12th House Moon

So, I'm more annoyingly Piscean than I care to admit.

I've been stumped by my 12 house/aries stellium and of late, I've come to realize how unknowingly distant I can be. The irony is, I recently posted in the Misc forum about this with regard to water signs only to realize today that the behaviors I hate, I naturally emulate. Go fucking figure...



source: http://nakedastrology.blogspot.com/2007/12/living-with-and-loving-12th-house-moon.html<BR>
The 12th house describes the unconscious, the hidden. It is the vastest, and the most mysterious of astrological houses. Trying to see its contents is as useless and as dangerous as trying to discern how deep the ocean by looking at its surface. The only way to experience the 12th house is to sink into it with eyes closed, using intuition and sideways senses and allowing its contents to rise up and meet you, like the distant ancestoral memories we carry unaware most often of the voices which sing in our blood, whisper in our bones.

The 12th house obscures whatever it contains, and its contents are not easily reachable. Attempting to grab a part of us that it's in the 12th is very much similar to fishing - direction and depth are illusory, things slip from our grasps, float to us in their own time, of their own accord.

On the subject of how to spot a 12th house moon, astrologer Alexander von Schlieffen gives a deeply helpful definition; namely that with a 12th house moon person their needs are hidden, elusive, both from themselves and others around them.

continued...

So, here's a list of useless questions to ask a 12th house Moon (unless you are looking for an excuse to work yourself into a froth of frustration):

How do you feel? ("Don't know, can't put it into words.")

What are your needs? (A wide-handed shrug that equates needs to vastness and unquantifiability of the sea; "I don't know")

What do you want? ("I don't know"; "What do you want?")

Can you remember how you felt about that? ("I don't know how to put it into words"; "I cannot find the words to explain how I feel about you either, words are so inadequate, I just feel".)

What are your boundaries? ("I don't know, but when you cross them we'll both know.")

What makes you happy? ("When you're happy.")

In short, a recipe for insanity if you're looking for any kind of a straight answer.

-fin




now the irony is, if you look at my post in the misc forum, it pretty much echos what is written above and i find myself ashamed and yet, chuckling inwardly because OMG!...i do it too!

Moon in the Twelfth House
It is not easy for you to reveal your feelings to others, because you are afraid they either will not understand or will disapprove. This refusal to share your inner self with others probably caused problems for you as a child, but as you grow and mature you learn to accept yourself more as you are, and this allows you to be yourself. You constantly pursue emotional security while at the same time believing that you will never achieve it. You are always afraid that others will disappoint you and abandon you in your hour of need, but this is not necessarily true. Even though you may not trust people easily, you do enjoy helping others. You may not see yourself as a generous, compassionate person, but you are. You have a natural talent for seeing a situation through another's eyes and can therefore understand their feelings more easily. You go out of your way to avoid emotional stress, and you would never intentionally hurt another. You are really a very kind and loving person, whether you know it or not. It is likely that you daydream a lot and escape to a fantasy world when real life gets too ugly or difficult for you. You are very truthful in your relationships, and as a matter of fact may be too truthful at times when it might be better to spare your lover's feelings by being too blunt. You would never do this intentionally; you are just telling the truth. Casual affairs are of no interest to you; you require more depth.
http://meinah.tripod.com/NS/p3.html<BR>

pfft...no, no phone throwing.

i'd say most would describe me as emotionless but more on that...

Reading from Tracy Marks, _Your Secret Self': Illuminating the mysteries of the Twelfth House_.

Your twelfth house moon suggests that you are a private person, hesitant to reveal your feelings and needs. Often, fearful of your vulnerability, you block awareness of your feelings; you seek refuge from your inner world in habitual activities which you may perform in an automatic manner. Contacting your hidden emotional self may be difficult for you, because you have developed a lifetime of defenses against primitive levels of need and dependency which frighten you. You may feel intense shame in regard to the child-self which is buried within you.

Repressed for a long time, your sadness and longing may sometimes burst forth as infantile tears, which seem regressive and inappropriate. Like Alice in Wonderland drowning in the flood of her tears, you feel overwhelmed, and seek to squelch future displays of feeling. "Be strong;don't cry" may be your motto. You are afraid not only of drowning in your feelings and your needs, but also of revealing your vulnerability to others, then being rejected or abandoned.

Perhaps because of traumatic experiences as a child, in which you experienced unbearable helplessness, need, and dependency in relationship to a parent who could not sensitively respond, you learned to turn to yourself early in life and to establish your self-sufficiency. "I must do it alone; I don't need anyone," you decided, as you withheld yourself emotionally in relationships, and learned how to engage with people without full involvement. Emotionally self-contained and insulated, you became a capable survivor, and learned how to effectively play the roles required of you. But often, as a result of your repression, you feel empty and depleted, out of contact with your source of inner sustenance.

If your moon is deeply buried, you may struggle against fear of the primitive infant locked within you, and against a desire to return to the womb or to escape into fantasies of total nurturance. Fearful of your passivity and your desire for motherly love, you compensate through cultivating your adult competencies and by becoming a caregiver. But although you are independent in the external world, you hold onto your established patterns of behavior and to whatever internal sources of security you have developed.

Forced to turn to yourself early in life, you learned how to take care of yourself, and how to substitute behaviors and activities for the nurturing from others you did not receive. You may as a result be compulsive about your self-caretaking rituals, particularly in regard to food. Tendencies toward anorexia, adherence to strict diets, preoccupation with cooking, and fear of eating in restaurants are all manifestations of a twelfth house moon. Sometimes, you become ill as a means of resting from the demands of your adult self, and in order to allow yourself to receive the caretaking that you seek.

Your twelfth house moon suggests that you never felt allowed to be a child. Perhaps your mother was emotionally a child herself, and wanted you to cater to her needs rather than become capable of responding to yours. She may have been deeply troubled, psychologically or physically unavailable; she may have sacrificed herself to involvements in the outer world at the expense of her family life. Whatever your situation, her negative responses to your needs and feelings, and her messages of "don't cry" "be strong" or "do it yourself" led you to believe that you had no right to have feelings. The hurt or trauma you experienced then may have resulted in a deep-seated decision never to make yourself vulnerable again. "I'd rather die than need you," you may have inwardly said to your mother, "because if I need you I will have to bear the intolerable pain of your failure to meet my needs." As you grew older, fearing the re-stimulation and opening of earlier wounds, you may have said to yourself, " I will not be dependent upon anyone ever again."

Often a twelfth house moon signifies a failure in the early attachment bond with the mother, although a deep inner bond with her exists. Such a bond ( accompanied by idealization) persists in part because you need to hold on to her psychically, as a result of not having received adequate nurturing. Frequently, a twelfth house moon suggests problems in the oral or suckling stage or lack of adequate physical nurturance. If your mother was unable to rspond to your nonverbal (and verbal) signals, you learned to distrust closeness to other persons, and failed to develop a healthy degree of trust.

Because of childhood trauma, you may have repressed your early experiences, and remember little of your family life; you may also have developed a life style which involves minimal family contact. Perhaps because you neer had a secure home, or because you fear experiencing your need for a home and family life, you may avoid creating a home that could be truly nurturing for you. Sometimes, people who have Twelfth house moons never develop roots anywhere; they move frequently, unable to settle down, afraid of sinking into the feelings and needswhich they associate with attachment to home and family.

Another influence of a twelfth house moon is confusion in regard to female identity and to relationships with woman. Lacking an adequate female role model, you may have distorted ideas about womanhood and motherhood. If you are female, you may be insecure about your identity as a woman, and inclined to equate female role behavior with self-sacrifice; you might then, in reaction, reject the traditionally feminine, and seek refuge in "male" values. Sometimes, woman with twelfth house moons deny the desire for motherhood; or, in contrast, allow themselves to become pregnant in order to recreate them mother/infant bond.

If you are male, you may feel insecure about the hidden female within you, which at times feels like overwhelming need and passivity. You may devalue the "feminine" realms of life, while simultaneously idealizing women, falling in love with inner images and fantasies, yearning for the perfect woman/mother/mate, or attracting clinging, dependent women who force you to make contact with the energies you project.
To the extent to which you fear your vulnerability and hunger for nurturance, you attract people who need you and become dependent upon you. Fleeing from relationships which awaken your own need, you are nevertheless quite capable of responding to need in others. In fact, you may even respond with a sensitivity and sympathy which you are incapable of giving to yourself. Psychically sensitive to others, you are attuned to their feelings and intuitively know what to say and do.

Because you are a natural caretaker, you are probably drawn to work in the service professions, where you can meet the needs of wounded or troubled humanity. Identifying with the troubled, ill or weak, you demonstrate your talent as a nurse, healer, or counselor. Having sacrificed your personal mother to the world, you may also sacrifice your personal mothering needs in order to mother humanity as a whole. You seek to give to others what you always wanted to receive. Such giving may not fill the empty space within you, but it does provide vicarious satisfaction and the experience of having made a significant social contribution.

Another advantage of your twelfth house moon is your keen intuition an innate spirituality. Because of your sensitivity, you need to spend a considerable amount of time alone, reflecting upon aspects of your personal life which you do not share with others, and clearing yourself of the psychic overload you have accumulated as a result of too much contact. Your solitude may also be important to you because it helps you to regain contact with yourself, to connect with your feeling nature, and through meditation, music, or other pursuits, to let go of the walls you have created and surrender to forces greater than yourself.

Because you have preserved your true child self deep within you, in a form that is largely untouched by the world, you are capable of contacting and drawing from rich sources of inner nourishment which reside with that child. Because its boundaries are thin, it is capable of openness to spiritual realms. The more you are able to honor that archaic child within you, the more you will become attuned to your divine nature and be able to enrich yourself with the openness to higher energies which it can offer you.

You need to contact, accept, and embrace the child within you, to tolerate its terror of abandonment and its primitive feelings and needs, and to learn to soothe and reassure it. Feeling-oriented therapy, re-birthing, self-psychology, primal therapy, and past-lives therapy all may facilitate this process. As you begin to acknowledge and honor your inner child, you may also choose to create for yourself a home which is truly nourishing, and which helps you to feel warm, safe, and emotionally secure. Once you begin to hear, accept, and meet the real needs of your inner child, you will experience a sense of realness and wholeness which previously was inaccessible to you; you will also be able to give to others more effectively, to meet their real needs, rather than vicariously using them as a means for recovering your lost self. -


source: http://soulgardentv.ning.com/profiles/blogs/moon-in-the-12th-house

i am creeped out. i have been trying to understand this 12th house thing for a very long time.

the solargardentv joint describes me so well. where it doesn't describe my mom to a "t," it does allude to the source. my mom worked two jobs all of her life...and she was a leo. loved us deeply but like almost everyone in my family, outwardly strong, composed, inwardly...who the fuck knows? now anger, that emotion was easy. ie...CLEAN YOUR ROOM!!! WASH THE DISHES!!! nothing over the top just anger was far easier and more readily displayed than sentiment/tears. i swear, at my mom's funeral, virtually no one in my family cried. i think we all were trying to hold it together for one another...my family is a fucking 12th house moon.

thus, i did in fact learn at an early age to deal with emo on my own. it was born out of a blend of fear, resentment and necessity. i hated that if i shared my emo, others would know. i didn't feel secure in telling one person for fear everyone would know. so i retreated and built walls.

what's also creepy is that part about moving around a lot. i can't tell you how true that is.

i DO need abnormal amounts of solitude. i don't mind being surrounded by genuine people but if left to my own devices, i'd make a great hermit.

i agree with that touch therapy line. i don't like it when people touch me. it annoys me. i hate hugs. my gf's for example know this about me. i don't care how long it's been since i've seen them, i will literally do almost anything to avoid "mushy" displays.

intellectually i know that the things i deny, i yearn for most. i do desire physical and emotional proximity but it's so foreign to me that it'd be like asking me if i wanted to live on the moon...astroliterally.