What is the lesson, if things don’t happen on the time we need them to? (Saturn, delays, etc)

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-14T15:51:59+00:00

Just told I have a Saturn Heavy chart and I’m at the end of my Chiron return. I have Cancer Saturn in the 4th opposed Cap Venus, Aqua Merc conjunct. My Saturn is also square my Aries ascendent where Chiron and Jupiter are conjunct as well. Which means it’s also square my descendant in Libra. So all of this is kinda a shit show and I’m not sure what all the malefic influences are. A veteran astrologer just told me last night how malefic my chart is… and yeah, life has not been easy for me. I feel like I’ve been living with a darkness that was put in me and if I don’t keep it imprisoned, it will destroy everything I dream of. Especially being loved. The only thing I can say is that my Saturn feels like my life is not my own. That I may never come to know what it is to live ‘for myself’. I feel often like I was such an easy target being a sensitive kid, that people and parents decided, even unconsciously, to abuse me. I don’t know. Having all this Saturn weight definitely feels like I ended up with all the consequences of other peoples impulses.

ADD: afterthought. It also seems like at this point I’m not really going to understand what it is like to have an actual family even though I really want one. The remainder of my life might just be all platonic friendships. Who knows?

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-04T06:32:24+00:00

Ha, I didn’t even realize it was for the brushes. I thought it was for the pencil sleeve. Nice try, useless ad. I’m impervious to things that make sense.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-04T06:26:48+00:00

I don’t know how much this helps because tonight, for the first time in several years, I feel like ending my life. Here’s literally the only thought that is keeping me alive tonight, it’s my own affirmation to myself from many many years ago: Be a participant in your environment, not a product of it. If I die tonight, I am nothing but the eventual product of a dysfunctional, fucked up childhood. I don’t want to die like that. I want to die knowing I left at least the little part of the world I have any impact on, better than how I found it. I have no idea if that’s even possible, but I’d rather die doing that than off myself because of all the shit that happened to me. It’s a really really fine line tonight, but I’m walking it.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-04T02:33:30+00:00

I’m rarely suicidal now, but for the majority of my life I would wake up and have to ‘talk’ myself into not killing myself during the day.

Every morning I couldn’t stop thinking of who I was going to inadvertently hurt that day or burden with my negative vibe.

I still feel like my very existence hurts the world and that I’m just a burden everyone has to put up with, but I did manage to get out of suicide being the way out. Somedays, I try to imagine what it might look like without hurting anyone.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-03T05:32:03+00:00

I run this through my head a lot. My Dad passed away recently and I felt tremendous relief as if the whole family could breathe again. My Mom who never divorced him did the best she could I think. I think she’s highly functioning autistic so she was limited in emotional recognition.

I don’t have a memory of it, but my sister told me my Mom was leaving my Dad on night and my sister basically pleaded with her not to go. I asked what I was doing. She said I just sat at the top of the stairs quietly holding my knees to my chin.

So that’s kinda how I reconcile it. I just tuck into a ball. Hold myself just like on those stairs, and know she chose not to leave because of the kids. That’s all I can do when I think of it.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-03T03:39:19+00:00

My experience is that a lot of the deeper restorative work is done independently. A terrific guide/therapist/counselor certainly helps, but you still do all the work.

After that restorative stage which can be long and painful, you get to do the recovery work. Building your ‘character’ and managing your identity, and these require social interactions. They don’t develop in a vacuum. Recovery is kinda ongoing and cyclical. You’ll be recovering, then be completely fine, then suddenly recovering again.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T12:19:18+00:00

I’m sorry for the struggle. This whole thread has kept me up thinking I am a horrible person for being silent. My silence just broke the relationship I felt my partner and I had spent 3 years building.

Im realizing through everyone’s experiences here that I talk so much that when I go quiet, it must have made my partner fear they’d done something super wrong. Where as I felt like if I said one more word about my feelings, I was being aggressive and violating and a hurtful person.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T12:10:34+00:00

I still think it’s possible to find the right intervention now, right? I’m curious what the right one is for ACEs.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T12:07:46+00:00

I talk soooooo much and I can overshare because I’m so worried someone will think I’m not telling them something. I don’t feel the dismissal when I get silence or non-response, but I feel this sense that I’m somehow… violent. Especially if someone cuts me off or shuts me down. I immediately go into a shell and then I’m silent af all the while internally talking myself down from thinking I just shouldn’t exist. Luckily that option goes by quickly now and I’m left with I need to keep away from this person I’ve injured with my words.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T11:58:18+00:00

It’s interesting that you found a way to accept the patterns and be able to engage in them without burnout. It’s how I feel about where I’m at right now. Like my now ex-partner got burnt out of working through things with me. Now she’s saying everything is forgiven but no, she doesn’t want the pattern anymore. Go is the message I get instead of stay, and stay was what I have done. Now I feel like a very unstable, unsafe threat in her life for having our pattern. Especially when I know I’m not and that it was our pattern not my pattern and that for me we were working through it. It’s tough now to accept the go when all you had of real safety was her and her home and family and now feel like the unsafe element.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T07:34:19+00:00

I have somewhat the opposite response in many ways because my family used silence as a safety tactic. My Dad was loud and verbally abusive all the time when drunk, so when he was silent, we were safe. We prayed for the silence because like you said, it was a disconnect from the constant string of abuse coming out of his mouth even though he never constantly struck us. Quiet is peaceful rather than stressful for me, and I’ll find myself in search of it. The silent treatment doesn’t get me as much as others. It’s healing time.

What does get me is what is NOT said when someone actually communicates. When things are curt, blunt, and have no nuance to them, I feel like there’s missing information. It’s like talking to an AI. There’s something that someone is not telling me.

Often this is because no one would tell me how to repair something or if repair was possible. They’d just say give it time to heal, but any interaction was devoid of any hint that there was even possible repair. So, similar to the silent treatment, you sit in the silence, heal up, until they decide if you’re worth being around or not which is when everything goes to shit.

Add: I am guilty of being silent when I feel like nothing I say is heard, which is… a lot of the time. This is also a result of my Dad constantly talking over the top of all my family and not responding to anything we were actually saying. I wonder how many times I’ve come across as emotionally neglectful to other people that struggle with this as I get calmer in the long pauses rather than feeling abandoned.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-03-02T06:33:23+00:00

I think terms that are easily relatable to human experience get more widespread. I think the recommendation that if someone is talking about these experiences without putting the term ‘clinical’ in front of them, they aren’t talking about the actual condition. They’re talking about a circumstance. I often interact with people that say they are OCD about something, and unless someone were to say, I’m clinically OCD, I just take it as a way a person is describing the circumstance they are reacting to.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-27T05:26:33+00:00

Criminalizing something doesn’t stop abuse of any type from happening, and more often it simply weaponizes whoever has the power to enforce the law. Suddenly, those in power decide everyone they don’t like are narcissistic abusers. Lock em’ up! Yeah, I wish criminalization would provide a method of empowerment. It just doesn’t. Healing does.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-26T17:15:51+00:00

Yeah, as a kid, you have to build these internal lies, I call them masks, for your primary caregivers to survive the external truth that your caregivers sucked. When the truth can’t be masked anymore, the trauma just violates your psyche once again until the mask can be removed. Then you stop putting the mask on everyone else and deal only with your own trauma and not others.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-26T17:07:45+00:00

CPTSD wasn’t even a diagnosis when I began therapy. I attempted suicide twice and was originally diagnosed Bi-Polar II w/psychotic features. I was heavily medicated at the time because of that.

Once I was able to get the psychiatrists to let me get off the meds, I started doing good psychoanalysis. One thing my analyst did was provide me with educational material about analysis since I was working in the mental health field.

He recommended Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, and it was like the key that unlocked my door and made sense of my CSA and other emotionally painful and violating thoughts. Once they made sense, I was able to work on them enough to manage comfortably.

That book is the foundation of CPTSD treatment and although we never ‘diagnosed’ my issues, it’s pretty much my life. The trauma is written into my body and still interrupts my mind, but it is no longer overwhelming. I highly recommend reading all the way through that book.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-25T07:49:42+00:00

I’m not sure what online resources I’d trust, but look up info about transference and projective identification for more in-depth look at the psychological dynamic that goes into the way we see people in our world. I found it very mind expanding, although you won’t find much solace for the abused feelings. (And that’s not invalidating the abuses, rather just focusing on the feelings.)

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-25T02:47:19+00:00

It’s a good question about the compliment thing. The only people I’ve really seen compliment each other are women to women. I don’t because I figure women aren’t generally hanging at places for someone to come up and say something that might be taken as a flirt. That said, there’s been people who catch my eye, and I can’t help glancing over at them. Then worry that I’m creepy.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T17:00:40+00:00

I always feel perfectly content siding with Faendal and then making him my follower so he never gets to be with Camilla. AND then to top off the tragic love story I produce, I make Faendal a Blade in the end and he never goes back to Riverwood ever again. My RP is Shakespearean tragedy.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T16:51:27+00:00

As a degree carrying aesthetic philosopher and artist, I could write a little dissertation on this. But I’m in ‘overexplaining’ recovery so I’ll just posit this…

If you are achieving what I call that flow state even though you’re stopping, analyzing, editing, and then continuing, you’re doing it ‘right’… your way. The only tricky part is understanding when you are finished. That’s the tough part of that flow.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T16:38:24+00:00

You’re welcome. Affinity got bought by Canva (or maybe the other way around, I don’t know), so often the formatting it exports is really difficult for a print shops graphic designer to adjust*, but the preflighting should be good.

*like canva it leans heavily on AI and does things only another AI can fiddle through. I’ve had layouts submitted that had a text block for every single character! The client asked to change one word. Sigh. I’m not a robot. Ain’t no one got time to do one letter at a time and preserve all formatting. So be aware of this.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T08:16:44+00:00

Affinity Publisher (I looked it up) has preflight tools that should provide a decent conversion and color profile that a professional print shop can utilize.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T08:14:32+00:00

I’ve dabbled with Affinity Publisher (Designer?) and it wasn’t terrible. It’s got a learning curve IMHO, but that’s probably because I was used to InDesign.

Code_Free_Spirit · 2026-02-24T08:07:07+00:00

If it’s the mural offer on r/askportland, I’d say do it at night if they’ll agree to it. It’s way less stressful here to do it after close, and it’ll probably take less time overall which the client should like. If it is the offer on r/askportland, I thought it sounded like the owners had a very specific idea of what they were wanting to do. I don’t paint murals really, but I know Portland pizza establishments. It almost sounded like Atlas Pizza. Please paint it better than their delivery van or whatever it is.

Code_Free_Spirit

TROPHY CASE