Overcoming Overspending

This is a picture I took of myself while waiting to be picked up by my beloved band to go play a show in Goldsboro, NC. It was our first show in a big theater and we had a great time!

Welcome to autumn, which I think of as a Pentacles Season. The pentacles are the suit in the Tarot that represents mundane magic, the everyday, practicality, enoughness, and, yes, money.

The way I think about money has changed a lot in the last few years. Some magical folks say money is an energy, but I prefer to think of it that money is a container into which we pour our energy. Like anything, it takes form and significance based on what we’re sending into it.

For example, I used to be terrified of money, but what I was actually terrified was shame, external and internal judgment, and not having enough food on the shelves. (And I have been very lucky in that I’ve never actually been at risk of not having food on the shelves. Didn’t matter: still afraid.)

While we may have Adult Lives and even budgets, often the deeper emotional realities of how we relate to and use money go unnoticed. “Push those emotions down,” Capitalism tells us. “Focus on making more money and that’s where security will come from.”

But security (or insecurity) exists in own minds as well as our wallets or our food cupboards. Creating a budget is one thing, but creating a budget that satisfies your parts, à la parts work, is a more important assignment.

Last year, I had a client whom I specifically worked with around her budget. We came to it organically, by starting with parts work. She had a part who used money as a soothing tool, who wanted to buy things as a way to feel safe and show love. This part was also afraid of talking about money, because they didn’t want to see how my client was overspending, because it was scary.

This caught my client up in a painful cycle of overspending, shame about overspending, then spending more to soothe herself.

Sometimes a part has such strong control over what we do that it’s like sticking a wrench in the gears to change it. I like to go right to the part and address them directly.

“What are you saying that you want your person to hear?”
“What are you afraid of?”

and “What do you want in terms of support right now?”

are the three questions I have a client ask their part first. The answers are things like:

“I want them to listen to me already! They just brush past me!”

“I am afraid everyone I love will leave me, and I won’t have enough food to eat.” (Yup, heavy stuff going on inside us.)

“I don’t trust my person yet. I need them to show me they can show up and manage money well, then maybe I’ll consider passing the reins to them.”

In my client’s case, her part wanted her to prove that happiness and security could come from places other than spontaneous spending. A second part wanted her to show that she could be trusted with money by not letting the first part run the show.

We opened her budget together and went item by item. There were only two that we really needed to talk about, and they were the places my client always overspent. We went right to those and I asked her parts what they thought about those categories.

Through that back and forth, and through more specific answers from her parts about what they needed and new ways they might get it, we were able to change her budget approach - not just in terms of actual numbers assigned, but in terms of what she did when she noticed she was going over budget.

“Talk to your parts when they want you to go over budget,” I suggested. “Practice having integrity in your Self around what you actually need, regardless of what your part is yelling at you. Compromise with them when it’s in service of longer term trust.”

We can replace spending-as-soothing with actual self-care, in the form of caring for our protectors. This is how to stop overspending: not a rigid budget you’ll force yourself into until you crack, but by addressing why you’re cracking in the first place. By taking care of you.

This also makes it easier to have gratitude. I like to write in my budget “thanks for the money” on several categories. If my parts aren’t so busy protecting me from things that haven’t been a threat in years, they have energy to prompt me to enjoy, to feel gratitude for what I have.

If you’d like to get a taste for working with me, we could have a Cure Call, a 40 minute call where we work with your currently loudest part. This might be a money part, and we could find out what they need within that 40 minutes.

xox

Isabel

Village Witch’s Corner

My intention this week : 

Start paring down my priorities. Find more time to read.

Question(s) I'm asking this week:

What is most important right now? What am I willing to sacrifice right now in order to have those most important things?

What I’m listening to:

I am in a deep Normal Gossip hole, listening to their older seasons. They make me feel light and laugh-y, and that’s what I need right now.

Spell of the Week:

Let myself cry, or make time to cry if needed.