Mercury Retrograde in Cancer: Who’s Your Daddy?

By Tom Jacobs

Oh my lord, I realized, I am.

I’m my daddy.

Or, rather, I’ve somehow become a carbon copy of my father. You know the one - the one I was trying everything not to become?

Yeah, that one.

It’s true. I deal with my feline, my friends, my food and my feelings the same way.

Now, while my North Node in Capricorn in the 4th house has sometimes seemed to indicate to me, “Become a father to yourself,” I thought I’d have more options. I proclaim now in half mock disbelief, “There was no menu! I didn’t order this one! I never ordered this one!”

Because I knew it all along. Why else would I fear and seem to think I thought I hoped I could avoid it?

The Mercury Rx in Cancer has afforded me numerous opportunities to get closer to the bottoms of these sorts of emotional things (see my previous three posts here). Now that I am finally aware of these things, though, what do I do? I have the option of feeling ripped off and angry that the single thing I didn’t want to happen has, and I have the option of chilling out a bit and accepting that I finally can see these things about myself and make peace with the part of me that resists it. In other words, I have the option of being angry or being real.

The other day, in my first Gestalt therapy exercise (the full moon was on my 3rd house Capricorn Jupiter, for crying out loud - I opened up to a new idea to get a grasp on emotional stuff. And to tell you the truth, I thought before I did it that it would be ridiculous. The stuff of satire I myself am prone to writing, so my mind can run off with a thread when someone tells me in all seriousness that they do this or ask me if I might be willing to do it), which I could not believe I was doing, I had a conversation with a part of me we’ll call Angry Tom. I imagined him opposite me and we conversed about our positions, and it came out that (big surprise here, Angry Tom) holding on to anger isn’t getting us anywhere.* So, am I going to stay angry, or am I going to get real?

I’m pretty much sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see what I’ll do.

*I have to say that the Gestalt business beats hands down a version of Byron Katie’s “The Work” I experienced early last year. It’s a process of evaluating the truth of things versus what we think is true, and had the unique therapeutic result of making me literally sick to my stomach as I saw the actual shape of my thought patterns. The practitioner I was with stopped questioning me when I got that “I might vomit” look on my face at one point, and she said, “You sick yet? It does that to people.” It even now seems to me a great party trick totally undervalued by being relegated to therapeutic contexts alone.

Leave a Reply

July 2, 2007 By Tom Jacobs