Therapeutic Astrology Podcast

"When our cries go unanswered, we find ourselves having to shout louder. It is easy to see how these attempts to be praised can be misread and labelled incorrectly as arrogance, misbehavior, or being a show-off. As a result, it may feel as if we are being told that our need for mirroring is in some way bad or wrong. In being misunderstood, our developmental needs can be misconstrued, and a distorted story may be told about who we are. Sadly, we often internalize these stories and labels and, in doing so, inadvertently deny and exile the vulnerability of our own needs. Misunderstandings of this nature occur not only during our development, but also in our daily lives." Just one of the MANY great quotes from my psychotherapist -guest today, Joe Pawson, from his book "Dependency and Denial: The Stories That Divide Us" (Karnac, 2026)
This became a deep conversation about how we NEED each other. And in a culture that idealizes self-sufficiency, our dependency, our need for others, becomes something we exile and DENY. Joe Pawson talks about how the stories we create protect us from pain, but also separate us, separation from each other and from ourselves. He is excellent with words (AND EMPATHY), so slow everything down and go into a reflective space with us as we talk about:
Why our connection to each other can be both the source of our wounds and part of the remedy

Anxious and avoidant attachment, and what may exist underneath the attachment styles themselves

How falling in love reactivates some of our earliest hopes, fears and developmental wounds

Denial as a way of creating maps and stories that make life, pain and trauma more manageable

How we can internalize the message that our needs are too much, silly, weak or unwanted

The moments in therapy where a client begins to become vulnerable and then suddenly interrupts, minimizes or dismisses their own experience - before the therapist does (?!) We have a long segment on denial in therapy setting-  and also we come to talk about the therapist's own vulnerability, the willingness wo be in the unknown 

How TRAGIC misunderstandings happen when we cannot see the vulnerability underneath another person's behavior

Projected vulnerability and what happens as when we see what is ours in other people

Buddhist ideas of interdependence, the illusion of a completely separate self and the difficulty of seeing beyond the maps through which we understand reality

The idea that the key to reconnecting with greater wholeness may lie precisely in the vulnerabilities we have abandoned

THEN I look at Joe's huge Cancer energy and in particular I say something about Mars in Cancer, and we explore Mars as the warrior who can protect vulnerability and tender places- It goes into his relationship to politics and ability to stay with the larger picture rather than concrete and limiting solutions.

-IN THE VERY END I challenge Joe to come up with a good not activating ending, as we talk about goodbyes in therapy. 
I hope you will love this! I have had the book with me all summer and have just enjoyed reading it slowly, taking in his beautifully put words and feeling into my own huge longing for more closeness in this world. PS another quote: "Breaking down can become breaking through when there is someone there to hold us - as we fall apart" !!
-Mannah
LINKS:
the book:
https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/dependency-and-denial-the-stories-that-divide-us/98431/
my guest:
https://www.jppsychotherapy.co.uk/
myself:
https://www.therapeuticastrologer.com/
 
youtube edition: https://youtu.be/S51zXfhXvU4
my preferred place to listen: https://podimo.com/s/m8a0anov

Sherrie Campbell, PhD, is a licensed psychologist who specializes in helping healthy people cut ties with toxic family members. She is a nationally recognized expert on family estrangement, an inspirational speaker, a social media influencer, and author of many books on the theme of toxic and abusive family and how to heal while navigating those biological relationships. In this episode of Therapeutic Astrology Podcast, we tap deeply into toxic family dynamics, emotional abuse, boundaries, family estrangement and healing of it!
Our conversation centers especially around Dr. Sherries latest published book, "You Are Home: Heal from Family Trauma, Establish Boundaries, and Find a Place of Peace and Safety" from 2026. Sherrie speaks not only as a psychologist, but as a survivor who has lived what she writes about! She describes her own journey of breaking free from a toxic family system, "turning predators into purpose," healing out loud, and moving toward redemption rather than revenge and in the book she gives a plan of how to rebuild yourself as your own home after emotionally abuse.
TAP in as we go into topics such has:
• Family estrangement and why going no contact still challenges such a powerful cultural taboo
• Why severing ties with family is rarely a sudden decision, but often the end of a very long history of trying, hoping and being hurt again
• Therapists can support clients exploring estrangement without imposing their own beliefs and judgements about family
• THE WHY of toxic parenting -why they  behave as they do don't matter
• Closure, maladaptive guilt, gaslighting and boundaries
• The central metaphor in the book, is that you are your own house! your own structure that belong to you
• We go through the floors, beginning with the basement and our "monsters" 
• I also ask Sherrie about the term "the bottom will fall out" 
• Boundaries as different levels of access: the porch, the yard, the fence and, when necessary, no contact
• The difference between imperfect parenting and emotional abuse touching on the importance of repair, accountability and making sure a child does not become responsible for a parent's emotions
• Emotional regulation as allowing yourself to fully feel rather than feeling less 
• The top floor of the house is your autonomy, and being able to reclaime your identity 
• Radical acceptance versus forgiveness
• Becoming your own greatest family and developing a rich inner world that does not depend entirely on other people
Toward the end, we move into astrology, exploring Sherrie's Aries and Libra signatures and her Sun–Chiron conjunction, and the spiritual support she has experienced during some of the darkest periods of her life, esepcially during her Neptune Square.
Hope you get much of this one - recommend it for someone who have had to cut ties with family
LINKS:
https://drsherriecampbell.com/
Sherries own podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sherapy-sessions-the-hows-of-healing-hidden-family-trauma/id1591691842
Mannah:
https://www.therapeuticastrologer.com/
support me on: https://podimo.com/s/m8a0anov
watch on youtube: https://youtu.be/qzwVh5ygK64

"The more sensitive someone is, the more crucial it is that they embody this other quality if their sensitivity is to inform their wholeness rather than disrupt it." & "If our sensitivities open us to the resonances of the world, it is another capacity that enables us to "gather" what is gleaned rather that being overwhelmed or knocked off balance by it: a capacity that enables us to be "collected"—to deepen into our wholeness and assimilate What Is. We might call this integrative quality 'groundedness'. (Radical Wholeness, 2017, Philip Shepherd - it makes even more sense when read in full context of the book, I just wanted to introduce you to his perspective a little when it comes to sensitivity) 
Welcome to the second part of my conversation with Philip Shepherd, who is an Embodiment expert, author and co-director of The Embodied Present Process. In this episode we continue to talk about his book RADICAL WHOLENESS, but this time with an emphasis on SENSITIVITY. Basically we learn how sensitivity is a form of intelligence!
I begin the interview by quoting him: "When your heart yearns to surrender to the freedom of your wholeness, the journey that beckons is one that has never been made before: no one has ever stepped into your wholeness, and no one can predict where it will take you. You are treading into the unknown. You are opening the body's sensitivities to the thriving wakefulness of the Present living through your being."
THEN here is some of the places we go:
-Sensitivity to hearing and understanding what you are here to do/your service
-Feeling the necessity rather than being pulled away by society
-Feel the earth to bring coherence to the sensitivity, and how we learned not to trust the earth and how that will help us join something larger than ourselves
-Sensitivity in the education system - I am here thinking of this quote: "Imagine, for a moment, how radically different an education system would be if 1) its aim were to foster intelligence rather than mere learning; 2) it understood intelligence to be 'grounded sensitivity'; and 3) it recognized that the attunement of each child's intelligence to the world is unique."
-Reward and punishment, is that the best education? or could we ignite students fire?
-Philip shares WHY he cares about sensitivity in the school system 
-This desensitized realm that seeks to dominate through a top-down relationship
-Some ideas on why more people are being diagnosed as autistic
-Can we trust the senses? Or the logic more?
-Walking in the woods can be while remaining in the head, rather than being in the present, we need to learn from nature
-Sexuality and the embodied present process 
-The wound is reinforced by the school system. Our being and thinking are in fact ONE
-Bodyworld,the unity of the self: I am inseparable from the world
-Responsebility over idependence 
-What happens when we shut down sensitivity 
-Being held by the Present
-Reality rather than over ideas about reality
-Rather than organizing ourselves and the bind of self-consciousness, we can be organized and guided by the present
-My body knows...there is a belonging
-Coming back to the body is coming back to sensitivity 
-A Surrender that EMPOWERS you
-Your fluidity 
-Question what has shaped you, so that you have a choice
-Philip - on a listeners request- shares a bit about his bike journey at 17 from England to Japan where he found the limitations of his own culture 
-HEAR THIS: I knew that if I stayed within my culture, my aliveness would be diminished!!! (Philip is so quotable!)
-The pelvic bowl...drop your center of your thinking there
-WHEN sensitivity gets dangerous! ...and when it can be SAFE to FEEL
Hope you love it. I'll keep reading Philip Shepherd, and I hope to speak with him more in the future. I feel he has some urgently important things to say to our time, and that his work can be therapeutic even through the way it is written, in a more poetic language that I feel engages more of me than usual. 
LINKS
find this episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/NCF4_wQJ458
Find Philip Shepherd here:
https://embodiedpresent.com/
the embodied practises: https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/embodiment-practices-for-uncertain-times
Philips books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003VO31LC
Mannah:
https://www.therapeuticastrologer.com/

Okay a long quote, but seriously, check it out: "We feel ourselves held within a personal boundary that keeps our life separate from that of the world. It's hard to appreciate how strangely normalized that state of ours is until we look to other cultures for comparison. When we seek to promote our personal well-being, for instance, we might think about taking the right supplements, eating organic food, exercising regularly and sleeping well.
I have no issue with any of that—but it's based on an assumption that health will be achieved by doing the right things to the body. So our focus is on the self as an isolated entity, as though it were a machine requiring upkeep. For Anlo-Ewe speakers, well-being is something quite different. It has to be, for they experience the self as porous rather than enclosed.
For instance, the Anlo-Ewe sense of personhood is described as having a "nonboundedness and a lack of the kind of unitary wholeness of being that is characteristic of Western psychologies of the self." This reflects the Anlo-Ewe understanding of being itself: "Not stable, being is highly changeable, always in transformation."
(Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being,page 15-16 (North Atlantic Books, 2017)
I feel this so deeply - I can only hope it reaches you as well, because I am talking life-changing with this interview, feel into what Philip is saying, is my advice in this first of a two-part series on Radical Wholeness. Enjoy this interview with teacher and author Philip Shepherd, who has developed "The Embodied Present Process" (TEPP) together with Allyson Woodrooffe. He is originally an actor, and a counter-culture biker, if I should name it, and the way he shares is also an experience, that might resonate for you too. TAP in with us as we
in this first interview speak about:
-What deep fitness is about around tapping into the bodies intelligence 
-How thinking moved from the belly to the head!
-Feel-Feel-at-Flesh-Inside
-We are in a Story culturally, can we step outside of it?
-How the process of balancing presents us with a model in which the self is not encased within a boundary but is oriented in the world by a fluid, felt partnership. 
-Why we are teaching our children that it's better to think with a portion of their beings than to think with the whole of their beings
-Spatioception is a sense that everyone is born with
-Presentation mode that manipulates versus being present that is relationship and receptive
-Every sense is felt in the body's resonance
-Our relationship to the body is our fundamental relationship, and the underlying template for all of our other relationships and hiw that relates to the meta-crisis we are in
-New terms rather than exteroception and proprioception -a term to tell you where space is in your body!
-'as we relate to the body, so we relate to the world'
-Philip Shepherds personal motto !!!! It is so valuable
-Thinking and being are not two different entities
-Security and safety
-Out primary wound
-There is an Inner Ocean in Your Body - You Are Fluid- Breath is an Experience of the World Passing Through You
 (I considered all this to be the title!!)
-Our body's intelligence has been fractured 
-You can integrate what has been stuck within the body
-the body as a bell
-A little comment on a significant Pluto transit where it applies pressure to whatever you've been quietly clinging to for a sense of safety, in order to expand conciousness and uncover Truth. I found this date from a talk Philip did, where he mentions the story also in the book, but you can find his bike-story by googling "Philip Shepherd's Bicycle Journey".
 
LINKS
Please enjoy these wonderful embodied practises for yourself, that Philip offers here:
https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/embodiment-practices-for-uncertain-times
Here is the book we speak of today: https://a.co/d/0gRa4Yxc
And it is also on audiobook, whereever you listen to books
youtube version: https://youtu.be/WhUpDldXC-E
See his website here: https://embodiedpresent.com/
 
More Mannah? you got it! https://www.therapeuticastrologer.com/

"Somewhere inside you there is a wildness that yearns to be acknowledged and seen, honoured and cherished, brought into the light. That untamed sliver of self is in all of us".  Welcome to an insightful and wide-ranging conversation with Christina Rodenbeck about her book "Lilith Untamed: A Guide to the Astrological Black Moon" (The Wessex Astrologer, 2026, the above quote is from the very beginning of the book).
Christina has a long experience with tracking Black Moon Lilith (BML) she started from scratch and tested whether the assumptions about the Lilith archetype actually held water, rather than inheriting them. In this episode, she introduces us to some of the key themes of the book and she is totally great at it probably because of her on Lilith placement!
Mythologically we can say that Lilith was a Hebrew she-devil/ Adam's first wife, formed from the same clay he was. She refused to lie beneath him during intercourse, arguing they were equals, spoke God's name, grew wings, and flew off to the desert and there accepted that a hundred of her children would die daily! What does this archetype have to do with us? According to Christina Rodenbeck A LOT. The book is her attempt to bring understanding of the astrological Lilith up to date and to make her as important a point in interpretation as, say, the Nodes of the Moon.
TAP in with us as we speak about this important and rejected archetype. Some of the points in our conversation are around:
-The way Lilith shows up archetypically, in her books Christina lists these 9 ways: Rebel / independent woman- Wild woman / innocent in the wilderness- Adulteress, seductress, sexual vampire / erotically liberated- Victim of abuse / avenger- Killer of infants / mother of millions- Independent woman / serial killer- Femme fatale / sexually fulfilled- The joker- Extraordinary or prolific talent
-Examples of public figures as Lilith symbols (extra point there, she stresses that the untamed self of Lilith is gender-fluid !!)
-Christinas own client cases plus her own lilith experience right on the day we were meeting!
-The space between the true and mean Lilith as a kind of power corridor in the chart, that Christina labels the "Via Lamia"
-What it is technically, because Black Moon Lilith is neither planet, asteroid, nor star, but a mathematical point. It is the Moon's apogee, the point in its elliptical orbit furthest from Earth. Kepler identified the point in the 17th century; the name Lilith was only attached in the 1930s.
-How Lilth relates to initiations and love affairs
-Light and shadow, what else are we
-Loving your own Lilith
-Tracking BML for example your Lilith Return comes every nine years
-Why Christina looks forward to BML moving into capricorn 
Thank you for being with us!!! Here are some links for you to look at further:
LINKS:
youtube version: https://youtu.be/ZcZF24CTtz8
the book: https://a.co/d/09KtIDFB
Christina Rodenbeck: https://oxfordastrologer.com/
and
My website: https://www.therapeuticastrologer.com/
support me by listening to the podcast at https://podimo.com/s/m8a0anov