'm saying." It justifies the kind of—of course, that's not your specific issue, but you can justify yourself. And the other thing you've got is a stellium in Capricorn. You've got Mars and Neptune and Uranus all sitting on top of each other in Capricorn, Venus and the North Node also sitting on top of each other in Capricorn. They're conjoined—I mean, it's all clusters, big clusters.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah, girl.

Jessica:            And so there is a way that your drive to, "I'm going to fix it. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to work through this. Okay, so I'm not feeling held by her in this way, or I'm not feeling understood or heard by her in this way. I'll just—I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out, and then once I figure it out, I'll bring it to the therapy"—that's specifically not what therapy is for.

Pea:                 So I'm with you on my narrative, and I'm actually glad you're bringing that to the forefront because I've been wondering, is this my narrative? I know that when I have a narrative of a thing, it's very hard to feel myself out of the narrative, like, "If this is my narrative, then it must be true," and I clamp on that.

Jessica:            Yeah. All that Capricorn in your chart inclines you to be like, "Okay. I talked about my dad. I did not feel held or seen. I'm going to go home, and I'm going to think about it all week. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to work through it on my own. And then I'm going to figure it out and fix it so I can come to therapy and still get value from my therapist."

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So you're trying to fix it outside of therapy, when literally, it's therapy to process it.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            There's nothing wrong with you having strong narratives. Your narratives are not the problem. The problem is that you are not letting other people in on the narrative. So, when you have a question of, like, "Did you actually hear the part that was heartfelt from me about my dad?"—let's say as an example—you're not asking the question of her. You're deciding for her what she felt. And the truth is maybe she didn't see you. Maybe she didn't really get it, in which case it warrants further communication. Or maybe she's a fucking dick, or maybe she's not compatible with you, or maybe she did actually really see you and hear you but didn't communicate that effectively. They're all equally possible. I mean, maybe some are more possible than others. But the problem—and this is a pattern for you, which is why I named things in your chart—is it's not just about your specific therapist.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            The problem is, when you're in a relationship with someone else, if you don't include them in that relationship, then you're not really having a relationship. And therapy is a tricky one because, on the one hand, it's not a back-and-forth relationship. You don't know shit about her. You're not her friend. You know what I mean? There's that. Then, on the other hand, if you're with a therapist for long enough, your personal relationship dynamics, whether they're familial or friendship-wise or whatever—they will start to rear their head in your dynamic with that therapist. And sometimes that's so you can process them with someone safe, and sometimes it's so you can be like, "No. I'm not doing this again." Right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Sometimes you outgrow a relationship. Sometimes it evolves in a negative way. Sometimes it evolves in a positive way. But what you're not meant to do is repeat your patterns of evading relationships, evading intimacy, hiding yourself, because the whole point of this relationship is that you come forth and you say, "This is what I'm experiencing."

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Now, not all therapists are going to be good for you, right? And she may have been good for you for four years and not good for you now. But you haven't given it a chance yet, and that's your job. That's your responsibility to you, is to say to her, "I have been letting some things go. Things feel like x, y, and z." And we're going to come to your specific list, but actually, do me a favor. Say your full name out loud, and then say hers.

Pea:                 Okay. My full name is [redacted].

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. What's hers?

Pea:                 [redacted].

Jessica:            Okay. And this problem you've been having for a few months?

Pea:                 Yeah. I felt the "Should we break up?" feeling on and off, I would say, for two years, but not consistently. But when it pops up, it pops up very intensely.

Jessica:            Mmm.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Two years out of four.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. All right. I can see her energetically, and I have a lot of things to say. But I think we need to talk about, will you—okay. So you were going to give me a list, and I should name this, actually. Energetically, what happened was I said to you in your and my reading, "Hey, I'm inviting you to do this thing," that you actually wanted to do. You wanted to be able to name something. Naming things is really important to you, yeah?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. So I invited you to name something, and then I shifted the conversation. And there has been a part of you this whole time that I only am aware of because I'm psychic—there's no way that anyone would know this if they weren't psychic because you're not communicating it with your body language or your verbiage, okay? But there's a part of you that's been super Aquarius. You've just dug in your heels energetically, and you've been waiting and kind of putting up a pole—and it's getting higher and higher and higher—of being like, "Hello? I was going to talk about something." Right?

Pea:                 Yeah. And I'm super patient about it.

Jessica:            Yeah. You are. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Pea:                 I'm listening to you, and also, I'm waiting.

Jessica:            You're waiting. You're on your thing. You're on your thing. So let's talk about that for a second, okay? Because I've been ignoring it. I've been pushing past it. You're letting me. You're very polite. You're very polite. You've been letting me push past it, but you stopped being emotionally open in the same way because it takes a lot of energy to keep that pole up. You know what I mean? And you're making it go higher and higher in your hopes that somebody fucking remembers the very important thing we need to talk about.

                        So there is a way, when you're not controlling the conversation, it's hard for you to be open to what's happening.

Pea:                 Damn.

Jessica:            I mean, whatever. You couldn't have thought having that much Aquarius in you made you the most adaptable person in the world

Pea:                 I mean, see, I thought I was actually all of the other shit in my chart. I feel like I have a strong Plutonian and Saturnian signature in my chart.

Jessica:            Interesting. You blame the eighth house—

Pea:                 I do blame it.

Jessica:            —because you do have a bunch of planets in your eighth house.

Pea:                 I've been blaming it for years.

Jessica:            And you know what? Sure. It's a fixed house. You don't need eighth-house problems because you've got Saturn, Midheaven, Mercury, and the Sun all in the most fixed air sign at the top of your chart. And so, because what we're talking about is both your identity and your ideas—we're talking about communication. We're talking about Mercury and the Sun. Now, those are fixed, fixed air. And I would say, yes, it's a control issue. And we could talk about where it comes from in your childhood and all these things, but there is a part of you—and this is just your personality and your nature.

Your mind moves so fast, and you process, process, process, click. "Okay. This is the thing that I need to say. This is the thing that I need to figure out. This is the thing that I need to have answered." And then, once that click occurs, this fixed air sign part of you is like, "Okay. Now I know what we need to talk about. Now I know what we need to figure out or what we need to work on," depending on the circumstance.

This is where Aquarius becomes objectively fixed, right? Because it stops being inquisitive and responsive and just gets kind of more and more attached to its ideas, which are interesting, dynamic, nuanced, layered, right?

Pea:     Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not like you're keeping shit on the surface. But there's an adaptability issue that can come up for you.

Pea:     Yeah.

Jessica:            And that is not bad or good. Let's not even fucking go there. It's not bad or good, but it comes up as a problem in your relationships—with your therapist, with your friends, with your family, with everybody.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Everybody. There's no way it doesn't, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And it doesn't mean that you're wrong or that you need to change. This is what it does mean, though: developing a habit where you can grab your phone and make a quick note and bullet-point, "These are the things that I need to make sure we talk about"—so let's say, in a therapist dynamic, this will be the easiest because then you can say, "I want to start saving five minutes at the end of every session where I just acknowledge these are the things that we didn't get to that I want to make sure we get to next time. Can you keep track of that? I am paying you to [indiscernible 00:15:12]."

With a therapist, that's an easy thing to do because that's their job. With a friend, you can say to yourself, "I really want to be talking about all these other things, but it's not working. So maybe I adapt," or, "I need to let my friend know," or, "I need to be assertive." There's different ways of handling it in different situations. But I wonder, if you jot it down, like on a piece of paper or in your phone or whatever, if you wouldn't then need to put so much attention and energy into tracking the idea, and it would empower you to be more adaptable in the moment when you're having an exchange with someone.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So are you a sleeper? Do you sleep?

Pea:                 I sleep a lot.

Jessica:            You sleep a lot. Moon in Pisces wins.

Pea:                 I identify—yeah. Thank you.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Yeah. You're welcome. You're welcome. Okay. And I asked you because this tracking behavior—I'm trying to clock, is it like an overwhelming tracking behavior? That would be very Scorpio, very eighth house. It's not. It's a digging in your heels. It's a fixed sign behavior. It's your Aquarius. So fun facts, right? Just finding, like, okay, this is the root source of a thing. There is a way that thinking ahead has saved you in your childhood.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Figuring things out and trusting yourself above the fucking adults around you saved you in your childhood. You never want to let go of that. You don't need to change that. It's about developing complementary tools that you can use at times. Okay. Hold on. Did you just have an anxiety spike?

Pea:                 Yeah, I would say so.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. I would, too.

Pea:                 I would say so. But I feel like I've been—there's been a lump in my throat, I want to say, for the past five, ten minutes.

Jessica:            Five, ten minutes. Yeah, because I started talking about this thing, and it's very—you didn't tell me. So I know you wanted a reading. I know you want me to dig.

Pea:                 Yeah. I do. I do.

Jessica:            You do want me to dig. I know. And yet I dug, and I saw something that you weren't planning on me to see, and you're not sure how you feel about it yet.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And it's fucking private. And there is a way that you do not want that. You objectively do not want that. I want to name that. I want to pay respect to the part of you that's like, "Back the fuck off." And I want to hold space for you. You are allowed to be complex. You are allowed to really want to be seen and really not want to be seen in equal measure at the same time.

Pea:                 Yeah. May I share—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 —what happened when that anxiety spike happened? When you talked about basically my tracking ability being something that I developed in childhood—I mean, it's interesting because, of all of the things—I would actually love insight into my childhood, but I was thinking about how—because I know that I track. I track every fucking moment of every fucking day for dear life. But when I think about how I've developed the habit, I actually have a hard time finding it in childhood.

Jessica:            Interesting.

Pea:                 Yeah. I have an easier time finding it in things that have happened to me as an adult, but—and I think—

Jessica:            Okay. I can speak to that.

Pea:                 Yeah, I think because I grew up in this household where mental illness was a thing that touched my family, I can feel myself actually, yeah, going into that, like, "Oh, maybe not there." But I was always told by my aunts/uncles that I had a great childhood, the best childhood of them all. And when I think of my childhood, I recall this kid just playing outside, twirling around in the grass and living in her own world. And I know there was shit in my—things happened to me in my childhood. But that's what I recall. That's the emotional state in my childhood that I recall.

Jessica:            Okay. Let me speak to that, and speak to that while clocking we still need to talk about your fucking therapist.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You have a Moon in Pisces. You've got Venus conjunct Uranus and Neptune. You've got Mars conjunct Neptune. What you just described is kind of textbook of those things, that when you think back on your childhood, it's kind of idyllic. It's kind of beautiful. And that's not wrong. That's part of the lived experience, absolutely, 100 percent. That was part of your childhood. You've got this Moon in Pisces. You've got Jupiter opposite your Moon. You were beloved.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            You were beloved.

Pea:                 I was.

Jessica:            You were. You were beloved.

Pea:                 Even the adults around me—especially as an adolescent, I don't think they were able to love me in ways that always made me feel seen, but I know that I was loved and wanted—

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 —and, like—yeah.

Jessica:            It was never confusing that you were loved and wanted—

Pea:                 No. Yeah.

Jessica:            —and that people were willing to reorganize their lives to support you.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            They really chose you.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            That was really clear in your childhood.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And also, reality wasn't completely reliable. You didn't know what you were going to get day to day, month to month. The unpredictability that I see in your childhood gave you really intense coping mechanisms. There was a loss that you suffered when you were really little, before the age of seven.

Pea:                 Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            And that loss was so deep and so painful that the adults that raised you were like, "Okay. We're not going to have to focus on that. We'll focus on all the good things. We'll focus on the good things, and you're good, and world is good, and we're going to be good, and it'll be good." And so you were allowed to have your emotions, but you shouldn't focus on those emotions because there's these emotions. And so, within that, it taught you really kind of messy lessons around which parts of yourself are okay to be seen.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            And it taught you to be a really good audio/video editor of your own lived experience. So what you show people—you strive to be honest and authentic, and also—

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            —you don't want to focus on the negative, and you want to focus on this, and you don't want to focus on that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this is where, when somebody else—like in that moment I'm going to refer back to that created the anxiety spike—and even as I'm saying that, I feel your anxiety spiking again. So I want to just name that. But even as I was pulling out an insight from the middle of fucking nowhere and naming something you didn't see coming, that mimicked something in your childhood that was incredibly destabilizing because when the adults did that, when they surprised you, it was a fucking 50/50 if it was going to be traumatic or if it was going to be wonderful. And so there's this element of you really fucking hating being surprised by what people say.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Right? You're really good at being like, "Okay. I know what this person is going to say next. I know what we're going to talk about." And this is wrapped up in your ability to—all this Aquarius stuff. You can see symbolism. You can see patterns.

Pea:                 Yep. Yep.

Jessica:            You know what to expect.

Pea:                 And I love to finish a sentence.

Jessica:            And you're great at it. I have Mercury in Aquarius—same issue. Different charts altogether, but that—you know, we can finish a sentence. We can see where it's going. That said, there's emotions of dysregulation. I'm calling it anxiety. It's not exactly anxiety. It's dysregulation that occurs for you.

Pea:                 I'm glad you're naming that, actually. I've been thinking about dysregulation a lot and especially my nervous system in states of dysregulation. And part of why I've been wondering about my therapist, to bring it on back, is because some of my nervous system dysregulation—I've just been wondering if it's possible to explore that. And maybe exploring is not the right word because there's a kind of holding that I'm looking for. And I've wondered, is this a sort of acquired neurodivergence? Is this like PTSD manifestation? There are times—

Jessica:            This is really interesting.

Pea:                 Yeah. There have been times when I'm like, "Are there OCD symptoms happening here?"

Jessica:            And are you curious about this because you find that the process of naming things is helpful? Are you curious about this because you feel you want to be medicated for one or all of these things? Do you have a sense of that?

Pea:                 I think it's closer to the naming things. I think it's like there's something so validating and something that makes me feel so safe about being seen properly and fully.

Jessica:            So let me interrupt that a little bit to say—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            Okay. You've got a Sun/Mercury conjunction. So, for you, identity, language—they're linked. They're completely linked. Your ideas and your identity—they're linked. And in 2025, we have neurospiciness, and language around mental health diagnoses is very—there's a lot of conversation about it, a lot of people on a path of self-discovery with it. I do not think that's good or bad. I mean, I think it probably is really good for a lot of people. I'm an astrologer; I'm not a therapist. I don't work with a DSM. I don't diagnose people of those things. But I can tell you, when you've got a really strong Uranus or a lot of Aquarius in you, you're going to have symptoms that the DSM will associate with autism.

Pea:                 That is so wild.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes.

Pea:                 A family member of mine—multiple family members have told me that I am autistic, and I'm like, "No."

Jessica:            Maybe you are; maybe you're not.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Let's not even find a diagnosis in this conversation because I'm the wrong person to do that with.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Your therapist may even be the wrong person. But I will say this. Whether or not you are just a person with a lot of Capricorn and Aquarius in their chart who has a Pluto square to the Sun—so, yeah, you're obsessive, and you fixate—

Pea:                 I do.

Jessica:            —and you are very self-contained, and you have a way of adapting to the world that we live in that involves your nervous system and that is all about actions that self-regulate—

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            —I mean, this is just having a lot of Aquarius and Capricorn. It also, to a therapist, might sound like some form of autism or other neurospiciness.

Pea:                 Wow.

Jessica:            As an astrologer who has a completely different lens than a therapist—I'm not a therapist. As an astrologer, I see your chart. And I see that you are fixed-air dominant. So you can call that autistic, or we could call that fixed-air dominant. Because I'm an astrologer, I'm just going to call it fixed-air dominant. And I'm going to say you have a tendency to want things to be clean and tidy.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            And this is about air; this is not about autism, right? But it also matches. Potato/Po-tah-to—is it the same? Does it matter? I don't know. I don't know. But again, I will say as an astrologer—because this is my tool, not psychology—what you can do if you're interested is really learn about the complexities of having a lot of Aquarius energies in you and what it means to have fixed-sign energy that's governed by Uranus that governs electricity and crystals and the internet and the unexpected. It means that you have a natural brilliance that empowers you to live in your head and that that's not inherently bad or good. But a negative consequence is that it takes you out of the present moment in your relationships.

                        And when you're not present, you don't always pick up on the cues that someone is showing you—"I'm not listening. I'm a bad match," or, "I'm listening. I'm just not expressing it the way you want me to." Right? And again, I'm hearing it, and I'm on TikTok enough to know a lot of that sounds like autism. So does it matter to me? To me, it doesn't matter. To you, it might matter. And the difference might be really important. But I can't talk to autism, so we're just focusing on the Aquarius part and bringing it back to, when you feel dysregulated because something is surprising—it's pulling you out of your head—from my perspective as your astrologer, it's in part because there's an old trauma pattern that just—it gets set off.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            It's also in part because your Mars is very fucking close to your Neptune, which means you do not spend a lot of time at home in your body. And so, if somebody surprises you and brings something up that pulls you out of your head, you feel your body when you leave your head. And it turns out your body is often like, "Woo. Woo. Woo. I don't know where I am. Wait. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it high? Is it low? I don't know."

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            Sorry. I gave your body a weird voice, but you get where I'm going with this.

Pea:                 I do voices all the time, so I appreciate it.

Jessica:            Okay. That's why I did it. Okay. Great. Okay. Good. All to say part of what happens when you get pulled out of your head is you meet your body. And because you haven't yet cultivated a reliable, consistent relationship with receiving your body, hearing your body, caring for your body, and all the emotions and thoughts that are stored in it, dysregulation makes you have this knee-jerk reaction, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            It's this knee-jerk reaction, is to always be like, "Wait. Wait. Wait. No. Wait. Wait. Wait." It's like, "I've gotta figure this out. I gotta reorient." And so I want to just name these things because they came up in our reading. Now, there's no way in hell any fucking therapist could ever, ever, ever know this about you if you didn't tell them, for the record, because the only reason why I knew is because I could feel it in my body because I'm psychic. There's nothing in your behavior or your words that communicated any of those things to me, okay?

                        So I'm not saying this to toot my psychic horn. I'm saying this to keep your focus on your therapist because there's no way that she could know this unless you tell her. When she's actually doing it to you—she's doing something that surprises you or pops you in your body, where she's not behaving the way you expect her to behave, she's not saying what you need—

Pea:                 Yes. She's not saying what I need. She talks about herself more than I would like.

Jessica:            Oh.

Pea:                 She self-discloses more than I would like.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 And I don't like it. I hate it so much.

Jessica:            Have you told her? Have you told her?

Pea:                 No.

Jessica:            Okay.

Pea:                 But I'm like—I've been like—I listened to your most recent horoscope reading about this week's transits and about being brave.

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 And since I have this fucking appointment tomorrow—

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 —I was like, you know, maybe I should be—I had thought about canceling this appointment and pushing it off for a couple of weeks because I had met her last on the most recent Eclipse. I knew I should have canceled that day. I knew I didn't need therapy. I just needed to rest but also just wanted to talk and be sad with someone.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 It didn't feel like a good session. There were parts of the session where her tone of voice felt too sharp for me, and that was something that I wasn't expecting. I was like—didn't know what to do with that. And to be fully fair, I already didn't feel good at the end of the session because it was like I had my whole system peered into when what I really needed was just to rest and cry.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Pea:                 And then the session ends, and I say, "Well, I hope the Full Moon treats you well and has treated you well." And she was just like, "Girl, it hasn't, but that's okay."

Jessica:            Oh.

Pea:                 And I just—you know, when things like that happen, when she shares bits of herself, fucking hate—like, it fucks me up because I'm like—

Jessica:            Okay.

Pea:                 —and I felt terrible that I needed it.

Jessica:            Okay. Let's do this. Okay.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            I'm going to give you really specific advice.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            And you don't have to take it. My advice is to say to her, "I want to talk about our relationship at the top of the session." And say, "I have been struggling with whether or not this is still working for me. And I know I have a pattern of making decisions about my relationships without including people in the process." Is that true? Because I just said it, but is it true?

Pea:                 Okay. I probably wouldn't have worded it that way.

Jessica:            I know you wouldn't have worded it that way, but is it true?

Pea:                 Yeah. I can recall at least two times to name where I've either cut off a relationship or have done a strong pivot—actually, this is what I did with my dad recently—or I have "taken space," quote unquote, forever because I haven't named the things, like little things, little cuts over time, little things that fuck me up.

Jessica:            And do they know that you've taken space? Have you told them, "I'm taking space," or you just ghost?

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            You do.

Pea:                 No, I am—I would say I'm a very skilled breakup/space taker texter.

Jessica:            Okay.

Pea:                 That Mercury in fucking—

Jessica:            Texter? You do that over text?

Pea:                 Texter.

Jessica:            Okay. We got things to talk about.

Pea:                 With my dad, I—yeah. With my dad, I did it over video chat because that's the only way we can talk. It was like this big reveal about emotions that I had done my best to be open with him about. I'd told him I want to say at least twice, "I need a lot of space from you. And when you call and I don't answer, it's because I'm taking space and I feel fucked up. And this is a very complex relationship for me." But I would say I did my best to include him in the emotions, but at the same time, yeah, I didn't name—but I didn't name because it was like if I named it, then I don't even know—what is this relationship if I name it? Then it's just heartbreak if I'm naming it.

Jessica:            Yeah. I'll say your relationship with your dad feels like it's one of those core relationships that created this issue.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            And so it's not what I'm referring to—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —because it's not the pattern. It's the OG.

Pea:                 Yep. Yep.

Jessica:            And so, I mean, it is the pattern, but it's not in the same way as if you did that with your friend or you didn't tell them that it was driving you nuts that they were constantly late; you just found yourself making less plans with them or something. That's more of what I'm talking about than—

Pea:                 Oh yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. You do that.

Pea:                 Yeah. I do do that.

Jessica:            Yeah. You do that.

Pea:                 But it feels like just not making plans with them or just phasing out—the only language that I have is that it feels safer that way.

Jessica:            Correct. Yes.

Pea:                 Like, what am I going to do, say, "The way you talk makes my nervous system"—

Jessica:            Yeah. That's exactly what you do.

Pea:                 —"go wa-wa-wa-wa-wa"? And—

Jessica:            Okay. Let me interrupt that.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            "The way you talk makes my nervous system go wa-wa-wa-wa-wa" is—no. That's a hard pass. Don't do that, Pisces Moon. That's your Pisces Moon speaking. It's saying, "These are my emotions. And because of this vague thing you do that is a core piece of your nature, I can't handle you."

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Don't do that. I agree. However, I am seeing that, again, by the time you use that—I know you were being kind of funny about it, but by the time you get to that point, you've already made a series of decisions about who they are and why.

Pea:                 Yeah. And I make decisions about people very fucking quickly.

Jessica:            Quickly. Quickly. And again, you're often correct.

Pea:                 Quickly, like—

Jessica:            Right. But this is part of the pattern of how you developed a coping mechanism around unreliable adults in your early development, and you figured things out. You became the one who figured it out so that you were safe.

Pea:                 Yeah. That's what it is.

Jessica:            And so this is where, if we come back to the start of the reading where I pulled the rug out from you and I started talking about something you did not see coming, it activated that dysregulation, that your brain is like, "Not safe. Not safe. Not safe. Not safe. Gotta go back to the thing I thought we needed to talk about." That cycle—because it's reflective/it's like a survival mechanism autopilot, it's not serving you. Now, you want to have those skills. I want to be really clear to the parts of you that are your reflexive survival mechanisms: we never want to get rid of those. Those are great skills. Fuck yeah.

Being able to say, "I am dysregulated. This is not good. I've got to get back to a safe place," is a good skill. But what happens is the sensitivity is way too fine, and so we're tripping a survival response in you even when you're just uncomfortable; you're just taken aback.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Right?

Pea:                 Yeah. Thank you for naming that—

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 —because that does happen. Then it gets hard for me to know within myself what is instinct, what's intuition—

Jessica:            Yes.

Pea:                 —and what's just me being uncomfortable and not wanting to be uncomfortable, and then feeling physically threatened, like my survival feeling physically threatened by this discomfort, and how to know whether to take the risk and—

Jessica:            So I'm going to jump in on this—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —because part of it is you can't know. Right? Part of it is life is risk. Everything could kill you. I mean, I'm a Capricorn, so I'm not going to try to make you feel better, okay? I'm just like, you could walk out the door, and a bird could hit you in the head, and it could be a fatal bird. I don't know.

Pea:                 Yeah, it could.

Jessica:            Anything could kill you at any time. Everything is dangerous. I'm not going to take that away from you, okay? I am going to double down on it. However—

Pea:                 Thank you.

Jessica:            My pleasure. Anytime. Life is terrible. That said, the way to find the answer to that question—because there is an answer in each individual situation, I'm not going to give you a prescription for how to find the answer today. I'm going to give you a prescription for how to be able to listen to yourself—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —because that's actually the problem, because what's happening is your narrative, your identity, your ideas, and your survival mechanisms are so loud and so well developed that they exist over top everything else.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so what's happening with a friend or in therapy is you're starting to feel like, "Maybe I'm talking about this, but I don't really want to be talking about this," or, "This person's not listening to me the way"—it's like, "I feel off about this." Right?

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah. When people don't listen to me in the way that I want to be listened to—and I feel like I sound like a whole dick. I feel like I sound like a dictator. I don't know if that joke's okay to make right now in 2025, but when I feel like I'm not being heard in a way that validates me—basically, when I feel like I'm—when there's no space for me, like when someone's interacting with me in a way that makes me feel like there's no space for me—and it can be as simple as a failure to ask how I am when we start the conversation.

Jessica:            Yep. Yep.

Pea:                 I ask you how you are, and you don't ask me how I am at any point in the conversation, and I kind of have to look to do that tracking thing and look for a space to jump in edge-wise. It's an immediate lack of safety feeling for me, and I will do the thing where I just won't text them. I'll phase out.

Jessica:            Right. You just shut it down. Yep.

Pea:                 I'm just going to phase out and hide.

Jessica:            So there's a couple things I'll say to that. One is you've got this Jupiter/Moon opposition. You've got the Sun top of the chart, tenth house, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            It gives you a little bit of main character syndrome.

Pea:                 Oh man.

Jessica:            Well, it does. And there's worse things.

Pea:                 I was afraid of that.

Jessica:            Well, I mean, you did call yourself a dictator. But it's not bad. It's not that bad. Your upbringing—the love you received was—the adults that took care of you centered you—

Pea:                 Yeah, they did.

Jessica:            —like you invented children, like you invented love, like you were the first amazing thing that ever happened.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            And you were given this undivided attention in part to compensate for difficulties you were going through. Now, you were a kid, and you didn't pick up on that. They were just really making sure that you felt loved and chosen and cared for because they loved you, and they chose you, and they cared for you. And also, they were adults who maybe didn't give you the tools to not be centered because the way that they proved their love was with attention, which—yay you. I mean, that's what most people want.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not a bad thing. But it is a thing, right? Because other kind of adults might have made you feel centered by being really structured with you. That's not what you got. You could have used that, right? But that's not what you got exactly. You got this kind of intense, just really focused-on-you attention.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, when it doesn't occur—there's two things I'll say. One is sometimes people don't express themselves the way you want, and it's just because they're having a fucking day. It's just because they don't know. They're just not as good at it as you are because the thing that we haven't named is that you have great social skills. You have really excellent social skills.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So you're able to adapt in a way that a lot of people just aren't. Not everybody's good at using their words and adapting their behavior. You are. And so you may have friends who are just fucking like—when they are low, when they are low energy, when they're not doing well, they just lose their verbal skills. They lose their social skills. I don't know. I'm seeing one person stand out to me in this way. Do you know who I'm referring to? I feel like it's somebody who was in your—it was a woman who was in your life and now isn't so much.

Pea:                 There were two people who came to mind.

Jessica:            Did one of them have kind of straight-ish hair in, like, a bob? Like they wear their hair in kind of a shorter above-shoulder length?

Pea:                 Yeah. They both had shoulder—

Jessica:            That's annoying. That's annoying.

Pea:                 Exactly. They both had. They both had, but one—

Jessica:            And so just describe both of them.

Pea:                 Okay, but one had, like, near-black hair, and the other had light brown.

Jessica:            Light brown? That's the one. It's light brown.

Pea:                 Okay. Yes. No, I couldn't fucking deal with it.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 But she also—she had a mental health crisis in a way that—like, she got the same diagnosis that my grandmother got late in her life.

Jessica:            I see. So it was really triggering.

Pea:                 It was really triggering.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 And it was messy, Jessica. It was like the definition of not fully naming the shit, and then, "Peace out. Bye."

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 It was bad. I exited her life in a way that—to this day, I carry so much shame around it.

Jessica:            That must be why it's popping up for me. So I want to say a couple things. So the first thing is I see that the pattern got deeply triggered in that relationship. And there's layers to this. Some of this was, because you weren't clear with her about what you could and couldn't do, she just showed up and took because she misunderstood what you were available for, and she was a mess. So there's part of it that she was a mess; she wasn't okay, and it was fucking triggering. And then there was part of it where, to compensate for how fucking annoyed you were, you became an excellent listener.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And this is your pattern, right? To compensate for how annoying you think they are—

Pea:                 Oh my God.

Jessica:            —you get extra nice.

Pea:                 Oh my God. I do do that.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 I do it all the fucking time.

Jessica:            Yeah. Every damn day. Every damn day.

Pea:                 Every damn day. Oh my God. And to my friends who are listening to this, I'm sorry. I love you.

Jessica:            No. It's not you trying to harm them. It's you trying to navigate safety as a child, like the way you did as a child. So the way you got taken care of by the adults around you is by taking care of them. But you're a grown-ass adult, and so you're like, eventually, "Peace the fuck out. I'm not doing this anymore," which is fair. But where we come back to the central issue of, "Should I fire my therapist?" the answer is no.

Pea:                 Got you.

Jessica:            The answer is maybe tomorrow, not today—that kind of a no—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —because you haven't tried yet, because if you're going to end this relationship, you might as well advocate for yourself and be real. And if there's a chance that this relationship that you've put all these years into could be salvaged, it will only be because you changed, because this is your therapy.

                        Let me come back to two points. One is, "You make me feel wonky in the head by the way you talk"—okay, we don't say that. But what you can say is something to the effect of, "I have a pattern of not telling people how I really feel about certain things, and then I kind of shut down and go away. And I'm working on it. And I just want you to know that I really am like a ping-pong conversation person. It's like I want to throw a ball and then you lob it back to me. And I know that there's lots of different ways of communicating, but most of them don't work for me. I really like the ping-pong style."

Pea:                 Word. Okay.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            That's just a way of saying it, right? Put it in your words.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And I think that there's probably actually, again, psychological terms for this that are not ping-pong, but instantly you knew what I meant, right?

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            You just want one person—the person who serves then is throwing the ball to you, and then you throw the ball back.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            And that is easy. That's what you like. And for instance, if you have a friend who's just kind of a chronically late person, you can say, "Hey, listen. I get it that you're chronically late, and that's like a you thing. But what's a me thing is it feels to me like you don't like me, and I get shut down and weird when people are late. So what should I do? Should I tell you to meet me a half hour early, and then you're early? Is that something that you think we can work on? I'm trying to not take it personally because I know this is how you are, but also, you should know that this is how I am." You're allowed to say that.

Pea:                 Got it. Got it.

Jessica:            Do you see what I'm saying?

Pea:                 I do.

Jessica:            So it's about being able to hold space for you're both complicated people who are just trying, but there's no way that they can meet you in the middle if you don't tell them where the middle is.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            And this requires you to accept instead of understand. I'm going to repeat that for you. I'm going to repeat that for you. It's important.

Pea:                 Yeah. Please repeat it.

Jessica:            Okay. Accept—with an "a," not an "e," right? Accept other people instead of understand other people, because if you accept that this other person is chronically late, talks about themselves too much—if you truly accept it instead of try to figure it out and understand it and explain it, then you can determine what your boundaries are and what your needs are and what you can offer is. The narrative and the explanation doesn't help you have boundaries.

Pea:                 Okay. I think I understand now because I think what the narrative and explanation does for me is it gives me a way of automatically determining what is right and what is wrong, and then what is wrong gets a really hard wall put up against it.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes.

Pea:                 And then I'm always safe. And I'm glad you said accept instead of understand. It made my whole body go taught, and I will tell you why. I think leaning into accepting instead of understanding is really hard for me because there's this thing that's like, well, what if I accept a part of someone that's fucked up? What if I accept this shit, and this shit is really hard for me? And then I'm not safe, and then it's my—like, you see the spiraling? But I know that—

Jessica:            Yeah. I have the answer to that, though.

Pea:                 —the boundaries—

Jessica:            Let me speak to this. Let me speak to this.

Pea:                 Okay. Okay. Okay.

Jessica:            Okay, because what you described of your mindset is very fixed-signed thinking, okay?

Pea:                 Got it.

Jessica:            It's very fixed air sign thinking. Let's say you and I are friends, right?

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            And I am chronically negative—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —based not on a personal example at all.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            Thank you. Thank you for getting me. Okay. So okay. Let's say I'm chronically negative, and sometimes you're really negative, too. And you love that I'm negative and we can be negative about the world together. And sometimes, you cannot tolerate the fucking negativity—

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            —also not based on a real example for you. Okay. Yeah.

Pea:     No, it is. It is black and white. It's like we're either emo, or we're like sunshine.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah. Yep.

Pea:                 And what's the in-between? I don't know. I can do it for like ten seconds, and then we gotta go.

Jessica:            And then you—right. So okay. Let's say that's our dynamic, and we're friends. If you were to accept that I am—I don't know—a triple Capricorn—just an example—and that I'm wired to be a little more negative, then that doesn't mean you are consenting to being the receptable of my negativity. It doesn't mean that if we meet up for coffee and I'm super negative that you're not allowed to say, "I love you, and I'm having a day. Can we focus on something more constructive or positive? Do you need me to just listen? Because I'm having a hard time engaging"—you can accept me and still have fucking boundaries and preferences and opinions.

                        But if you don't accept me and we're friends, then what you're doing is you're like, "Why is she being so fucking negative? She's being negative because she did x or y or z or because her childhood did y or z or g." You see what I'm saying? Now you're distancing yourself from the present moment with me, and you're actually less well defended. You are less safe from trying to create understanding about who I am than you would be if you would just be like, "Oh. I don't enjoy this. This is not fun for me, and I can just tell her because she's my friend," or, "I can be more diplomatic and not exactly tell her but redirect," or be like, "Okay. I'm not going to enjoy Jessica today. And that, for me, sometimes happens with Jessica. And maybe I need to change my expectations of this friendship, or maybe I just accept that sometimes I have shitty hangouts, but most of the time, the friendship is good."

                        You can adapt because you are adaptable. This is why I keep on giving you examples that require your adaptability, because you are adaptable if you are present in the moment.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So, when we come all the way back to the start of our conversation where I was like, "We should go in this direction," and you were like, "Yes. Let's go in this direction," and I was like, "Wait. No. We're going somewhere else," the destabilization that occurred for you, the dysregulation that occurred for you, is also something I want to encourage you to practice noticing so that you can accept it because you knew it, but you didn't accept it. You were aware of it, but you were like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm tracking. I'm tracking. I'm tracking. I'm tracking," instead of being like, "Oh. This is a thing that I do. I'm not really listening anymore because I feel unsafe."

                        So, in that moment, you weren't able to say—if this was like a therapy session, like we had a weekly meeting, you could have interrupted me and been like, "I actually need us to go back to that. I'm not comfortable with moving past it," or you could have said, "I'm having a dysregulated set of feelings right now. Can we just pause what you're saying so I can focus on what's going on for me?" The only way to get there is to first accept what you're feeling.

                        And what happens in your pattern—right? It's like a trauma pattern from childhood. What happens in your pattern is you don't accept what you're feeling because acceptance is kind of more of an emotional state, and you're so focused on your thinking, your thinking, your thinking, your thinking, because that's what keeps you safe. It's like you keep it focused on this looping thoughts, which is why you're like, "OCD? Autistic?" because, yeah, check those checkboxes. They also just check your birth chart boxes, so potato/pot-ah-to [indiscernible 00:52:05] protective.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            But all to say—we're coming back to your therapist because that's why you reached out for me. Naming for her, "You share things with me that are really personal to you sometimes, and it always makes me feel surprised. And I don't prefer it, because when you do"—you can't just end with, "I don't like it." This is important advice.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            It's to say why. It's to say, "because if we have more of a personal relationship, then I feel like I have to take care of you."

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            "And this is my one place where I want to not—I want to be selfish."

Pea:                 Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            That's what therapy's for. That's what you're paying for.

Pea:                 Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            And so you have a right to say that. And she has a right to say, "Huh. Let's talk about that." And you have a right to say, "Actually, I don't want to talk about that. I just need you to hear it. Maybe we can talk about it another time, but I just need to feel like you heard it." Or you have a right to say, "You know what? I'm going to trust this therapist, and let's unpack it because there's value in me understanding myself."

                        What I'm trying to say is you have a choice. But if you're trying to have a back-and-forth relationship with someone, you also have to give them a choice. So we don't know, if you tell the therapist the truth of, like, "Girl, when I'm sharing something really personal about, let's say, my dad, and you redirect the conversation or you don't let me fully unpack my thought, it shuts me down, and I feel, again, dysregulated. I just feel like I don't even know what to say or do, and so I go into a mode"—if you just tell her that, her job, if she's doing it right, is to ask questions, to ask you to help her understand. And if she doesn't do her job right and she doesn't ask questions and ask you to help her understand so that she can be a better support for you, then yeah, you're going to want to fire your therapist for sure.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So the acceptance and the self-advocacy is not so that you stay. It's so that you know whether or not you should stay, which is why you haven't fired her yet, even though you've been thinking about it for two fucking years, because you haven't given her the chance.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And the relationship is inherently—there's a lot of good in it.

Pea:                 Yeah, there is.

Jessica:            There is. And also, unfortunately, I can also see—hey, listen. Don't ask her how her day is going if you don't want to fucking know.

Pea:                 Thank you. Okay. I needed to hear it because I do, and I think it's probably the fucking Pisces Moon in me that's like, "She's a human, and we should acknowledge that."

Jessica:            Yeah. "I have to take care of her." Absolutely. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with asking at the end of a session, "Hey, hope the Full Moon's, like"—I agree. For you, it's a crossing of boundaries. But what you haven't told me and what I believe I'm seeing psychically—you tell me if I'm wrong—is that you ask questions about her in every session.

Pea:                 I do. And it really can be just like, "How are you?"

Jessica:            Right.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            There is a whole brand of therapy that is of the modern world, so if she's in your age group, this is the brand of therapy she may have been taught on where it is about a personal relationship.

Pea:                 Interesting.

Jessica:            So she may have no idea that you actually need—

Pea:                 Got it.

Jessica:            —the roles to be tidier.

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah. Something I do is—I had a previous therapist who I swear changed my life. And so I try not to, but I find myself comparing her to how—you know, it was kind of a thing he and I would do. Every time, I would ask him how he was, and he would just, blank, say, "We're here to talk about you. It's about you."

Jessica:            So okay. So what you did there was you pushed the boundary, and he kept the boundary. Right?

Pea:                 Oh, wow. Yeah.

Jessica:            And thank God you got to do that. And also—right? Right? It's so powerful that he did that. And also, eventually, all of the cognitive intelligence and pattern recognition in the world will not help you grow if you don't do the emotional integration. Right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so this is where, in this relationship with this woman, you ask her how her day is going, and she's like, "Good," or, "Bad." And you're like, "Bitch, you're not holding a boundary." But for her, she might be a different kind of therapist. And at a certain point, it becomes you not holding the boundary. Your boundary is, "I don't want to know about her day." Again, Capricorn on Capricorn violence—I know you're not Capricorn, but just about—I respect that. I have that same feeling with a therapist.

                        And also, if that's your boundary, then stop asking her how her day is going, because she's not inserting it. She's not telling you, and you're not asking. You're opening the door, and she's like, "Oh, don't mind if I do." She's just walking through it. And so this is a pattern for you, is that you unconsciously invite people to do something that you know you don't want them to do.

Pea:                 Yeah, I do. I do.

Jessica:            You do. And hey. Let me say you, me, and everyone else—that is called being a human, especially a human in your early 30s. It's okay. The more awareness you bring to this, the easier it will be to notice yourself doing it. And I know it sounds overly simple to all your Aquarius energy, but the practice of noticing things in the moment and choosing to be emotionally present for that thing that you've noticed so that you can accept that it's happening is the literal and most reliable foundation for everything—everything—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —because acceptance—you've heard me say this seven million times. Acceptance isn't consent. Acceptance is awareness, but it's emotional awareness, which is more integrated than cognitive awareness.

Pea:                 Okay. Okay.

Jessica:            Does that make sense?

Pea:                 Yes, it does. I do accept in my head and not with my feelings a lot.

Jessica:            Right, which is why you perpetuate the same mistake over and over and over again, because you're like, "The emotions aren't behind it, so it's not integrated." Now, you mentioned the friend and the shame. And I wanted to come back to that and say there's apologies, and there's amends. Right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            You can reach out to this person and apologize and be like, "I was really triggered. I didn't treat you with the care that you deserved. I had boundaries, and I didn't navigate them well. I just disappeared on you, and I regret it. And I want you to know that I see you, and I'm sorry you went through that, and I'm sorry that I wasn't there for you in the way that you deserved." You could write her a letter and say that, right?

Pea:                 I have, essentially. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Good. Beautiful. Beautiful. But that's an apology, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            The amends—it requires more emotional intelligence. The amends is, "I'm going to give myself the grace to have made a mistake. I'm going to be humble about that mistake instead of guilty because humility—it's like an action step. It's a learning—and I didn't know, or I cognitively knew but I emotionally couldn't. And guilt is more self-referential, and it can incline us to self-obsession, which can easily lead to fucking shame and self-hatred, right?

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so I want to just invite you to take this traumatic experience that happened between you and a friend and put it on a different part of the shelf, whenever it comes up in your thinking, to remember it with humility and care—"I didn't love myself enough to have the boundary. I didn't know how to express love to her in a safe way. I didn't know how to navigate the situation. And I made a mistake that I hope to not make again."

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            "And that's my living amends." But the living amends can only happen if you love yourself through the error instead of punish yourself through the error. I want to just ground you into this theme of having a carceral way of thinking about yourself means that you have it about others. If we are punishing ourselves and blaming ourselves, then we're going to punish and blame others.

                        And you deserve and have within your nature—I mean, you've got this very Plutonian nature. Fuck yeah. I mean, it's very punishing and can be very carceral. But you've also got a Moon in Pisces opposite Jupiter, which is forgiveness and grace. So you have both parts. So we can't kick out the Pluto with your Pisces. That's not a thing.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            But you can bring the wisdom of that part of you that knows that you're just evolving and growing, and you were younger, and you just didn't have the skills yet, and she made mistakes but she wasn't right, and that wasn't against you on purpose or whatever—

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            —having that spaciousness to say—and inside of  this spaciousness, there is grief, and there is shame, and there is all the feelings—and to practice allowing those feelings to be without attaching to them, without recoiling from them, just allowing them to be—I'm going to repeat this—without attaching or recoiling—practicing that will give you greater access to your body because when you settle into your body, you do have a lot of attachment and recoil impulses.

Pea:                 Yes. Yes.

Jessica:            And they keep you from freedom. They keep you from being really emotionally present so that you can advocate for yourself, take care of yourself, show up for yourself, show up for others.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So practicing forgiveness and humility for yourself, as well as for others, is not a practice of taking yourself off the hook. It's a practice of taking the hook out of your own heart. And it's a practice. You're not going to be perfect at it. You have a Pluto/Sun square. This is a life practice. You don't need to be perfect at this. But this practice will help you to have more options in your relationships, whether it's with your therapist or with people in your life. And those options may land you making the same choices that you're already making.

I want to be really clear. It's not that you're doing something wrong. It's that you're not holding all of yourself. You're centering the part that you feel safest with. And what happens to all of us eventually is the Universe is like, "Oh, you've developed only this one part? Okay. Cool. We'll make that one part not work. We'll make that one part irrelevant, and we'll only focus on this other part." And that sucks.

Pea:     Yeah.

Jessica:            So, if you do this now, if you work on this now with this therapist who is an established safe space, it'll be easier than if you wait. It'll just be easier. So you might as well—you know what I mean—use this opportunity where she's paid to be nice to you. That is true. It's her job. So let her be kind to you through this process. She's a safe person to make mistakes with.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            If you say something really mean and you sit on it and you're like, "Aah. That felt wrong," you can come back next week and be like, "I said x. It sat really bad with me. Did it make you feel weird? I'm actually asking." You get to really use this as an experiment, in a way.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So do.

Pea:                 Yeah. I'm glad you named that, because I have thought about therapy that way for years, and yet I haven't emotionally accepted it as a safe space in which to experiment because it's like I know, my brain knows, that it gets to practice naming really tough shit about our relationship in this dynamic, but my emotions down in my gut are like, "No. Because this is a safe space, it must remain safe. And what if we bring a messy thing to it that makes it all unravel, and then I have no safe space?"

Jessica:            And if you're doing that with your therapist, then you're doing it with everyone you date and your close friends.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            And so that's great information—

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            —because it's just information. And you are not supposed to be perfect. You are meant to evolve. And so you have the awareness. We had this conversation the day before therapy.

Pea:                 Yeah, girl.

Jessica:            Okay? And so we are going to hold space for—you get to be scared. You get to be uncomfortable. You get to do it wrong. And I tend to find, in an arch of naming things, you can say to your therapist, "I'm feeling really scared. I'm confident I'm going to do this wrong, and that makes me even more scared. And I'm going to do it with you because I've been not doing it with you, and this is the place where it's right for me to do it. So help me out." You know? And just practice it. That's really the move, is just practice it.

                        So you don't have to break up with your therapist, and you may break up with your therapist. And if you decide to break up with your therapist after giving her a chance, then you're always going to feel good about it. I think that that's like—I just wanted to say it really succinctly for you. And when we get off this call, you are likely to feel sad and not exactly know what to do with yourself. And I want to encourage you to try to sit in that soup without trying to figure it out or redirect or anything like that for 30 seconds longer than you're comfortable with, three minutes longer than you're comfortable with—nothing too bananas, whatever feels better, 30 seconds or three minutes, because your pattern that we've uncovered in our conversation today is to have your mind leap to the rescue of your heart, even when your heart just needs to be felt.

                        So practice sitting in the messiness without attaching or recoiling, without attaching or recoiling—just being. It's awkward. And just be. There's like a—it's not a vulnerability hangover, but there is this thing that happens for you when you do have an emotional experience, where you are seen, where things are intimate like we've just had. It feels like grief to me. I don't know if that's the word you would attribute to it, but it feels like grief. And I want to validate it and name it and say that it's just—you have been using this coping mechanism of superimposing your head, like the great and powerful Oz, over your body and your emotions for so long that when you actually do drop into your body, what happens is you actually are feeling some of your sadness from five years old.

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            You're feeling some of your sadness from like 17, right?

Pea:                 Yes.

Jessica:            Some of it is—it doesn't make sense because it doesn't make sense. It's just emotions that you have—it's like water you haven't wrung out of the—I was going to say the rag, but you know what I mean?

Pea:                 Yeah, I do.

Jessica:            That's all it is. And if you can quiet the mind—you can just let that be; practice it—what will happen is you will get better over time. I would say that practice, for me, took maybe 15 years—

Pea:                 Wow.

Jessica:            —to feel like I made objective progress on. Now, it might not be that way for you. You have a much happier Moon than I do. You know what I'm saying? Everyone has a different path. But I'm saying it is slow work. It's slow work to just be. And it's why the rest movement is so powerful now, right? It's like to just be is hard. And so, if you make teeny, eency-beancy bits of progress, rejoice because it's progress. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter how fast it is.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            Teeny-eency. If 30 seconds is all you can do before you take a nap or grab your phone or call a friend or whatever, 30 seconds is great. As long as it's pushing you just a teeny bit, not so much that you are in trauma, but so much so that you are expanding what your inner child can tolerate, you're doing great. I hope that this has helped because I feel like we got to some things.

Pea:                 Yeah. No, Jessica, this was amazing.

Jessica:            Yay.

Pea:                 Thank you so much. I am so grateful, and I feel like I have so much to move forward with, not only with my therapist, but you tapped on some shit in my relationships, too. And I think that was actually what it was really about, is supposed to be about.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Pea:                 So thank you. Before we wrap up officially, I wanted to make a point to ask you about energetically transitioning out of the reading. To me, getting psychic'd is a very intense experience. And I wanted to ask you about energetic maintenance after the reading—

Jessica:            Interesting.

Pea:                 —aside from just going to bed, drinking water.

Jessica:            Interesting.

Pea:                 I think I had an idea of, like—maybe because I was feeling the vulnerability before the reading—about maybe having some kind of cleansing bath after this.

Jessica:            Okay. I have advice about that. So, when we get off the call, one thing you can do is just simply say your full name out loud—in your head or out loud—and set the intention that you're calling all of your energy back to yourself, so that you didn't leave anything with me, you know? The other thing you can do is take an Epsom salt bath. Epsom salts pull out toxins from the system, so whenever you need a cleanse—Epsom salt bath. Do you have roses in the house or rose water anywhere?

Pea:                 It's interesting. No, no fresh roses, but I have dried rose tea petals, and I drink rose tea petals every day. I'm drinking some now.

Jessica:            I would then have some rose tea. You're already having it. Good.

Pea:                 Okay. Yep.

Jessica:            And the reason why I mention roses is actually for the thorns. The problem with rose tea is it doesn't have thorns. So I would say also maybe buy yourself some roses with thorns, if you can—

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            —in the next few days because roses are like—they're heart chakra, right? They're all, like, Pisces Mooney. They're tender. They represent love. They come with fucking boundaries. They come with thorns.

Pea:                 Yeah.

Jessica:            So it's about embracing the thorns.

Pea:                 Got it.

Jessica:            Okay? That's my advice to you. So those are two things you can do.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            But let me just take a peek at you energetically and see if there's any last thing that is coming up. Oh. It's really simple. Okay. All you gotta do is put your two feet flat on the ground, and really affirm your connection to the earth, to your body and the earth. So you're going to get grounded. You just did it already. You feel better, eh? You can feel it? Can you feel it?

Pea:                 I thought of putting my two feet on the ground, and yeah.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. You just—you connected to the earth really quick, and you just felt a little—

Pea:                 Interesting.

Jessica:            —subtle more grounding, right? So, the second I asked you if you did it, you went into your head, and you started thinking about whether or not you did it instead of doing it—

Pea:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica:            —because you're a fucking Aquarius. But that's the move, okay? That's the move, is to practice ground, receiving ground, getting grounded. Don't ask yourself if you do it. Just do it. But you already did it.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            So you can leave that part alone. You already did it now, okay? But you can do it again if you start getting too in your head in 20 minutes or whatever. Just ground.

Pea:                 Okay.

Jessica:            But those are all the things you can do. You don't really need to do anything. But because you're so sensitive and because it's in your mind that you'd like to do it, those are all excellent things to do.

Pea:                 Okay. You're wonderful, Jessica.

Jessica:            I'm so glad we did this.

Pea:                 Me, too. Thank you so, so, so much.

Jessica:            It is my pleasure.