Money is important--it's the grease in the economic
machine. Some of us, though, get that grease all over our clothes, hair, and skin.
When our body is overlaid with it, and every pore sealed up, the smear of cold
cash turns our humanity blue.
Money can be greasy to the touch, whether we have a lot
of it or a little. A shortage of it provides us with the opportunity to feel
deprived, refused, helpless, abandoned, unworthy and unloved. A big stash of it
enables us to feel smug, intolerant, greedy, and fearful of losing it. We can
use money to feel elation and to know despair. Like sex, romance, and food, it
offers us a smorgasbord of positive and negative emotions.
How do plain old dollar bills get so entangled in our
emotional life? All of us have unresolved conflicts in our psyche that produce emotional
and behavioral difficulties, including self-doubt. This sense that we're lacking
in value is a widespread human weakness. For many of us, it's part of our
identity. Sometimes it's just a vague, uncertain sense of uneasiness. Giving up
(or letting go of) this self-doubt can be difficult, even when we know we're
good people trying our best to do what's right.
Self-doubt can stick to us like thorns dipped in Crazy
Glue. Some people are strongly attached to the negative feeling, to the point
where it produces self-pity, depression, and despair. Often we scramble to
cover up, with psychological defenses, our attachment to (or resonance with) this
painful self-doubt. Money, it turns out, can buy a lot of self-deception--and we
don't even have to spend it. We can simply accumulate it, or we can long
desperately to possess it. The more money we have or the more we want, the more
we're using money (or misusing it) as
a prop to avoid seeing our unconscious, emotional entanglement in feelings of
unworthiness and helplessness.
In this manner, our high regard for money and our
striving to accumulate it "prove" that, in denial of the underlying reality, we're
not emotionally entangled in feelings of unworthiness. Our fondness for money, we claim, establishes
our fervent desire to feel and portray our value. The more we value money, this
rationalization claims, the more we can establish our own value by accumulating
and hoarding money and by flashing it around.
This approach, of course, rests on a thin veneer. If
the money is spent, stolen, or lost, we will easily collapse into a painful
sense of physical and emotional destitution. People can thus become highly
dependent on their wealth, and they're determined "for safety's sake" to
accumulate more.
Money is also a counterfeit coin for measuring success
and avoiding a sense of failure. Financial success can be associated
emotionally with one's alleged superiority, while financial failure (or simply
less-than-spectacular success) can be evaluated as an indication of
inferiority. On the playing field of our psyche, the desperate person slices
reality as thinly as needed to "prove" his value and feel his "power." Typical
risks associated with this measure of success include a ruthless ego, greed, a
workaholic schedule, and cold-hearted ambition.
The miserly person--the kingpin of greed--displays an
unwillingness to part with money in conjunction with an intense desire to
accumulate it. Both of these behaviors are defenses. The first proclaims, "I'm
not a weakling who can easily be separated from my money. I aggressively hold
on to it. Not even the taxing authorities can get at it." The second defense
might proclaim, in some cases, "I'm not a frightened weakling. Look at how
aggressively I go after money. My professional money managers are the best and
most aggressive in the business. I don't even care if they rob from the poor."
Deep in their psyche, though, such individuals can live in anxious fear of
being taken advantage of in money matters and losing what they do have. Their
mentality underscores the power of unresolved negative emotions to torment us--even
when all we're doing is imagining
worst-case scenarios--no matter how much (or how little) money we have.
The hurt of deprivation also comes into play. A person
can feel deprived just through the impression or the prospect of loss. Real
loss is not needed for suffering to occur. We can plunge into discontent or
distress simply by using our imagination to produce an impression that our
assets are not as significant as we would like them to be. In the process of spending
money or being asked for it, some of us can feel sharply reduced of assets, even
if the amount spent or requested is a tiny percentage of what we own. It's as
if who we are and what we have is cut in half. If, deep down, we're mired
emotionally in a devaluation of our own personhood, $50 out-of-pocket can feel
like forfeiture of a pound of flesh.
When asked for money, some people erupt in indignant
anger: "You good-for-nothing! Go out and make your own money!" Instead of calm
refusal, they express outrage. The outrage is a form of aggression that's
employed to cover up inner passivity. Money neurotics feel that the requests
made to them for money indicate that they're seen as an easy mark. No one would
dare to ask them for money, their skewed reasoning goes, if they were a more
formidable figure. The allegation that they're an easy mark comes from their
inner critic, and they absorb the negativity contained in that criticism. In
turn, they lash out critically at the one who requested the money. They also
perceive, in the moment of being asked for money, weakness in the person who requests
it, and they identify with that weakness. Their indignant anger is their
attempt to cover up that identification.
All of us can embellish on the feeling that we'll be
rendered helpless, and perhaps homeless, if we run out of money. True, if it happens
we're likely be in a messy pickle. But people who worry about running out of
money often never do. That means they worry for nothing. All their suffering is
unnecessary. Still, they're determined to suffer in this way because of the
human compulsion to feel and recycle unresolved negative emotions such as
helplessness, abandonment, and unworthiness. To stop doing this, we just have
to see more clearly into the irrationality of our worry, while exposing our
secret desire to recycle unresolved negative emotions.
