At the end of her blog today about how her shopping vice is not unlike a smoker’s addiction, Alexis, my eldest daughter asks, “I haven’t yet figured out the root of my misguided desires, but as this year unfolds before me, I vow to look within my heart (and my closets) to find out.”

And I want to add… You might want to look into your family of origin too honey!

I come from a long line of acquisition soothers. A family of people who used buying things to soothe ruffled feathers, disturbed emotions and uncomfortable feelings. To stuff what we didn’t want to feel, we bought what we didn’t need.

As a child, I remember my parents arguing, a lot, about money. The lack of its greenery cast a dark shadow on every family affair. My father was a spendthrift. A poor money manager, he truly did believe in the philosophy, if there are cheques in my cheque book, there’s money in my account.

My mother was more practical, more concerned about holding to account our spending.

My father’s voice was louder. My mother eventually lost her voice.

Growing up, whenever there was discord, my father bought us something to soothe it over. We didn’t talk about hurt feelings, or familial upsets. We bought our way into forgetting.

Those are the memories of my childhood. And in their shadow, the adage, “Money is the root of all evil,” became the belief, “Talking, thinking, doing anything around money (and anything else that upset me) is unsafe. It will only cause distress and discord.”

So, I never talked about money. Nor did I really think about what I was doing with it. And to stuff down my feelings of discomfort, I spent whatever money I had to avoid the  distress having to think about it created.

When I was in that abusive relationship that almost killed me, money was how he eventually came to control me. He started with giving me gifts. Lots of them. And then, it was money. And then, once I became accustomed to his largesse, he took it all away. I became ‘the burden’ and money became the issue. To ease the burden, I gave him whatever I had, whatever I could. I didn’t care about ‘the money’, I cared more about stopping his anger, his yelling, his blaming of me as the cause of his distress. I wanted the prince charming I’d met to replace the prince of darkness raging before me.

“Look at all I’ve given you,” he’d scream. I couldn’t stand his rage  so I gave in, continuously, until I no longer had anything to give. I’m simplifying, it was more complicated and darker than that, but money definitely was a point of attack for him to access my psyche. And because I had such poor boundaries around the issue, I was an easy target.

The irony? It was eventually a cancelled cheque that lead the police to arresting him. In the final four months, he was attempting to escape the country and took me with him when he fled the city. He had promised that a) he had money in the states and would ‘make it all right’ once he was out of the country; and b) he’d let me go once he got out of the country and could make it ‘all right’.  Ahh, the lies we believe when first we set out to give into deceit…

In those dark and final months of that living hell, money was tight and one day, I found a cheque at the bottom of my purse a girlfriend had written to pay me back for something I’d bought for her. Not willing to do anything without his approval, I gave him the cheque. He cashed it. Because we were hiding out in a small town west of Vancouver, it was easy for the police to track him once my girlfriend gave the police the cancelled cheque  with the bank’s stamp on it.

At the time, I did not have the mental capacity to think through the ripple of that cheque, beyond the message I hoped she’d get — I was alive. Just barely. But I was alive.

I was blessed. My girlfriend and another angel had not given up on finding me and here I am today. Free. Loving my life and living in the rapture of now.

But there are still residual issues that linger — issues that are embedded deeper into my psyche than the almost 5 years of that relationship.

And they stem back to my own family of origin beliefs about  money. And they reach forward to my daughter’s family of origin learnings about… money.

In her excellent book, “The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Spiritual Fulfillment” author, Maria Nemeth, PhD asks, “Does [how you use money] bring lasting satisfaction, or are you using it for instant gratification because your life is off-kilter? These are the questions that bring clarity to your hero’s journey.”

I like clarity on my hero’s journey.

I like being true to me, myself and I.

Time to go back to The Energy of Money and redo the work of ensuring I am using money and other forms of energy to intentionally express myself with love and joy in this world of wonder.

Namaste.