October 25

There’s no real news on the American Express front. As I mentioned, it looks like it will be several days before I have anything to report. I have a call in to them, and am waiting to hear back when the gentleman I need to speak with when he returns to the office. In the meantime, I’ll talk about some other things that are going on.

Today, my wife and I had one of the most difficult conversations that a debtor and his spouse can have. You may be familiar with it: the “we don’t have enough money” conversation.

Money has a disproportionate role in a debtor’s self-esteem, because we measure our self-worth with how much money we have access to. That’s what got us in trouble in the first place; we didn’t feel we had enough money, and so we debted as a way to get access to more.

In many cases, the problem went beyond the amount of actual cash on hand. It was a deeper, emotional, even spiritual problem that led us to debt: we felt that we were not enough, because we didn’t have enough money. Then, eventually, we started to feel we were not enough, because we had so much debt. Either way, the internal belief is that we’re no good.

When you get to this point, someone telling you there isn’t enough money is like throwing gasoline on a fire. I didn’t feel like I had enough money when I first started debting, and now I feel that even more acutely, because of all our debt. So when my wife brings this up, it puts me in a bad place emotionally. I’m not saying it’s her fault; I’m just saying I wish we had more money, and I wish it didn’t bother me so much to talk about it.

Of course, everyone would like to have more money. For healthy people, this just has to do with wanting the privileges and access to goods and services that money provides. That’s normal. Not everyone is wired to equate money with self-worth. However, in today’s consumer culture, more and more of us are becoming debtors, both emotionally and financially. We borrow money on credit, so we can have things and do things we can’t really afford to do, and feel better about ourselves, at least temporarily.

For a long time now, I’ve labored under the false belief that my worth is measured by material possessions and buying power. Even after a little over a year of abstinence from debting, I’m just beginning to learn that this may not be true. Today was one of those days when I revert to my old thinking, and forget what I’ve learned. My wife told me she thought the amount of work stress I’m under isn’t worth the amount of money I’m making, and this set me off into a tailspin of perseveration.

What did she mean when she said that? I wasn’t quite sure. I thought she meant that she admired and appreciated how hard I’d been working, and that she’s glad that one day the amount of stress I experience will result in more income. She knows I’m building my career, and I suppose she’s just eager for it to pay off, which of course it will, down the road. This was all true, and I heard her on these points. But what I also heard (and this had nothing to do with what she actually said) was, “You’re not good enough because you don’t make enough,” and that kind of interpretation always causes a lot of trouble.

Luckily, I was able to nip it in the bud, and our conversation didn’t escalate into a full-blown fight. In the past, we’ve had huge blowouts over these kinds of things. Like most couples, we tend to fight about money. It’s just that I’m particularly sick around money, and so I tend to fight more often, and with more spirit, about money than about other topics.

I’ve finally learned from some of my mistakes, however, so instead of getting defensive right away, I asked some clarifying questions. I wanted to know exactly what my wife was feeling, and why; exactly what was scaring her; exactly why she felt stressed; and what, if anything, I could do about it. I tried to emerge from the debtor’s haze of vagueness, and get very specific and clear with her.

As I did this, I came to realize that I wasn’t hearing what my wife was saying, and that she wasn’t actually accusing me of anything. Despite what it felt like, I was not, in fact, under attack. So what could have been a huge fight just turned into a fairly low-tension conversation about money.

Although I’m glad we averted calamity, my brain still went to some key (and sometimes unhealthy) questions, such as: “How can I make more money? How long can she be patient with how much I make? Is there any way out of this jam? Am I bad because I don’t make more? Did I do something wrong? Would she be happier with someone who made more? Does she regret marrying me? Am I not a good man because of my debt?”

These are all painful questions. They are also very common for debtors. I’ve talked with other debtors, both by treating them as a therapist, and also being friends with them (and related to them). What I’ve learned is that, for us, money has a disproportionate emotional charge. We equate way too much of our self-worth with money. On some level, money becomes our god. We forget that money is not our Source. We forget that our true Source is infinite, and goes beyond the numbers. We get totally lost in the figures. Two key thinking errors emerge:

1) WE ARE NOT ENOUGH

and

2) WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY.

As a result of these thinking errors, perfectly innocent, nuts-and-bolts questions about money, or well-intentioned comments from one’s spouse, sound critical and demeaning. These questions can set off a shame-based set of new questions the debtor asks himself. When my wife commented that I have more job stress than someone at my salary should have (probably a correct observation), I had to stop myself from extrapolating criticism and panic from her words. I had to listen to what she was actually saying, not what my debtor’s brain was hearing.

This is not an easy task, and I’m still learning how to filter what she says so that I don’t take it personally. I have to be careful, so that when she says these things, it doesn’t make me feel worse about myself and our financial situation. She was just making an observation, and I think it was meant to be supportive. But no matter how much money I ever make, or how much or how little debt or savings we may have, I’ll always have to wrestle with my feeling of inadequacy. I’ll have to keep reminding myself that my value as a person does not come from how much or how little money I have. This isn’t easy, and it is, painful though it may be, a daily practice which every recovering debtor must undertake.

When I pray about it, the message I receive is this: “Your worth has nothing to do with your net worth (or debt), even if you feel like it does. Forget about whether you are a good person or not, and don’t equate your self-worth with how much you have. Being a good person is irrelevant to whether you are going to have to deal with the consequences of your debting.”

It’s like gravity: whether you are a good person or a bad person, you can’t jump up and not come down, and if you jump from too high up, you will get hurt. Like gravity, debting has consequences that cannot be avoided. So once you’ve created debt, you have to deal with your creation. Don’t waste any more energy complaining about it than you would about a natural law, like gravity.

At the same time, don’t think you are a bad person because you have a lot of debt or don’t have enough money. Money is a symbol, not a Source. If you can get beneath the connection between money and self-esteem, and deal with the self-esteem issue, you will eventually enjoy Abundance. At least, that’s what I suspect will happen, for you, and for me too.