Healthy Boundaries Series: 1. Money management

This is a series on maintaining healthy boundaries within relationships.
The guidelines stated in this series may challenge a lot of long-standing habits. It is my experience that these old societal habits are unhealthy and that these new boundary markers point us to healthier ways to navigate our interpersonal dynamics and shared experience. I recommend that readers consider these guidelines and try them on before starting in with arguments. The suggested changes are nuanced and will possibly threaten our collective go-to behaviors for judging and attempting to manipulate other people's choices.

These boundaries outline what is ours to control and what is not ours to control. They keep us in our own business and out of other people's business. Poor boundaries encourage us to spend too much time trying to manage other people's lives and discourage us from the hard work of managing our own. It is a spiritual practice to move increasingly into managing our own business and to get out of everyone else's. The more we do this work, the clearer we will also become in identifying what is our shared business, and how to navigate that as well.  Without this work, we will do poorly in managing shared or public business.

Credit for identifying and articulating these boundaries goes to Mark R Carlson, MS, MDiv, Marriage and Family Therapist in Huntingdon Valley, PA. USA


1. MONEY MANAGEMENT: Do not judge how someone else spends their money

Several years ago a friend of mine was invited on a cruise. At the time, some of her income came from a grant. When she went on the cruise, the body who awarded her the grant felt obliged to question her use of her money. Were they justified? In my eyes, it seemed beyond their scope of management.

Recently, my husband and I were invited on a cruise. Most of the expenses were paid by a generous relative, but not all.  Should we say yes or no, knowing a "yes" would add unnecessary expenses to the debt which we could avoid by staying home?  As I debated, in the back of my mind were all the judgmental voices waiting to have an opinion should we say yes.

Sufficient money and growing debt have been an issue for us for a few years now as I struggle to make a living wage in New York. Many people know this. It is not something I believe I should feel ashamed about, even as I struggle with deep shame about it. I tell the truth about it even though several people have leaped to judgment of me as soon as they heard.

(I see this freedom to judge those who struggle to have enough money as a collective societal ill. Being poor is equated with having a moral weakness. It is as if those who are poor did something to deserve being poor, and if they would simply make better choices they would be lifted from the depths of poverty in very short order. This has not been true in any aspect of my lived experience. Speaking as a white person with two masters degrees who is the daughter of relative wealth, if anyone should be able to lift herself out of disadvantage, it is me.  But so far, despite my best efforts, I have not. Does the fault lie purely in me? Perhaps it does, if luck and timing and the stacked-against-the-poor nature of this country are not taken into account as well.)

Do not judge how someone else spends their money.

Notice all the objections that come up when that line is drawn.

Here is a common situation.  Joe and Jane are a married couple. They pool their finances, and each gets to take an equal portion from the group finances for their personal hobbies and interests. Jane spends her portion on facials and manicures and fancy hair coloring. Joe spends his portion on model trains. Joe secretly judges Jane, thinking her vain and wasteful, wishing she would spend the money on better housekeeping tools or a gym membership. Jane secretly judges Joe for spending his money on a childish hobby when he could be bettering himself with courses or more stylish clothes or a grooming regime.

Discuss.

My thoughts? The judging these lovers are doing tell us about their own preferences and insecurities and longings and say nothing about what the other partner "should" be doing differently.  They are projections. They are absolutely not loving of the other one's autonomy or freedom. They come from some sense of a need to control the other one's resources. He does not get to judge what she does with her portion. She does not get to judge what he does with his either.  PERIOD.

Good counseling would help them discover and name the fears underlying the attempt to control the other's use of money. It would deliver them each back into the things they need to address within themselves and take them out of the other's business.

When I first learned that I needed to stop judging how others used their money, I felt uneasy, insecure, and angry. I felt like some of my power was being taken away.  But by now I am grateful to have gained an understanding of why I long to control other people's anything, and for much better skills in discovering where my agency does and does not lie. I feel MORE empowered and better informed, not less.

Should my beloved husband choose to spend money in a way with which I do not feel comfortable, I can express that I feel uncomfortable and name why (to the best of my ability). I OWN my discomfort and do not try to use my feelings to make him choose differently. I ask him to hear my struggle, and then support him in doing what is authentic to him. Several times lately, when he asked I have expressed my opinion only to have him choose what he originally wanted anyway. I felt GLAD. I do not want to manipulate him with my feelings or thoughts, and in all those cases, it was the right choice for him. When he did reconsider his choice, he was learning about himself, not pleasing me.  He does like to please me! That is why it is so important to make sure I don't try to manipulate him by exploiting that desire to please me. I could exercise some control that way.  It would be toxic if I did.

Before I learned this boundary, I felt it was my duty to judge others in certain contexts. As I saw it, my judgment served to help them make better choices, which they might not make without the societal pressure of my (and others) judgment.

During that time, a dear friend ended up on welfare.  I felt entitled to judge her for many reasons, including for keeping the family pets (their feeding and care cost money!) and for not being harsher with her children who threw away their packed school lunches. It felt like my duty to nose into her decisions and try to influence them.  That we are still friends today is a testament to her forgiving and patient nature. She expressed how my advice affected her, said a bit about her reality and the choice to keep her pets, and did not take any of my advice. She drew a firm boundary without judgment and with a clear expression of feeling hurt. It took me a while, but over time I realized with increasing mortification just how clueless and entitled my so-called "help" had been. Subsequently, life also saw fit to drop me down into the debt-carrying class. I have since had many experiences from the "poor" side of the fence that have continued to educate me about the hurtful and harmful lack of boundaries our culture has around money.

Is someone else's use of money our business?  If it isn't, why are we trying to control it by judging it?  We can examine someone else's use of money to learn about our own longings and desires and values. We don't get to tell someone else our opinion about it unless they ask. Whether they heed our opinion or not is not our business either. We must leave others alone and manage our own money by our best judgment. Remember, "Do unto others as you wish them to do to you." Do you like being micromanaged?

The very question of how we manage money individually and collectively speaks to our societal narrative about money and entitlement and what belongs to whom. It speaks to the group assumptions that are part of each country's collective storytelling regarding entitlement and belonging and worth.  Who is deserving? Who is undeserving? Why and why not?

That is another entire blog post.

Following are the other three entries in the series:
Health
Family of Origin
Thoughts and Feelings