Developing ruthless focus

JUPITER IN AQUARIUS Your good fortune is tied to the fortunes of others. The realization of your hopes and dreams and the success of all your ventures depends on your friends in high places. These are the people who can make things happen. Benefactors are drawn to you like fairies to a princess's christening. They want to imbue you with their wealth, wisdom, and grace. They're more than happy to introduce you to their friends and friends of friends. The remedy is to see this as a cognitive distortion and recognize that although some people aren't interested in you, there are other people who are. This is a plague in today's world, a mental auto-immune disorder. It needs to be recognized and rooted out whenever you see it, for this is poisonous to well-being. Critical self-talk can be replaced with compassionate seeing that empathizes and understands you were doing the best you could at the time. Giving yourself permission to make mistakes and fail is essential to growth and learning. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, just that you've had the courage to take a risk. The remedy is first, to identify this mistaken way of thinking, and then second, to substitute a more rational thought, such as, I'm average in my bad qualities, no worse than most, and I also have good qualities as well, just like others. The future: This blows out of proportion minor events that you believe signal doom. For example, doing poorly on a project at work and fearing this means your team and supervisor will hate you and you'll be fired. Save a four-day spa vacation for bigger achievements or a consistent run of smaller ones over a period of time. Base your rewards on how difficult you know the new behavior to be for your loved one, and how valuable it is to you. Don't underestimate the power of a kiss or kind word.

Switch up the reward. This will help keep her interest. Some animals never tire of the same treat day after day, year after year, for the same behavior, but humans are more easily bored. When in doubt, refer to the first point of reward selection: you do know what he likes, and you can think of more than one thing. Reinforce him in different ways that all mean something to him. Make the connection. It is not always necessary to announce what you are doing. They see something in you--which means that you need to be something worth seeing, and this is where life gets tricky. How can you be true to yourself and to them at the same time? It's the predicament that every politician faces. You have to have a mission statement and a genuine love of people when you have Jupiter in Aquarius. Otherwise it will backfire. Jupiter isn't kind to users and social climbers. Monies are at your disposal to serve the common good. Serve them well and the tide of fortune will lift all boats--serve only yourself and you'll be left high and dry. Aquarius Jupiter . Enriches: Aquarius Suns through cooperative effort. The remedy is to see this as a worst-case scenario and to replace it with more reasonable thinking that recognizes everyone makes mistakes, it's part of any job, they can be corrected, and they are counterbalanced by all your positive contributions. Asking, Do I really know absolutely for sure what will happen? Seeing that killing hope negates any positive future allows the person to unhook from this bad mental habit.

This black-and-white thinking reduces the complexity of life to simple either/or categories. The remedy is to identify this overly simplistic thinking and recognize the gray nuance in life's complexity, and to learn to hold different, even opposite views of a single situation. It substitutes both/and thinking for either/or. To identify, challenge, and replace faulty thinking is a kind of mental detoxification, for these cognitive neurotoxins are eliminated when you see them, challenge them, and replace them with undistorted thinking. Depressogenic cognitions lead directly to feeling bad and depression. Seeing the world and oneself more clearly and realistically, with positive as well as negative aspects, leads the person to feel better. There is a good deal of research support for the utility of cognitive therapy for depression. Reinforcement works without discussion, but your loved one may wonder about a change in your behavior and ask you (Why are you being so nice to me? You might plan to say something like The effort you've been making to not smoke in the mornings is not lost on me. I really appreciate it, so I just wanted to let you know that I notice! Use your positive communication skills to make sure your loved one understands the cause and effect. There's a big difference between You're going to have to earn this and This is something you could earn. You needn't mention the substance use if that feels too hot or likely to provoke a defensive reaction. Just keep your focus on the behavior you want--I'm so happy you're playing basketball again that I wanted to come and cheer, as opposed to I'm so glad you're not too hungover to play basketball, or I appreciate your playing basketball instead of drinking yourself to death. With practice, you'll learn to sense when it would be safer to say I had a great time with you tonight, and when the mood can handle Thanks for stopping after two drinks like we talked about. Beware the competition. As you set out to reinforce nonusing behaviors, you'll be competing with everything your loved one enjoys about using. Misses the boat with: Capricorns and Pisces Suns by being uncompromising. Both signs want the best but also recognize the need for give and take. Benefits: Aries and Sagittarius by giving them a social conscience.

Squares off against: Taurus and Scorpio Suns when it gets too idealistic. Blesses: Gemini and Libra with community spirit. Is anyone's guess with: Cancer and Virgo Suns because if you don't schmooze, you lose. Sometimes good because it gets them out of their shells; Opposes: Leo Suns. You see other people as holier-than-thou. When Jupiter is opposite your Sun sign, you don't connect to its energy naturally, which means you will always find yourself at a disadvantage until you do. The big advantage of cognitive therapy is that it is relatively short-term. The downsides are that many people find it doesn't go deep enough for significant change and there are many people it doesn't work for. Also, for unknown reasons cognitive therapy works about half as effectively as it did during the 1980s. One proposed reason is that as its techniques became more widely known, more people already have changed their cognitions in the direction cognitive therapy prescribes. For some people it works wonders, for others not so much. From the perspective of depth therapy, distorted cognitions are the result of feeling depressed, not the cause of it. Nevertheless, distorted cognitions clearly make depression worse, so adopting logical, undistorted cognitions can only help, even if it doesn't entirely resolve the depression. Since the protocols for cognitive therapy have been standardized, you can find many free resources online, through articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, DVDs, and free webinars. However, finding a good cognitive therapist to work with in person is ideal. The Spiritual Level There may be other people working against you or people who have interests in her behavior staying the same, such as friends she uses with or dealers. Keep adding weights on the nonusing side of the scale, in the form of enjoyable alternatives and rewards, and hang in there--eventually it will tip. The double-hard part about this .

First, you'll recall from our discussions of dopamine and the brain's reward system earlier in the article that your loved one's ability to enjoy alternatives to using may be neurologically compromised. For you, dinner and a movie together might be an ideal way to spend an evening. For her, and specifically for the blunted pleasure receptors in her brain, it may pale in comparison to club hopping on amphetamines. This is why your reinforcement strategy is so important for motivation: external rewards can pick up the slack when the behavior you want isn't intrinsically rewarding enough (yet) for your loved one to do for its own sake. Second, as your loved one's use has taken up more space, she may have forgotten what else she enjoys. Even more troublesome, she may have turned to substances to meet her needs before she discovered alternatives. You may think she's been wasting her life, while she looks at her life and can't imagine what else she would do with it. The best way to tap into your good fortune is to look past the messenger and embrace the message. Maybe it's about economic equality, reducing your carbon footprint, or being more progressive. It's grating that it's coming through someone so sanctimonious, but it's a small price to pay for being on the right side of history. JUPITER IN PISCES You have always depended on the kindness of strangers, and they've never let you down. It doesn't matter what your gender, skin color, or income is. You can be traveling far from home and people you've never met before (and may never see again) will naturally open their hearts and hearths to you. That's because they recognize you as brethren. You are--soulfully speaking--their brother or sister. This is why you can walk down streets in neighborhoods others wouldn't go near, chum around with those who live on the other side of the political divide, and why hardened types always show you their softer side. There are a number of spiritual causes of depression. Lack of meaning. One of the primary spiritual and existential tasks in life is to discover meaning.