As astrologers, we often work with people through archetypal analysis. The language of astrology is built through a collection of symbols that either stand for other symbols—such as a plant standing in for a person’s resiliency or a bird standing in for their love of freedom—or symbols that stand for themselves. Symbols that stand in for themselves are the closest that we will get to experiencing some archetype that is in the process of being described and not, yet, willing to be reconstructed.

I think that, as astrologers, working with people whose Venuses have them in a vice grip or with Saturns that refuse to allow them any entry way into pleasures that they charge to be guilty, we can recognize when a symbol is fun and creative and willing to allow the person who reimagine it and when it feels stuck.

Symbols that feel stuck often elongate themselves. They often go places where they are not really needed. Symbols that get stuck on some memory or emotional state because of trauma are also symbols that get very extreme. A boundary is no longer a skin but becomes a great wall. A person’s crab-like hesitation is no longer a shy hermit crab willing to roll on the sand but a monstrosity that will reach out and punish, pinching, whoever dares to witness it. Mother is no longer mother but a cruel demon who is capable of possessing you and walking along the walls.

Scaling down a symbol can look like this—that great wall you live your life adjusting around becomes talkative and then becomes a prickly hedge and you begin to notice how watering the hedge keeps it alive. The monster with pinchers is no longer pained by its own shell and becomes a sometimes irritating but loveable presence. The demon who has been trying to get your attention no longer feels dismissed and, in being soothed that it will get the attention it needs from you, stops trying to crawl on walls to distract you.

It is always important to recognize what an extreme symbol looks like. A symbol is not extreme because it is very powerful or when it scares you, the astrologer, and not the client. If a client finds that their Saturn seems and feels like the president, this might mean that the symbol is extreme if it’s actually a reflection of a parent. Clearly, a parent does not have the power that the president has. However, the president as a symbol may not be extreme. Saturn here might be their relationship to the literal president of their country and the client might be exploring their relationship to the state. Making the parent more extreme might suggest a lack of control while exploring a relationship to the state by playing with Saturn as the president can be empowering.

A symbol becomes extreme when the client feels as though they have no imaginative control over it. It’s a symbol that feels omnipotent, like it could be out to get them or protect them. It’s a symbol that feels like it cannot be disagreed with. There is little space around extreme symbols.

Over the years, I’ve picked up just a few ways to work with people on symbols that feel like they must take on the most extreme form that they possibly can—symbols that frighten. These are not the only ways to work with extreme symbols. When working with extreme symbols, you should also always keep in mind that these symbols might be adjacent to traumatic memories. The process of scaling down extreme symbols is not to force them to become smaller by pure willpower but by seeing if there is anything that feels reliant on the extremity of the symbol in the first place.

Physical touch as support

This is one of my favorite ways to scale down extreme symbols. This also happens to be one of the slower feeling ways. This doesn’t mean that this exercise takes longer than the other exercises but it uses less brain power or intellect. This means that this technique is actually the fastest but feels the slowest to the client. If a client is agitated or urgent, you will need to slow down the conversation or breathing before exploring this exercise. The exercise can also help you and your client slow things down.

Basically, what you do is you ask the client to pay attention to the physical impacts of the extreme symbol. The symbols that live in your client’s experience of life and their chart might be inside their bodies, doing things in their belly or chest, or it might live outside of their bodies being projected or externalized onto other things or people or the space itself. Whether the symbol is inside or outside, you ask the client to focus on how it makes an impact on them.

This step is the step that feels like it takes the longest even when it’s really just a few minutes. This is because the client must be willing to trust the process and session enough to put their attention inside of themselves instead of watching you, the astrologer, in seeing what opinions and judgments you might have of them. Not all clients are willing to do this or need to be willing to do this. If a client is willing to do this once, they may not be willing to do it again in another session or on another topic. If you ask a client to do this with you, you should have a way to ask for their consent on it.

The exploration of the physical or somatic impact of the symbol can take just a few minutes or however long the client wants it to take. It can go on for an hour if the client is really interested. The thing to keep in mind, as the astrologer, is when you might notice that a client is overwhelmed by a symbol or when they experience a symbol that feels extreme, one that they don’t feel they have control over.

This is when you can ask a client to place a hand on the part of their body where they feel the symbol the most. If the symbol is outside their body, touching something outside of their body like placing their body against a wall or feet against the floor or back against the chair, works too. If you see clients in person, you can offer touch to your client.

It’s funny—we think that extreme symbols are omnipotent, that they can punish us or have so much power over us. Noticing when these symbols require physical support from us? Wow. That really does something.

Playing with a physical object

This is something that clients have taught me to do over the years. It’s been a pleasant surprise that, when we uncover the meaning of a symbol in the client’s chart, they'll exclaim something like “oh that’s this ring my grandma gave me” or “that’s this musical instrument that I have.”

You can also ask your clients if there are any physical objects that they have around them that remind them of the symbol or make them feel the same impacts as the symbol. A boss might become a demon, for example, and their phone which is constantly chiming with work notifications might come to resemble this demon. An old bracelet might make someone feel the same as the ex who gave them the piece of jewelry.

Ask your client to hold onto this symbol and play with it. Fidget with it, do weird things with it, talk to you about it. Ask them what they do with this object and its history with them. Ask them to move it around themselves, to place it in and out of view, and whether there is anything that they would like to say to the object or anything they feel the object is saying to them.

Again, what you’re trying to do is to enter a space where the client has agency in their relationship with a symbol that is overwhelming to them. Play is absolutely liberating. For a client, noticing that they have the ability to do things to an object that has an impact of them, muting notifications or throwing a bracelet away, can remind them that they have choices in their relationship with the object that carries the symbol and this can remind them of the places where they might have imaginative agency with the symbol itself.

Richard Schwartz’s rooms exercise

This exercise, from Schwartz’s book Internal Family Systems Therapy, actually does take a long time. I haven’t found a way to do it in under less than 30 minutes.

There is a huge difference between therapy and astrological work. One of the primary differences is that therapy is usually an ongoing and consistent relationship that you have with a therapist while astrological work happens more sporadically. The other difference, of course, is that astrological work deals with astrological charts. This means that our goal is synthesis of meaning since synthesis is where change comes from. This means that, a lot of the time, the client doesn’t want to focus on one image for a very long time during a session. Not always but this can be true.

I think that not everyone getting an astrology reading is interested in deepening on one symbol or placement for the majority of a session and that is fine. It can be really freeing to know where the chart feels like a pit that we can go into and not come out of for a while but to choose to focus on lighter topics. However, there are people who book a session with the intention of only talking about a particular placement or transit. I think that Schwartz’s rooms exercise can be really useful when this happens and that symbol feels extreme or when you have an ongoing relationship with a client who is willing to spend all of one session on one placement because they know they will be back to talk about something else later.

The rooms exercise is this: you imagine that you put the symbol that is overwhelming you inside of a room and you peek at it through a window. You notice what emotional reactions you have with this symbol and, for every reaction you have, you put that reaction in its own room until you have no more reactions. Then, you look into the window at the overwhelming symbol again and see if it has changed.

This is a really useful and powerful exercise. I only really use it with clients who I have long relationships with or with clients who seem interested enough in one symbol to really spend time with it. Sometimes, one image might be crucial enough to impact all other parts of the chart—it might be a chart ruler or some other planet that has relationships to everything else.

Making a story with the symbol

This exercise is why I started doing my Astrology and Storytelling sessions where we make a fictional story using a person’s birth chart.

The point of scaling down an extreme symbol is not to diminish it or to weaken it in meaning. Images and symbols keep us alive through their meanings. The purpose is always to make it so that the person who lives with the symbol knows that they have creative agency in their relationship with the symbol. That’s the point of astrology—as above so below but also as below so above.

The thing that makes a symbol extreme might be that there are other symbols that need the symbol to be monstrous. There might also be symbols that are pretty dissatisfied with the omnipotent symbol, already having ways to satirize or calm its power. After all, the client has lived with the extreme symbol for this long. They have all kinds of things up their sleeve that scale down an extreme symbol (and possibly things that scale it back up again).

When you invite the client into the session as an artist or storyteller, I think that this empowers the client to discover all of those things for themselves. This is why the storytelling sessions have become my favorite these days, because the client is no longer a client but an artist who I am in service of with all of my questions, observations, and analysis (some of which might be helpful and some which should be disregarded). As the astrologer, you’re no longer a professional who has some rigid process of working with the chart. The client as artist is the person who brings their own magic in and the astrologer’s attention and expertise helps support that creativity.

Because we are trying to get the client to exercise imaginative agency with an extreme symbol, noticing their imaginative relationship with the symbol is quite powerful. There are some storylines that feel crucial to the symbol itself and the client as storyteller can choose whether they are swayed by that storyline or not. They can see clearly how that storyline impacts other characters or settings. They might notice where the story becomes stuck. They might start to wonder why the story gets stuck there, about whether an image needs the story to stop progressing.

Symbols change within a story, even the extreme ones. That’s what makes a story a story in the first place.

Making a story with the chart and the symbols in a chart can be really empowering and other exercises, like supporting a symbol with physical touch or finding it in an object that they can get their hands on. It can be used with role playing.

Drawing attention to the symbol as a symbol

This exercise isn’t even really an exercise. It can quickly be integrated into other things. It’s a bit similar to the storytelling one where you’re trying to encourage the client’s creative play and can be used with it but it does bring the client out of the storyteller’s hat a bit.

You can draw attention to the symbol as a fictive element by simple questions such as “when do you think the symbol started to mean this to you?” or “have you encountered the symbol in a movie or book?” or even “does the symbol know that it is imagined by you?”

Alternatively, you can also ask the client what it would look like if the symbol you are working with would look like were seen on a screen like in a movie or how it would be described if found in the pages of a book.

The point of asking questions like this, where you draw attention to the symbol as a fictive and imagined thing, is not to make light of the symbol. Great care must be exercised here because sometimes, you can unintentionally embarrass someone for endowing something with so much meaning that it appears to control them. This is not the purpose of asking these questions and I try to avoid questions like this if I feel that a client might be embarrassed by them or start to withdraw from the potency of the symbol itself if I ask them.

The point of asking these questions is to, again, remind the client that they have creative power over the symbol. I’ll ask a question like “does the symbol know that it is imagined by you?” if I feel that a client might be really interested in this question and in the creative process that they took to imagine the symbol and not if they are hesitant to engage in fictive elements in the first place. If they are timid, a more immersive exercise might be in order.

Sometimes, pulling the client out of an immersive storytelling rhythm might be just what they need to reflect on their meta-relationship with the symbols they work with. Sometimes, drawing attention to the meta-relationship can be detrimental to the person’s creative life.

And a note: If you work with people who tell stories professionally, artists or musicians or writers, encouraging a meta-relationship with a symbol might bring in feelings that they have about the canons in which they work, the demands of their industry, and the historical trajectory that they see themselves residing within. If this happens and these feelings seem very different from what you have been engaged with the client on, it can be helpful to point out that these feelings are important but that they are also different and to ask them whether they want to explore these feelings instead or if they would like to keep working with the symbols that you have been working with. That way, the person can show you how to bring these new feelings that came up with the ones you’ve been exploring or even make a decision on whether to explore the beckonings of their professional creative life that day or not. It is not up to you as the astrologer to define whether the new feelings are distractions but up to the client. Pointing out the potential of distraction can help the client make decisions within the session.

Conclusion

There are all kinds of reasons why some symbols become so large, powerful, or scary that it might begin to appear to take power away from the person who imagined that symbol in the first place. These reasons can have to do with past trauma, ongoing trauma, cultural alienation, historical erasure, and even damage to imagination.

When you come across these huge and powerful symbols, you might feel intimidated by them as the astrologer. You might feel like you cannot help a client. You might feel scared about upsetting a planet or like you don’t want to jeopardize a client’s luck. You might fall into patterns of worship that are less about play and more about obedience. You might not feel good about yourself as an astrologer when this happens and this is also okay. It’s important to know when this happens even when you’re not sure what you can do about it yet.

The imagination can always heal. This will always be true.

Your imagination as an astrologer will always heal and, as it heals, it will heal your clients. The imaginations of your clients will also heal and, as they heal, they will show you where your practice might get more creative.

I think that this is what it really takes to do astrological work with people—to feel their fear or distrust or numbness with them but then, also, to know that they have power and creative magic. All of these exercises are really just exercises. The exercise itself will never solve a problem because problems are not meant to be solved—they’re meant to promote curiosity. The exercises will only work because you and your client have a curiosity and faith in creative practice. This curiosity and faith can be supported by exercises and can be discovered through doing exercises but its existence is never dependent upon choosing the right exercise. You may not need an exercise at all to exercise your curiosity and faith.