Money – Power and Safety?

My greatest fear throughout my life has been not having enough money which I had control over.

I saw money as a protection against dysfunctional male dominance.  When I was young, money was always short because of the crazy way my father spent it.  Paying the mortgage was not necessarily his first priority.  Having my own money became a way out.  I got a good job and kept it for many years.  As a result, in my adult life I have always had plenty of money.  However, my sense of power and safety around money comes not from saving it but from spending it.  I am Daddy’s little girl after all, but I do pay the mortgage.

Naturally my depression is tied up in the “money is power and safety” issue.  Until this month when my money came into my account on the first of the month I paid the major bills and then tried to spend the rest in the first ten days.  If I saw something I liked I had to have it,  whether I could afford it or needed it was not even a consideration.  Credit cards made purchasing it in the moment possible.  I used buying as a way to cheer myself up because I felt depressed.  I was vague about my money and did not even know how much I spent in a given month.  

I realized that while spending money helped ease my depressive feelings for a few minutes, the situation was not tenable.  Constant debting  was only going to end badly.  I was coming to realize that it was dangerous for a depressed person like myself to be so unsteady about such a basic part of life.

This summer was the time for me to manage it.  I joined Debtor’s Anonymous in August.

For the last month I have gone to a telephone meeting a day. I have listened in and participated in so many meetings because this is the hardest thing I have ever had to do.   It has brought back so many memories of the desperation I felt as a child around keeping my father working, so we had a roof over our heads and we could eat.  It has  brought back so many other bad memories from my childhood that I started going to Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings to help me understand why I was having such a tough time.  This whole month I have felt crazy.  My body is full of nervous physical symptoms.   I have been trying to work out why this is so hard for me.

Today it dawned on me why this was hitting all the painful buttons in my life.  Spending money represents my “Power and Safety”.  Two things that I have found essential to facing my adult life.  Depression magnifies these feelings ten fold.  Changing to see solvency as my “Power and Safety” is very hard but I got through one month.   I am not sure I can go from the fantasy world of spending through debting to the reality of paying for things.  I pray this gets easier and my past traumas, which I thought I had been put to rest a long time ago, stop rearing their ugly heads.  This feels like the last frontier from my dysfunctional childhood that has not been explored.  Once again it is about staying in reality.