When money fear strikes.....
In July I finally signed up for unemployment; which was a job in itself; as the application was extremely confusing, especially for a freelancer/student like myself. My shoe spray invention which I mentioned many months ago as the first product under 1-800 EARTH had a delay because the main ingredient (organic cane alcohol, a few other ingredients, and sustainably printed glass bottles for packaging) was unavailable or hiked up crazy prices so I decided to take a break and focus on other things, like a wonderful business course and finishing my health + detox practitioner certification.
That being said, regardless of this economic situation the world is in, up until today I have had a deep aversion to dealing with anything to do with money. I know that I am not the only person out there and I am bringing it up as this is a very important wound I hope to heal (need to heal)
...AM HEALING NOW :)
I received an answer from the unemployment yet for over 3 weeks I have avoided reading the contents of the envelope.
Why do I self sabotage by avoiding anything to do with money?
I looked at the pages but it is like my brain cannot compute dealing with it and I feel frozen.
I want to sell some stocks to buy more gold/silver before December (when I forsee the economic crash - or January... )but its like my brain cannot compute dealing with it and I feel frozen even though I literally cannot afford to ignore this specific issue anymore. AT ALL.
It has been a perverse luxury to avoid dealing with this these last few weeks but I can't anymore.
I am really honestly so amazed that this is the part of my life where I still hold so many blocks; even though I saw with my own eyes how the Law of Attraction works in 2016-2017;
On a logical level, I know that by me being so deeply avoidant of money (feeding this issue of avoidance/increasing fear energy versus action energy) I am robbing myself of time and energetically repelling money.
I just asked myself inward why I am afraid of dealing with money and I was told that it is because I equate it with responsibility and being overwhelmed by responsibility.... so rather than open the can of worms, I just avoid it.
The irony is that actually dealing with it is so much less intense or hard than the avoidance.
There are many cases where avoiding something is so much worse than dealing with it, yet the primitive parts of us cling so deeply to their primitive idea of safety that they force us to avoid it until there is no other option than to deal with it.
I am trying to deal with it today and it got me to thinking about people who have the compulsion of self-harm/mutilating one's body..... (I know that is a violent image to bring up; I send love to anyone who has dealt with that)
As someone who has come out of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and healed, what self-harm appears to me is one attempt at choosing to feel a pain that you can control - your own doing - versus pain (caused by another) which you can't control.
There was likely a period in a self-harmmer's life when they had a traumatic experience and because they didn't feel safe to feel the pain/terror of that experience, they avoided the feeling and the feeling is sitting in the body lingering, waiting to be dealt with, but because the person does not know how to access this memory (and might have even forgotten this memory, on a conscious level) they don't know how to deal with it - so harming themselves is their solution of making themselves feel a worse pain which covers up the pain of the original trauma, since they don't know how to access that original pain, which may have been in some ways 'less' painful than their current self mutiliation.
Does that make sense?
Not to make a simplistic generalization but this is kind of the same way I have treated painful conflict, especially money. I am ignoring the original pain (in this case, of money) by avoiding my original money wounds - and this avoidance is getting in the way of me moving forward in life, in a real way.
I am going to do a Gestaldt practice with myself (inner child) aka talk to her and see what is going on:
She says:
I am afraid of getting in trouble.
I am afraid of being yelled at.
She just showed me my grandmother (dad's mother) yelling at me for losing a dime in the telephone booth in New Jersey and her telling me I am an idiot. I just remember how horrible I felt and incapable of dealing with money.
I am imagining myself going into this supermarket (circa 1986) and telling baby Carlen she is not stupid she tried to put the money into the phone booth and it didn't work properly; it wasn't her fault.
She is not bad with money.
I told her that my grandmother was affected by World War 1 and the 1929 Depression and had her own trauma; she raised my father to be a scared human and her trauma has affected me too. But now it is time for a new perspective.
I just closed my eyes and allowed myself to feel the actual terror I felt when my grandmother told me I was stupid and bad with money. It felt horrible but nothing compared to the pain of potentially running out of money as an adult.
I am relearning the TRUTH that I, Carlen am not bad with money; I make good choices with money.
Proof of this is that all I have done in the last 3 years is healing myself , paying rent, paying for my car, buying organic food and vitamins, and going to various schools and donating to my church Agape which funds all of the wonderful programs they do.
I deserve to know I can now deal with my financial issues because I now know my limits and boundaries and I will not take on more responsibility than I can handle.
I will not take any disrespect from anyone, including myself (and avoiding money is a bit disrespectful to myself, from a survival standpoint/thriving standpoint)
On a subconscious level, what has happened is that I don't trust myself that if I am taking on responsibility, that I will promise myself that I will stand up for myself/set limits with myself.
Up until now, when I have had responsibility, it has always been with pain.
When I ran my jewelry company Jewish Rosaries™, I would sit for 14 hours a day making rosaries for people and my shoulders and back and brain and eyes took such a terrible beating; I equated this situation where , as a necessity to "succeed" as on paper, I had to be in pain --- I somehow believed this is what "success looked like" (having my jewelry in magazines, in stores, on television shows like THE TODAY SHOW - all made from my room with $500 investment saved up from one of my many horrible jobs) but being deeply in pain and not feeling confident enough to charge enough money for my jewelry to make it a sustainable business.
When I went on tour for standup comedy, it was because a famous comedian who got me the opportunity had a crush on me and made sexual overtures and I did not know how to handle it. On paper, this sounded like a success but it was so degrading and frustrating as I did not know how to handle this.
When I made a "successful" movie, a similar thing happened with the filmmaker and I did not know how to handle it.
When I had a job at MTV, again, the same thing.
When I worked as the vintage buyer of a store, we were not allowed to sit and I felt physically ill at the end of the day because my back hurt so much.
Everytime I have stepped into a place of responsibility, that "looks good on paper" / has led to me receiving money, I have felt violated and not known how to stand up for myself...
(In these situations and so many others; which you can read about in previous posts, which I never acknowledged publicly outside the office of my therapist until now)
But now it can be different. Now it HAS to be different.
I have invested into myself so it IS DIFFERENT NOW.
Up until now, I have equated responsibility with PAIN because I have not yet had an experience of responsibility where I am the adult in the situation and give myself boundaries and limits.
I have avoided giving myself boundaries and limits because (asking myself inward for an answer) I don't want to feel pain.
Pain from who?
Angry adults; lost and wild and boundary-less and miserable adults....
I am telling inner child Carlen that I am here with her and I will stand up to any nasty yelling adults (like Grandma Rose or anyone else) or creepy men or anyone else.
We will lovingly make things together.
Anyone who is mean to me is living in fear.
I have avoided money and responsibility and chose to live in fear of chaos and of other people's outrage fear; but we don't have to anyomre.
Fear does not stop them from being mean. It makes us a prisoner of their fear for years on end and no amount of money is worth that, right?
It is a new chapter. I genuinely feel it. Thank you to baby Carlen for her help in this post, along with 2 drops of Indica!
I hope you can sit with yourself and feel the original pain; which may be robbing you too. We are strong now! And you are not alone in this journey.
Now I will go open the envelope!
(Dopamine inducing art by this woman)
PS luxury companies trick us into equating their iconography with luxury - it is honestly so amazing how this works! It is a combination of our species' innate desire for belonging' and so much more! That is for another time! I STILL LOVE THIS SO MUCH!
5:02pm
I feel a bit high in a great way and I just ate 3 pieces of bread which George got last night from the organic supermarket dumpster; I can't believe I just ate this! Not because it is from the dumpster, but because of the gluten in this particular brand. I always avoid gluten!!! : D
I just went downstairs, enjoying every bite of this delicious wholewheat seeded-bread with vegan margarine, tomato, avocado, red onion (all organic and all from the dumpster) and began laughing about all of this, and also imagining if I had been on a dating show from the early 2000s to reel in a rich millionaire ...
I imagined a montage of scenes if I were a contestant....
Scene 1
Fellow normal female contestant rivals in the livingroom doing shots of toxic cheap vodka with the elegible bachelor and me, the only one in the bedroom, with my face to the wall, researching human design on my laptop with my headphones on, to block out the noise....
Scene 2
A hot tub scene with the sexy bachelor and I start commenting on the negative health effects of chlorine in hot water
Scene 3
Me, in a bunkbed with a sleep mask on, telling the girls they need to be quiet because I am trying to sleep.
Scene 4
A rose ceremony where I tell everyone about how most conventional roses are transported from Asia to America, using so much fuel and everyone groans.
I would be such a downer and now I finally embrace all of this.
I WOULD DEFINITELY WATCH THIS HIGHLY SENSITIVE DATING SHOW, WOULD YOU?
