Money is a huge trigger for many women who go through divorce. Many of us feel so much anxiety and worry around money and whether or not we will have enough at the end of the month or enough to live on. We want to feel safe and secure around money, but are at a loss on how to make this our reality.
Listen in as I teach you what money actually is, why you're feeling worry and anxiety around money and why money itself isn't capable of creating a sense of safety and security in your life. I'll give you the steps to take to understand what your relationship with money is, and how you can begin to feel safe and secure around money after divorce.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 88.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
Hello my friends. Thank you so much for being here today. I really wanted to thank each and every one of you who continues to show up and listen to the podcast each week and those of you who are sharing it and who have left a rating. Thank you so so much. Becoming You Again as you know is still in its infancy as a podcast. We are not quite at a year – still a couple of months away from being to that point and we have already hit 10,000 downloads which is so incredible. It is so much fun to see that number when I go to check and see how the podcast is growing. I have to say that putting out this podcast each week it is truly one of my very favorite things I get to do. And the fact that you are listening and learning and sharing means so much to me. So this celebration of hitting 10K downloads is as much a celebration for me as it is for you because you have made that happen. You are the ones who are showing up in listening and then doing the work in your own lives to create evolution and growth that you are seeking as you move through your divorce. I am so proud of you and I hope that you are also so proud of you. I am incredibly grateful for you each and every week when you show up and listen and so thank you. Thank you so much.
This week I wanted to talk a little about money. It’s been a while since my last money podcast and since money and divorce can be triggering for many women I wanted to teach a little more on the subject. Specifically, money safety and security after divorce.
Historically money is what was decided upon by the institutional structures to be what we use to exchange value. Before money we used the barter system, trading things like animal hides or teeth or rocks, and in some places things like actual livestock were traded. Once governmental institutions showed up paper and coins denoting certain amounts was decided upon as an easier, more universal way to exchange one value for another. Like even in today’s society this is evolving, where so much of our value transactions aren’t even with actual paper money. Like remember during the Covid lockdown nobody took cash anymore. You could not pay with cash and there was a coin shortage and everything was credit cards because it was easier and safer and there was less transferable disease should we say through the actual transferring money from hand-to-hand. So many of our value transactions today aren’t even using paper money. I know it is still out there. I still use it. I know there are many of us who still do but with credit cards and debit cards, transferring money is basically transferring numbers on screen. And we can do this through Venmo, or PayPal, or Apple pay. Even bitcoin which is another way of evolution when it comes to exchanging value for value and has nothing at all to do with paper money or coin money that it is in itself a completely different form or way of thinking about money that is evolving from the very beginning days of that bartering situation that was started years and years and years ago.
But because so many of us in Western society and in the United States especially have been raised in a capitalistic society, this has informed our beliefs that money is more a status symbol and is attached to our worth. The more money you have, the more you will be included in society and looked at as worthy, smart, lovable, successful, wanted, desired. And what’s really interesting is that western culture has also been historically built on the ideals of Christianity in some form or another, which conversely offers a completely different idea and belief about money. In the Bible it says something like money is the root of all evil for being greedy and wanting more money is evil and bad and wrong and you shouldn’t want that.
This is all to say that it is not surprising that so many of us have such a confusing, conflated relationship with money and what we make it mean in our lives. For me personally, I have been working for years to unwind the baggage that I carry with me around money. One of the very first books I read during my divorce that completely changed the way I thought about money was You Are A Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero. I had never thought about money as something that I actually had a relationship with and when I read that book I realized that I had a bad relationship with money. My relationship with money was very confusing. I was raised in a very Christian household, as you’ve heard me talk about before, I was raised in the Mormon Church and I had that idea running through the background of my mind that having money and/or wanting more made you greedy. Made you a bad person. And it meant that you were prideful and would eventually lead to doing bad things, choosing bad things for an evil life in some way.
And I also conversely had this ideal of capitalism and wanting to create more money in my life, and knowing that this was a place, this country was a place where that idea was, you know, supposed to be possible for anyone in any situation. And I had that idea in the back of my head, I have for years and years. This idea that I wanted more money in my life. I wanted to have my own successful business. I wanted to be in a situation and I continue to want to be in a situation where I am one day able to create jobs and opportunities for other women as well. Because I think that is a truly beautiful thing to aspire to and to be able to provide to other women living in this country and I am not there yet with my business but I am definitely on my way and it is on my horizon. So my money relationship has been something that I have been working on for years and I continue to work on strengthening and growing every day.
But as I was going through my divorce, I started to notice that I was putting a lot of pressure on my money relationship. I wanted enough money after my divorce so that I could feel safe. I wanted to be able to look at my bank account and feel secure and not worry that there wouldn’t be enough at the end of the month to get by. I was looking at money and saying things like, “You need to be the thing that makes me feel safe and secure in my life. I really don’t want to have to worry about money anymore.” I felt like I had been worrying about money my entire adult life and I was so tired of it. And I really wanted to change that but I did not know how. And I really wanted that safety and security that we seek when we are going through a divorce, especially as women. We want to feel safe and secure in who we are and using money as that prop was a big deal in my mind.
But here’s what I have come to learn about money. Money is not safety. Money is not security. Money cannot and does not create a feeling of safety or security within us. What’s really going on when we have “enough” money and whatever that means to you or me is different, right. But what is really going on we think that we have enough money in the bank account or the right amount coming in on a monthly basis is not an actual feeling of safety, but instead you are just not having feelings of worry or anxiety about money. It’s not feeling safe for secure, it just means you are not worried about it. You are not feeling fearful around it. An absence of worry or an absence of anxiety about money doesn’t automatically mean that you now have a feeling of safety or security around money. The absence of the worry is because you changed the way you were thinking about the money you had in your bank account or the money you have in your life currently.
So for example, if you’ve been stressing over the final divorce decree about what it will state about your child support and alimony. You get the final decree and the numbers just aren’t what you were hoping for or expecting. If you have thoughts like, I’m a stay at home mom and have been for the past 15 years and this amount just won’t cut it. You are probably going to be feeling some worry and anxiety because you’re thinking I’m not going to have enough. How am I going to do this?
And on the flip side, let’s say it’s the same situation, you’ve been worrying about the decree and what it is going to state in terms of child support and alimony you see the final numbers and think, this is great. I’ll be able to live and take care of the kids. You’re going to maybe feel relief from the worry and anxiety because you’re thinking I am going to have enough. It is going to be okay. I can do this.
But you’re most likely not feeling safe for secure. You are feeling relief or you are feeling worried and anxiety and there is a difference.
I promise you there is a woman out there who has the amount of money you have in your bank account and is worried and fearful that it is not enough and she does not feel safe and secure around her money. And conversely I guarantee there is a woman out there who has the amount of money in your account and she isn’t worried at all about her money situation. Money is not creating these thoughts and feelings for us. Often we think that it is the actual situation or circumstance of money but it is not because again money is just numbers on the screen. Money is just a piece of paper or a coin. It is what we are thinking about money that is creating our feeling inside. That is creating that feeling of relief. That is creating that feeling of worry or anxiety and so how do we create safety and security when we think about money?
Because having money doesn’t guarantee that you will never get sick. Having money doesn’t guarantee that you will live a long life. Having money holds no guarantee whatsoever that you will be emotionally safe in any way. Money can definitely make things easier. I am not denying that at all. It can make life so much easier in many practical ways but it doesn’t mean you’ll be protected from stress or anxiety, death, death of a family member, sadness, loneliness, any of those things.
So if what you are seeking is not just a lack of worry and fear and you do not want to feel just relief around money but instead a sense of safety and security for yourself when it comes to money then how can you best do that? Well you first have to look at what your thoughts about money are and really get up close and personal about your relationship with money, and then from there you want to figure out some thoughts you can think that truly make you feel secure and safe. I also think it’s a really good idea to start figuring out what safety feels like in your body and what security feels like in your body so you know, when I think this certain thing about money, I do feel safe or I do feel secure.
The first thing you need to do is start with your thoughts about money. Write them all out and there is probably going to be a lot and it is okay. What did your parents teach you about money? What did your community or your religion teach you about money? What did your spouse teach you about money? What do you think about lending money? What do you think about borrowing money? What do you think about debt? Is money or having money good or bad? Write it all out. Get it all out. Everything that you think about money in so many different situations you need to take a look at. Get it out on paper and just take a look at what your relationship with money looks like. It might be kind of like mine were you have thoughts where you want to create more money in your life and you want to find success for yourself but you also have this underlying idea that money is bad and wrong and you should not have it. And that is important for you to know because until you recognize that you have got these conflicting ideas you may not be able to move past the amount of money that you are creating in your life right now without noticing what is going on underneath.
Next start to notice any moment in your life when you feel safe and secure whether it’s around money or not. Where do you feel it in your body? What does it feel like, what does it look like? What are you thinking about when you feel safe and when you feel secure? The more aware you can be about this the easier it will be to choose thoughts around money that support being able to recreate this feeling for yourself.
Once you know where you are at and have noticed what safety and security feels like in your body, the next step is to decide on purpose what you want to think about money. You get to think anything you want about it. You may need to start with some stepping stone thoughts to help you eventually get to the thought you want to have about money, and that’s totally fine. There is nothing wrong with stepping stone thoughts. We all have to start there. Right? But choose some thoughts that feel believable and help to create that feeling of safety and security when you think about money.
For example, in my own life I notice that I feel safe and secure when I believe I am capable of creating my own financial result. Before I was able to do that for myself, I used a stepping stone thought of, other women are capable of creating their own financial result so it’s possible I can learn to do that too. So what is it for you that you can think and work to believe for yourself when it comes to your relationship with money that creates that feeling of safety and security? Brainstorm some thoughts and then pick one or two to work on believing them. It is not just this idea of picking a thought and thinking it once and oh my gosh it did not work. I do not believe it. Sometimes we have to work to create that belief and we have to think up over and over and we have to redirect and become the manager of our brain and allow that feeling to overtake our body so that we can and actually begin to go to that automatically rather than having to think it on purpose in moments. That is the ultimate goal and it is going to take time and it is going to take practice and it is okay.
Alright my friends, that’s it for today. I love you. Thank you for listening. I will talk to you next week.
If you like what you’re learning on the podcast and you’re ready to create lasting change and results in your life then you need to be working 1:1 with Karin as your divorce coach. This is where we take everything you’re learning in the podcast and 10x it with implementation and weekly coaching where you start to see change in yourself and your life immediately. To find out more about how work exclusively with Karin go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com . That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
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