Our Dance with Money

Meeting the Money Monster

The day I realised I’d been living with a monster was a shock.

I’d known it all along, of course, underneath it all… 

My monster was a Money Monster. Have you met one of those before?

It’s in the dizzy headache you get when the numbers in your bank account dip dangerously low. It's in the desperate yawning emptiness in the pit of your stomach when making up a shortfall feels like it might be beyond your powers. It’s in the bankruptcy suicide stories and the selling-of-human-parts-for-money stories…

What does Money look like in your world?

When I dared to look at mine, it looked like a sabre-toothed deep-sea creature of nightmares.

And it wasn’t just any money monster - it was MY Money Monster. My fears, my memories, my misgivings for the future, the urgings I’d heard at home and at school to learn how to “make a living or else suffer the consequences!” – they were what gave this monster its substance. I recognised myself in its make-up.

So that day, there were the two of us, staring at each other: me and My Money Monster. It dawned on me that we knew each other, after a fashion. We were in this together.

I had a relationship with Money? What a strange idea!

But now that my Money and I were staring at each other in the imaginal landscape of my mind, the idea took hold. 

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense – human beings have a habit of humanising impersonal forces, like naming storms or talking to your car as if it could understand you. There’s even a word to describe this tendency to attribute human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal, or object: to anthropomorphize.

Why not money?

The Hidden Partner: How Emotions Shape Financial Habits

We say that money is corrupt, that it makes the world go round. We credit it with huge power and influence in the human world, a participant at least on a par with 'mere humans.' We treat it as a powerful, albeit invisible, player in human affairs.

Having arrived at the realisation that money was an invisible presence in my world and that I had a kind of relationship with money, I searched for a way to explore it more. 

As a relationship coach, I’m used to thinking of relationships as a dance.

This habit grew out of the decade-plus I’d spent learning, and later teaching, Argentine Tango. I visualise situations between people, both in personal and professional settings, as a kind of slow-motion dance, a sequence of moves that weaves in the space between the ‘dancers’.

Visualising how people are relating as if it were a dance unfolding in physical space helps me to see the overall shape of what’s going on. It also reminds me that any relationship is a living-breathing exchange, not a fixed entity. At any moment, it’s amenable to change.

Visualising how people are relating as if it were a dance unfolding in physical space reminds me that any relationship is a living-breathing exchange, not a fixed entity. At any moment, it’s amenable to change.

So as I sat imagining Money and me locked in a painful, macabre dance à deux, I asked myself if there was a way to fine-tune the dance, to loosen the grip, to create more space to breathe.

But why was I thinking of money in this way at all?

Until I tried running my own business, I was convinced that my financial struggles were solely due to a lack of opportunity. As a single mom, I chose to stick with part-time admin work to ensure I had enough energy to devote to my child at the end of the day. However, those low-grade admin jobs unsurprisingly came with low pay.

With my child now grown, starting my own business seemed like a promising way to break free from my previous dead-end career. So, it was sobering when I realised that I couldn’t bring myself to set a price for the services I was offering.

I loved the idea of building a profitable, successful coaching practice. But the thought of saying those prices out loud, with actual people within earshot, was daunting.

The experience took me by surprise, leaving me feeling choked up in a major way.

I was blocked, and none of the readily available stick-on-plaster approaches (what the Barefoot Doctor used to refer to as “ra-ra coaching”, mostly telling you how you should feel and what you should think), made much of a dent in my invisible barrier.

My barrier was monumental! But I had no clue as to its nature or origin. 

And in this Money Limbo I remained for quite some time, stuck in that position, familiar to many, where expenses continue as regular as clockwork while income is a rare sight and all too swiftly gone when it does put in an appearance.

The Wall Within: understanding our psychological money barriers

Eventually I came across the Japanese 'Zen Millionaire' Ken Honda and his book ‘Happy Money’.

I felt deeply conflicted encountering the book’s message. There was a glimmer of something there, and I trusted the sensation in my gut that here was a wholesome guy speaking with sincerity. On the other hand, the phrase 'happy money' prompted a maelstrom of fury welling up inside me that blocked out most of the reassuring or inspiring messages Ken was offering. I came close to chucking the book across the room in disgust (but I love books too much, so I stayed my hand, just in time). 

Why was it so difficult for me to allow the possibility that there could be such a thing as happy money? To envision that a person could have a wholesome – perchance even happy(!) – relationship with money…

That was the moment when I committed to go on a pilgrimage to discover what lay behind my invisible Great Wall of Money, and to go beyond my barrier to discover other possibilities might exist.

Financial footprints: reflecting on past money patterns

My pilgrimage began with pondering how we get started with the whole topic of money.

If I already had acquired a barrier, long before I had ever begun thinking deliberately about money psychology, how had my barrier been formed? Where did its building blocks come from?

As soon as I began thinking about that, the obvious truth came home to me that none of us get to start from a clean slate.

By the time you reach adulthood, you have close to two decades of experiences with money already under your belt. What you made of those experiences, first as a youngster, and then as a growing adult, will have created your personal map of How Money Works. 

Famously, the map is not the terrain, because no map can ever capture the infinite richness of an actual landscape.

A map is only ever an approximation, a portrayal that leaves more out than it includes. All maps also distort, because a map is by necessity a reduction, in the same way that you can’t cram three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional page or screen. 

We know this, at least subliminally, yet we can get so accustomed to travelling by the map that it can feel like quite a wrench to question our map and look afresh at the terrain itself. 

And so it was for me. I choked up whenever I imagined myself daring to go where I had not gone before. The thoughts running through my mind at such times are typical of what people experience in front of any psychological barrier: “It might be alright for other people, but I… might not survive taking such a step!”

This visceral sense of personal and imminent danger gripped my throat, prompting me to favour any kind of detour and avoidance tactic over stepping across the invisible ‘no-go’ line on my inner map.

I couldn't help but wonder – how do such barriers get ‘installed' in the first place?

How our unspoken money rules form a wall of silence

One very important piece that goes into the making of a psychological barrier is silence. 

As families and communities talk about money, which aspects get talked about, and which get left out or go unacknowledged, almost invisible?

Whenever we leave things unspoken and unacknowledged, whether at a personal or cultural level, we create what is referred to in hypnotherapy as a 'negative hallucination'. The more familiar kind of hallucination is the experience of seeing something that isn’t there. Mirroring this, a negative hallucination is the experience of not seeing something that’s right in front of us. 

This explains why, when we try to take a step beyond our personal Great Wall of Money, it can feel intensely scary, like stepping off the edge of the world – because in some real, visceral sense, we cannot 'see' beyond its limits.

When we try to take a step beyond our personal Great Wall of Money, it can feel intensely scary, like stepping off the edge of the world – because in some real, visceral sense, we cannot 'see' beyond its limits.

As I probed deeper into where our walls within come from, it stood out to me that two things in particular reinforce the ‘travelling the map’ effect: our emotions (in the fullest sense of the word), and our sense of identity, of who we are.

Our emotional landscape

Those early experiences with money in your childhood will have come ‘packaged’ with more than simply intellectual inputs, more than just information.

When an adult is instructing a child on how to behave, what the ‘correct’ actions are when it comes to money, these instructions get delivered 'wrapped up' with the emotions the adult is feeling as they speak. As children, we’re particularly susceptible to the ‘infectious’ effect of strong emotions, and especially so from people we care about and feel connected to. 

If the predominant emotion to do with money emanating from your closest grown-ups was distress, or fear, or anxiety, or anger, or resentment, or something else, you will have felt those too.

We imprint the motions – and the emotions – as part of our efforts to learn our culture and to belong.

So the emotional tone surrounding money is shaped for you well before you can actively and independently think about money for yourself. It’s like learning a song – even before you can make out the lyrics, you can absorb the ‘tune’.

The ‘tunes’ you learn as a child will tend to become the ‘backing track’ to your encounters with money later in life, and the ‘moves’ to go with them will become the dance you know.

Identity and financial choices

Beyond giving you instructions on ‘correct’ behaviour, your adults will have also conveyed a sense of ‘who we are’ in the world. It’s striking how commonplace it is to define a person by their financial status. Fairytales demonstrate this, often in the very first line, e.g. “There was once a rich man who had three daughters.” 

So, how your family was positioned financially will have informed your sense of who you are, which then tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whether it’s 'we’re poor but decent folk' or 'we’re okay but need to constantly strive to avoid sliding downhill', or any of a thousand other possible permutations, your ‘place on the map’ gets repeatedly reinforced, and will tend to become your Comfort Zone, where you know and love the people, the places, the activities, and even the emotions.

You know the lyrics and the tune for this ‘song’, and there is a certain level of comfort in that familiarity. This is why someone who grew up in a family who experienced, to take just one example, repeated boom-and-bust cycles may unwittingly mimic the familiar pattern when they grow up. Its very familiarity will feel reassuring, that you know where you are.

Applying this lens to myself, I recognised that 'who I was' in my dance with money at that point was a Scrounger, scraping by the best she can, devoting most of her energy to hunting out bargains and making do.

This was where I’d developed the greatest savvy, so that lots of my habits were geared to supporting that life-style and that way of going about things.

Other options for action, such as having a go at enlarging my income, seemed unreachable, unthinkable, altogether beyond a Scrounger’s powers.

From Battle to Ballet: Transforming the Money Relationship

In case the above seems to imply that your childhood will have set you up with a ‘one-note drone’ in terms of your emotions around money, that would be as misleading as calling someone an ‘angry person’. Behind any such label lives a complex and nuanced reality, yet it is this very complexity that can make any efforts to unpick what’s going on for you around money so disorienting and perplexing.

The best we can hope for, when speaking in generalised terms, is to identify the predominant refrain in the complex interweavings of your ‘money song’. 

How could one do this?

Attachment theory, proposed by the British psychologist John Bowlby in late 20C, provides a way to map the prevailing patterns in our inter-personal relationships. 

Attachment theory postulates that our experiences early in life prompt us to form an impression of how relationships work, especially where receiving care and attention are concerned. Based on these impressions (which are often deeply buried in our memory banks), we develop a style of interacting with those who act as our sources of care and nourishment. 

If we’ve experienced them as warm and dependable, we will tend to feel relaxed even when connection and care are temporarily interrupted.

If the care and attention we’ve experienced has been warm but precarious, we’re likely to feel cautious around forming strong bonds in future, e.g. by getting anxious whenever the connection appears in danger of being severed, or by blowing hot-and-cold, attempting to care less about the connection being sustained.

If we form the impression that our main sources of care are distant or uncaring, we may build a habit of keeping our distance.

Since money acts as a conduit for care, providing for our needs in different ways, it makes sense that we may similarly develop patterns in how we go about money in our lives.

I’ve created a short money-themed test (based on Attachment theory) that highlights the most common patterns of how we feel and act in relationships:

• Detached (distant and distrustful)
• Clutching (close but uncertain)
• Hot-and-cold (come close, run away - on repeat)
• Warm and steady (trusting and relaxed about oneself and the other, trusting of the consistency of the connection)

When I first scored my own patterns with money, I could not deny the truth of what the diagnostic revealed: I’d been keeping as far away from money as I could manage without actually starving.

Having ‘seen’ my Money Monster, this pattern made sense: why would anyone want to spend time in close proximity to that? 

I was learning about where I was at, but I was yet to figure out how to reshape the landscape and liberate myself.

Living the dance

It helps to recognise that we receive early priming for our dealings with money, which can exert a powerful influence on our later actions.

We all experience an introduction to money in childhood that foregrounds some emotions over others, and inculcates in us the sense that we each belong to a specific category of people defined by money, which then shapes aspects of our identity.

What does all this amount to?

By the time you finish school, you will have formed a relationship with money that was shaped and informed by your family and your community, and this relationship is framed and maintained by powerful emotional experiences and personal bonds.

Does that mean that your future is determined by your past?

My answer is an emphatic No.

What it does mean is that ‘switching tunes’ may involve a fair amount of soul-searching to find ways to metabolise the ‘molecules of emotion’ that your body will have stored that encourage you along some paths and veil others from you. It may take more than an intellectual enquiry, as it’s likely in addition to demand emotional courage and interpersonal savvy.

If your past does not determine your future, if it’s possible to re-shape and transform the relationship you’ve formed with money so that new scenarios for your future begin to feel both plausible and achievable, how might you begin?

New rhythms: psychosynthesis and financial healing

One approach to transforming relationships is to seek out new experiences in a way that engages directly with our psychology.

I knew already that I had poured all of my painful and frightening experiences with money into the image of a nightmarish monster. Was there a way for this to change, so that I could feel more at ease and access my intelligence more readily when it came to dealing with money?

Psychosynthesis psychology provides a useful lens for working with such inner 'monsters'. In Psychosynthesis, a portion of the psyche that has “cocooned” away so that it operates semi-independently is described as a 'sub-personality' (not to be confused with split personality or dissociative disorder). 

A sub-personality is commonly compared to a subroutine in a computer programme, which operates within its own parameters, and is only activated in specific circumstances or contexts.

In a similar way to a computer programme containing multiple subroutines, your psyche can contain contradictory perspectives which can each exist in their own ‘bubble’, without much dialogue or interaction between them. Once such a subroutine has been activated, it is difficult to control it using ordinary thinking processes or willpower; it can feel as if the 'monster' has taken over.

We form a sub-personality in an effort to cope with some psychologically challenging circumstance. But the sub-personality can continue to exist and activate, even after the circumstances that originally prompted us to form it have ceased to exist.

We form a sub-personality in an effort to cope with some psychologically challenging circumstance. But the sub-personality can continue to exist and activate, even after the circumstances that originally prompted us to form it have ceased to exist.

Think of a tall person who’s had to stoop every time they walk through a squat doorway. They may continue to duck down automatically even when stepping through a taller doorway.

In addition to describing the phenomenon of sub-personalities, Psychosynthesis psychology provides a blueprint for reversing the process of 'cocooning.'

By re-accessing the original wholesome content of the ‘bubble’, we can bring about a swift positive shift in mental outlook and the person’s overall emotional and somatic state. Once the ‘bubble’ has been reintegrated, the subroutine has been dismantled and does not reoccur. The psychological impulses which had been distorted within the bubble get restored to serving their original, life-affirming purpose.

That said, people can and do make psychological shifts with no professional-level skills or input. 

I said earlier in this piece that I’d been oblivious to psychology and money having anything to do with each other, but that’s not the whole truth...

The joyful choice: discovering love and money through my child’s eyes

Imagine a windy English June day, and a tiny tot fresh from an outing at the swimming pool. 

“Can I please have a ride, Mummy?”

I turn around and spot what he’s talking about: a bumper car ride. Damn! The trip to the swimming pool has already claimed a hefty chunk of the meagre allowance we have to manage on each week. Almost reflexively, I say No. 

 “Please, Mummy!”

The voice 'at my shoulder' insisting that I need to preserve the fiver in my wallet because it has to last us till the end of the week is familiar. It’s my voice, and I know well its constant refrain: “Save it for a better use.” 

But this time, suddenly, I hear those words afresh. And I dare to talk back. “What better use can you name than granting this little lad a moment of childhood?”

Tears are welling up in my eyes. I’m remembering myself as a seven-year-old, gazing longingly at a bumper car ride, long ago and far away, but still so vivid to my heart.

I brace myself to open my wallet, and stare at that last fiver. 

“Mummy, please?”

I hand him the fiver and he runs off, gleeful in the sunshine. I stand shrouded in gloom and fear, doing my best (badly) to nod and smile to his joy.

I’ve never regretted it.

And I have yet to find a better use for a fiver.

I made a shift that day, by challenging the Rules of Money that I’d formulated for myself and that I’d been living by. I shifted my identity, going from 'Scrounger' to 'Loving Mum who will scrimp and save to bring her child the best she can'.

I chose to let Love lead the way.

Stepping into Growth: Embracing Financial Change

In leaving behind the 'Scrounger', I’d managed to adjust my compass so that my financial priorities got more in line with my determination to do the best by my child that I could. But, as you already know, my second self-definition of Loving Mum wasn’t going to get me into the space of being able to build a prosperous coaching practice.

What would?

I first tried going the intellectual route. I worked to educate myself, I read books on finance and money history. It was a riveting experience, but it had limitations. Exploring other maps of How Money Works introduced me to new ideas, yes, but that’s often not enough to reformat convictions forged in the fire of intense emotional and visceral experiences.

I got better informed, but it didn’t change how I felt about money. It still seemed threatening and ferocious, and I still felt mostly frightened and helpless.

I next searched for a way to change my inner portrait of money, in the hope that this would also help me transform my portrait of myself. Casting around for other ways to transform my perspective, ways that could get more directly at the emotional layer, I wondered "What would make my Money smile?” 

Just the question itself felt so… bracingly odd.

Could my Money smile? Ever?

Imagine a deep-sea monster grinning… The picture my mind painted wasn’t all that enticing!

Eventually, I concluded that the only way out was through. I had to go back to the scene of that strange ‘Margarita v Money Monster’ dance.

Confronting the Money Monster

You’ll recall that Money had been represented in my mind's imaginarium as something vicious and inexorable, inhuman and inhumane. And who was I in relation to this towering, overwhelming giant? I was a cowering scared child, tiny in comparison. 

Fortunately, I was already a Dragon Whisperer, by way of Psychosynthesis psychology.

In my coaching work, I’d used the blueprint for working with sub-personalities to coax clients’ inner 'monsters' to reveal their hidden gold. So I knew the Big Secret shared by all such 'monsters': a monster is an outcast, rejected and unacceptable, beyond the pale. 

Love is the answer to its anguish. 

I knew the Big Secret shared by all such 'monsters': a monster is an outcast, rejected and unacceptable, beyond the pale. Love is the answer to its anguish.

I knew that my Money Monster, too, was capable of tears and laughter. And of feeling relief. And of transforming when that relief hit just the right spot. Because it was, underneath it all, human. It was me.

I had to find ways to get love delivered directly to those rejected and dejected parts of me that kept singing the old ‘tunes’ of anguish and distress so insistently that they wouldn’t (or couldn’t?) let them fade out and be replaced with something fresh and new.

Did I manage to land in Happy Money territory in one giant leap? Did I manage to transform my Money from a fang-mouthed creature to a benevolent luxuriant Goddess of Abundance in a few deft moves?

That would make a superbly neat story, but it would also be too simple.

In truth, my Money turned first into a stingy, withholding 'old spinster aunt' with perennially pursed thin lips. The new image felt true for now, although I still felt the longing to discover a Goddess of Abundance.

That said, reclaiming Money as 'of human' did make it possible for me to ask my ungenerous Auntie Money, in my imagination, what would make her smile. “Joy” was her immediate reply – so unexpected, yet so obvious.

And who did I become, once my world within was freed from the domination of the Money Monster? Who did Scrounger Margarita become, once her Money Monster had transformed into Auntie Money?

I became an Apprentice Magician, still on a mission to find more ways to let rays of love reach the deeper recesses of my inner world, the places that still occasionally cause my Auntie Money to tighten her lips and chant her miserly ‘Money Says No’ refrain.

My pilgrimage in the inner landscape of money continues – it is far from over.

A new dance with money

Even as I help others explore and expand their personal money universe, mine is also a work-in-progress. I still bump into pockets of stored-up pain, left over from days when I ‘packaged’ it away, to be dealt with when I would have more resources and savvy. And I still continue to explore what success means to me, how I want it to fit into my life, and what definition of money will ring the truest.

But there are also signs of progress.

More and more, I feel, at the gut level, that I don’t need to race or to brace. Other options for how to be in the money landscape are becoming accessible, tangible and possible.

I’ve opened up enough space to be able to name a price to potential clients, and I have added the experience of hearing “Great, I’ll send the money over" and "Thanks! I’m so excited to work with you!” to my bank of lived experiences.

It’s progress and that’s good enough for me for now, because we often need to transition in our lives in the way terrain does – by landmarks, by degrees, one step at a time through a gradually changing landscape. 

There is obviously a lot more to our collective social history with money.

It’s worthwhile to explore how our culture’s dance with money evolved to become what it is today, and the rich variety of nuances in how we, individually and collectively, do money.

That said, for me the most interesting and compelling story is the one yet to be written. 

My search to understand how and why we got here is ever in the service of opening up space for what we – you, me – would love to create next. 

The dance continues.

How do we each expand our options so that we can weave new tunes into our Money Song, and dare to make new moves in our Money Dance?

The path I’ve travelled has convinced me that such transformations are engendered by new experiences spanning the full musical range of being human:

• the ‘top notes’ of new ideas, new perspectives, the thinking and spiritual levels,
• the ‘mid-range’ of the emotions; and
• the lower, ‘base notes’ of the visceral, in-the-body level – our dance.  

What if you could re-enchant money? 

What if money could be reclaimed as something human? 

What if your dealings with money could become a beautiful dance? 

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