For over a decade Dr Phil has been trying to tell us that money problems are not about money, and thus, they cannot be solved with more money. This is because it is not the lack of money itself that is the problem, it is the sense of lack itself. This feeling of lack exists in all areas of our life, but for many of us, it is in our financial lives where we feel it the most. Almost everyone, regardless of their financial situation, lives with scarcity as an underlying and fundamental belief about life, which diminishes all dealings with money into expressions of fear.
Even people with lots of money are often just as fearful, and feel as vulnerable, as those without. While the poor struggle to get money, the rich struggle to keep it, and the social standing that accompanies it. That’s why some CEOs need $378 million remuneration packages. One needs that much money not just to survive, or even to live well, but to assuage their gnawing fear that unless they have more than anyone else they are not good enough.
In our current mainstream ethos, if one earns more than everyone else then it stands to reason that they must be more worthy, more important, and more valuable. By achieving such indisputable superiority, one can temporarily silence the self-doubt, fear, and the soul-destroying sense of inferiority that is the flip side, and instigator, of all feelings of superiority.
Money is the arena where our deep and abiding fear for survival meets our entrenched feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness. This confluence of existential anxieties creates a fairly deadly cocktail of destructive emotions: desire deteriorates into need, and need quickly becomes desperation. The naked need for more, without awareness, becomes an enormously powerful force for dysfunction.
Most of us have a deep-seated and persistent fear that we are not good enough, which leads many of us to use money, and all the things that money can buy, to self-medicate, to numb the pain of our self-hatred, in order to enhance our outward appeal to others and bolster our social standing. How we deal with money is often the outward expression of how we deal with our fears, especially of inadequacy, as well demonstrating what we are actually prepared to do to survive in what seems to be a scary and dangerous world.
So much energy goes into (mis)managing money because we do not understand that our financial situation is the effect, not the cause, of our imbalance. We spend inordinate amounts of time and energy chasing, and then often wasting, money because we use it to try and fill the bottomless pit of our fear and self-hatred. No matter how much money we throw at this particular monster that constantly rides our back, nothing changes, at least not permanently.
For many of us, every thought, word and deed connected with money comes from a place of fear and thus the lack of money can never be solved by an infusion of more money, no matter how large. Even huge amounts of money can have no permanent effect because money on its own does not address the original fear. The unexamined, and unresolved, innate belief of insufficiency always works to reduce the outward circumstances of our lives to a state that reflects the fundamental lack we feel so that even the super-rich can feel that they do not have enough.
But money does not reflect who we are, it reflects only what we think about who we are. Money acts as a window into our personality, not our soul. It is an agent that ultimately acts to externalize all the imbalance, discord and dysfunction that lies unhealed and hidden within all of us, including the super-rich.
