Insights on my complicated relationship with money

I have a fairly long-standing and complicated relationship with money. Growing up, I had the sense that my family had very little money. I felt bound and stuck by the limits of that. As a teenager, there were so many things I wanted to do and couldn’t because of the lack of money I experienced. Subconsciously, and understandably looking back, I concluded and predicted that if I had money, then I would be free. This was also the truth I internalized others were living.

As a young adult in my early twenties, that shifted dramatically. I started having a lot of money, by most people’s standards, including my own. For the first few weeks following whenever I received a big sum of money, there was this sense of deep aliveness, intoxicating freedom, and energy. As this faded, on the other side emerged a fear. Its voice said that if I lost all this money, then with it, I’d lose the freedom I so craved for already as a child.

Old belief 1: Money is freedom 

The underlying belief I held was this: Money is freedom. And my life evolved around that. When I had no money, I couldn’t be free. And when I had money, I feared losing it and with it my freedom. Freedom was externalized and projected onto money. And I’m sure, some of that is still true for me today. A very strange bind, that I was never really quite aware of until I recently dove deep into what caused those kinds of beliefs in a session with my coach. 

I’m not surprised by the deep, unconscious nature of that belief driving me strongly in life. I’ve heard the term “financial freedom” used so frequently, I wonder if it’s almost a cultural staple belief that has money and freedom linked together so tightly for many of us, maybe even on a collective level. Unfortunately, as I discovered both from my training in the monastery and as a trauma therapist as well as my personal experience, simply knowing that this was an unconscious belief is of little help in the long term. The linking of money and freedom was a bond, deeply wedged into my bodies bracing too, not just my mind. It was connected to implicit memories of when I was 7 years old and had an experience with one of my best childhood friends around money. And then to another one when I was 14. In both cases, I had learned that it is not ok to ask for money and not ok to receive money. This kind of memory was stored in the body, what neuroscientists call implicit memory. As I touched into that old belief, I also touched into how my body tightened and physically held that belief. For the first time in my life I found the courage to not shy away from that binding and pain and to hold space for that. Slowly, my body had a chance to shift and move through the fear of letting go of the belief, that I wondered might destroy me or alienate me from those that shared that belief (originally likely my parents). This is a devastating fear of my child-self.

At the end of the session, there was deep relief and a deep knowing. It was strange because it also had a sense of being very ordinary. Almost anti-climactic. The words I wrote down in that probably more trance-like state of awareness were this: 

• Money is just money
• Freedom is just freedom
• Freedom is already there and who I am is not dependent on money, although at times, can be supported by it

Not very “grand”, as I otherwise might have predicted the wisdom I’d have after a session that brings me clarity around money. Almost surprising. And yet, quite different from the beliefs my 14-year old self had come up with:

• Money is freedom
• Losing money means losing freedom

Old belief 2: Money is dirty

There’s another belief that I had subconsciously adopted growing up, which was that money is dirty. I’d hear adults in my life tell me to “go wash your hands, don’t you know how many people touched that?” after I’d received money and put in my pocket. I’d never heard the same command after say, touching a book in the library, where undoubtedly also a lot of people must have touched the same books I had. So, the feeling held inside of me was a kind of disgust towards money. 

That’s a big culmination of confusing ideas for a child, that isn’t even verbally stored, but held as implicit beliefs. On the one hand, I wanted money so bad, because it’d give me freedom, but had learned I couldn’t ask or it and on the other, I was disgusted by it. Phew, just imagining the confusion of me holding that in my body as a 10-year old makes my head spin and want to give myself a hug. 

Money as a rich projection surface for the unconsciousness

What I’ve come to distill for myself is that money, because of it’s high tabooization in my native culture (I grew in Austria) is fertile ground to store many of my unconscious beliefs in. In some way, money is almost an unconscious storage of many of my externalizations of who I can’t allow myself to be: free, in pain, dirty, scared, expressive and probably a number of others I haven’t even quite fully explored yet. 

Meditating on money

One of the ideas that came to me to close the chasm between my projections onto money and money itself has been to surround myself with money more, physically speaking. To see it, to touch it, to smell it, to roll in it. Even talking about that kind of closeness to these pieces of paper triggers shame in me, it’s fascinating. What I’ve done is get several hundred euros and scatter bills all over my apartment on shelves, coffee tables and desks. 

I’ve also found a kind of joy that’s getting clear to me in writing this to have touched the depth of my projections around money. The topic is so rich in unconscious beliefs and the opportunities for undoing and unlearning deep. I have no doubt that this topic will continue to come up for myself and my clients as it already has on many occasions in the past. To keep holding space for this within myself gives me a chance to continue to hold all the different stories and beliefs people hold about money themselves. I’m grateful for that. 

What’s your relationship with money?