The Money Trap
Stabilizing hard-to-break patterns with practical, real-world financial solutions designed for clarity and soul-level progress. Explore insights and excerpts from the acclaimed exploration of our psychological relationship with money.
Excerpts & Articles
Compulsive Spending
Compulsive spending and compulsive debting are a very effective way of keeping unwanted feelings at bay. They are, like any addiction, an attempt to manage anxiety, and to find a way to feel good about yourself. Essentially, compulsive spending and compulsive debting are a defense, a comprehensive system designed to avoid psychic pain. Spending and buying bind anxiety, give a little ego boost, and produce the momentary illusion that all is well. And, of course, there is that extra added attraction for the spender and debtor–that all the spending and buying is meant somehow to demonstrate how worthwhile they are, something in their deepest reaches, they do not believe.
Carl Jung once said that he considered addiction to be a form of low-level spiritual quest. The core of the problem, he said, was not with the substance. The substance was simply the symptom of underlying emotional problems–what he called spiritual imbalances. That is why addictions are progressive. The ante keeps getting raised. Because what is sought is not what is missing, there can never be enough of it.
Money and Recovery
Money is particularly troublesome for people in recovery. Addicts of all stripes often have stubbornly entrenched money problems long into their recovery from other addictions. I know of no surer route to depression and despair for a recovering addict than chronic and baffling trouble with money. I regularly field calls from people with five, ten, twenty-five years of recovery who are at their wit's end about money and work.And it's not just the bill collectors who are demanding reparations, their intimate relationships bear the brunt as well. Despite profound changes in most areas of their lives, addictive money problems continue to occupy a fortified position.
The phenomenon of switching addictions is well know, of course. Addiction has been likened to a ten-headed dragon: once you think you've cut off its head, another one pops up for you do battle with. One of the dragons is money. After all, not only do addictions switch but they also coexist, and different ones become ascendant at different times.
The fact of dual and triple addiction is well established as well. Most addicts have some chronic problem with money while in recovery from other addiction(s). The process addiction problems of food, money, and relationships in particular tend to cluster together. For some the money stuff really does resolve as they stay committed to their recovery. For others, though, money problems become deeply impacted, and the confusion and despair they cause may be the most painful and protracted difficulties in their lives.
Even Bill Wilson continued his struggles with money into sobriety. "Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us" is one of the promises in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. It does tend to be particularly elusive to many. If you are one of those in recovery and suffering with a money disorder, this particular promise doesn't come to pass without specialized help. The fundamental idea of turning your will and your life over to a higher power has a hard time holding for this group when it comes to money.
Adding to the problem can be the wisdom of twelve step programs themselves. At least the wisdom as it is passed on informally by sponsors and fellow travelers. The idea that if you stay sober and do the steps all else will come into line turns out to be true only for some. Consider the case of someone with a severe case of anorexia nervosa. Can you imagine that not drinking, going to meetings, and doing the steps in AA would also take care of the problem? Not likely. And addiction counselors themselves adopt a sometimes similar approach that if you are vigilant enough in your recovery and treatment that all the money stuff will work itself out. It tends not to until addressed directly.
Yes, of everyone walking through the doors of AA, for example, most of them will have some difficulty in their financial life but perhaps half or so will work through that stuff organically as their recovery takes shape. Another quarter of them will struggle with that part of their life, a thorn in their side, difficult to manage in therapy, difficult in their relationships. The final quarter will find their money trouble very deep rooted indeed. Very often for that last quarter, their very recovery itself is threatened and their suffering very real, indeed. That ease and serenity their fellow AA'ers seem to have all around them remains tantalizingly close but ever elusive.
Money and Psychotherapy
The problem with psychotherapy for people with chronic money problems is that it can be uncommonly frustrating for both the patient and the therapist. Beside the money or work obsession, people with chronic money problems exhibit mostly the same symptoms others generally seek therapy for: fear, anxiety, problems with relationships, feelings of alienation, a lack of integrity, of integration. Relief is sought from psychic pain. Initially, those with chronic money problems may find the process of talking in therapy comforting and helpful. But, over time, the psychotherapeutic process can fail a deep-seated money problem.
What happens is that fears and complaints about money tend to take center stage at each therapy session. The obsessive worry about money, about their particular financial bind, or work. If the therapist doesn't have a practical or quick solution to offer for the money or work problem, the patient might find the entire enterprise to be a colossal waste of time. Eventually, as the therapist fails to offer practical solutions, the dam finally breaks. "I don't care where this all came from or why I do it--I need help now. I can't even pay your bill!" Any attempt by the therapist to draw the focus back to underlying emotional terrain is met with roadblocks.
This might sound like any typical resistance in therapy. But it is not. Most resistance is just that, resistance. And it is an integral part of the work.Patients and therapists alike get confused because struggles with work, money, relationships, and meaning are the very stuff of therapy to begin with. But here, until the nuts and bolts of chronic money prolems are addressed, this material serves as a distracting smokescreen. Therapy for those with chronic or obsessive money problems is like that with any addict-without addressing the addictive nature of these problems directly, the therapy hasn't got too much of a chance. Hoping the financial matters and obsession with them will go away with enough insight is exactly like hoping an alcoholic will stop drinking after he gains enough insight. As well know, it simply does not work that way.
Depression and chronic money problems: which came first?
Depression can often be found in lock-step with chronic money problems. It is never easy to tease out which came first: did a depressive episode trigger an intense response attached to money, or did the chronic money stuff cause the depression in the first place? I'm not convinced it would be all that instructive to learn the answer. The difficulty is similar to distinguishing whether a psychosomatic symptom came first, or the fear attendant with it actually caused the symptom in the first place. Suffice it to stay, they often come in pairs.The divide in the psyche/soma is as permeable and fluid as the financial/emotional divide in chronic money problems.The great problem with depression and chronic money problems is that they feed off each other. and make it much more difficult to treat either one. "Ho win the world will I ever solve my money problems when I fall so easily into depression?." "And my money problems are the biggest part of why I get depressed in the first place."
When chronic money problems take center stage in therapy, then the moments carrying all the meaning will be the moneys about money. Unfortunately, by that point, achieving any real traction in the therapy may have become unlikely unless the compulsive cycle is broken.