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Author Insight
Money Myths You Didn’t Know You Had
Why do people have such strange reactions when the subject of money comes up? That’s a question I started asking myself as early as 1975. Back then I was a young psychotherapist with about 5 years of experience and thrilled to be able to explore such questions. The Age of Aquarius, the seventies, was a very exciting time for the development of new ways of understanding human growth and potential. One tool was script analysis, developed in the Transactional Analysis Community. Essentially, how do we create the semi-hidden life plans that we develop as children and use as an unconscious blueprint for living our lives. Those plans are created out of both the verbal instructions from our caretakers and the things we observe going on around us and our reactions to those things. Some of my colleagues and I began examining money scripts. We asked ourselves and our clients what we had been told about money when we were children, and whether what we observed matched the verbal messages. Often, they didn’t and it was confusing. The conclusions we reached sometimes interfered with learning to manage our financial lives. What did you learn? How does it impact you now? This book will help you look at how the answers to these questions affect your life now, and what you can do to make different choices if you want to. Get started now.
Book Excerpt
Embrace Prosperity
You Need to Start Where You Are Now
If you don’t feel like you have enough money, you’ve probably learned to believe some ideas like these:
- Money burns a hole in your pocket
- The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
- You can’t win for losing
- Money is the root of all evil
- One way to lose a friend is to lend him money
- Save it for a rainy day
- Marry a rich man—or woman
- Money doesn’t grow on trees
- You spend money like it’s going out of style
- We can’t afford this
- It’s only money
Did you hear your parents, grandparents or religious institutions insist that this is the truth, even the absolute truth? How did hearing them help you learn to believe in scarcity?
Laurie: Whenever I teach a class about relieving money anxiety, the first thing I ask participants to do is create posters of statements they heard about money when they were children. We put them on the wall and refer to the statements throughout the workshop. Later, we try to answer the following questions about each statement:
- How did you learn this?
- Why did people in your environment repeat this when you were a child?
- How has this idea been useful to you in your life so far?
- Is the statement useful now?
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