Question: If you had the chance would you want to be free of bad Pluto experiences, believing that they never happened, and never took place?

A Pluto trauma takes something out of our control and it often makes individuals feel powerless in the wake of a tragedy. It takes them on a long, painful journey to some kind of healing and recovery if they ever reach that point. What if they are sent trauma as part of an important life experience? There are Pluto events in life that completely change the shape of destiny. Trauma also changes a person in ways that are hard to put into words. Astrologers say that Pluto’s merciless acts help us to grow, gain spiritual awareness, and reach a deeper maturity, when in fact, people often go through a long period of being depressed, angry, and life feeling like their world has ended. Grief makes a monster out of us sometimes, and sometimes we say and do things that are unforgivable to the people we love that we can’t forgive ourselves for.

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it. J.K. Rowling

Many people tend to repress their memories and push them down anyway, and this may have short-term benefits. In the long run, those remembrances work their way back to the surface, and life could be controlled by this terrible event unless it is released, healed, and they move on. Society pressures us to sweep our grief under the carpet of normality, and we may be terrified to re-experience everything and shut out all of those emotions psychologically. Those memories, experiences, and related feelings are in the basement and we close the door tight, never letting those experiences see the light of day.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. Leo Tolstoy

If a really terrible thing has occurred in our lives some people uncomfortable around us don’t want to talk about it, even pretend like it never happened, and it doesn’t exist. Everything is fine. But it’s not? Something terrible has happened, someone hurt us badly and something was taken from us. Under a Pluto event what was taken was of importance and value. Pluto is like a thief in the night, taking something precious from us. It takes our innocence, dreams, and the future we imagined. All we know is that a part of us has been torn away. We then build this tremendous wall of self-protection, resourcefulness, and control, but this protective layer around us begins to take over our lives and it shuts everybody out. People say life goes on, and that we should move on. We are not the same anymore. Pluto has changed us forever, and on every cellular level of our being we know this to be true. But what if all we feel is stuck, and life isn’t moving anymore, at least not for us. We might still be stuck in 1995 when tragedy struck. With Plutonian events there is always a before and after such an event. Reality has dramatically altered.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy. Jandy Nelson

The repression of memories is one of our greatest survival defenses and mechanisms for the protection of the psyche. There is never an easy way out or an easy answer to give when telling others how to heal Pluto wounds. What does one do with a wound or trauma? Do we perform a psychological burial, and lay some flowers down? Perhaps we shed a tear for what we have lost, and say our final goodbye? Maybe the most important part of healing a trauma is mourning. We need to let out all of the grief, sadness, anger, and bitterness about our deep loss. Inside there is an emotional void that may never be filled again. In trauma theory, they support retrieval of the memories that have been repressed or dissociated, and the idea encourages individuals to bring up the pain, feeling it all over again allowing its release.

Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life. Dean Koontz

With a psychic wound, we don’t know how to get out of the cycle of pain. Pluto has us questioning the meaning of suffering and we are told that it can be transformative. However, we are left with the after-effects of trauma like depression, anxiety, disassociation, and shock. Psychological healing approaches believe that the end-goal should be when the person realizes that the wound is a part of the self and to not allow it to dominate every part of their being. It is not the entirety of who they are. Some people feel their life-script has been changed by a Pluto trauma and things will never go back to being the same again.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope. Elizabeth Gilbert

No doubt there will be supporters of the idea of erasing memories and some would gladly have the traumas they have witnessed permanently gone from the mind. If someone can be free of nightmares, and if they can sleep again at night, lead a normal life, maybe it be would unfair to take that choice away. In Pluto’s realm, there are probably some things that are best forgotten. Overall, though, mourning and release are best because if you lose the bad memories you lose all of the good.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler