Tomorrow! Why healing your relationship with money feels more important than ever

Hey it’s Pam 🦋

Tomorrow! RSVP for Creative Thrive NYC’s virtual workshop, How to Heal Your Relationship with Money, 4/16 at 1pm ET.

Dyalekt and I have been thinking a lot about what financial education needs to look like as things seem to be falling apart before our eyes and one thing we will never stop teaching is how the financial system affects your nervous system.

We’ve been teaching money personalities for nearly 20 years now to kids and adults. I first learned about them at the money camps I used to teach in college, helping kids unravel their budding relationships with money.

Studies have shown that we start developing a relationship with money as early as 5 years old, but if we bring in what we know about interpersonal neurobiology, your relationship with money might even start in the womb.

I’ve talked about explicit vs implicit memory before when it comes to saving, but here’s a refresher:

💕 HUGE acknowledgment to our interpersonal neurobiology teachers, who have asked to remain anonymous, for this transformative information

Explicit memories are the conscious retrieval of past information or memories - they live in the mind. Things like appointments, birthdays, grocery lists, bank account balances live here.

Implicit memories are your unconscious, or automatic memories - they live in the body and may not be easily recalled by your mind. Things like brushing your teeth, driving a car, knowing all the words to a song, emotional connections to money live here.

Explicit memory fires off in your brain/body at 5-60 bits per second.

Implicit memory fires off in your brain/body at 11 MILLION bits per second.

What’s even more amazing is that your implicit memory starts developing at 7 months in the womb! Your memories are literally generational and so is systemic oppression.

When you have a financial system designed to ignore, exploit, or take advantage of you, AND make you believe you should blame yourself, your nervous system springs into action, doing whatever it needs to do in the moment with whatever resources you have.

This can show up as spending money as soon as you get it (no matter how much you get) because there is a fear someone will take it anyway.

This can show up as having anxiety around filling out paperwork because you or your family only had bad experiences with forms and bureaucracy.

This can show up as buying something when the rest of your life feels overwhelming because you need a dopamine hit or need to feel in control of *something.*

This can show up as feeling guilty about every purchase you make that isn’t a “need” because you weren’t allowed to want things.

This can show up as buying 20 packs of soap or a dozen tea towels because they were on sale and these things never go bad, right?

Our money personalities are the armor we put on (the protective adaptation if you want the official terminology) to withstand a financial system that is actively trying to harm us.

The How to heal your relationship with money workshop gives you the neuroscience and the context to start asking yourself why instead of telling yourself you should have, to forgive yourself instead of blaming yourself.

We are here to remind you that there are no such things as financial mistakes because we’re all just doing the best we can with what we knew at the time.

We are here to remind you that your net worth does not equal your self worth and a punitive system doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself, it means we’re all in this together.

We’ll see you tomorrow. RSVP here.