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

The Union of Effort and Ease

The Union of Effort and Ease

For the past several months I have been job hunting.

Job hunting in New York City as a 54-year-old woman has been a lesson in powerlessness.

My first full day in New York I had an interview that went very well, and by the evening I was offered the job!  I brushed my hands together and thought, "Lucky me!  Mission accomplished! Where is that Staples Easy button?"

However, three weeks later I still had no communication from that employer, and after pursuit I found out that I wasn't hired after all, because that manager "had been told she wasn't allowed to hire anyone."  (I'm not sure what was going on there.  Weird.)

Fortunately I had continued sending out resumes, and did get other interviews, but nothing has resulted in a job.

So I got proactive, and started introducing myself to all the managers of the local Starbucks.  I learned their names and let them know I was wanting to work for them and to look for my name in the bank of resumes on the Starbucks hiring site.  This seemed to be greeted with enthusiasm and curiosity, which gave me hope.  I made sure my resume was fully updated and refreshed.

But ultimately, I was powerless.  Once I had done everything I could reasonably do, the rest had to be surrendered to the whims of chance.  This was made especially clear to me when, upon checking back in, the various managers all told me that my profile was "locked."  Apparently the original manager (that said I was hired my second day in the city) not only didn't have a job for me, she hadn't released my profile back into the Starbucks hiring pool.  She had made it impossible for any other Starbucks to hire me either!

I experienced a profound sense of helplessness when I heard that news---I was thrown into a profound narrative of victimization. "No matter what I do, the universe is against me.  I can do everything right and still experience no success.  Ultimately, I am powerless and helpless."

That is a terrible place to visit.

This tension between powerful and powerless is a deep and longstanding one in the human condition.  The twelve steps answers this tension by asking us to embrace our powerlessness.  It calls us into acceptance of all that we cannot control in life.  We are to tackle the things we can, but then let go of all that is beyond our control.  Ultimately, we are far less powerful than we would like to think, and acceptance of this fact can bring us tremendous peace.  It brings a sense of proportion to life and opens up a lot of forgiveness of ourselves and others.

It is the paradox embodied in yoga.  It is the paradox of life---to seek the union of things that seem diametrically opposed---strength and relaxation, taking action and surrendering, effort and ease.

Embracing my powerlessness actually gives me more genuine agency. Settling down to do what I can do and releasing all that is beyond me gives me much more peace of mind.

And so I realize that I am doing all I can.  I have focussed on three specific workplaces and done my research.  I have courted the managers, and honestly, I have been "hired" twice at one of my best choices, Starbucks. But I have yet to work a day, due to circumstances beyond my control.  Ugh.

I have done my part and am now utterly dependent on others, on technology, and on the whims of fate.  Acceptance of that and release of the outcomes is what brings peace.

If I am honest, life is pretty good. I have somewhere to live.  I have loving friends and family.  I have an education, enough to eat, and self-respect. That is more than a huge percentage of humans on this planet have. And I have the promise of a job, though every day of living without an income just sees the debt mounting.

Effort and ease.  Active and passive.  Do my part and let go of other people's part; which includes being at the mercy of those who are as human and flawed as I am.

Breathe and release.  No matter what comes my way, let it in and let it go again.

This is no easy spiritual "yoga pose"!  It is taking all I can do to stay present and keep breathing.  I want to be anywhere but here in this uncertainty and vulnerability.

Contentment lies just a few breaths away if I can just let it in.  Have I done all I can in this moment? Then I can let the struggle go.  Genuine contentment makes me more powerful.  Can I embrace that?  (I can, but will I?  Can I choose contentment in this moment?)

I will get back to you on that.