An Exercise For Forgiveness

[sage]

I'd like to understand more about your financial insecurities. I don't mean this insultingly at all, in fact, I admire your ability to look at this challenge and face it. The reason I ask is that my H totally freaks out about anything financial. Just this morning I found out that the bank made an error and he was ranting and raving. There is something deeper than just being upset about the error. There are some deep emotional issues involved that I have seen throughout our 8 years together. We are doing fine financially but I think that he still feels insecure. Have you been able to pinpoint what is at the heart of your financial/emotional challenges? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Christine

Hi Christine...WOW. An ASSumption on my part but your h's sitch (bank error) really resonated with me...I swear I can guess what he's feeling!

The bank sitch/financial insecurity would be about 3 things for me:

1. needing a sense of security

2. needing to have a sense of control

3. needing to right a situation where something was going "against me" even though I had done nothing wrong

All three of these things are related to my childhood and the ways that my family, my parents' divorce and the aftermath played out. When I was young, my family life was EXTREMELY chaotic...my parents were miserable with each other at the top of their lungs...and my mother was miserable with her three children, too (see comment about the lungs!)...she was up and down and all around as far as moods go...verbally and physically abusive. She would retreat to her bed for days on end and then just get up as though nothing had happened.

For years and years my parents would sit us down and tell us they were getting a divorce...that we would be moving...that we'd no longer go to the same school, etc...and then it wouldn't happen. By the time they finally separated when I was 14, we had heard the D words hundreds of times.

You can see the need for control and security, no?

Why money? Well, after the S, my mother went thru this horrendous phase where everything was about $. We would go to the grocery store and my mother would say "get the peanut butter" and when I'd go reach for a name brand she would SCREAM "not that one, get the generic one! Your father doesn't pay enough for us to eat that one"....over and over and over again.

Every month the bills would come out...and she show us how we were practically destitute (not true) due to my father's departure.

The scenario also played itself out a bit while they were married...my dad lost his job a number of times and each time my mother would involve us...tell us how we were going to have to sell the house to eat, etc.

It left me feeling groundless and terrified in a thousand different ways...and it hammered into my head that none of this would have happened if there had just been MORE MONEY (total crap...obviously the money wasn't truly the issue...in fact, we were solid financially).

If we just had more money then everything would be in control and people wouldn't leave and others wouldn't be unhappy and I'd always be safe and able to take care of myself and ....

Probably lots of other reasons have played into the $ thing for me...but those are the ones that stand out.

as for the bank "error" -- that goes to the very core of another insecurity of mine -- that some mistake will happen that will mess up my life that I won't be able to fix even though I have all the information to make it right (don't think you'll find that one in a text book! Maybe Shiny can diagnose!)

I think it's partly about being blamed or misunderstood for something that I didn't do. Kind of like "crud, I'm trying to do all the right things and this stuff STILL happens". Ah, I guess it's about control again!

and it scares the bejeepers out of me when it's some institution (bank, the law, school, whatever) that I'm going to have to go against.

It makes it a thousand times worse if I can't fix the problem right away...(bank is closed until morning, etc).

You didn't ask but here's what helps me in that sitch...if my h treats my worry as understandable and "worthy" -- not over the top -- but enough to let me know that he "gets it". The perfect response would be "Oh, this is so frustrating! Let's put an action plan down on paper so we know the three things we're going to do tomorrow to make this right."

Did your h have a chaotic childhood?


Sage