Grieving Money
Grieving Money
Generations pass on, money beliefs can too.
Money, Grief, & Vision
What’s your first memory of money? Who was there with you? What did you learn about how money worked or about your worth? As we dig into our financial past, the more truth we decide to see, the more opportunities we give ourselves to heal, be proud of our origins, and step fully into our power.
Grieving allows us to dream a new tomorrow, today. I often hear, read, and experience media highlighting exactly what’s wrong with our financial systems and how harmful they can be. I do not, however, hear many people explore what will get us out of that pain. I believe that if we learn to grieve our financial wounds, more people will be freed up to stand in their own financial visions for our future and guide humanity to more regenerative systems. Through grief, we will increase our collective capacity to dream.
Money on The Ancestral Altar
We all inherit money cultures and beliefs. We come by them honestly (no shame!) Not all of them are currently helpful to us or healthy for the Earth or our communities. As every supportive self-help professional will tell you - the strategies we need thrive are often not the same strategies we use to survive - and we all inherit the financial strategies of survival.
To Grieve, we have to first acknowledge that our relationship to money is decaying on a cultural scale, and our personal relationships to money are as varied as we are. From there we can look into our own past to see what remnants of our ancestors still live in our money mindsets to get started.
Which traumatic financial, resource-based event(s) have your ancestors survived? The Great Depression? The Holocaust? The Indian Relocation Act? Manifest Destiny? Enslavement? Prison? Privatized Healthcare? Climate Change? What lessons did their responses to those events teach you about money? What financial lessons have you inherited that you can be proud of? Which financial lessons weigh us down?
Trauma Responses are acting in our bodies and minds until we decide to heal them. American history is full of financial trauma responses. We can’t heal what we decide to look away from. Once we take a moment to see what happened or feel the impact in our bodies, we can then grieve, and make some of the most defining decisions of our lives - How do I actually want to relate to money? How do I want to feel about it? How do my money beliefs and actions align? Grieving money can be the beginning of a journey to communal and self-actualization.
Yeah I said it. Money.
Eulogies
Grief is a many-layered, non-linear, organic process. It begins with naming the truth and brings us along a journey to accept it. The generations we never met are gone and their financial beliefs still live in us. Sing their strength and resilience and weep at their need to be so. Offer your tenderness and truth as a testament of their destiny.
Let those beliefs become artifacts. Place them with honor in the museum of our hearts. Visit them as often as you need. Know that while they are a part of you, they are not the entirety of you.
Keep their financial lessons that serve you and open your heart to something new. They never had to deal with globalization, social media, or A.I. like you and I do. Most of their financial lessons won’t fit in today as well as they did back then. So let them die with dignity and send them off with love.
Generational Grieving
Each generation has their signature defaults for grieving our financial wellbeing. While each has the capacity to embody each stage of grief, they tend to activate in one more than others. These are generalizations of course, but what’s important here is that these stages are stacking, instead actively being grieved and processed because we lack the cultural practices to make space for financial grief. (Or grief of any kind, to be honest. “Get back to work!”)
Baby Boomers: Denial. “There are no cultural financial issues to grieve! There is no harsh truth to acknowledge because everything is working fine. Anyone saying otherwise just doesn’t get it and is complaining or lazy.”
Gen X: Bargaining. “Maybe we can make this financial system work. I’m willing to hurt myself to make it work. I’ll overwork myself, never take a vacation, and make as much money as I can. Wait, why doesn’t anyone care how much I hurt myself to make this work? Why isn’t it working like I expected?”
Millennials: Anger. “How could they require us go to college, go tens to hundreds of thousand dollars in debt just to make minimum wage? How is everyone ok with this? THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING BETTER UUUUGHHH.”
Gen Z: Depression. “Well, nothing works anyway, so why bother? Why risk anything for financial systems that don’t care about me or anyone else? I’ll show up at work when I want to and how I want to and they can deal with it. It’s not like I can afford nourishing food anyway. There’s nothing I can do.”
Will Gen Alpha finally move our culture to a place of acceptance or can we start now?
Let’s start now. With you. With me.
Grieve with me.
Feel it all. My personal favorite aspect of grief is anger. We can’t lie to our anger (or love.) We can lie to every other feeling and convince it that what we’re enduring is ok, except for anger. Anger MAKES us move. Anger protects us valiantly from the violence around us and it’s the inherent changemaker within us. Anger let’s our imperfection shine and show us another way to be at any cost. Anger is also unsustainable. That kind of chaos is not something we can healthily hold in our bodies for too long. (Why else do you think millennials are so into health industries and therapy?)
So get angry. Let it settle and become something else - whatever it is at its root. Maybe it’s desire. A desire for something more healthy for us. Name it. Seek it. Make it true.
Accept our grief for what it is, whichever aspects or stages come up for us. Because Acceptance let’s us know that we matter. Your financial truth matters. Your financial journey matters. You matter. And you’re worth investing in.
When you touch the acceptance stage for the first time, know this:
You are not your ancestors’ failures. You are the literal embodiment of their gifts and their hopes. You carry the genetic memories of their struggles and strategies. You are the torch-bearer for our collective financial wellbeing - now.
May truth and forgiveness guide your financial grief to a place of love and acceptance. We need you. I need you. The next generation needs you.
Visions Beyond Grief
What if you felt full integrity with your finances? What if you practiced your personal values through the language of currency? What if your relationship to both giving and receiving felt …. good? What if your finances flowed in a way that nourished you and your community without sacrifice?
And what if there were a lot more people like you?
Well, I have some good news for you - there are. We’re here and we’re ready for you. Get ready for us.
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Co-Conspirator Highlights - Kelly Campbell
Kelly is so rad they’re releasing a book soon called “Heal to Lead: Revolutionizing Leadership through Trauma Healing.” Kelly has worn many hats in life including Trauma Informed Leadership Coach, Business Coach/Consultant, Founder of Consciousness Leaders, plant zaddy, and the most plannerific explorer I’ve ever known. (Not many people who are so organizationally motivated are also so expansive in the messiness of life.)
Personal and Cosmic Updates
Say goodbye to hormonally destitute fishbrain! I finally get to increase my chances to remember things, be more comfortably in my body, and even sleep better. Offer a word of thanks to the wind on my behalf! I’m so so so ready.
My niece’s bday is coming up! She’s my fave little human and I’m so excited to celebrate the day she came into the world. I was there in the room when she was born. I tended my sister diligently and I heard my niece’s first breaths. It was magical and absolutely unforgettable. I’d never seen my sister so strong or cried so hard in my life. Waterfalls of intense joy overcame me. I feel so lucky.
I started as a participant in the High Consciousness Queer Leadership program today. I’m excited to see how it will help me grow as a leader and prepare myself for the impact I want to have on my world, community, and chosen family - how I’ll get to shape the world and entrust it to my niece some day.
Has anyone else played Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Radical Queer Witches? If not, fucking do it. Those games are queer and hilarious AF.
Today is the energetic new year in Human Design. I love it. The new year always begins with the sun moving into gate 41. Gate 41 is all about dreaming and expanding our capacity to RECEIVE our dreams as they become reality. I have my unconscious Jupiter in 41.6. That means I have the ancestral gift of vision. I can move myself on the spectrum from spacey → hyperactive → antici….pation → Emanation and bring others with me. It’s one of my favorite parts of my chart. I can move beyond opportunism for myself and enrich my community with ease. I also have pretty good taste for a lot of different things. It’s pretty cool. Let me make you a cocktail or mocktail sometime. ;)
“41.6: Bringing benefits to others while expanding your own resources. I enrich everyone through my inner watchfulness and my selective ways.”
Happy Energetic New Year!