Emotional Currency'

By Kate Levinson

I never feel I quite do justice to the topic of money when I write or speak about it. No matter what I say, I leave out essential pieces. The longer I work with money emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, the more I’ve come to appreciate the dynamic complexity of money in our lives. And I tolerate the discomfort of not being able to know its enormity, recognizing that no symbol or mystery can be completely held by one person.

Imagine its presence in your life, internally and externally. We touch it every day but how much do we think about its meaning? Do you know what money means and holds for you? Do you have repetitive thoughts and feelings about money? Money touches every aspects of our lives. It’s personal and collective, it’s political, emotional, spiritual, and racial. It’s generational, cultural, and gender-informed. It’s longings and desires, it’s food on the table, a roof over our heads, it’s seeing the doctor or getting a tooth fixed, and it’s where we live. It’s staying in an abusive relationship and it’s belonging and exclusion. It's creativity and transportation. It’s greed, opportunity, exploitation, and freedom. It’s African Americans, Whites, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians. It’s first-generation immigrants and Mayflower descendants. It’s farm workers and Fortune 500 CEOs. In other words, each of us has a mixture of influences and experiences that contribute to our own particular relationship with money and our own personal economy.

Money is god in our society. We’re taught that the dollars and cents, the bottom line, the quantity is what matters most. Money is dominated by the masculine in our culture which sees money as something concrete and knowable, to control and master. In this view, money is external to us, we go out to get it. It’s not the means to an end, it’s the end itself. Not only are feelings not included in financial equations, they are seen as dangerous to sound money management.

Money is legal tender and it’s also emotional currency. By devaluing and pushing away our emotional responses to money we, especially as women, lose access to working with our actual experience of money and bringing our whole selves to our money lives. And since most of us don’t even talk with our best friends about the money dilemmas we are facing, we’ve lost additional grounding as talking with others is one of the primary ways women learn. We locate ourselves as we talk to an attentive listener about situations and people in our lives. And we learn from their sharing of their experiences and insights. We are marginalized financially by making less than men, which translates into having way less over our lifetimes. And the more that men treat us as if we don't understand financial matters — whether by financial advisors, at home, at work, or in the media — the more we come to doubt ourselves. 

I believe we begin to improve our relationship with money by turning inward. That’s the starting place to knowing what our feelings, beliefs, and attitudes about money are, and where they came from. Finding trusted others to talk to — and listen to — about money can be an important part of exploring our inner money lives. To get to hear others’ longings, frustrations, dilemmas, blocks, confusions, and competency is a gift. We have so much to tell and learn from one another. I believe that it is through bringing more awakeness and compassion to our personal money lives that we each can contribute to bringing heart and feeling to the collective’s relationship with money.

I’m very excited about the Women’s Money Summit providing an opportunity where we can hear from a range of women about their work and experiences with money. I hope you will join us!

Dr. Kate Levinson is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology. She has spent more than 20 years studying the interface of money and psychology. In her private practice in San Rafael and Point Reyes Station, California, Kate works with individuals, couples, and groups around a wide range of life and financial issues.

Kate is the author of Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money, an insightful and empowering guide that offers a profound new approach to dealing with money. Kate leads Emotional Currency workshops throughout the country, and Women, Money, Spirit conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the end of June, Kate will be teaching her first course for The Shift Network: Understanding Your Emotional Currency: A Compassionate Approach to Healing the Way You Think & Feel About Money. Look for more details in future issues of Catalyst.

Click here to visit Kate’s website. Click here to contact Kate.