The Astrology of Family Dynamics

An overview into better understanding how family relationships show up in your birth chart.

Happy new moon in Capricorn!

I’ve been meaning to talk about the astrology of family dynamics for a while, but it hasn’t felt like the right time until now. Discussing family matters with astrology is a bit complicated, because not everyone has a great relationship with their family or even a relationship at all. Family is personally the most challenging area of my own life, where all of the difficult lessons I would like to avoid continually pop up. However, it has been through learning astrology that I have been able to heal a lot of anger I had towards my family. Understanding my birth chart has helped me to realize that I was meant to be born into my exact family situation for a reason. 

There are many different chart elements to take into consideration when understanding family through the lens of astrology. Your birth chart shows how you perceive your relationship with your family to be. So your siblings may have had the exact same parents and family situation as you, but their perception of family could be completely different than yours, and their charts will reflect that. That’s how it is in the case of me and my sisters. We definitely have some similarities, such as us all having our moons aspecting Mars in our charts (more on the moon and why it’s important below), but there are notable differences too, which explain why we have such unique relationships with our parents.

We will first get into what parts of the chart can help you to better understand your own family relationships, then I will be touching upon common synastry chart alignments that are often found between family members. The topic of family in astrology is huge and could fill an entire book, so think of this article as simply an intro to these areas.