Ep #88: Money Safety and Security After Divorce | Becoming You Again Podcast
Money is a huge trigger for many women who go through divorce. Many of us feel so much anxiety and worry around money and whether or not we will have enough at the end of the month or enough to live on. We want to feel safe and secure around money, but are at a loss on how to make this our reality.
Listen in as I teach you what money actually is, why you're feeling worry and anxiety around money and why money itself isn't capable of creating a sense of safety and security in your life. I'll give you the steps to take to understand what your relationship with money is, and how you can begin to feel safe and secure around money after divorce.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again episode number 88.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
Hello my friends. Thank you so much for being here today. I really wanted to thank each and every one of you who continues to show up and listen to the podcast each week and those of you who are sharing it and who have left a rating. Thank you so so much. Becoming You Again as you know is still in its infancy as a podcast. We are not quite at a year – still a couple of months away from being to that point and we have already hit 10,000 downloads which is so incredible. It is so much fun to see that number when I go to check and see how the podcast is growing. I have to say that putting out this podcast each week it is truly one of my very favorite things I get to do. And the fact that you are listening and learning and sharing means so much to me. So this celebration of hitting 10K downloads is as much a celebration for me as it is for you because you have made that happen. You are the ones who are showing up in listening and then doing the work in your own lives to create evolution and growth that you are seeking as you move through your divorce. I am so proud of you and I hope that you are also so proud of you. I am incredibly grateful for you each and every week when you show up and listen and so thank you. Thank you so much.
This week I wanted to talk a little about money. It’s been a while since my last money podcast and since money and divorce can be triggering for many women I wanted to teach a little more on the subject. Specifically, money safety and security after divorce.
Historically money is what was decided upon by the institutional structures to be what we use to exchange value. Before money we used the barter system, trading things like animal hides or teeth or rocks, and in some places things like actual livestock were traded. Once governmental institutions showed up paper and coins denoting certain amounts was decided upon as an easier, more universal way to exchange one value for another. Like even in today’s society this is evolving, where so much of our value transactions aren’t even with actual paper money. Like remember during the Covid lockdown nobody took cash anymore. You could not pay with cash and there was a coin shortage and everything was credit cards because it was easier and safer and there was less transferable disease should we say through the actual transferring money from hand-to-hand. So many of our value transactions today aren’t even using paper money. I know it is still out there. I still use it. I know there are many of us who still do but with credit cards and debit cards, transferring money is basically transferring numbers on screen. And we can do this through Venmo, or PayPal, or Apple pay. Even bitcoin which is another way of evolution when it comes to exchanging value for value and has nothing at all to do with paper money or coin money that it is in itself a completely different form or way of thinking about money that is evolving from the very beginning days of that bartering situation that was started years and years and years ago.
But because so many of us in Western society and in the United States especially have been raised in a capitalistic society, this has informed our beliefs that money is more a status symbol and is attached to our worth. The more money you have, the more you will be included in society and looked at as worthy, smart, lovable, successful, wanted, desired. And what’s really interesting is that western culture has also been historically built on the ideals of Christianity in some form or another, which conversely offers a completely different idea and belief about money. In the Bible it says something like money is the root of all evil for being greedy and wanting more money is evil and bad and wrong and you shouldn’t want that.
This is all to say that it is not surprising that so many of us have such a confusing, conflated relationship with money and what we make it mean in our lives. For me personally, I have been working for years to unwind the baggage that I carry with me around money. One of the very first books I read during my divorce that completely changed the way I thought about money was You Are A Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero. I had never thought about money as something that I actually had a relationship with and when I read that book I realized that I had a bad relationship with money. My relationship with money was very confusing. I was raised in a very Christian household, as you’ve heard me talk about before, I was raised in the Mormon Church and I had that idea running through the background of my mind that having money and/or wanting more made you greedy. Made you a bad person. And it meant that you were prideful and would eventually lead to doing bad things, choosing bad things for an evil life in some way.
And I also conversely had this ideal of capitalism and wanting to create more money in my life, and knowing that this was a place, this country was a place where that idea was, you know, supposed to be possible for anyone in any situation. And I had that idea in the back of my head, I have for years and years. This idea that I wanted more money in my life. I wanted to have my own successful business. I wanted to be in a situation and I continue to want to be in a situation where I am one day able to create jobs and opportunities for other women as well. Because I think that is a truly beautiful thing to aspire to and to be able to provide to other women living in this country and I am not there yet with my business but I am definitely on my way and it is on my horizon. So my money relationship has been something that I have been working on for years and I continue to work on strengthening and growing every day.
But as I was going through my divorce, I started to notice that I was putting a lot of pressure on my money relationship. I wanted enough money after my divorce so that I could feel safe. I wanted to be able to look at my bank account and feel secure and not worry that there wouldn’t be enough at the end of the month to get by. I was looking at money and saying things like, “You need to be the thing that makes me feel safe and secure in my life. I really don’t want to have to worry about money anymore.” I felt like I had been worrying about money my entire adult life and I was so tired of it. And I really wanted to change that but I did not know how. And I really wanted that safety and security that we seek when we are going through a divorce, especially as women. We want to feel safe and secure in who we are and using money as that prop was a big deal in my mind.
But here’s what I have come to learn about money. Money is not safety. Money is not security. Money cannot and does not create a feeling of safety or security within us. What’s really going on when we have “enough” money and whatever that means to you or me is different, right. But what is really going on we think that we have enough money in the bank account or the rig