Anyone who has interpreted horoscopes professionally for any length of time has no doubt experienced their own learning curve as to what is — and isn’t — effective when working with clients. As most of us have come to realize, a careless piece of advice or bit of counseling can have long-term effects on the life-direction or emotional well-being of a client, for better or worse.

 

So what are the most serious mistakes astrologers tend to make with their clients? Having made my fair share of them over the years (while also having the benefit of observing other astrologers at work!), I’ve put together a short list of what I believe are among the more common problems astrologers should be on guard for. Here they are:

 

1) Starting off your consultation with something negative. This one seems simple, but it’s actually a biggie. Years ago one of my first astrology teachers offered me this advice: “Whatever you do, make sure the first thing you say during a reading is positive, especially if it’s a first-time client.” Why, I asked? “Because if you start off with a negative comment, that’s all they’ll probably hear and they’ll go away thinking how dire or downbeat your reading was.”

 

This is one mistake I learned about early myself, in fact. The very first astrologer I ever spoke with, when I was just 18, began our discussion with something slightly ominous about my future. Even though they went on to say other, more positive things during the reading, by that point I was so bothered by his opening salvo that it largely eclipsed everything else he said. It wasn’t until a full year later that I finally worked up the nerve to seek out a more experienced astrologer for a second opinion on things; to my relief, they explained how the previous astrologer (a relative beginner) had used the entirely wrong birth year when calculating my horoscope, so was using a mistaken chart! Had I never gone to another astrologer, I would have gone on for years believing what he said about my destiny; but I’m also convinced that had he inserted those critical comments later on in the reading, rather than opening right at the start with them, they would have packed far less punch than they did.

 

2) Telling people what to do. On more than one occasion, I’ve had a client ask me whether they should marry such-and-such a person, or move to another part of the country, and some such life-changing question. But is it really our job to make up our client’s minds for them and decide the important actions their lives? As I'll explain more detail in chapter seven, that may not be very smart. Spiritually speaking, it not only deprives them of an important element of free choice—remember Star Trek’s “Prime Directive” of non-interference?—but it can actually set them off in the wrong direction since we’ve based our counsel on the context of our own life-perspective, not theirs. Rather, our job as astrologers is to provide as much sound feedback as we can about their choices, but leave the final decision up to them (unless, of course, you’re itching to take on that load of extra karma from them following your advice!).

 

This same advice holds for interpreting birth charts. One of my very first chart sessions was with someone with an extensive background in therapy, and who was psychologically savvy as a result. At one point I began focusing on an especially difficult configuration in his horoscope involving planets in the 10th house. Not being content to simply describe the dynamics of that pattern, I went the extra step of telling them how they need to be “less ambitious” and  “career-driven,” and learn to focus more on their domestic life—in other words, telling them how they should act.

 

My client calmly took issue with this, explaining why he disagreed with the “curative” approach to counseling in general. It’s one thing to try and shed light on someone’s issues, he argued, but quite another to tell them, authoritatively, what they should do, how they should act, how they need to be, and so on. It’s easy for many of us in a counseling line work to fall prey to the “rescue” mindset, of thinking we need to jump in and change the client somehow, or impose our value system onto them. More often than not, such impulses are usually driven by unconscious needs of our own, relating to unresolved issues we haven’t come to terms that we’re now trying work out through them, by “proxy.” To put it simply, our job is not to change our client, but to help make change possible.

 

3) Not being sufficiently informed about why a client came to you in the first place. During the early years, I sometimes had the experience of finishing up what I thought was a superb, first-class reading—only to discover towards the very end that I didn’t even touch on what they came for. I spent an hour elucidating the marvelous subtleties of their psyche and their karmas, only to discover that what they really wanted to know about was their prospects for finding true love.

 

So whenever I begin my sessions now I’m careful to ask, “What did you come here for?” Or, “What are you most hoping to learn from this session?” Is it about romance? Or career? Or something else altogether? This doesn’t mean one can’t cover anything besides those requested points, of course; after all, there may be a reason they were paired up with you in the first place that’s completely apart from their conscious intentions. But from a professional standpoint it’s only fitting that you provide them with the service they’re paying their hard-earned money for.

 

4) Using jargon. Imagine walking into a someone’s office and they start saying, “Well, your zargon is squaring your wiggleshank, and your alpharop is in stressful relation to your kokomo in the seventh-domain. That’s important!” No, that’s gobbly-gook. But it’s exactly how our counseling can sometimes sound to a non-astrologer when we insist on using insider terminology. 

 

I have to confess I’m not a purist on this point since I feel there are times when some terminology is helpful, presuming the client has a basic knowledge of astrology. In those cases, coupling your remarks with a basic reference to the planetary symbols at work can actually fast-track your discussion nicely in some ways, since the person will automatically have a grasp of the archetypal implications involved. But ultimately that’s something each astrologer has to decide for themselves, since it hinges on the knowledge and openness of the client. But for the most part, too many beginning astrologers seem not to realize when they’ve crossed that fine line between clarity and obtuseness, when falling back on jargon largely can actually be an excuse for not fully understanding the meaning of the patterns involved yourself.

 

5) Overly simplistic or judgmental interpretations. Though I’d like to think most of us have long since moved past the stage of black-or-white renderings that were more common in the old days (“Saturn squaring your Mercury means you will die on the gallows!”), I continue to be surprised by how even many advanced practitioners continue falling into the trap of simplistic interpretations. It may take subtler forms now, though, like looking at someone’s natal Jupiter/Sun square and simply telling them they have a problem with their ego— and leaving it at that. Or noticing a Saturn/Moon opposition and telling the client they may be depressed or emotionally blocked— while completely overlooking the potentially constructive qualities this pattern can bring about, such emotional gravitas, or compassion born of early suffering. (It was immensely reassuring for one Buddhist client of mine to learn that the Dalai Lama himself also had this aspect!)

 

This is what I call the “this-means-that” approach to interpretation, as though a given symbol or configuration means just one thing, and one thing only. You have Jupiter in the 9th? Well, you’ll have positive experiences with travel or higher education. Simple, eh? You have a retrograde Venus? Well, you’re unlucky in love. Too bad. The fact is, planets and aspects are multivalent symbols with many levels of significance and their meanings are virtually inexhaustible, and while there isn’t time to delve into each one of these fully, of course, there can be an even bigger danger sometimes of touching on them too superficially. While you don’t want to be too vague, don’t hamstring your client with the straightjacket of literal meanings, either!

 

6) Not giving the client a sense of hope or any constructive options for dealing with the challenges in their horoscope. When I was first starting out as an astrologer, I had one client arrive with a particularly challenging horoscope, centering on a t-square between the Moon, Venus and a 5th house Saturn. I spoke to them at length about the subtleties of the configuration, going into brilliant detail about all psychological and practical manifestations of this difficult pattern, and felt quite proud of my diamond-sharp insights. But when I was finished, I couldn’t help but notice they looked a little dejected, so I asked if there were any questions or comments about what I’d told them. At which point he asked, almost with a hint of exasperation, “Okay…but what am I supposed to do with all that?”

 

That was a sobering wake-up call for me, because I realized that I hadn’t really been offering my clients enough constructive suggestions about their difficult patterns, which probably left more than a few of them feeling a bit confused, or even hopeless. While we don’t want to make up their minds for them, it’s important that we offer the client options or practical suggestions about how they can respond to their challenges, whether that take the form of therapy, spiritual practice, or specific actions or rituals that can channel or counteract those difficult energies. It’s not good enough to simply tell them how difficult things are; we need to provide them with choices, too.

 

7) Overlooking the larger patterns in the chart—a.k.a. “missing the forest for the trees.”  A few years ago a client came to me wanting a second opinion about what was happening in her life, after a previous astrologer had failed to find anything that explained the enormous difficulties she was experiencing at work, in large part with her boss. It didn’t take long before I learned what the problem was, or why the other astrologer had missed what seemed so obvious now: they had based their forecast strictly on a computer-generated “hit-list” of transits showing the day-by-day litany of planetary energies, but which didn’t emphasize the larger trends in effect at the time.

 

Specifically, Saturn had moved into this woman’s 10th house one year earlier, and would continue to remain there for at least another year; but the astrologer’s hit-list was set up only to show only the dates when planets made aspects, as well as when the slower-moving planets first entered houses. Had that astrologer simply taken a step back to actually look at this woman’s birth chart to see where those current transiting planets fell along the wheel, he would have realized the importance of this roughly two-year phase in her life as Saturn traversed the 10th house.

 

A similar problem often crops up when looking at the transits of the outer bodies to one’s natal planets. Because they move so slowly, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, or Saturn can be ten degrees or even more away from the client’s Sun or Moon, say, and yet that client will often feel this transit long before it actually becomes exact. (For example, how many Sun-sign Aries, even later degree ones, felt a marked shift of energy in their lives the very week — or even day — that Uranus moved into their sign last March?) Yet such trends won’t show up on many computerized hit-lists, since they’re configured to show only a detailed view of what’s happening. Consequently, it can be a good idea to visually study the horoscope to see where those transiting bodies actually are within the horoscope, not only in terms of the houses and angles, but in relation to how they are to the natal planets. We can become so focused on the minutia of transiting and progressed positions that we miss the proverbial “forest for the trees.”

 

These, then, are a few of the problems that can crop up in our dealings with clients, although there are doubtless many others. The moral of the story? It pays to be careful when offering advice or counsel that can have a serious impact on people's lives!

 

Reprinted from The Mountain Astrologer, April/May 2012