By Karin Mizgala
“He still loves me” aren’t exactly the words you’d expect to hear in a financial meeting. But these words, expressed by a recent money coaching client after finally being honest with her husband about the state of her finances, certainly capture the emotional charge and fear of judgment that money can bring to relationships.
Psychotherapist Olivia Mellan in her book Money Harmony says that money is “tied up with our deepest emotional needs: for love, power, security, independence, control, self-worth.”
In our client’s case her biggest fear was that if she let her husband know that she had more debt than she let on, he would cease to see her as a competent, intelligent, independent woman and ultimately leave her.
While she wasn’t necessarily conscious that this belief was driving her to avoid dealing with her finances and to keeping her “dirty little secret” to herself, the relief and emotion behind her words – “he still loves me” – reveal the intensity of her fear about fessing up.
We avoid thinking about, talking about and dealing with money for all sorts of reasons – and most of them really have nothing to do with the dollars and cents of money. It’s the emotions that inevitably are tied to our relationship with money that are the true demons of financial stress.
Overspending, unmanageable debt, avoiding or fighting about money usually have a deeper root cause than may be obvious on a surface level.
While it may be uncomfortable and scary to open up about our money challenges (even to ourselves), this is often where true financial freedom starts. It sure was for this client.
Karin Mizgala is Money Coaches Canada’s CEO and resident “money shrink”.
