If this title makes you uncomfortable, join the crowd: It actually makes me feel very uncomfortable. But it’s an important question, not because it’s answerable (it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be), but because it points to the deeper heart-ache and desire for unconditional love at the heart of every family.
How did people know what was worthwhile in your family? Was it:
- making sure you had financial security, no matter what?
- doing better than “the Joneses”?
- not embarrassing anyone and making sure you go with the flow?
- giving everything away and keeping nothing for yourself?
- keeping everything, and giving nothing away?
- or, perhaps, having nothing to begin with?
In themselves, there’s nothing really wrong with any of these standards of worthiness. But they are a poor replacement for genuine love and belonging, which we all naturally want.
They are also a terrible guide to how to deal with money, in any form. As I wrote last week, human life, love and meaning cannot be measured in dollars and cents. The only way to answer the question of “What is someone worth in your family?” is “Everything.” From the Family Soul point of view, everyone is precious, necessary, included and belongs.
We live out our lives in the tension between this radical inclusion of our family souls, and the contradictory messages we receive from our families about worth. What happens next?
- We have jobs we hate.
- We are drowning in debt we can’t pay.
- We are underemployed throughout our lives.
- We can’t ask our clients for appropriate payment, or we attract people who are unable to.
- We find ourselves in money relationships of conflict and unending resentment.
- And much else.
What a mess. But the good news, there is a way out. Proper belonging–a way of belonging that doesn’t require our families to become better than they were or are, and which provides infinite support, inclusion and love.
This may sound unrealistic. And if I suggested you do it just by “changing your mindset” or snapping your fingers or placing an affirmation on your mirror, you’d be quite right about that. That’s not realistic. Systems are powerful, and we can’t think our way into a different experience of them. The emotional system always wins.
Finding proper belonging is not a mindset fix. It’s genuine healing of the Family Soul of which you are a part.
This healing is possible through the power of family constellations. Want a taste? Join me for two free calls that are coming up in a few weeks, July 3rd & 10th, 6-7p PT.
Next week, I am going to continue this article series on our Infinite Value with a focus on the special anguish that comes from how our complicated inheritance around worth makes being in business especially difficult. You might be able to scrape by with crappy work, but if your relationship with worth and your family (and how it impacts money) isn’t in order, being in business is almost impossible, and makes it hugely painful.
I want to introduce these topics as I invite you to consider joining me for a deeply healing series this summer: You Are of Infinite Value: Healing Money Problems that Come From Your Grandparents (and their parents). This is a six week teleseries that I hope you’ll be part of. (See more info about that, below.)
I am really enjoying your insightful articles and hope that you will consider turning these into a book one day. There have been so many self help books and workshops around “getting” money but they usually are from an intellectual point of view or from as I call it the “cheer leading” perspective, which do work for some but leave so many people feeling even worse when they still don’t seem to be able to move forward. The insights as to the messages, overt and hidden, that have been passed down and then the vibrational shifts that happen in a Constellation are so powerful in helping people move into a new and healthy place with regard to self worth that can then shift their relationship to money.