Why We Turn Money into the Enemy (& How to Stop) Part 2

Abraham Lincoln once asked, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

I love this quote because it implies that there’s no such thing as an enemy and every enemy is a potential friend.

This is true even of money. You can destroy money as an enemy by turning money into a friend.

When we hate money, we give money power over us.

All that energy spent hating money, blocking money and blocking ourselves from making money and going after our dreams because we could make money or need money, is so exhausting.

Wouldn’t it be better to take that energy and use it to expand into the people we really want to be?

In last week’s blog post I spoke about how we turn money into an enemy when we blame money for the pain it caused the people we love.

In this week’s blog post I want to talk about the second reason we turn money into the enemy.
 

We turn money into the enemy when we realize that having money can cause us pain
 

Money is scary to many people. People have many limiting beliefs about money, people who have money or who have an open money flow.

Having money can give rise to jealousy and cost us our relationships.

I had a vivid memory of of this during one of the Creating Money Magic Meditations.

I had a memory of my maternal grandmother's funeral, in the memory I can hear my cousins shouting and asking why my sister and I got to go to private schools when my grandmother spent her last days in a public hospital.

Instead of everyone mourning and remembering my grandma, my family was fighting about how money was spent and how she should have been taken to a private hospital.

Nobody pointed out that our schooling was being paid for by my dad, that these were his ex-in-laws and he had no financial obligation towards them.

In my meditation I saw how in that moment I made a decision about money – I decided that having money and having access to things makes people hate you.

I decided that it was wrong to have something that someone else doesn’t have.

I remember thinking – I don’t want something if it's only going to bring me pain and make others hate me for having it.

I made this decision because I wanted so badly to belong and my cousins often accused me of not thinking like them or seeing the world the way they did, which made me feel like an outsider.
 

we reject money in order to be part of a tribe and belong
 

I desperately wanted to blend in with my mom's family but unfortunately for me, most of the people on that side of my family aren’t very good with money.

So I chose to blend in by blocking money and without realizing it I turned money into the enemy.

Added to that was the fact that my one cousin would often beat me because he felt I was trying to make myself better than everyone else.

The message that I got during these incidents was that it was wrong to aspire to be better or want more. I learned that it wasn’t safe to be visible or different from others.

This belief held me back financially and it held me back in business because as soon as I tasted success, I’d lose friends,  withdraw into my shell and start panicking because success didn’t feel physically or emotionally safe.

we hold ourselves back financially to make the people around us feel comfortable so we don’t lose their friendship and support

In this case money becomes the enemy because having money can cause the people around us to treat us differently.

And worse – it can change us.

We suddenly develop new interests, most of which cost money to sustain, which can make some of the people close to us feel abandoned and lost.

I’ve seen this in life, which is why I’ve become an advocate for finding our tribe so we can give ourselves permission to thrive and know that it’s okay to play big and ask the universe for more.

Humans are by nature tribal creatures and a huge part of us wants to feel like we belong and forming our own tribe can give us that sense of belonging.

I explain all this in the video below:

What decisions have you made about money and how are you turning money into the enemy?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.