Our Mother and Father Complexes – A Natural Cross
Which one of your parents did you swear you would never be anything like? Which one did you idealize and seek to emulate?
This diagram shows the houses of an astrological birth chart. Notice the relationship involved between (1st) Self and 180˚ opposite is our (7th) Other/Marriage Partner and (4th) is Mother and (10th) is Father. Our relationship to our parents and to our marriage partner is a veritable cross, a crucifixion. This cross creates a tension in our psyches as we are striving to know ourselves, and knowing ourselves is each individual’s responsibility.
Our partners are unconsciously chosen in order to show us missing and mostly denied parts of ourselves. Becoming conscious of each aspect of this cross that we are destined to live out gives us pretty accurate clues as to what parts of us are being projected onto our partners. When I first learned this information, I was immediately impressed by its accuracy. Not only did my marriage and business partner have the energy of Aquarius described by my marriage house, but every person I have had a lasting relationship with also contained this sign on my 7th house cusp. Because Scorpio and Taurus were on my 4th and 10th, those signs too are dominant in my relationships, especially Scorpio the 4th house cusp. Our relationships can be astrologically (psychologically) described in detail by looking at our unique birth chart as our birth chart describes the archetypal blueprint of our psyche.
First Half-of-Life Relationships
When we leave home, we are trying to separate from our parents, find our identity and become our own person. Healing the inadequacy of our primary relationships is what most of our marriages in the first half-of-life are about as we are making an attempt at healing these primary wounds. Carl Jung called them our mother and father complexes that live on in our unconscious — even after our parents are deceased.
A big part of learning the lessons inherent in these first-half-of-life marriages is that eventually we have to become our own mother and father, or we will continuously be searching for this archetypal need for a mother and father through our significant others.
When two people become fascinated with each other, all goes well at first. A couple may even be together for several years getting along great. Confident in their happiness, they make a formal commitment, sign legal documents, take nuptial vows, and then the relationship begins to radically change. Hidden from us, our complexes in our unconscious psyche now have complete permission to show up. We come face-to-face with our complexes and especially the one that is the NOT I called the Shadow.
The relationship with our parents complicates our relationships because of this archetypal need we all have for them. As no one had a perfect parent, we either had too much mothering; or not enough; or too much fathering; or not enough, so there is a drive inside us to complete what was incomplete in our relationship with them. Qualities and characteristics of our parents that we didn’t like are often delegated to our Shadows.
The Apple Never Falls Far
from the Tree
Have you ever found yourself saying, “I will never be like them.” The parent we couldn’t stand the most is the one who’s more dominant in our unconscious. Well, guess what? We’re like both of them, and we are especially like the one we didn’t want to be anything like! The other parent is more acceptable because most likely we can identify with them and often have similar energy (archetypes).
This tension of opposites personalized by our parental imagos gets constellated early on in everyone’s environment. What is happening in most families is that one parent will take “the good one” role and the other parent will be “the bad one.” There is an unconscious collusion between them. The word ‘collusion’ comes from the Latin word for “play together” and refers to acting in unison toward some secret purpose. This collusion, if perpetuated can become a form of abuse.
Both parties of any relationship enter into an unconscious agreement that goes something like this: “I’ll be your good side, if you’ll be my bad side. I’ll be the strong one, if you’ll be the weak one or I’ll be the responsible partner, if you’ll carry all the carefree and playful parts so I can see you as irresponsible. Another common one is I’ll be serious, gloomy, and pessimistic and you can be optimistic and overly ‘Pollyanna’ (the always happy child) while refusing to look at any of our real issues. Partners will polarize and take opposite sides of any extreme.
A nursery rhyme expresses this idea really well:
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
His wife could eat no lean.
To demonstrate this, I will share my own story. When I was growing up, it was easy to identify my Dad as the “bad one” and my Mom as the “good one.” My Dad, being a Leo, was very Leonine — very self-centered, egotistical, domineering and bossy. At the same time, he embodied numerous positive Leo traits — entertaining, magnanimous, and idealistic. My Mom was a Scorpio. As his polar opposite, my Mom was very quiet, kind and gentle. I admired the fact that she was very giving of herself and would go out of her way to help others. Conversely, she was also very much a martyr and complainer acquiescing to whatever it was that my father wanted. Still, in my mind she was good, and he was bad.
Until I studied astrology, I was unable to recognize my Mom’s dark side. By learning about the negative traits* of Scorpios, I was able to see how sometimes she would manipulate my Dad into being the bad one. She would do things covertly to irritate him and he would get really angry with her. For instance, he would say, “Don’t do this or that.” Then, she would do whatever it was that irritated him anyway and often. Sometimes exasperated, he would just start screaming at her uncontrollably.
*[Usually, several astrological signs will be a factor in seeing a person’s character and our astrology is not limited to our Sun sign. Every sign of the zodiac has two sides, so I have extensive keywords + and – for each sign in my workbook, online webinar, and also on my web site.]
Then behind his back she could say to us children, “See how he is,” and we would all agree. True to her Scorpio nature, she was very secretive and extremely sensitive emotionally. Her feelings would get deeply hurt by his domineering, brusque behavior, so she would passive-aggressively get even with him. My Mom was also very identified with how good she was. Much later as an adult, I realized my parents were both very much the same in many ways. They only appeared to be different from each other because they were so polarized. Fortunately, they both knew their times of birth. This gave me the opportunity to more fully understand the confusing family dynamics I had grown up with by seeing their birth charts.
If only my Mom could have seen that she, too, was self-centered; that she, too, was domineering. She just wasn’t doing it overtly; she was doing it covertly. Had she realized this she might have been willing to express herself more openly and my Dad would have had to back off. Vice versa, if my Dad had been able to express more of his loving and kind nature (this was more apparent at the end of his life) and less self-centered and domineering, then the same is also true.
To be fair to my Mom, my Dad was hell on wheels. She lived in a time when Hispanic women of our culture did not assert themselves easily. Confronting him would have been a very difficult thing for my Mom to do so she submitted to his willful domination. Understandably with six children to raise, she had become dependent and was unwilling, (I later figured out), to grow up and fend for herself.
I was raised Catholic. I remember my Dad telling us, “I’m the devil. Your Mom’s an angel, and I don’t know how she puts up with me. I just hope God takes me to heaven.” He was very identified with being their darker half.
A few years after my divorce, I took a psychological course called “Life Training” where it became clear to me that when I was married, we unknowingly repeated their contract; their unconscious collusion. We marry our parents and our unfinished business with them gets projected onto our relationships. Our partners have to live out the parts of us that are like them that we cannot come to terms with inside ourselves. Often marriages become a reenactment of these old wounds. As I said in my previous article, Jung says it is not the conscious mind that falls in love; it is the unconscious that makes this decision. We will only attract and become fascinated by people who carry our energy, our complexes and can fulfill this evolutionary task with us.
It’s truly remarkable how this repetition compulsion happens to everyone. This is the dance of opposites – what I call “the Shadow Dance.” We need each other to do this dance otherwise we would have to be BOTH our light and dark sides. Keep in mind that when I say “dark,” I mean what is hidden from us in our personal unconscious. This is not to be confused with archetypal evil and toxicity in relating.
My Dad was also popular, humorous and loved to tell jokes and make us laugh. He was a typical outgoing, larger-than-life Leo character. Sometimes he was outspoken in the community and would voice his views or write letters to whomever he had an issue with as he had high ideals related to what should be happening in the city by public officials.
However due to the intense polarization, all I saw in my parents’ relationship to each other was how horrible my Dad was. Many people see only opposites in their parents, not realizing both are actually a lot alike because of the compensatory nature of the psyche. What is conscious in one parent will be unconscious in the other and vice versa. Some people say their parents never had disagreements. That only shows that they kept a lot hidden to maintain the peace and were probably in denial even about themselves as no one is always in perfect harmony.
If these shadow traits are not passed down to the conscious part of the psyche, then they will remain in the unconscious. Often a child’s shadow is formed from these split-off parental imagos. Jung says that children are highly susceptible to picking up and living their parents’ unlived lives; their opposites. Therefore, looking at our parents and their relationship to each other, and to us, is helpful to get clear on our own patterns that are set up at the very beginning and usually come down from one generation to the next. As the Bible says, “the sins of the father are passed on to the children up to seven generations.” We inherit this dance from our parents just as they inherited it from theirs.
According to Jung, “So long as a positive or negative resemblance to the parents is the deciding factor in a love choice, the release from the parental imago, and hence from childhood, is not complete.” Of course, we don’t consciously know that this is what is happening to us, but it is. The opposite dynamics of either parent usually closely resemble our own marriages or business partnership or we ourselves act out these inherited archetypal energies to an extreme.
And this is where Astrology is so interesting. Looking at their birth charts, my Mom was a double Scorpio (Sun and Moon) and Capricorn rising (1st) and therefore the sign of Cancer is on her 7th house cusp. She also had both Jupiter and Neptune in the sign of Leo in the 7th house. My Dad was a Sun sign Leo, Scorpio rising with a Venus/Neptune conjunction in Cancer. These are the archetypes they projected onto each other, and more, but these explain the Cross of Life diagram. It was really interesting after my Dad died how the character traits he was overdoing, she began expressing. NOW, she wanted to be the center of attention. He lived that energy out for her while he was alive.
So, if we ourselves project our 4th or 7th House signs and planets onto the other person — they become the parent figure instead of the equal. Freud says that when we marry that there are six people in the bed — our mother and father and their mother and father and us. So, notice things about your parents, especially where their behavior is, or was, polarized into extremes. Growing up we saw the challenges in their relationship, and we tell ourselves, we would never have the kind of relationship they had. An amazing aspect of this is the amount of time it takes to recognize that we actually created a version of our parent’s life for ourselves.
Many people never question themselves about their life or relationships. They blame their partners, get divorced, leave their jobs, move to another city, whatever. By doing this, they do not integrate their shadows and parental complexes and the scenario will just repeat with someone else. We each need to become aware of what is really happening. Everything in our unconscious wants to become conscious, and this is the only way it can come to conscious awareness. If we are madly-in-love with someone that we don’t even like or trust, we are stuck in a mother or father complex still trying to get our Mom or Dad’s approval.
In a profound elaboration of unconscious collusion, Carl Jung gives credence to this phenomenon. This below is a rather long quote but very worth reading.
“The impulses underlying it certainly show their dark side to begin with, however much one may try to whitewash them; for an integral part of the work is the ‘umbra solis’ (shadow of the sun) or ‘sol niger’ (black sun) of the alchemists, the black shadow which everybody carries with him, the inferior and therefore hidden aspect of the personality, the weakness that goes with every strength, the night that follows every day, the evil in the good. The realization of this fact is naturally coupled with the danger of falling victim to the shadow, but the danger also brings with it the possibility of consciously deciding not to become its victim. A visible enemy is always better than an invisible one. In this case I can see no advantage whatever in behaving like an ostrich. It is certainly no ideal for people always to remain childish, to live in a perpetual state of delusion about themselves, foisting everything they dislike on to their neighbors and plaguing them with their prejudices and projections. How many marriages are wrecked for years, and sometimes forever, because he sees his mother in his wife and she her father in her husband, and neither ever recognizes the other’s reality! Life has difficulties enough without that; we might at least spare ourselves the stupidest of them. But, without a fundamental discussion of the situation, it is often simply impossible to break these infantile projections.”
—Carl Jung, Collected Works: Vol. 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, paragraph 420
Rebeca Eigen
Rebeca Eigen, an astrologer for 25+ years and author of The Shadow Dance & the Astrological 7th House Workbook specializes in relationships. From every day decisions, to critical life-altering moments, Rebeca shares with you her practical wisdom and guidance for your life’s journey in becoming who you are meant to be.
https://www.shadowdance.com/
