If you are someone who spends a lot of money on buying little treats or little snacks or you reach out for your shopping app, or maybe you spontaneously buy BIG things, or you spend your weekends at the thrift store buying things you want but don’t particularly have room for, then this episode is created for you!
And no, you will not be lectured about budgeting, delaying gratification or automating your savings...
While these strategies have a time and place, we are going on a different route in this episode- the Holistic Money Healing Route which is focused on compassion and true transformation.
In this episode, we peel back the layers of what's actually happening when we resort to emotional spending, and venture beyond the surface of these purchases to the deeper emotional motivations driving them.
In this episode, I will share 2 steps you can start doing on your own to heal any emotional money wounds and rewire your nervous system to hold in abundance.
This episode isn't just about managing your budget; it's a holistic approach to aligning your financial behaviors with your deepest values!
Links:
Thank you for being here ❤️
Join my 6-month program, Create Fulfilling Abundance.
Learn more and apply here: https://www.saveamillioncents.com/cfa
If you are interested in working with me 1:1, send me an email!
✨If this podcast is a helpful resource for you, please share it with your friends, on social media, and leave a 5-star rating and review.
💝 To receive your FREE Money Archetype Workbook, complete this form
Connect with me on Instagram for free tips, inspo: https://www.instagram.com/nadinezumot/
~Podcast theme song by The Jilted Irony
If you are someone who spends a lot of money on buying little treats or little snacks or you reach out for your shopping app, or maybe you spontaneously buy BIG things, or you spend your weekends at the thrift store buying things you want but don’t particularly have room for, then this episode is created for you!
And no, you will not be lectured about budgeting, delaying gratification or automating your savings...
While these strategies have a time and place, we are going on a different route in this episode- the Holistic Money Healing Route which is focused on compassion and true transformation.
In this episode, we peel back the layers of what's actually happening when we resort to emotional spending, and venture beyond the surface of these purchases to the deeper emotional motivations driving them.
In this episode, I will share 2 steps you can start doing on your own to heal any emotional money wounds and rewire your nervous system to hold in abundance.
This episode isn't just about managing your budget; it's a holistic approach to aligning your financial behaviors with your deepest values!
Links:
Thank you for being here ❤️
Join my 6-month program, Create Fulfilling Abundance.
Learn more and apply here: https://www.saveamillioncents.com/cfa
If you are interested in working with me 1:1, send me an email!
✨If this podcast is a helpful resource for you, please share it with your friends, on social media, and leave a 5-star rating and review.
💝 To receive your FREE Money Archetype Workbook, complete this form
Connect with me on Instagram for free tips, inspo: https://www.instagram.com/nadinezumot/
~Podcast theme song by The Jilted Irony
Hello, hello and welcome back to the Money Healing Podcast. I am so happy to be here with you today, and this episode is especially for you. If you are someone who tends to spend a fair bit of money on buying little treats or little snacks, or maybe you're someone who reaches out to your favorite shopping app and you might even spontaneously buy big things without planning for them, or maybe you even spend your weekends at the thrift store or retail shopping and buying things that you want but do not particularly have the room for in your home or in your money plan. So this podcast episode is dedicated just for you. And no, I will not tell you that you need a budget, and I will not be telling you how to hide money from yourself or how to automate your savings or learn how to delay gratification, as if that ever works. No, we're not going to do any of that. We are going to do this, the holistic money healing way, and this method, as it's called it, is holistic, it is gentle, it is compassionate, it is trauma sensitive and it focuses on creating permanent transformations, not that just these quick fixes and superficial changes. So what I'm getting these days is a lot of clients who actually feel really disempowered, or maybe even feel ashamed and embarrassed, because they they have this habit of spending money on these little things, or even promising themselves that they're going to pay off their credit card in on a certain length of time, but all of a sudden they just surprise themselves, even by purchasing this big thing and charging it on their credit card, and that just makes them feel ashamed and it's setting them back and it makes them feel bad because it just feels like it's impossible to control. Right, and if this is you, please do not feel bad. Please, let's also put the money aside for a second and start acknowledging how much time and energy you are spending on feeling guilty and validating even or justifying your financial decisions or avoiding looking at your finances. So, again, I'm not looking at your finances for now we're going to look at that in a minute but please, we want to start looking at the what's actually happening from.
Speaker 1:This pattern is not just financial. It is eating away at your creative energy and at your peace of mind and at your sense of self-confidence and empowerment, and I don't want this for you, because forget empowerment, this is not joyful, okay. So now we're going to talk about money when we label this as emotional spending in its name, we are bringing shame to ourselves, or whether you're labeling it yourself or whether you are listening to people who name it as emotional spending I use this term sometimes just so that I can help people understand. You know what I'm talking about. So when we use the term emotional spending in itself, we are inflicting shame on ourselves. Okay, so let's make this deal today, in this episode let's not call it emotional spending anymore. Let's call it what it really is. Let's call it soothing or comfort buying.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a lot of my clients self-sue through buying food. They also find themselves buying a coffee here and there or treating themselves from their local cafe before walking into a difficult meeting or maybe even seeing a difficult client. And, as I said earlier, this habit is setting them back from paying off their debt in the way that they want to, and it sets them back emotionally because they are feeling disempowered and unfulfilled. Okay, this the same goes to you. If you perhaps use online shopping as a distraction, you might find yourself constantly browsing and making these little impulse purchases again also big purchases when you just like surprise yourself, and then you justify and then you know if you live with someone, you kind of go to them and kind of make it into this confessional and they're like, okay, I don't really care. And you're like, but I do, blah, blah, blah. You know, I've been there, that's why I know it, and hundreds of clients have been there too. So here's the thing like grabbing that little treat from the cafe or shopping, or maybe even in person shopping, that's not bad.
Speaker 1:But what I want to emphasize is that I'm talking about that excess when we are purchasing, excessive self care, when we are excessively shopping, excessively buying. Like, for example, me. I have a habit of like buying more books that I can ever read in five years. I seriously, when I look at all the books I have in my house and on my Kindle, if I do not buy any new book in five years, I can read a new book to me every month for the next I don't know a long time. So I have this habit too.
Speaker 1:So we buy little things for these hobbies that one day you hope you are going to get around to doing. Or you might even have a lot of subscription services that are like, oh my God, what are? What is all this? I'm not even consuming this. So, again, none of this is bad. But actually, yeah, none of this is bad. But I want to say that no coping mechanism is bad. Okay, I really believe in this thing where there are no bad coping mechanisms unless they start to limit you, unless you start finding yourself reaching out for them as a way to distract yourselves from feelings, especially if these feelings are uncomfortable. Okay, so, if you're feeling like it is impossible to quit your these patterns, and these patterns are setting you back and limiting you, it's time to you know, look at them in a different way and look at what you are actually trying to soothe From or distract yourself from. Okay, we're going to get into all of this in this episode, all right.
Speaker 1:So, emotionally, the way I see this is that this limitation or the frustration, can come from a lack of fulfillment that comes both before and after the, the consumption right. Like, let's just imagine that you felt uncomfortable and you went to the cafe and you bought something, you ate it and you're like, okay, now I feel unfulfilled again. Or you reach out for that app, you buy it and you're like, yeah, cool, it's going to arrive in a few days. And then it's that feeling, that void is back, okay. So it leaves us feeling empty and anxious and it makes us want to grab on to the next thing, that contemporary soothers, and then the next, and then the next, and then this episode. What I want to do is to gently invite you to start looking at the underlying cause of this.
Speaker 1:Okay, because this behavior with money is a symptom of not feeling safe to feel your feelings or to soothe what needs to be soothed. You know, to soothe what actually needs to be soothed. So why is this happening? I like to break things down into practical, emotional and spiritual steps. Okay, so, from a practical perspective, this can be a symptom of having too much of a fear, of being in a situation where you're not feeling safe. You're not having too much on your plate, okay, you have. Your capacity is just at its limit and you are very busy low capacity, so your nervous system does not have the capacity to process what life is throwing at you, right? So you are getting emotions that are a little bit heavy. They are signaling that you're unfulfilled, or like there is an you know, emotional trauma that is being triggered. So what you do is like I don't have time for this, you know, and fair enough, you don't have time for this, so you do anything to kind of suppress or repress that feeling. Okay, so you reach out to a soothing resource. From an emotional perspective, this might be a sign of unprocessed trauma.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, if, if something feels too overwhelming on your body, if it feels too overwhelming on your nervous system to process some deep emotions, we repress them. So, first of all, we need to, first and foremost, acknowledge that knowing how to process emotions and how to feel our feelings is not something that we are born with. It is something that we learn from our parents. So they might actually sit us down and teach us, but most likely what happens is that we learn from example. We learn through seeing how our parents process their own emotions, and we learn from how they are feeling and from how they help us process our own emotions, or how they process our emotions more like you know, and most of the time what happens is that our parents don't have that skill. Okay, so when you express an emotion that might be too much for them. So you get the stare or they tell you, ooh, don't be too emotional. Or you see them repressing their own emotions or throwing tantrums. Okay, so what happens is that we grow up without the skill of knowing how to feel our feelings, and the other thing is that sometimes there are feelings that are not meant for you to process on your own.
Speaker 1:Okay, so some emotions and some feelings are you know, they come from unprocessed childhood trauma and you need someone to help you through them. Okay, and that's why in my program, create fulfilling abundance, my six-month program, the first thing we do is not budgeting. We don't do that anyway. We never do that. It's not looking at finances and financial systems and manifestation systems. We actually look at the basics of how to feel our feelings. Okay, because Repressing our feelings has huge impact on our finances. That's why we sometimes, when we can't process our own feelings, it's not because we, we, we are weak or whatever. It's because, one, maybe we don't know how to and two, maybe these feelings are too big and need, and we need, help with them and we need someone to guide us to do it in a slow, antitreated way so that we don't re traumatize our nervous system. So One thing I really want to talk about really briefly is that the pattern of Reaching out to something that soothes you from outside of you is a pattern that I see a lot with clients who have experienced any trauma that happened in their body.
Speaker 1:So, physical abuse, sexual abuse, these are the usual patterns that I see when you the underlying pattern that can result in people reaching out for Shopping food and all that stuff. Okay. So, just needing to, to acknowledge this, to presence this, okay. So when that happens, being in your body and feeling your feelings is actually pretty impossible, because when we experience that kind of abuse, our body is actually Not safe, it doesn't feel safe and it's I'm not talking to your conscious mind. Of course, being where you are is fine, but and on an unconscious level and from a inner child perspective and a nervous system perspective your body is not, is not safe.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's very difficult to do these things on your own, okay, so when we look, when we look at things from this perspective, I am hoping that you are seeing how it makes complete sense to be, you know, to have this habit or have this pattern of Reaching out to find ways to ease discomfort with your emotions. I want you to see that it makes sense, that there's nothing wrong with you, okay, so when we have emotional trauma that goes unresolved or unprocessed, your nervous system and your body Can label all emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones, as dangerous. Again, this all happens on a subconscious level and Every time you feel any emotion, even happy emotions, it can go into survival response. Okay, so what happens then is that we look for instant gratification and any way to distract ourselves from feeling the feeling, because all feelings are uncomfortable. Okay, and that's what happens. If a feeling is uncomfortable, if a feeling is triggering A threat in your nervous system, you are automatically going to grab to something outside of you Shop, you eat, whatever. So this is why cognitive solutions like Just follow a budget and try to delay gratification oh, all you need to do is automate your savings. These don't work because this pattern is not in your mind. This pattern is actually in your body. On a different angle, spiritually, what might be happening is You're you have perhaps this experience of being Unfulfilled. Okay, there is this spiritual void.
Speaker 1:I remember I had a period in my life when I was feeling very Unfulfilled. It was right before I started this business, started this money healing business. I got into this habit of buying lipstick. So I would go on these cosmetic websites and you know, I have to say that all the lipsticks I bought were Cruelty-free and vegan and all that stuff. So it's good stuff. But after my 96th lipstick Yep 96 lipstick I Realized that there might be something emotional and spiritual that I needed. So I got help and that was when I knew that my soul was ready for a big change and to step into a new Um and you, you know path right. So, as you can see, the solution was not to budget better. As a matter of fact, I had a really good and very strict budget at the time and, yeah, it didn't help, because what was happening is on a physiological and an emotional level.
Speaker 1:When we experienced discomfort again, our nervous system goes into survival mode. So the most thing, the most common thing I see, is that we experience discomfort, we experience unfulfillment Again. That registers as a discomfort in the nervous system. Your nervous system wants you to be comfortable. It doesn't and it wants you to stay alive. So when it views an emotion as a threat, it goes into.
Speaker 1:Usually in this case, it's a flea response. So that comfort consumption or the comfort spending might be a flight response in your nervous system. It could actually also be a fight response or even a freeze response or a shutdown, but what I generally see is it's a flight response. So, of course, what response it is? Or, of course it's not black and white. We simplify things just to help ourselves understand. But sometimes it's just a blend of all of these responses. So, depending on the unique circumstance, depending on what your capacity is on the day, depending on what your hormones are doing how hungry, hungry, angry, thirsty you are, what else is happening in your life that is going to also determine what type of nervous system state you go into.
Speaker 1:So we're just going to stick with the flea response for this episode, just for examples. That's the most common response that I see in this instance. So no, do not try to budget better, please. And no, the solution is not about making more money or manifesting more, because if the underlying emotions are unresolved, then you are just going to end up spending the more that you are manifesting. So a lot of people think that I'll just make more money. But no, if you have an emotional wound that is creating a nervous system response that is causing you to overspend, you are going to have more to overspend, right? So that's not the solution. The solution is to address what is asking to be sued in the first place.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's why we start with healing first. That's why everything I do is so healing oriented, before we dive into finances, before we dive into manifestation. It's all about healing first, and then we do the financial systems and then we work with the laws of nature and money and abundance to manifest and create fulfilling abundance. And, by the way, cfa it starts back up in March, but if you want to enroll soon, you will get access to my program, money Healing 101. And that is. It's a great program that can get you started on your money healing journey and, specifically, it will teach you how to start soothing your nervous system, to start making better aligned financial decisions and create healthier financial patterns. Okay, so, let me know if you're interested in joining. All right.
Speaker 1:So another thing that is super helpful, if this is something that you are wanting to shift, is doing your inner child work. So connecting with your inner child can really help you develop a deeper understanding of your emotions and also your triggers and their origins. Okay, so with awareness, we can start noticing our triggers and what triggers us to become uncomfortable and therefore, what sets our nervous system into this flight survival mode, which can lead to comfort spending, okay. So when we start working with our inner child, we are going to start developing this awareness that, let me tell you, it's going to take time. It's not like, oh boom, it's done. It's going to take time. So please be very gentle and patient with yourself. Okay. So I'm actually currently recording modules for CFA on inner child work and we really go very deep in that.
Speaker 1:So what we are doing with inner child work, especially when it comes to money, is we are essentially re-parenting ourselves. So what that means is that we are cultivating the self-care and the compassion that we lacked in childhood. Okay, even if your parents were like angels, they're still human. They still had responsibilities, they still had maybe other children they needed to take care of and the housework and the emotional trauma that they never got to process. So please know that your parents are not perfect and when we re-parent ourselves, we give ourselves or give our inner child that compassion that we really, really wanted in childhood. Okay, the emotional regulation Relying also means slowly introducing new soothing techniques, so we slowly become less reliant on comfort spending. Okay, so I'm going to link my ebook Emotional Regulation for Financial Success in the show notes. You are going to also find other soothing tools in there that are going to help you and slowly, slowly move you away from relying on comfort spending. So, to end this episode, I really want to teach you a nervous system exercise that will help you shift this pattern and help you go from feeling disempowered to making more empowered choices.
Speaker 1:So say that you are, say that you're going to sit down and do a financial task, or maybe you need to go and speak to your boss, or you received an email, whatever something happened that caused emotional discomfort or caused you to feel a feeling that is big. Okay. So you have this urge to grab a snack, or you have the urge to go to the cafe and buy your favorite snack, or go on your favorite shopping app and purchase something. I'm not telling you not to do this. What I'm telling you is what I want to invite you to do is first acknowledge that you are in a state where you are needing to self soothe. That in itself is a major win, okay. So before you grab onto something outside of you, stop for one second and gently acknowledge that you are in a state where you are needing some soothing. After this, feel free and give yourself permission to grab your snack or whatever it is that you are feeling urged to do. Go ahead, okay.
Speaker 1:But this in itself is such a big win because, as simple as it might seem, what we are essentially doing is that we are breaking the pattern. Instead of moving away from the discomfort, we are very slowly shifting towards the discomfort and acknowledging it instead of fleeing from it. Awareness is always the first step. Changing the pattern is wonderful, but it begins with that small step of awareness and creating capacity in your nervous system so it doesn't feel like it's being shocked. Okay, and if this is cool, if this sounds like you can do this, you can.
Speaker 1:It's fine for you to turn and just acknowledge that you are needing to self soothe, then I'd like to invite you to take it one step further. Okay, I would like to gently invite you to name the feeling, so that could look like grounding in the present moment and maybe using your fingertips to touch your body where you feel that feeling of discomfort very lightly, as if you are touching a butterfly. Okay, as if there's this delicate butterfly that landed on your body and you just want to touch it very gently. Okay, and it feels uncomfortable to touch your body doing that Don't just do it from outside. You know you're like, oh okay, I feel. I know that I'm reaching out to something to soothe. I'm going to turn very slowly towards the feeling. Where am I feeling in my body? Oh, it's anger. You name it, you feel it in your stomach, you touch it gently, you let it go and you go and continue on with your life.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is a major, major win. It might sound or seem like a very small step for our complicated human brains, but to your nervous system, especially in trauma, this is a huge win because we are slowly increasing our capacity to begin feeling big feelings and with time and practice, and maybe even with support and guidance, you will find yourself turning towards you know this comfort consumption or comfort spending less and less often. Your nervous system always responds better to slow and incremental steps. So try this and let me know how you go.
Speaker 1:I would love to hear from you and if you love this podcast episode and you feel like somebody in your life could benefit from some money healing, please forward it on to them and let's just spread the word, let's just start stepping into financial empowerment and well-being and abundance in this gentle money healing way, and if you would like some more help from me, then I would love to invite you to book a one-on-one session with me. The link is in the show notes. Don't forget to download my free ebook and it will be a wonderful resource for you, and I wish you the best of luck. Remember, please go slow. There is no shame in any of this. This is something that I was challenged with in the past, and so did hundreds of my clients, and again, this is something I always continuously work on deepening within myself. We all have money wounds and you are so brave and I am so proud of you for being here, and I'll see you next week on the Money Healing Podcast.