The Biggest Taboo

I bet you are thinking I am going to talk about sex… Not today!

Sex is not the biggest taboo in our culture – believe it or not, it is money. Are you surprised?  When was the last time you talked freely about money?

When I am getting ready to start a workshop I tell women to get together with someone they don’t know and have a conversation.  The rule for this conversation is that they can only talk about two topics: sex or money.

If you could see their eyes!  They go wide open and then…..they go mute. I know those two topics are hard to share with someone you don’t know. The point I want to stress is that when we talk about sex, at least we smile and giggle but with money, we all get really serious and tense.

Money is a serious topic, so serious we rarely talk about it and when we do it’s to say we don’t have it, or how hard it is to earn it, among other things. Financial education was not available to us and the internal personal aspects of money are never talked about.

If you want to bring the topic to a therapeutic setting you may not find resolution because the majority of people in this field have not dealt with the issue themselves and they have not been trained to help their clients in this realm.

How can we talk freely about money when we have a distorted perception of it?
We put very negative emotions into money, making it very difficult to talk about the subject with ease.

To talk about money in a healthy way we must transform our relationship with money by addressing issues like:

•    frustration for not manifesting the money we deserve, for being an underearner.
•    anxiety when dealing with money
•    guilt for overspending or hoarding it, and
•    clarity about whatever you are feeling around money.

My invitation to you is to consider starting a woman’s circle where you can share your experiences with money in a small group, and talk about it freely. One way to start such a circle is by organizing a book club that focuses on money.

I highly recommend Money, a memoir by Liz Perle.  This book will spark a discussion — start by talking about the author’s issues and at the same time it will give room for the women in the circle to start talking about their own issues. Once the circle gets closer the group can share their money auto-biography which contains powerful information about our beliefs about money.

Over the course of the upcoming year, I’ll share more ideas around money and how we can unpack some of our own issues around this “taboo” topic!