Many years ago I had a life coaching client who anonymously wrote this week’s Blog. As a life coach I have used her article to help women see how our male dominated left brain society subtly conditions women to believe they must depend on a man to earn money. I also use it to help men see the effects these beliefs have on their spouses, sisters, female friends and daughters.
I am an HLC life coaching client and recently I learned that my negative money beliefs are inextricably linked to men. For years I have been referring to my belief systems about money as though they were separate from everything else. Once I made this realization about men and money, I was able to see how I stayed dependent on men and unconsciously gave away my power.
When I was seven years old, I can remember my mother telling me that the child support check was late. My mother’s fear and anger left a deep impression on me. This is the first time I was aware that we needed money to pay for our basic necessities of life. This instilled in me the belief that our financial security was out of my mother’s and my control and in the hands of a man.
From this day on I believed in financial lack and that we needed a man to financially support us. Even when my mother remarried, my stepfather was never able to contribute adequately to the household. He was either out of work or held low paying jobs that could barely pay for the necessities.
No wonder I sought to find a man to take care of me; I didn’t believe that I could take care of myself. I got married at 23 and when my son was born I gave up my job to stay home and raise him. I was economically and emotionally dependent on my husband. The cost of this dependency was that I gave away my power in the relationship because I allowed my husband to use money to control me. When I saw this unhealthy dynamic in my marriage I tried to reclaim my power, but when I did my marriage fell apart.
I vowed from that day forward to never give away my power to a man or to anyone else ever again and that’s what attracted me to husband #2. He is a like a like-minded Soul, and is very different from husband # 1 in just about every conceivable way. Marriage #2 went well until he left his job to try to build his own business. At the beginning it was easy for me to be emotionally supportive and financially supportive by earning most of the income, but as one year turned into two, then three, I began to feel victimized by his emotional neediness and angry because he was not contributing his fair portion of the financial responsibilities of running our household.
I realize now that I have unconsciously replicated the dependent man-woman dynamic that was present in both of my mother’s marriages, but in a subtler manner. With husband # 1, I felt I had to give up my power in order to be taken care of. He had the money and therefore the power. When I married husband # 2, I went to the opposite extreme, creating a dynamic where my mate would be dependent on me. I did this in an attempt to keep my power. Even though I earned 95% of the household income with husband # 2, my unconscious men and money beliefs still made me feel dependent on him and that is the realization for which I’ve been searching for years…Thanks God!
It feels wonderful to finally be consciously aware of why I was psychologically dependent on men. Now that I can see these negative money and men beliefs, all I have to do is dis-create them to free my Self and create the financial abundance and emotional independence that I’ve always desired!”
Namaste, my fellow life coaches and Anam Caras!
(We are all one, my soul friends)