I’m a believer in the law of attraction- that the transfer of energy from our thoughts, affects our lives, happiness and health. It’s only logical that the same applies to our finances.
For as long as I can remember, I always thought about money negatively. “Some were lucky with it but I just wasn’t.” Even as I got older and gained independence from the environment in which I was raised, my relationship with money continued to be negative. I interacted with money behind a fearful aloofness. I relied on this strategy to protect me from the evil of money and most importantly…my lack of it.
But a couple of years ago I moved to Germany and experienced a huge mental shift. It was the second ‘shift’ that I’d experienced in my life but this one I call my financial awakening. I started to see the financial world and its languages in a way that I had not before. I started to learn things about money, savings, the economy and financial independence. Being the education chaser that I am, I started to dig deeper into that world. I quickly became “obsessed” with the topic as I began to understand more about the economic narrative at play around me. I just needed to search for tools to help me understand where I stood in that narrative.
Financial trauma had been dictating my relationship to money. This moment of realisation changed my life.
The Trigger
I started to unpack my relationship with money and came across Emilie Bellet’s book You’re Not Broke You’re Pre-Rich (link here). The first chapters of Bellet’s book helped me to organise the thoughts that had been chaotically occupying space in my mind for some time already. I was eventually able to articulate how my upbringing in a single-parent, working class, second-generation immigrant household on a council estate had indeed affected the way that I interacted with money. And it had done so in more ways than I realised. Financial trauma had been dictating my relationship to money. This moment of realisation changed my life.
My money mindset had been shaped by behaviours I’d learnt growing up. For instance, as a child I was conscious of the ways that my mother’s mother would weaponize money against me (more on this in a future post). I felt the scarcity of funds not just in my working class family but also among the families of my friends and neighbours. Money was simply scarce in my community. These realities shaped my perception of money as something highly discriminatory (against Black, brown, poor, “dysfunctional” families). I saw money as dangerous (to those without it) and damaging (also to those without it). And guess what? I was also not talking about my awful relationship with money…to anybody!
The Change
I wasn’t seeking new ways of thinking about money- but as with any awakening, it finds you. I quickly understood that I needed to confront my demons, the trauma and see myself as worthy. I had to not only confront the “evil eyes” of money but learn the rules of its game in order to defeat it and achieve financial wellbeing, independence, healing. I had to start thinking differently about money in order to be able to talk about it and not hide from it. I had to talk about money in order to attract it. I had to start attracting it in order to believe that I would attract more.
Clarity disclaimer: I am NOT suggesting that poor people are poor by choice because they have a poor money mindset. On the contrary, I believe that our destructive relationships with money are often caused or worsened by structural and institutional inadequacies. As a result, we have to unlearn what those systems have taught us and see that financial suffering is NOT our destiny.
The reinvention of my self-image from “victim of the economy” to “worthy of financial wellbeing” has significantly impacted the ways that I approach the financial world. I am now able to engage with and create opportunities more confidently. I can share ideas, seek resources, save money and…speak about it out loud. It has been an important shift that propelled me onto this journey of improving my financial education and literacy. I’m excited for this blog to help start important conversations about money, trauma and wellbeing.
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