Q. I was born in the late sixties with a Venus/Pluto conjunction in Virgo and the Seventh House and even now that I'm nearly 40, I still can't get a handle on why I've attracted so many dramas in relationships.

A. The Venus/Pluto describes your feminine and your sexuality as being very powerful, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. On the highest level, it describes a deep inner dynamic that subconsciously drives you into relationships as part of the desire to transform your life. Because of this, you will only be drawn to powerful individuals who will force or catalyse that process, and because any real transformation demands the death of the old and the flushing of ancient psychological debris, these experiences will be dramatic! And surprise, surprise, Pluto/Venus individuals carry a lot of such material in elaborate, confusing and slippery patterning.

The kind of individual you will tend to attract will also depend on what lies hidden from your past here, as well as how much you've been able to separate love from power because the two tend to be entangled in most people with this combination.

Firstly the symbolism of this, particularly in Virgo, echoes the classic myth of the Rape of Persephone, where the youthful and naive Persephone is abducted into the Underworld and raped by the Darth Vader-like Hades or Pluto, who then turns her into his queen. In the lives of individuals, this is acted out by some deep, early trauma, whether the loss of a parent, a destructive parental divorce, the termination of an ill-timed pregnancy or quite literally as sexual abuse, something that shatters the individual's world and drags them into the underworld. Whatever the case, it demands a lot of healing as it lays a blueprint for relationships that echo the original wound, until one is able to go deep enough. A lot of Persephone-like people are driven into therapy by this legacy but often get stuck halfway, a situation that then necessitates another round of relationship dramas because the call has only been partly answered.

Pluto, a Shiva-like transformer deep within the self, wants a queen and is quite ruthless about it. No half measures! Unfortunately, in our parent's generations there were few good role models of how to be with the depth and power of Pluto or how to really own the full potency of Queen Persephone. Consequently, the power of transformation is poorly modelled as control issues, manipulation and power struggles, and in the context of the Venus/Pluto plays out these issues in our significant relationships, whether we play the role of protagonist or the recipient. It's funny that what could actually heal us gets expressed as controlling defences around our vulnerability and capacity for love, locking up our very hearts.

Ultimately, the deeper we go in untangling this complex dynamic, the more conscious and committed we are to owning our full depths, the more we are willing to take risks in intimacy, the better the quality of what we attract in the form of partners. And the more we heal here, the more we can become an agent of healing and transformation in the lives of others. This is actually a part of your soul's calling and as a colleague once wrote, better to embody the power of love than be a lover of power.

The current squares from transiting Pluto to your natal Pluto/Venus means that it is time to go deeper and there's a lot of very powerful grace behind this surge of transformational energies. Go for it and go well!