Pluto’s Trauma

2413693While the source of our own trauma may be obvious, it is more likely to be repressed or otherwise out of conscious awareness. As a result, our personal wounds may be complicated to fully understand and accept. The coroner examines the body for evidence of trauma to determine the cause of death. When seeing an astrologer, we delve into Pluto to understand the person’s emotional scars. Pluto can cause us to look deeply within ourselves, slicing and dicing our hurts and resentments. Aspects of Pluto indicate what we need to bring to light, such as compulsive cravings, uncontrollable unconscious processes, and something concealed far within ourselves, while Pluto itself contains extremely soul-wrenching events and some type of survival. It may sound simple on paper, but the practise of opening up and looking within at everything going on is necessary to change this energy. Among Pluto’s many stigmas are connections to violence, abuse, and the macabre.

Something deeply wounded us emotionally and left an indelible mark on our psyche. Pluto wounds can take the shape of dehumanising hurt, including insults about our appearance or behaviour, and an often-mentioned emotion, humiliation, a common impact of bullying on schoolyards. Abusive words can cut deep into our psyches and leave us feeling depleted. To add insult to injury, we can also be made to feel inferior, which has implications for our sense of power over others and our ability to effect change in our own lives. Pluto rules the need to cleanse oneself of one’s inner filth, as well as the desire to keep one’s nasty little secrets buried deep within one’s soul. These feelings could fall anywhere from mild to high on a range of severity. Pluto always has the capacity to drive us deeper into the ground and into the lowest points of our world. Every once in a while, life (Pluto) throws us a scary situation that we aren’t ready to handle emotionally.

Pluto is the volcano in our horoscope; it can lie dormant for a long time, but then suddenly erupt and spray hot lava everywhere. When we’re talking about people, events, or situations that have obviously injured us, the word “hate” often becomes a large part of our vocabulary. Because we don’t learn about Pluto ruled subjects in school, most of us are unprepared to deal with it as adults. Suicide and thoughts of self-destruction can certainly creep into the mind under extreme circumstances of fate, leaving us to trudge through the darkness, unsure of when or if the light at the end of the tunnel will arrive. Falling lower and then ascending back up to the surface, which may be a long and tough journey when in Pluto’s realm, is a common experience under its transit. Our actions clearly show that we are lashing out and are unable to manage our feelings. Due to the intense volatility that characterises Pluto’s domain, we are often forced to bury our feelings and begin again from scratch. Unfortunately, it seems that unpleasant circumstances have a way of finding us and adding fuel to the already burning emotions, exploding them all at once.

According to Jeff Green’s Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul, Pluto involves a profound adulthood meeting with all of the barriers we’ve built up to expressing ourselves and with our actual feelings related to past wounds. Remember that at our deepest levels, human beings are seeking wholeness and independence. Pluto’s dramatic element of release and rejuvenation is the genuine feeling of who we were intended to be before we let others pull us down is most evident in the dramatic imagery of the Phoenix emerging from the ashes of his past. The protagonists of such tales typically undergo or have undergone some sort of amazing transformation, or they learn to forgive and let go of the past in order to start a new chapter in their lives and let their old ways of being in the world die a fiery death.

The above-described Pluto profile is an extreme outlier. Pluto appears in everyone’s horoscopes, and everyone has to deal with something enigmatic and ominous. Pluto may taint our liberty by burying the individual expression beneath heaps of hurt and guilt. Trust, love, and a positive outlook that have been buried under decades of pain and shame must be dug up if we are to prevail. We become our own greatest adversary, but it is through these trials that we learn who and what we really are, and how to silence the voices within us that condemn us. It’s an acute confrontation with our own identity and the great internal battle that Pluto symbolises.