When I’ve said the occasional “That seems surprisingly relevant,” while reading a newspaper horoscope, I’ve chalked it up to the same phenomena to which I attribute surprisingly relevant fortune cookies: 1.)coincidence, or 2.) vagueness adequate to make it applicable to anyone who reads it. Astrology has always made me think of a guy on the prowl sidling up to a woman in a bar and saying, “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”

When I first heard the announcer on Jennifer Freed’s podcast, FREED UP!, describe her as a psychological astrologer, I rolled my eyes. The idea that the position of the planets at the moment of my birth could have any significant effect on who I am, what happens in my life or where I’m going was much too out there for this rationalistic writer and veteran consumer of psychotherapy. Why would someone who’d gone through the rigors of a PhD education in psychology be messing around with something as esoteric as astrology? I kept listening, because I liked what she had to say and respected her work as a psychologist. And then, one day, she did an astrological reading on the air for one of her guests. I thought: Wow. Within a week, I was sitting on her couch having my own reading. And I was blown away.

Jennifer is a licensed marriage and family therapist, group leader and educator who has been a practicing clinician for over 30 years. She has held the post of Clinical Director at Southern California’s Pacifica Graduate Institute and continues to serve as a professor and adjunct faculty member there. But what she shared with me in my reading was not gleaned from a long therapist-client relationship. Based on three bits of information—my date of birth, my place of birth, and my time of birth (down to the minute)—Freed has showed me a portrait of myself that is detailed, thorough, and revelatory. Based on the placement of the planets, sun and moon at the moment of my birth, Jennifer has been able to hold up a mirror that accurately reflects a self that feels absolutely authentic. And this is a self I  actually feel not just good about, but great about—despite a long history of questioning, frustrated meandering, garden-variety self-doubt and even the occasional bout of energetic self-loathing.

Jennifer’s discovery of real astrology came in much the same fashion—she had a reading that blew her away. “At 19, I had my first psychological astrology session,” she tells me, “and no one, including myself, had ever articulated my strengths, weaknesses and contradictions so clearly.” This interest in astrology led her to find a PhD scientist who knew and practiced it. As she earned her degrees in psychology and became a therapist, she underwent a parallel course of study in astrology that included study with many teachers. Since the mid-1990s, Jennifer has taught a diploma course in psychological astrology.

In her analysis of my strengths, potentials, and growing edges, Jennifer was affirming and encouraging, compassionate and funny. Her words gave shape to my most difficult paradoxes and are helping me let go of limiting beliefs about both present difficulties and past choices. Apparently, there’s a lot more to this astrology business than newspaper horoscopes predicting an ominous or auspicious future. And it seems that the man who asks his potential mate about her astrological sign might be more evolved than I previously imagined—that knowing a prospective partner’s astrological sign may be more meaningful than knowing what he or she does for a living, her hometown, or any of the other things about which we tend to ask prospective partners.

This is a tough one for me to wrap my mind around. My own graduate education in exercise physiology equipped me with tools for understanding how scientists use rigorous study designs, hard data and statistical analysis to come to solid conclusions about this or that hypothesis. And although I knew its limitations, I had come to believe that science was the place to look for answers about most things. How would the placement of the planets affect the way our personalities form? Where’s the data demonstrating how gravitational fields affect the genetic coding that creates our biochemical milieus? Show me the studies! Explain to me why this is true! (As it turns out, this view is in perfect keeping with my Capricorn nature. Down-to-earth, practical Capricorns want completion, achievement and accomplishment. Another part of my chart shows that I have deep fears around security. Faith, giving over to a higher power, hope, prayer, visioning, meditation? A big leap for someone who wants solid ground beneath her feet.)

I’m far from alone in my skepticism. Astrology is widely considered to be a form of pseudoscience—a subject that superficially seems scientific and is spoken about as a science, but that doesn’t hold up to modern scientific methods. Pseudo comes from the Greek word for “false.” Pseudoscience is false science. Fake science.

Sure, in terms of the very limited view of modern science, there’s little available to explain astrology. The same is said about homeopathy, shamanism, mind-body medicine, energy healing and depth psychology. But these protests are significantly enfeebled by two parallel trends: 1.) the failure of modern, mechanistic science to solve some intractable problems, notably the insanity that tends to set in when human beings feel increasingly isolated from spirit and faith; and 2.) the incontrovertible help that these so-called ‘pseudoscientific’ disciplines offer to real live human beings, despite continuous effort to debunk them by those who are attached to modern science as universal problem-solver.

The kind of science used to develop astrology is far older than the science its critics say it fails to stand up to. Astrology began with the ancient Babylonians and was developed over centuries of careful study of the paths of the planets (which, in astrology, include the sun and moon) and the linking of those paths to human traits, strengths and proclivities. Astrological science is about close observation of parallel phenomena, the discernment of patterns and the intelligent application of those patterns for the purposes of prediction or understanding.

In its earliest applications, before an understanding emerged of the potential for human growth, inner exploration and change, astrology was used to fatalistically predict and label. Today, astrology is still sometimes used in this way, and this is the kind of astrology to which most of us have been exposed in newspaper horoscopes. But now that we grasp the enormous potential of each individual to evolve, astrology has found a new application: as a tool to be used in psychology for the purpose of recognizing and working with inborn traits. This enables us to choose our courses in life in a way that recalls swimming with the current instead of against it. We can make choices based on what is and is not changeable about ourselves. Building a house that’s wrong for its foundation is a foolish thing to do, and many of us, in this time of radical individualism and the notion that we are free to choose in just about every aspect of our lives, have tried hard to build a house that didn’t sit right on that foundation, making it prone to earthquake, flood, and other kinds of disaster.

Psychological astrology uses the archetypes and symbolism of the Zodiac, which was first drawn around 500 BC, to inform the process of psychological inquiry. Practitioners usually adhere to schools of psychological thought that embrace important roles for the unconscious mind, the link between mind and body, and the power of mythology, spirituality and archetypes in the human psyche: depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, humanistic psychology, integral psychology.

You won’t hear a psychological astrologer diagnosing a ‘biochemical imbalance’ to which their client’s depressions or anxieties or neuroses can be attributed. Neither will you hear a practitioner in this niche tell a client to solve their psychological problems by mechanistically, willfully changing their thoughts or way they talk to themselves or others. Instead, they encourage clients to understand why they do what they do based on their inborn and lifelong traits, and to work within that structure to find a healthier way of being and relating; to see how hereditary leanings and astrological patterning collude to make us who we are and how best to work with what we have been given. A good astrological psychology session helps to bring more clarity about what is and is not   one’s innate talents or tendecies in  life and  relationships. “This work will let you know what your classes are in this school of your life,” Jennifer told me. “It shows you what you came here to this Earth school to learn. What kind of student you’ll be is up to you.”

Psychological astrology does what few psychological disciplines can: it clearly demonstrates the relationship of individual psyche (microcosm) to universal/collective unconscious (macrocosm). It helps to heal the huge rift that has opened between individuals and the universe from which they come. Through recognition of the relatedness of each human being to patterns, energies and relationships much larger than ourselves, and through a grounding of very personal details into this larger cosmological map, we come to see that we aren’t the only ones driving the bus here.

Spiritual teachers often exhort pupils to “let go and let God,” to stop trying so hard to control our lives and to just say no to attachment to the outcomes of our decisions. Many of us place huge stock in having total control over our own lives, but control is a vastly overrated entity. There’s always some glitch in the works, just waiting to knock us off of our carefully orchestrated trajectories. And oddly enough, the harder we hold on to those trajectories, the faster and harder we tend to get knocked off.   None of us are farther than a single disaster away from losing it all.

Trusting in psychological astrology requires a willingness to surrender into not-knowing.  Pseudoscience or no, it forges a path toward knowledge and understanding that each of us is made a certain way. When we are helped to acknowledge this in gorgeous detail, as was the case with my reading, we can be present and move forward with greater confidence and joy. We can see the broader map of our lives in a universal context. There is a kind of freedom in this that is quite different from the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’ variety.  It’s the freedom to be who we truly are and to share that with the world.

This once-cynical writer’s conclusion: the cycles and patterns of our human lives are, in some important fashion, driven by by complex and grand forces, including the gravitational pull of the planets, sun and moon—and this is a good and comforting thing. We still get to drive, but this particular bus has GPS. It’ll tell us where to go if we take the time to understand, listen and pay attention.

Widely recognized for her expertise on issues such as teen bullying, character development, marriage and family relationships and diversity, Jennifer Freed sees patients in private practice to help them with effective communication, anger management, sexuality issues, and prevention of drug addiction and violence. Jennifer also co-founded and directs a program called AHA! (the Academy of the Healing Arts), which helps teens in California and the Southwest to develop character, imagination, social conscience and emotional intelligence. Through AHA!, teens learn to set goals, support peers and serve their communities.

Freed is also the author of several books, including the books used for AHA!—Relationship Wisdom, Character, Compassion and Creative Expression—and The Ultimate Personality Guide (Tarcher, 2001). This year, Perigee Trade will publish Lessons from Stanley the Cat: Nine Lives of Everyday Wisdom. Jennifer has appeared on Good Morning America and National Public Radio, and hosts two popular radio programs, Signs of Change on Arizona’s KFNX-AM and FREED UP! on Voice America. For more information, to request a reading, or to sign up for her upcoming workshop (it starts January 15th), contact Jennifer at JFFREE@aol.com.