Why We Turn Money into the Enemy (and How To Stop)
A few months ago I was doing one of the Lesson 1 meditations in the Creating Money Magic course.
The meditation focuses on releasing the emotions you're feeling about money in this moment, so I decided to call up any remnant emotions I was feeling towards money.
One of the activities in the meditation is a guidance to connect with an emotion and explore where this emotion comes from.
During the meditation I saw my mother and the emotion that I felt was anger, deep anger towards money.
There was a part of me that was angry at money on my mother’s behalf.
As kids we identify a lot with our parents traumas and see them as our own.
I didn’t understand the significance of this until I did the meditation.
When I was growing up, my mother made lots of money; she was really good with money.
And then one day my uncle returned from Exile and my mother started saying things like – my uncle (her brother) was more educated, had lived and studied abroad so he must be better at managing money then she was.
She gave her assets to my uncle . asked him to manage them and eventually left her job because she believed her money was in good hands.
She even cashed out her pension fund, moved in with my uncle and left her house unoccupied, with no tenants.
As all this was happening, she was using her savings to help her family out.
Unfortunately, it turned out my uncle isn’t good with money and in a short space of time my mom was broke with no income or savings.
In my teens I watched my mother’s car get repossessed when she only owed R 2 000 (US$200) on it. She’d already paid off 99% of the car but at that point in her life, she couldn’t imagine finding that amount of money.
This was a financial trauma for my 14 year old self.
I watched my mother go from being able to afford almost anything she wanted to struggling to buy food for my sister and I.
I blamed money for that and I was still angry at money for that incident.
I didn’t trust money; I saw money as an unreliable lover – he was there for the good times and pulled a disappearing act when you most needed him.
Who wants to rely on such a lover?
We go through financial traumas in our childhood and because we’re too young to process all that’s happened, we blame money and turn money into the enemy.
When I watched my mother lose everything, I came to a logical conclusion: I'll never ever let money get that close to me. I will never be disappointed by money.
It’s the same conclusion that someone draws when they’ve been hurt by a man or woman – they decide to never be hurt like that again, shut down, stop dating and they avoid falling in love.
I blocked money, stopped asking the universe for any money and made myself believe I didn’t need money to live.
The spirit of money got the message and money stayed away even when I really needed it, which only reinforced my belief that money couldn’t be trusted.
Until I saw that family trauma, I didn’t realize how deeply it had impacted me and that I was still storing it in my body.
This is why it’s so important to examine our relationship with money.
You can learn more by watching the video below and answering the following question in the comments section below:
