cancer moons learn to be responsible from an age too young. their parents and relatives put all their hopes and expectations on the cancer moon native, and expect them to just live with it. in a way, it’s like there’s this unspoken contract where they take on the burdens of their entire family – and not just that, it’s like they take on their family’s feelings. water moons are extremely sensitive to others’ peoples emotions and, more than that, they’re observant; and with a cancer moon’s ability to express feelings, they’re also able to take on the bad feelings of those around them, in a gesture that atempts to ease their burdens (even if they’re going to be the ones feeling the pain themselves). their emotional state is very influenced by their surroundings, so they can instinctively feel what everyone needs and is struggling with.
they grow from pain, a tough childhood, the feeling of abandonment and expectations too high to be met. often, one of the parents is too overwhelming and present in their lives to the point where they feel entitled to the childs’ secrets, taking from them the sense of privacy and giving the cancer moon the feeling that they can’t escape their family. the parents might also meddle with the kid’s romantic life – i’ve seen it before, how their parents push them to date a certain person, or how they’re not accepting of their kid’s sexual orientation because it’s not what they want. even when the parents are very present, they also tend to be toxic and manipulative, making the cancer moon person have its heart at conflict with itself - they’re toxic, but they love me. i’ can’t blame them, they’re doing their best. until they become wise enough to understand that people aren’t all black and all white, they teeter on the verge of greyness and it’s actually a regular occurrence to have someone love you and still be bad for you.
and then, there’s this struggle for individuality. the person with the cancer moon isn’t given their freedom on a silver plater – if they want it, they need to fight to get it. there’s this internal war where they struggle with wanting to “save” their family, to make them proud and do what is expected of them, but also wanting to express their own feelings, beliefs, philosophies which often contradict what was enforced on them in their childhood. and it’s often a long journey before they stop letting their family mistreat them and depend on them, before they realize they can’t grow in the same place that gave them trauma - because they do love their families, but they also need to love themselves.
they understand almost instinctively that if they’re not the ones doing the healing, no one will for them – they hate seeing themselves as victims, so they oftentimes feel like it falls on them to be the “curse breaker” of their family. they sit on the opposite end of the spectrum of the moons in detriment – capricorn and scorpio moons – those two tend to hold on to their pain almost obsessively, to identify with it until they feel it’s the only thing that makes them themselves. just like with moon-saturn, moon-pluto and sun-pluto harsh aspects (square, opposite, and the conjunction as well), there tends to be a feeling from a young age that they only bring destruction, that they’re the devil, that they’re broken beyond repair and it takes a lot for them to understand that they also have an equal amount of goodness in them, that everyone is composed of both parts and you don’t have to pick and choose one, you need to learn to accept both.
but cancer moons… it’s almost like they separate themselves from their pain? they joke about their trauma, ignore it sometimes to the point of repression, because of this need to live a better life. they seek emotional stability no matter where they are, no matter how tormented they feel at the moment – they believe in better days. in the goodness in people. in finding a home that they can build and nurture. they have a lot of emotional depth and while this can be very frustrating at times because of how intense everything feels and how they notice their own self-sabotaging patterns, it can also bring the awareness needed to do better.
like @evilesqe told me, even if they move on from wounds caused by love and friendships, family is the most sensitive topic for the cancer moon and they might feel like it’s a burden that keeps them from attaining true happiness; a fear that “that’s how it’s supposed to be”.
(but remember that it’s the biggest hardships that we have to face that end up being the most rewarding. a cancer moon’s biggest strength is when they break from the self-imposed barrier that they can’t do it and start believing that they, in fact, can – they have a talent for manifestation and it works both ways. for destruction and healing.)
