About
Short Bio
Vanessa Couto is a storyteller, teacher, archetypal astrologer, and ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC).
She holds an MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute (depth psychology, Jungian lineage), where her thesis was titled The Healing Power of Fluff: The Heroine's Transformation in Romantic Comedies.
She works with clients at thresholds and transitions, reading birth charts and lives for the story underneath.
She hosts the podcast Romancing the Threshold and writes on Substack about the guidance hidden in the genres our culture insists on dismissing.
She lives in Portland and works with clients in English and Portuguese.
Some traditions name three faces of the feminine: maiden, mother, crone.
My work follows a different trifecta.
Three sisters: Death, Grief, Joy.
They are not stages we pass through.
They are companions who arrive at the table whenever a real threshold is being crossed.
Most of a life's thresholds begin with a death of some kind.
The end of a relationship, a role, an identity, a self that no longer fits. Death opens the gate. Grief is the room you find yourself standing in. Joy, when she comes, can come at any time, including in the middle of the grief, sometimes as the relief of leaving something behind. Our culture only invites one of the three sisters to dinner. I work with all of them, and the work takes four forms.
As an archetypal astrologer, I read the chart for what it knows about the threshold someone is in. As a threshold guide, I sit with people while they cross. On my podcast, Romancing the Threshold, and a Substack of essays, I write about how stories carry the medicine, including the romance novels our culture has been busy dismissing. Four shapes, one practice underneath.
The work began earlier than I knew at the time.
When I was ten, my family moved countries. I learned a new language and a new culture inside the same body that had been a different self the year before. That was my undergrad in thresholds, my first experience of the truth that a passage of this kind is not a problem to be solved.
It is a crossing that asks you to leave one shape behind and grow into another.
I have been studying that territory in one form or another ever since.
The formal training came later, at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Pacifica was an alchemical vessel for me. It changed how I see the world and how I work, and it exposed me to the cornerstones of what I now do: depth psychology, archetypal astrology, the study of myth and fairy tale. I am happy I underwent that initiation. The thesis it produced has a title I have grown into: The Healing Power of Fluff: The Heroine's Transformation in Romantic Comedies. I worked with three rom-coms the way one works with a dream, looking for the guidance that hides in the genres our culture is sure are unserious. I have been working that thesis ever since.
Two later crossings shifted everything on its axis. Both came through the deaths of my parents.
My father was an expansive man: funny, warm, uninterested in cages. From him I learned to hold things lightly. The seriousness of the work I do, I balance with his humor, on purpose. After he died, the landscape of grief widened my view in a way I could not have predicted. It opened me to the help that comes from the unseen realms, the help that does not announce itself but is there once you learn to recognize it. That recognition is part of what a client receives in my room.
My mother was a different teacher. An intellectual force, a general in a small body, a retired educator with three degrees, fierce in her thinking and resilient in a life that gave her plenty to fight. From her I inherited rigor, depth, sharp observation. Some of her gifts came at a cost familiar to daughters of complicated mothers. I kept my joys hidden through much of my life. I called it my secret garden. I tended joy there, where she could not rain on it.
When she died, walking out of the hospital room, I made a promise to myself: I would stop postponing joy.
Postponed joy has painful repercussions.
The cave year that followed was a long gestation. I followed romance novels down their rabbit hole, the way Alice did hers, and discovered the genre had been doing serious work all along. Romance is the genre that puts joy at the center, where joy belongs.
I know what thresholds are. I have been crossing them since I was ten years old, with all three sisters at the table at one time or another. The territory is real to me.
What I do is sit with people while they honor what is actually happening to them.
I am not here to help anyone optimize, escape, or get to the other side faster.
I am here to help them recognize the threshold they are in and meet the sisters already at the table.
Death, Grief, Joy.
Sometimes all three at once.
If you are standing at one of your own and want someone to sit with you through it, the work is gathered around this site, in shapes that may meet you where you are: a chart reading, a threshold accompaniment, a podcast episode, an essay.
Any of them is a way in.