Many of us want to improve our well-being. But efforts do not bring results. It seems that everything is working against us: the crisis, loan payments, sudden expenses. I don’t have enough money, I want more... Or maybe I just don’t want it?
In this article we will tell you:
- Attitudes that prevent you from earning money.
- How parents convey to us their attitude towards earning money.
- Why are we sometimes afraid of money?
- How do traumatic events affect our relationship with money?
- How to understand your attitudes: practice.
“It’s better to be healthy and rich than poor and sick!” is an obvious statement that is often said ironically. But who would have thought that the obvious is actually not for everyone.
No, we are not talking about those who choose asceticism in search of their spiritual path. There are many ordinary people among us who seem to want material growth, but in fact... don’t want it.
Sometimes we ourselves don’t even realize how much we are afraid of money. After all, big money means big changes in life, big responsibility, and perhaps also changes in relationships with others. On this score, a huge number of attitudes have formed in our heads that play against financial success.
We talked about this with three practicing psychologists and psychotherapists, specialists in working with the financial sector.
Attitudes that prevent you from earning money
We asked psychotherapist Ksenia Blinova, who has been working as a financial and business consultant for more than 10 years, and psychologist Ekaterina Oksanen to highlight the most popular negative attitudes regarding money that experts encountered in working with clients.
It turned out that different people at the top have the same beliefs. Here they are:
- Money is a shame, it’s bad for yourself to take money.
- Me and money are not meant for each other.
- I'm a poor man.
- Money is dangerous, something bad will happen to me.
- Money spoils people.
- We didn’t live richly, there’s nothing to start with.
- You can't get rich honestly.
- Success attracts envy; it’s better not to stand out.
- All rich people are swindlers, swindlers and thieves.
- Money leads to conflicts in the family. Either money or love.
- Money comes only through very hard work.
- I can't earn more than my parents.
- Without connections there is no money.
- There is not enough money for everyone.
Such attitudes can manifest themselves, for example, in laziness, which prevents us from earning more. However, when we have a fear of success or active negative attitudes about money, our difficulties can look not just like laziness, but even more often as chronic bad luck, lack of job offers, sudden expenses immediately after earning something.
For example, we are offered a good job, and we suddenly feel that we have absolutely no energy to complete it (although before that we had enough energy for everything).
Or, in order to receive a substantial amount of money, we need to draw up some documents, but we constantly postpone this process, we always don’t have time.
Or we receive a large sum, but immediately spend it in stores on things that we actually don’t really need.
Treatment of phobia
Treatment for a phobia begins with recognizing the problem. As long as a person justifies his own irrational behavior, he will not be able to part with fear. Cognitive behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis are used in the treatment of chrometophobia.
Harmony between mind and body will help you get rid of the problem. It is important for the patient not to be left alone with his fears. Support from family is the key to a quick recovery. Therapy excludes drug treatment (tranquilizers and strong sedatives are prescribed only in cases where the phobia directly threatens the life and health of the patient).
How parents convey to us their attitude towards earning money
For financial success, love for your business is very important, which attitudes can also block.
Family history plays a role here, in particular, parents’ attitude to money and work. Did they enjoy their activity? Did you bring money into the house with difficulty or ease? How exhausted were you?
If our parents have suffered at work all their lives, we are unlikely to think that work is healthy and good. But without love for your business, it is extremely difficult to achieve financial success.
What does it take to love your job? The following beliefs:
- I love what I do.
- I am a professional in my field.
- The world needs me and the results of my work.
There is another extreme: our parents were so passionate about making money that they paid almost no attention to us. Then a dislike for money could also take root in our heads, or rather, a deep resentment towards work, because it actually took away our time with loved ones. Sometimes we decide to at all costs not be as workaholic as mom or dad, so as not to repeat their mistakes in relation to our children.
Psychotherapist Ksenia Blinova confirms that most often the fear of money, the fear of becoming rich are associated with negative attitudes put into our heads before the age of 10. This could be a family attitude, regularly repeated phrases by one of the significant adults, their examples. A child unconsciously develops a picture of the world that is quite difficult to change in adulthood. After all, it’s easier for us to rely on something understandable, on something already accepted by our psyche.
3 important steps
which every woman should go through
Anika Snagovskaya
Author and presenter of women's trainings on harmonizing feminine energy. Master of removing limiting beliefs and master of constellations.
I have prepared three lessons for you that will help you better understand yourself, remove the restrictions that prevent you from feeling loved and living happily.
01
Video lesson with meditation: 5 states of femininity
You will learn about 5 female states that exist in every woman, how they manifest themselves and which archetypes are most manifested in you and which are not developed.
02
Video lesson + meditation: How to let go of past relationships
I’ll tell you what you need to do to free your heart from old feelings and break the energy threads connecting you with your past partner.
03
Audio recording: Neuro-af
Thanks to this neuro-affirmation, you can regain self-love and feel sincere gratitude and happiness for every day.
✕
Top 3 useful materials that will help you know yourself better
And start a new, happy life for yourself.
Video lesson with meditation: 5 states of femininity
Video lesson + meditation: How to let go of past relationships
Audio recording: Neuro-af
Take your gifts!
Now let's give a couple of examples from life.
Story 1: “Money is a shame, it’s bad for yourself to take money.”
This attitude appeared in a little boy when he decided to go into “business” at school: he sold his homework to his classmates. The teacher called the parents to school and shamed the mother and child. The mother could not withstand the pressure and also shamed the boy using her negative attitudes. A family council of relatives added fuel to the fire of children's shame, where the whole family once again condemned the boy's behavior. This is how the attitude was formed: “I can’t take money for my work, for my idea, for my product - it’s a shame, it’s not accepted.”
There are a lot of stories like this about children who wanted to sell the results of their work (drawings, crafts, chips, homework), but received negative feedback from adults. Most often, it is they who form the attitude that “it’s a shame to take money.”
Story 2: “I am a poor man.”
The girl really wanted a new beautiful phone, like her classmates. But my mother said: “I won’t buy you a phone, because we have a poor family and no money.” One of my classmates carelessly asked: “Oh, you don’t have a phone, are you poor?” This is how the label “I’m poor” stuck, which suggests a certain doom. After all, a poor person is a person who almost never has money, this is not about temporary financial difficulties, this is an attitude towards the future: there is always no money.
Of course, there are situations when there really is no opportunity to buy something. And here the task of parents is not to generalize this experience for the child, but to provide “loopholes” so that the general attitude “I’m poor, this is forever” does not form. For example: “Now we are buying new clothes, we have money for them, this is cool. We’ll buy a phone later” or “Let’s think about how you can earn money for it yourself. Do you want to try?".
But we talked about another popular attitude: “Me and money are not meant for each other.” Does it also come from childhood? Not always. Often this attitude is formed in adulthood, when some methods of generating income have already been tried, but they did not work. Then the idea arises that we are simply not created for money: “Someone is created, but I am not.” But this is a broad setting, which may also hide deeper ones, because something is definitely preventing you from earning money.
Or maybe, having earned money, we are afraid of losing our dreams and interest in life? Will we have nothing left to strive for? Or do we just not know how to live with money?
Why are we sometimes afraid of money?
Let's imagine that we earned a lot of money and bought what we wanted. What's next? What will we do when we cover all our essential needs? Will we really have nothing left to dream about?
Our psyche is very afraid of emptiness, so it is necessary to always have some plans for life. Doing nothing with money will not work. They need to be constantly put into action, otherwise there will be no flow. Even just large purchases entail an increase in responsibility: the car needs maintenance, the house needs repairs, etc. Any capital needs to be taken care of.
Useful tips
Pretty soon you will notice that financial flows are steadily coming in and increasing if you turn your head at the right moment and bring your plan to a victorious end. If it is impossible to get rid of the fear of parting with a certain amount of money on your own, you will have to undergo a course of psychotherapy or hypnotherapy. Features of the techniques are presented on this channel.
We must remember that the path of an investor is difficult and thorny. It will take a lot of effort to achieve your goal. Without regular large deposits, it will not be possible to become a permanent and real investor, despite all your efforts. When choosing this path, it is recommended to move on to simpler, less profitable and less risky ways of earning money.
How traumatic events affect our relationship with money
Psychologist and business consultant Leonid Kulik talks in detail about how traumatic events experienced can make us consider ourselves unworthy of financial well-being and form incorrect attitudes about ourselves that affect financial success.
Psychological trauma is severe emotional stress from some external event (or series of events, because in the case of trauma regularity plays a significant role), which caused intense experiences that exceeded our adaptive capabilities.
The trauma in this case is not necessarily related to money, it can be any traumatic events that led to the conclusion: “I don’t deserve good things. If the world treats me this way, it means I’m bad.”
The source of such events could be child-parent relationships, when parents showed their love “crookedly”, often punished, led an antisocial lifestyle, ignored, and did not give the right to make mistakes.
If a child is harshly punished or ignored as a child, he will not blame his parents. He will believe that his parents are doing this because there is something wrong with HIM. He is bad and does not deserve to be treated differently, EVERYONE should treat him that way.
Money is a unit of exchange. When we enter adulthood, we begin an exchange with the world. We tell the world: “I am ready to do something, and you give me something in return.” And often the price in this exchange is determined not by market mechanisms, but by internal ones.
If a person is determined that he is one of those who will not earn more, for example, 30 thousand, then he will filter out all offers related to big money.
A person with low self-esteem will find hard work for little money. And having received money for his honest work and time spent, he will feel that it is just luck that will not happen a second time, and will be afraid to spend it. He will also be afraid of a promotion at work, and believe that he cannot cope with such responsibility and higher demands.
In the case of trauma, developing an adequate attitude towards money and oneself requires more serious internal work - psychotherapy. “Home” work with settings is unlikely to help here.
Fear of spending more even if income increases
A person with a scarcity mindset is prone to unhealthy hoarding. If he starts earning more, this does not mean that his spending will increase. Such a person can tighten his belt even tighter and begin to live in conditions of austerity, because the passion for hoarding has awakened in him: he saved a million, and now he wants two. Two appeared, now you need to earn three, and so on. A person does not realize that money is created in order to spend it. He is obsessed with seeing big numbers in his bank account balance.
How to understand your attitudes: practice
If attitudes against financial growth have become entrenched in our heads, we will unconsciously do everything to ensure that money passes us by. That’s why it’s so important to discover our attitudes and at least realize that we have them. To work independently, we suggest taking the following steps:
Step 1. Write down on a piece of paper everything that comes to mind regarding money and wealth (quotes, phrases of loved ones, images of rich people), without filtering the bad and the good, but honestly absolutely everything. By the way, if a task causes difficulties, this is also a demonstration of our attitude towards money).
Step 2. Opposite each phrase, write how it is reflected in your life now. For example, if we have the conviction that we don’t need to spend money on ourselves, then we save on things that can bring us joy, we save a lot or give to others.
Step 3. Think about how we would behave if we believed not in these negative attitudes, but in others that lead to success. What would we do if we allowed ourselves success? How would our environment, schedule, and everyday life change? These changes are instructions for overcoming difficulties.
Having carried out such a thorough analysis, many things will become clearer to us. And what we understand, we are able to change. At a minimum, choose new beliefs about money, write them down on paper, and try to live according to these beliefs for at least a week.
Manifestation of phobia
A complex psycho-emotional state is expressed by acute symptoms. Gradually a person becomes hostage to fear. Chrometophobia manifests itself:
- panic attacks;
- trembling in the lower and upper extremities;
- dizziness and headaches;
- aggressiveness;
- irritability;
- alienation.
A phobia can manifest itself in the rejection of a threat. For a person, contact with money (your own or others) is a great stress. His heart rate increases (against the background of this symptom, tachycardia gradually appears), and sweating increases. It is difficult to gather and concentrate; all thoughts are aimed at avoiding the situation.
Alienation and isolation require a reason. Against the background of chrometophobia, social phobia, fear of contact with people, and hypochondria develop. The fear of getting sick or infected applies to money of any type and denomination. A person with suppressed fear is unable to be in public places without panic or hysteria.
