72: How To Have a Healthy Relationship With Money → 6 Steps to Healing
Relationship With Money
What is a relationship with money? A relationship is a way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected. When it comes to a relationship with money, it's you YOU connect with money. How you think, feel, and behave when it comes to money.
If you aren't sure about it, think about your relationship with other concepts or objects in your life. Think about your relationship to those other items--food, movement, or work--and it helps to think about what your relationship with money is like.
How do you feel about money? What emotions come up for you when the topic of money comes up? Do you have a pattern of recurring thoughts that arise when you interact with money? When you finish the sentence, "Money is [BLANK]" what's the word you automatically want to put in there? All of these things inform our relationship with money.
What is a Bad Relationship With Money?
An unhealthy relationship with money differs from person to person, but in general, it's when you experience a sense of powerlessness over money, feel avoidant, or grossed out by money. When your relationship with money makes you feel out of control, anxiety, financial shame, or other avoidant experiences.
Money Relationship Mistakes
The biggest mistake I see when people are working on their relationship with money is thinking that a habit will fix their relationship with money. For example, "If I only stuck to my budget, then I'd feel good about money," or my personal favorite, "If I earned more, then I wouldn't avoid my money."
We must work on our relationship with money to make these changes stick. It's hard to stick to a budget when thinking about a budget makes you feel constricted and stuck. It's hard to earn more money when you feel conflicted about capitalism. Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us that capitalism is different than money. Capitalism is a system where a small number of people profit off of exploited labor. Money is a tool--it's a neutral means of exchange and versions of money have been around since most of humanity. And when it comes to earning more, think about it as keeping the door open for others behind you. When you negotiate a raise, or raise your fees if you're self-employed, you are keeping the door open for others to negotiate a raise or increase their fees.
Heal Relationship With Money
Examine your money story. What are your first experiences with money? What was it like growing up in your household? What was the tone around money?
Forgive past real or perceived money mistakes. Striving for perfection and holding onto past money mistakes—real or perceived—is bound to make us experience money shame. Instead, making meaning of the mistake and forgiving yourself is paramount to moving forward.
Understand the ins and outs of your money. This is also known as “financial literacy.” While everyone’s personal finance situation differs, I believe there are three constants or “pillars” of financial literacy. Pillar one is your spending plan or understanding your budget, pillar two is having a way to save for mid-term goals like a downpayment on a house or buying new furniture, and pillar three is investing in your future via retirement accounts, life insurance, and debt paydown.
Examine your financial anxiety and list out current financial behaviors or thoughts that aren't serving you. You are the expert on what you want your relationship with money to look like.
Replace old unhealthy financial behaviors or thoughts with ones you'd rather have. I'm not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't do with your money. Here are a couple of questions and ideas to get you started as you replace unhealthy behaviors or thoughts with healthy ones. Does looking at your bank account weekly feel like a healthy financial habit? What about starting your day with a mantra like, "I'm confident enough to understand money."? If you normally bristle when you pay your bills, try, "I'm able to afford this expense."
Plan for mistakes and setbacks As you create a healthy relationship with money, mistakes will happen. Rather than beat yourself up, plan for hiccups as you heal your relationship with money.
Professional Development For Therapists
Money is a common cause of stress for therapy clients and a risk factor associated with many mental health diagnoses. If you are a marriage and family therapist, social worker, psychologist, or mental health counselor, there is professional development and continuing education available to help you learn more about the intersection of money and mental health. Mental health clinicians are trained to help clients with a variety of stressors, but rarely is money covered in our professional training. As shared above, there is a need for mental health clinicians to understand how money and mental health are related.
In my Simple Practice Learning course “Money and Mental Health,” I teach participants how to describe at least four mental health risk factors directly related to money, describe at least four differences between a finance professional and financial therapist, describe at least three benefits of including money in therapeutic work as a mental health clinician and how to apply at least three interventions related to money in the therapeutic setting. To get access to the on-demand course, click here.
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In today's episode, I'm going to be covering what the heck a healthy relationship with money is. It's a question or concept that I talk about a lot, but I realized, I don't know that I've ever actually defined what a relationship with money is. In today's episode, we're going to cover what a relationship with money is, what an unhealthy relationship with money, is some common mistakes I see when working on money relationships, and some tips or steps you can take to heal your relationship with money. Let's get into it.
Alright, so a relationship just to rewind it back to grade school a little bit here, a relationship is anything in the way of the way that two concepts, objects, or people are connected. So when it comes to the way you have a relationship with money, it's really how you are connected to money or how you are engaging with money. In other words, how you think and feel when it comes to money? And if you're not sure about it, think about your relationship with other inanimate objects in your life. Things like what's your relationship with food like? What's your relationship with movement like? What's your relationship with work like, right? And that can kind of help you go start to go, Oh, okay, I definitely have relationship with things outside of people in my life, and how can we think about how my relationship with money shows up? So how do you feel about money? How do you relate to money? When you finish the sentence: Money is _____? What's the word that you automatically want to plug in there? Is it money is for greedy people? Is it money is a tool? Is it money is neutral? What is the thing that comes up when you try and fill out that sentence? Is there a certain pattern of recurring thoughts when you get your paycheck, or when you pay a bill, or when you contribute to retirement? All of these things inform our relationship with money. And when it comes to What is a bad relationship with money? I like to think about it less of like good and bad and more of healthy or unhealthy or to use some more buzzy terms, what's serving you and what's not serving you. Sorry, I have to say that a little sarcastically not that. I think there's anything wrong with using that language. But I think it gets thrown around a lot. And we don't really talk about why anyway. Alright, so an unhealthy relationship, of course, is different from person A to person B, but in general, I think about it, in terms of when money has power over you. And when that money has power over you, you might feel avoidant with money, you might not want to look at it, you might not want to negotiate a raise at work, you might not want to really look at how much money is coming in or going out. If you feel powerlessness over money, you might feel grossed out by money; I've had people say to me that they feel like prickly about money, or they feel slimy about money, you know those kinds of terms. And if you're feeling grossed out by money, or slimy or prickly when it comes to money, you might keep everything with your money at arm's distance, right? And of course, I'd be remiss to talk about having an unhealthy relationship with money if I didn't talk about financial anxiety, feeling nervous on edge or worried when it comes to our relationship with money. So if you're experiencing a bad relationship with money or an unhealthy relationship with money, it might be preventing you from taking empowered action toward creating a healthier or more balanced relationship with money. And I want to talk about balance your super super quickly here. I I've been getting some pushback on the word balance, which is fine, you don't have to use it. But given that this podcast in my business is called Mind Money Balance, I want to kind of share with you how I'm thinking of balance. I don't think about balance in black and white terms of it being like 50/50. To have your mind and money in balance, you have to have 50% of your time thinking about the the thought side of money and 50% of your time thinking about the logistics of money. I don't think of it like that. I think about it in in a scale where yes these parts are equal, but one side of the scale may have have more things on it than the other. Does that make sense? Or maybe a better way to look at it is rather than it being like, a two legged stool that just like automatically falls over. It's a three legged stool or four legged stool, there are more things providing support, and providing you with security than just how you feel about money and the logistics of money. Does that make sense? If not DM me, I'll answer it, hopefully, in a more clarified way.
Anyway, so coming back to having an unhealthy relationship with money. The biggest thing I see is that people drink the Kool Aid that personal finance people throw at them, which is if you have a budget, then you'll have a good relationship with money. Or like, if you earn more money, you won't avoid your money. And that's just like, unequivocally not true. Making more money having a budget investing, check, check, check, yes, those are like good things to do on the surface. But if you don't cultivate the feelings around money, you're not going to fix an unhealthy relationship with money, right? We have to work on the way we think and the way we relate to money in addition to the things that we are literally doing with money, right? So if I'm a person who's been drinking all the personal finance Kool Aid, and I'm like, I just have to like get my YNAB down, my You Need a Budget down, I just need to like zero out my dollars every month. Yes, that might help you to feel more empowered about making financial decisions. But if you feel constricted, following a system like that, it's going to be hard to stick to it. It's going to be hard to negotiate for a raise, if you automatically go negotiating for a raise is asking for more money and asking for more money is supporting the system of capitalism. And I'm, I'm opposed to this system of capitalism. And Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us that capitalism is different than money. Capitalism, in her words--I'm paraphrasing, is a system in which a small number of people profit off of exploited labor. Money, on the other hand, is a tool, it's a neutral means of exchange and we've had versions of money or bartering, since the dawn of humanity, right? So when it comes to earning more money, I like you to think about it as keeping the door propped open for others behind you, when you're negotiating a raise at work are raising your fees if you are self employed, that makes it easier for the next person who comes along to have a higher salary or to charge a more sustainable fee. Okay? So think about that when it comes to this and you have to kind of work on healing your relationship with money, it won't happen overnight. I mean, doing things like you're doing right now, listening to things like this podcast is obviously helpful, but it's not going to be healed overnight, you're not going to have a healthy relationship with money overnight.
So here are some general tips. I want for you to think about as you work on healing your relationship with money, and healing, meaning having a healthy relationship with money, whatever that looks like for you. First up, examine your money story. How did you get to where you are in believing that money is good or bad or evil or great, right? We cultivate our relationship with money with our money stories, which are some of the first experiences we have as children with money. Remember that psychology says that most of us develop our relationship with money by the time we're about eight years old. So what was going on in your early childhood? What was appropriate to talk about in the household? Did you talk about you know, our parents are going to work? Or did you hear your your parents or caregivers fighting about money? If you asked for money for lunch money? Was it just a given? Or were you told we can afford that? What was the general tone or the general feeling when money was discussed in your household? That's going to help you start thinking about why you do what you do now with money and thinking about it with compassion, which leads me to the second thing, which is forgiving past money, mistakes, whether they were real money mistakes or perceived money mistakes. We cannot heal our relationship with money if we're still carrying this bag of rocks behind us. That is our money guilt so start working on saying I made a mistake, my mistake doesn't define me. Okay.
Next up, you have to have an education around your money, AKA know what's going on with your money. That is where some of these personal finance people really come into play. They can help you with some of the things like creating a spending plan, figuring out what your midterm goals are, and investing in your future, which by the way, that's my opinion of the three kind of pillars of personal finance, you have to know what's coming in and what's going out and making sure that you're not overspending. It's also known as a budget, I prefer the term spending plan. That's our first pillar of Personal Finance information or knowledge or literacy. I don't know, whatever word you want to use, take it with you. The next pillar of personal finance is understanding your midterm goals and actively saving for them, whether that's a down payment on a home, whether that's saving up for a vacation, whether that's saving up to spoil your dog and get them a bougie new dog bed, whatever your midterm goals are, you have to define them and have a way that you're saving toward them. That's the second pillar of personal finance. And to me, the third pillar of first personal finance is investing in your future with literal investment in your retirement accounts, but also paying down big debts. Also making sure that you have things like a will and a living trust and making sure you have a plan for how will you care for your aging parents, or is that even your responsibility? How are you going to help out your children, or if you're like me and you're child-free, nieces, nephews, is that even something that you want to be investing in in your future? So thinking about some of those bigger picture, things will trust investments, debt pay down, those are super, super important. Oh, and life insurance, of course, if that is something that you need, four. So so far, we've have examined your money story, forgive your past money mistake, understand the ins and outs of your money--those are the first 3. Four, examine your financial anxiety and list out your financial behaviors or thoughts that aren't serving you. Financial anxiety is of course, feeling nervous, anxious on edge around money that often looks like financial perfectionism or financial procrastination. But I want you to jot down the things that aren't helping you in your relationship with money, which leads to step five, replacing those unhealthy financial behaviors or thoughts with ones you would rather have. I'm not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't do with your money. But I want for you to replace those old behaviors with new ones. When we are working on behavior change or habit change, it's much easier to replace an unwanted behavior or habit with a new behavior or habit instead of just pulling the plug all together. Okay, so we want to think about instead of--Oh, gosh, why can't I think of examples, this, this is why it's helpful to have notes, you guys, this is why podcasters take notes. So that way, when their brain runs out of fuel, they have a cheat sheet. So let me pause for a second and think. So instead of I'm not going to buy a latte every day. That's a super overused one. But whatever my brains on E so deal with it. Instead of I'm I'm not going to buy a latte everyday we want to replace that habit with something else. So what else did you get out of that latte habit? Did you get a moment of community a moment of connectedness as you swapped your credit card over for that latte in your community? Did you get a moment of consistency? Did you get a moment of peace when you hopped in your car with your coffee and that felt really good? If so how can you replace community connection? How can you replace consistency? How can you get a moment of peace instead? Maybe that means when you make your coffee in the morning, replacing some of those rituals with like putting on some soothing music or some energetic music, if that feels good to you? Maybe that means cultivating other ways to be connected in your community outside of that barista exchange. Do you see what I'm saying? So instead of just saying I'm not going to buy the latte, think about what else are you getting out of that latte purchase? And how can you replace it with something else? Okay, cool. Finally, plan for mistakes and setbacks. That is number six, don't think that it's all going to be smooth sailing as you you know, create a healthy relationship with money and heal your unhealthy relationship with money. The the path to healing in general is not linear, right? It doesn't go from A to Z immediately. There's a lot of step backs. There's a lot of backwards and forwards, two steps forward, one step back all that good stuff as you work on healing your relationship with money. So be kind to yourself when you make a mistake because you're human, you're going to make mistakes.
So let me recap these six steps really quickly. I did take notes here. One, examine your money story. Two forgive past or real money mistakes. Three, understand the basics of personal finance and how they apply to you. Four, take a look at your financial anxiety and jot down the financial behaviors or thoughts that aren't working for you. Five, replace those old unhealthy financial behaviors with new ones or you know, find a way to kind of replace what you are taking away and plan for mistakes and setbacks. That is just a part of any sort of healing journey. Cool. If you are going to take any of these steps, DM me and let me know screenshot this episode and tag me out on Instagram @MindMoneyBalance if that feels good to you and if you loved this I want to remind you that I wrote a book, The Financial Anxiety Solution that talks about all of this good stuff about our relationship with money about replacing habits--all of that is available for you in a workbook I highly recommend snagging it from your favorite local realtor.. realtor.. book realtor--bookstore. Yep, that is word and supporting the bookstores in your community. Until next time, I'm Lindsay and I'll see you right here.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai