Our money stuff (part 2)
my stuff + your stuff = our stuff!
If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter - do that. Today’s post will be far more resonant if we’re starting from the same spot.
Last week I talked about — my money stuff; What my parents inherited from their parents, and the messages I learned about what is the “good” way to spend money vs. the “bad” way to spend money. What ways money represented both power and freedom in my family of origin, and the ways in which finances fueled conflict between my parents. Etc. etc.
So, imagine when I met my partner, and I’m coming into our relationship with all this baggage^ and then he comes in with his own script (& baggage), and we get to start the dance all over again! So fun!
For the sake of my partner’s privacy, I won’t share his money script — (because well, I think we can all agree he is already very generous with what is shared on this platform.) And, I will say that his money stuff is SO different from my own and it has changed both throughout his childhood & adult life in a very boom and bust sort of way. There is a lot he has processed and continues to process, in real time.
[In this weeks newsletter - I focus on the ways old scripts can get triggered in a couple and then interact with one another. At the end of the post I have a list of questions for you and your partner to explore both about how to better understand each other in financial conversations and opportunities to dig a little deeper in your alignment.]
I want to share an anecdote about how my stuff became our stuff —
Early in my marriage, when I was freshly out of graduate school making nearly no money as an associate therapist, our finances were super tight and my husband was looking through our credit card statement. He asked me about a particular purchase and I remember feeling a full body panic come over me. It was a simple question (asked without tone or anger), but all of a sudden - I was watching my parents fight about spending, I felt I had done something wrong and I needed to defend myself; my body felt under attack.
I was acting out an old familial script — the one in which the woman gets scolded for spending too much money, and the arbiter of spending (the man) requires her to justify her actions. I felt guilt, shame, anger … my brain wasn’t even catching up with all the tears until much later.
Thankfully, in that moment my husband was able to realize I wasn’t ok; he calmed me down, and reassured me that this wasn’t a moment of “being in trouble” but rather, curiosity. I am not sure I believed him the first time, nor the 10th… but over time, his patience and reassurance allowed me to realize he really didn’t see it as my “bad spending” and I wasn’t “in trouble” and he wasn’t out to determine what was appropriate spending and what wasn’t. It was all my old stuff getting projected onto him.
This moment was the beginning of being able to rewrite my script around money and spending, and the dynamics of gender/power etc. We began to explore (and continue to!) how those conversations brought me back in time, and what he can do to support me emotionally as we co-create a new script for talking about family finances. His responses (& consistency) helped to heal an old wound around spending — what I grew up with isn’t the capital T truth of how couples interact over money, but just one model that I get to choose not to replicate.
Now, imagine if my husband hadn’t been attuned to me in that moment; He might have kept going with the conversation - ignoring my cues of distress and powering through what he believed to be a benign conversation. He might have completely missed the opportunity for us to name this as a potential trigger in future conversations - and I would likely never have realized how deeply held my beliefs were around this dynamic.
Or, imagine if my stuff had triggered his stuff in that moment; What if my spending triggered his sense of scarcity? What if my defensiveness around my spending brought him back in time somehow? What if all my tears in the moment actually triggered another script around big displays of emotion? It very well could have devolved and escalated into a conflict around finances that was really us fighting with our own ghosts. That fight would then act to reinforce an old belief that money talks cause conflict and my family of origin script repeats itself. (And create another reinforcing narrative on his end.)
There is no perfect blueprint for how to handle this — we are all complex, dynamic beings with pasts that inform our present. My stuff and your stuff create “our stuff” — and we can work to make that look and feel really different from what we started with.
Here are some questions that can begin a deeper conversation of financial alignment between you and your partner:
Share your individual answers from the reflection questions;
What did you learn about your partner for the first time?
What do you appreciate about their story?
On a scale from 1-10 (1 = never and 10= always) how often do you think about money?
Do you think we are aligned on our values around money (spending and saving?)
What happens for you when we talk about money?
How can I better understand you as it relates to our financial conversations?
What can I do differently to make you feel safer in our conversations around money?
How do you feel about your role in our family - both spending money and making money?
I hope this can be a helpful jumping off point for you and your partner to explore what’s really going on in these typically “charged topic” conversations —
I would love to hear more about how this shows up for you — feel free to message me privately with questions/thoughts or leave a comment!
Thank you for reading along.
with gratitude,
Sasha