I actually think that any placement in either the second or eighth house can mean that it is expressed through difficulty. I know that we commonly associate the eighth house with difficulty but I think that there’s difficulty with the second house too. I know that my own second house placements both took a long time for me to figure out how to express and that the way I express them tends to be associated with difficult periods of my life.

So, the second house and the eighth house represent resourcing and loss. There’s a lot of feelings located in this axis of the chart. There’s feeding and fullness. There’s dearth and scarcity. There’s feelings of ownership and feelings of owing other people. There’s feelings around being robbed and there’s fear around what happens if we can’t repay our debts.

The topics that the second and eight houses in the chart signify are just resources and losses. You have to really work with yourself to figure out exactly how you feel about these things. How you might feel about your nodes being in houses two and eight don’t have to be the same as another person who has their nodes in these houses.

Having the lunar nodes in the dark houses also doesn’t mean that your life is necessarily harder than other people. I don’t want you to read what I said about the second and eighth houses being harder houses and psyche yourself out too much.

What I mean by expression coming through harder in these houses is that placements in the second and eighth houses tend to express themselves quietly. They might be expressions that feel unclear or nonverbal. They feel a bit more wayward than other houses. You’re not condemned to misery simply because you have placements in dark houses. Everyone has placements in harder houses and, if you don’t then you’ll have transiting planets in the more difficult places in your chart.

South Node in the Second House, North Node in the Eighth House

There’s sometimes a feeling of trapped when the south node is in the second house and the north node is in the eighth house. Sometimes, the entrapment is circumstantial. You are literally trapped in a place with no way out. Other times, the entrapment is psychological. You had to limit your imagination so that you could figure out how to reliably predict your own responses to certain stimuli.

South node in the second house can feel really black and white for this reason. Things are either a resounding yes or a resounding no. We think that we either have to be really eager to try something out, be someone’s friend, or to do something or else it all falls apart and nothing in life has any meaning. People with their south node in the second house can sometimes feel like they have to choose enthusiastically or not at all. For some people, if a thing isn’t completely safe then it can feel like a threat.

What is actually happening here is that the south node in the second house feels resistant towards its holder changing their own values. The south node wants the world to be more predictable than it can ever be and, so, it tries to shrink the circumstances. It tries to reduce everything to simple questions of morality and it can get quite angry when those reductionist frameworks are challenged. If allowed to, the south node can recreate situations of entrapment over and over again.

People who have their north node in the eighth house grow best when they allow their worlds to get larger. They grow when they make friends with people who have no idea where they are even coming from—people who don’t react to the same morals as they feel they have to because they are coming from a completely different context.

The north node in the eighth house doesn’t always feel pleasant in expression. This is because it often is expressed when a person becomes exiled away from the place where they originally felt trapped. But, even when this doesn’t happen, someone with the north node in the eighth house doesn’t usually want to stay in one place. They want to move on. They want to keep going. They feel a drive to break out of the container that once made them feel so trapped.

South Node in the Eighth House, North Node in the Second House

The most striking thing about people who have the south node in the eighth house and north node in the second house is that they have a funny and almost childlike way of expressing themselves. They feel really tender and purehearted. They talk about the things that they want candidly and with relief. It’s like they really just want to express themselves. That’s what it’s all about. They want to be seen and celebrated for being who they are.

The eighth house is actually the house that expresses through losing control. The south node in the eighth house is about a familiarity around not having that much control. The south node in the eighth house is very comfortable with giving other people some degree of control over itself. It likes to be taken care of, described by, and empowered by other people.

This might be why people who have the south node in the eighth house can feel so, well…cute. I don’t know how else to describe it right now. When I think of cuteness, I think of adorableness and this makes me think of cuteness as a state of being willing to be loved. The south node in the eighth house is comfortable asking for more from the world.

The second house north node is actually about developing pride. The north node in the second house really just wants to develop dignity and self respect. We develop self esteem when we know what our values are and when we see that we can commit to actions that align with those values. The south node in the eighth house and the north node in the second is really just concerned about self image. The goal isn’t to create a self image that feels likable but to build towards a feeling of self that is flexible enough to change and is also strong enough to feel actionable.

Both the south node in the eighth house and the north node in the second house are about love. This nodal axis is about love being shown through actions, about committing to the actions that you want to do. Love isn’t just about trusting other people. Love is about about trusting who you are and your own consistency.