What Does My Astrology Have to Do With Alcohol Use Disorder?
Hint: Matthew Perry’s birth chart shares this signature
“You didn’t need all that alcohol to escape the world. You already have access to other realms.” The astrologer told me matter of factly during my first astrology reading, on February 27, 2023.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, your chart shows some placements which might make other realms easily accessible.” She went on to explain something about Neptune and my Sun, and either experiencing Spirit or spirits in a big way. Something traveled over the zoomosphere and lodged like a butterfly in my stomach. Or maybe something within me started awakening at that moment.
I was just so blown away that she seemed to be able to read my life without ever having met me. The alcohol, yes, but also the troubled family of origin, the self-destructive and impulsive tendencies, the high achieving leader I had become, the need for exercise that pushed my physical and mental limits, the inability to have a healthy love partnership. The astrologer gave me a feast of food for thought to chow down on, and for awhile I forgot about the ‘other realms’ amidst the recognizable dishes.
I had started journaling daily the day I got sober, and the next day I wrote “…there is a lot to unpack … there was something about the fact that I have a lot available to me, like information, space, energy.” There was something more than inherited DNA, more than what I was able to express of my genes at play. Or maybe this mysterious factor accounted for our DNA, or somehow determined it. In any event, I was a New England Journal of Medicine published scientist, and the majority of my peers had never heard of an astrological birth chart. Astrology was fluff, not even rising to the level of pseudo-science in my circles. But I was hooked. What can I say, it both rattled me and left me wanting more. So, I started studying astrology in my spare time, taking classes, watching YouTubes, listening to podcasts, and becoming a closet astrologer.
Thank goodness there were people in my life (sorry Mom and kids!) who tolerated me analyzing their birth charts, explaining why they were this way or that way. In the beginning, I was more drawn to analyzing other people’s charts rather than my own. Kind of like when I used to run in the winter in Seattle at dinner time. It would be getting dark, and people wouldn’t have closed their curtains yet, enabling me to access vignettes of their lives for a brief moment, then continue my run, avoiding what awaited me at my own home. But eventually I had to look at my own chart to find - along with all of the unpacking I had to do about the patterns I now saw with more context - what was in there that had caused me to fall down this endless rabbit hole of planets, signs, houses, aspects, and archetypes.
And indeed, in my chart, along with the glaring signature of alcohol abuse (Neptune square my Sun) and karmic relationships (Saturn in my 7th house square my Sun), I found the equivalent of genes correlated to having some abilities in all things unseen. And although I had been living almost entirely in my conscious mind, dissociated from my feelings for decades, having to break my OCD centered around alcohol was allowing new relationships to form between my unconscious (in my body), subconscious, and conscious parts of my mind. Within these new connections I would find my ability to connect to other realms. No alcohol required.
