Can’t live without it! Most of us spend (or have spent) a significant part of our lives earning money by working. Do what? Food, housing, free time, etc. Of course, buying a box of ravioli or caviar depends on the amount of our income, but not only that. There is also an element of choice related to our relationship with money. Tell me what you do with it, I’ll tell you who you are.
A relationship stemming from the environment, culture
In France, it is still rather cloudy to talk about money. Saying the amount of your salary seems immodest, especially in the case of high income. On the contrary, in the United States it displays its value from year to yearamerican dreamsSuccess would be accessible to anyone if they strived for it. If you grew up in a family where money was hard to make ends meet and where money was always about (giving, spending, finding, earning, etc.), you will have a more ambivalent relationship with finances than if you had a sheltered childhood where money was enough , so that it doesn’t become a topic of conversation.
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The desire to control
“We all struggle to find points of stability between control and pleasure in our daily lives, and our relationship with money is an excellent indicator of our general personality,” explains Joseph Agostini, psychologist and psychoanalyst, author of I spend as I am (Duke). This relationship to money requires our desire to control or, on the contrary, to enjoy.” There are those who count, store and accumulate with gradation. storing, maintaining, underlines Joseph Agostini. He is an obsessed person who cannot help counting in order to forget that his enjoyment, if he got a little out of control, it would take him way out of his comfort zone.” On the side of control there is also frugality, however, distinguishing himself from the stingy in his ability to enjoy the pleasures of life – his concern to “delay” can be devoted to this goal.
…or enjoy your money
Spenders also have different profiles. Generous with their money, they spoil their loved ones to please them, but sometimes with an unconscious request for love. People who are chronically overwhelmed may seek in this transcendence the authority or limits they lacked in childhood. “The ultra spender wants to match the desires of others by getting what others dream of without allowing themselves to buy it,” adds Joseph Agostini, who subscribes excessively to the capitalist dialectic of consumption. One subject replaces another, none is enough. Dissatisfaction is chronic.” A mistake that puts many consumers like us at risk.
So wasteful or stingy? “In the end, we are all more or less both, but some fall into unhealthy relationships with money, which means that we suffer and prevent us from having relationships adapted to others,” concludes the psychoanalyst. Psychotherapy allows us to connect our relationship with money to our primal experiences of anxiety and joy and understand our mechanisms with greater nuance.”