The Second and Third Waves:
Financial Trauma and Institutional Betrayal
The smell of your own sweat wakes you out of a restless sleep. Wherever you look, unpaid bills have spilled over chairs, tables, and counters onto your floor. Maybe your mortgage is due today or maybe it was last week, or last month. Ditto your phone, internet, and utility bills, not to mention the kids’ tuition and your credit cards, which are close to maxed out.
Never one to be late on payments, you cannot shake off a sense of failure and foreboding. You try fighting it off and fall back asleep instead of getting out of bed and forcing yourself into financial triage mode. Which bills do you defer or negotiate a partial payment? From which account can you scrounge just enough to cover the minimum? Your credit is hanging on by a thread and most of your investments and savings have been tapped.
The dawn brings deeper shame and confusion than you felt yesterday. Are you ever going to get through it? What happens if you can’t? You used to be so organized and took pride in never missing a payment. Now, the thought of opening your inbox or mailbox triggers a flood of nausea. That knot in your stomach that never goes away pushes up toward your throat, making it hard to swallow. The phone calls are already starting: persistent, hostile, and threatening. If only you didn’t have to get up.
Unmanageable debt is the leading cause of financial stress, according to a 2016 survey by GoBankingRates.com. The elephant in the room that never gets addressed is the shame that accompanies financial failure.
The Second Wave: Financial Trauma
When it follows a catastrophe, the second wave of trauma often supersedes the original event. But financial trauma qualifies as a disaster in its own right. Rarely if ever talked about, the primary emotional wound of catastrophe can be superseded by a new deluge of stress hormones triggered by a state of financial emergency that can dominate your life for years. Personal disasters can include the devastating costs of such events as catastrophic illnesses, divorce, and job loss. A mass disaster inflicts financial damage on families and communities as well as individuals. Although most misfortunes in my life have turned out to be blessings in disguise, the pain of losing everything for which you have worked can do serious damage to your sense of self-worth.
Lynn Robinson, author of Real Prosperity: Using the Power of Intuition to Create Financial and Spiritual Abundance says, “Financial trauma is very scary, partly because it’s such a taboo subject. If you talk about it, you may feel you have a big L on your forehead for ‘loser!’” As an intuitive advisor, she’s seen financial anxiety occurring with greater frequency over the past several years. “It’s awful to look at your bills and believe that you have no way of paying them. It makes you feel very helpless, anxious, and worried. Fighting for respect when dealing with institutions doesn’t help when you’re consumed with fear,” she says. “But if you can find peace of mind for the day, that’s powerful.”
In her own life, Lynn has used visualization as a tool when she’s been anxious about finances. She imagines a golden bowl or tray in front of her. She says, “God, I am worried about money and about my husband and my home. I am going to put this worry in this golden bowl and give it up to you. Please bring it back to me filled with answers, peace, and guidance.” She imagines receiving it back into her heart.
“You might not get the next $100,000 you need, but the answer will come back in the form of a peaceful feeling. Or you might be guided to an article, a podcast, or a conversation that has just the right phrase to bring you peace or give you an idea to bring more prosperity into your life. Sometimes someone will call and offer to help,” she says. “What is important is remembering that we are here on this planet to surrender, have patience, and allow ourselves to love and be loved. Crises help us to learn these things.”
Financial Issues After the Las Vegas Shooting
We don’t immediately think of the financial impact of a mass shooting, but after gunman Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded 500 others in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, those who survived—and the loved ones of those who didn’t make it—discovered complicated and costly legal issues. The financial fallout from a shooting can affect the safety and well-being of a victim’s children, spouse, and immediate family members.
Only 44 percent of Americans have a will, according to a Gallup poll conducted in May 2016, two weeks after Prince’s untimely death on April 21, 2016. The lack of a will, trust, or estate plan puts a legal and financial burden on those family members and friends who are responsible for sorting out someone’s affairs upon his or her death.
This and other issues are concerns for Christine Miller, a community outreach director at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada. She told Bloomberg News, “Loved ones of those killed will find themselves navigating complex legal territory when they attempt to settle the affairs of murdered wives, husbands, and children. It will just be a matter of the dust settling.”32
Miller anticipated that once people started coming out of shock they would need to deal with estate, immigration, and child custody issues in addition to health care paperwork and negotiating family leave with employers. Those who need time off may need legal assistance with debt issues, as well.
Thinking proactively, the State Bar of Nevada offered pro bono legal assistance to shooting victims. A Nevada-based attorney did pro bono work for victims of the Emanuel African Methodist Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine worshippers were killed by a white supremacist on June 17, 2015. In addition to forty-five lawyers on staff, Miller’s Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada has more than 1,000 local attorneys who do pro bono work for the Center.
You Could Not Have Known
Since any financial disaster affects your key survival needs, post-traumatic aftershock can resurface long after the initial event. Years after the 2008 recession, several people began sessions for post-traumatic stress flashbacks, hypervigilance, and severe anxiety due to their financial losses at the time.
“Even though everything is solid now, I can’t stop worrying about what will happen if there’s another recession,” a vice president of a bank told me at our first session.
Working with the Five Gifts helped him recognize that these inner resources would help him stay balanced through any future financial storm. The most important gift, to him, was forgiveness.
He says, “When I understood that I was still blaming myself for those financial losses, the gift of forgiveness stopped me from ruminating about past decisions.”
Eileen and Denis Kelly have worked with more than 500 clients who were financially traumatized after Hurricane Sandy. Denis is an attorney in Long Beach, New York. He says, “People sit here and say, ‘. . . and I should have . . .’ and I tell them, ‘Your sins are completely forgiven. You could not have known. You bear no responsibility for this. Even though I am the lawyer you are coming to for help, I never saw it coming. We had no idea how this was going to play out.’”
Looking at the Numbers
Statistics in the news show the big picture but they fail to illustrate the harm suffered by millions of people in the impact zone. In the three years following a hurricane, states that suffered a direct hit show a 50 percent increase in filings for bankruptcy. During the same period, adjoining states report a 20 percent increase in bankruptcies.33
A representative of FEMA explained that due to the population density along the northeastern coast where Hurricane Sandy did the greatest damage, the government agency projected staying in the area for the coming decade. More than one million people, including me, took direct hits.
Hurricane Sandy killed 159 people and caused as much as $75 billion in damages along a thousand-mile length of coastline, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). More than 650,000 homes, 250,000 vehicles, and 300,000 businesses were flooded. FEMA statistics show that 8.5 million people went without power for a month. For several months after the storm, abandoned vehicles randomly burst into flame whenever salt water leaked into batteries, causing the cars’ alarms to go off.
In “Triage in a Trolley,” published in Lifenet, the journal of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, a volunteer EMT with the Long Beach, New York, fire department described the scene:34
“As we drove through the streets, we came across a traffic light floating in the street: a traffic light, pieces of the boardwalk, and a sewing machine. Tons of debris. Cars were all over the street, up on the sidewalk. It was problematic trying to get to the emergency or fire scenes. Contaminated seawater put more than half of the fire department’s fleet out of commission for more than a month. Sanitation soon became a major concern.”
The financial wreckage from Superstorm Sandy is dwarfed by the long-term damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina. It is too soon to add up the bill for Harvey, which outranks Katrina as the most expensive storm in U.S. history, with initial damage estimates running from $150 to $180 billion.
Not only did Katrina claim 2,000 lives in five states, the storm caused $108 billion in damages. But numbers mask human suffering and the financial hurt endured by flooded communities and businesses.
Here’s what an article in the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review published in 2007 said:
“Survivors will have to rebuild their lives and recover from their debilitating losses. However, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita did not completely wash away all the remnants of their past lives. Mortgages, credit card bills, and other debts still remained. Survivors still had to contend with the costs of escaping the hurricane, as well as credit card bills and new mortgages to replace the items and homes they used to have.”35
In Communities and Banking, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren writes:
“When there is a series of major disruptions like the 2005 hurricane season, hundreds of thousands of middle-class families may deplete their savings and turn to credit cards to supplement the aid they receive from charities and the government. Additionally, victims of natural disasters often return home to find they have lost substantial assets. Insurance may cover some of the damage but . . . every aspect of a family’s financial circumstances is exposed to the effects of a natural disaster.”36
A Crash Course in Surviving Financial Trauma
The three cycles of loss—control, safety, and freedom—help to explain the emotional impact of financial trauma. When you are unable to generate income or obtain the loans and funding needed for basic living expenses, you lose a sense of control. If you are displaced from your home by a disaster, you might not be able to return until you have raised sufficient funding to rebuild and satisfy current building codes. As a homeowner, you would normally get to choose when, how, and if you are going to replace siding or windows.
In an interview with the New York Times, I said that that one million people did not wake up the morning of October 30, 2012, saying, “Let’s redecorate our houses.”37
Once a disaster has damaged your home, your choices must comply with regulations and stipulations from the bank holding your mortgage, your insurance company, and multiple government agencies. It’s not uncommon for regulations to change in ways that stall the process. For example, after Hurricane Sandy, residents of several Long Island towns were told they could make repairs without needing costly building permits. Two months later, building permits were suddenly required. For thousands who had already started rebuilding, the added stress of filing permits, paying several thousand dollars in permit fees, and stopping work for several months until the permits were granted pushed people to the breaking point.
At our support group meetings in the Long Beach city hall courtroom, people came to share information, resources, and their frustrations. While there were no immediate solutions, in realizing that losing control over their home situations added yet another layer of trauma to their lives, attendees reported they felt better for having their experiences validated.
As Denis Kelly says, “You don’t have control. The bank has got control. You wouldn’t have had the money to buy your house if you hadn’t given them control. The government has control because you wouldn’t even have insurance if it wasn’t for the US taxpayer.”
As days turn into weeks, then months and years, you lose your sense of safety. Before a disaster, very few of us consider what it’s like to struggle for food, clothing, and shelter. We take for granted that clean water will automatically flow from a faucet. We take our faucets for granted, too. When we are cold, we turn up the heat. And when we are hungry, we can open the fridge because we assume our basic survival needs will be met.
Catastrophic events disrupt that expectation. If the disruption is short-term, we soon forget what it was like to stand in line for a bottle of water and a sandwich at the American Red Cross tent.
“I will never forget what it was like to have no clothes, no contact lenses, and trying to find milk for my kids,” says Andrea Michaelson, an attorney who lost her home to Hurricane Sandy.
When that disruption continues after the Red Cross and other organizations leave, our sense of safety begins to crumble. In a literal sense, home is shelter. It is supposed to be our place of safety, which originates in the reptilian brain, according to the late Dr. Paul MacLean, who discovered the triune (three-in-one) brain at the National Institutes of Mental Health. Also known as the primal brain, this is our center of automatic patterns, habits, routines, and territory. It does not like sudden change, and when our territory is threatened, the reptilian brain gets agitated. Tempers flare and stress levels go through the roof.
“It can be property damage, zoning, or permits; when it’s home, that adds another level of anger to it,” says Eileen Kelly, who manages her husband Denis Kelly’s law practice in Long Beach. “If it’s medical malpractice, if a doctor hurt them or they were in an accident or fell off a ladder, they don’t have the same need to protect as they do when it’s about home.”
Coming Home to an Unstable Environment
Our environment is an extension of home. Whether we live near a forest that is vulnerable to wildfires, in an earthquake zone, or close to the sea, living through a catastrophe sensitizes us to how vulnerable we are to our environment. Fear, anxiety, nightmares, and phobias often develop in response to our perceived loss of safety.
Rebuilding emotional safety while remaining physically present in an environment that once proved destructive and continues to be potentially dangerous is a complex process that takes time—and the second gift of patience.
Remember: There is no predictable timetable and each of us moves through our losses in our own unique way.
Five years after Hurricane Sandy demolished her house, Andrea Michaelson was still fighting her way through a morass of bureaucratic obstacles to obtain the funding she needed to rebuild. Untouched since it was condemned by FEMA after the storm, her house was rotting. Gutters, window frames, siding, and pieces of the roof were peeling away from the hundred-year-old structure. Although five years of wrangling had familiarized her with the process, Andrea was shocked to find that she had regressed.
“When I had to call my insurance carrier, the bank that holds my mortgage and the organization that distributes government grants, someone slammed a door nearby and I jumped out of my skin. The noise hurt my ears,” she says. “I tell myself, ‘You’re an attorney. What’s wrong with you?’ I do paperwork for a living.”
If you have never experienced financial trauma, Andrea’s reaction may seem extreme or over the top. But what happened to her could happen to you, or me, or anyone. Understanding that each of us would be as helpless as Andrea, we try instinctively to protect ourselves by shutting down, numbing out, turning off our emotions, or suggesting she is being “too sensitive.” It might make us a bit more comfortable to label Andrea’s case an anomaly. But given that mass catastrophes affect hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives, I would confidently estimate that at least 50 percent of those who sustained a direct hit would find themselves dealing with these themes years after the event.
“I get a kick out of people who talk like it only happened to them,” says lawyer Denis Kelly. “I wonder, ‘Didn’t you notice that everybody else is going through it?’”
A Tsunami of Shame
Financial crises cut deep into the psyche. The lack of financial stability and the loss of ability to generate sufficient funds to take care of whatever is needed can have a negative impact on our core sense of ourselves as productive, competent human beings. It’s not uncommon for people who are worn down after years of struggling to get back on their feet only to doubt their value and question their identity. As feelings of failure build into a tsunami of shame, coping with small tasks like telephone calls or writing checks can become overwhelming.
“I’m frustrated that financially I haven’t recovered and I am still in this holding pattern after five years,” says Andrea. “I lost the abilities that I once had. I used to live by my datebook but I can’t keep one now. There are days I can’t look at my phone because I get so overwhelmed I can’t deal.” She copes by coaching herself to keep going, adding that, “I feel like if I stop, everything is going to fall apart.”
Barbara Kaplan, an employee of Merrill Lynch, who escaped from 2 World Financial Center across the street from the World Trade Center on 9/11, has been struggling financially since being laid off from her job there.
“The World Trade Center was my world,” she says. “I never recovered professionally.” A string of lower-paid jobs ensued. “I was working at the fragrance counter of a department store but I could not focus or remember any details. It was so hard to pay attention that I started breaking down and crying.”
After leaving that job, the continual stress took a toll on Barbara’s marriage, which ended in divorce in 2007. She moved to an oceanfront apartment, where on the night of October 29, 2012, she witnessed the destruction of everything she owned and watched her car get swept out to sea. Five years later, she says, “The financial trauma is still haunting me. I worry about ending up a bag lady.”
The Bag Lady Archetype
Barbara is not alone. Some 49 percent of women are afraid of ending up as bag ladies, and 57 percent report that particular fear keeps them up at night, according to a 2013 study on women, money, and power, conducted by Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America.38
Surprisingly, one-third of women who earn more than $200,000 share those fears. The Allianz study surveyed 1,416 women between the ages of twenty-five and seventy-five with incomes of $30,000 or higher. While there is no corresponding study of men’s fears about ending up broke and homeless, the third annual Chapman University Survey of American Fears, published in 2016, shows that 39 percent of men and women surveyed have a fear of not having enough money for their future. Nearly 38 percent are afraid of another economic crash. The Chapman University Survey of American Fears questioned 1,511 people about terrorism, crime, death, and government-related concerns. Financial fears ranked third after government corruption and terrorist attacks.39
Full Disclosure
The financial fallout after a catastrophic event makes those fears real. Chellie Campbell teaches people how to confront and challenge fears about money. The author of A Woman’s Guide to Financial Success without the Stress: From Worry to Wealthy, her Financial Stress Reduction program has helped hundreds of people take charge of their emotions, beliefs, and talents so they can rebuild their financial foundations.
Chellie’s knowledge is hard-won. She herself filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s after her bookkeeping business failed because her biggest client left. After maxing out her credit cards, she found herself living hand to mouth and unable to pay her mortgage.
“Bankruptcy was the only way out but I was humiliated,” she says. “After all, I was teaching financial stress reduction workshops and was president of the National Association of Women Business Owners.”
She was too ashamed to tell anyone until six months later, when two students in her financial stress reduction class challenged her by asking, “How would you know about our problems? You’ve never been through anything like this.” In that moment, she says, “I knew I had to tell the truth and explain that I had to file for bankruptcy six months earlier.”
That full disclosure set her free.
“As I spoke, I relaxed and started to heal because I admitted it. People came up after the class to thank me,” she says, adding that now she teaches from a perspective of having gone through it. “There is always something else you can do. You won’t lose your mind and you won’t lose your talent. No one can take that away from you.”
When speaking to someone who is experiencing financial trauma, Chellie says, “You don’t have the skill or the talent to be a homeless person.”
Rather than focus on fear, she recommends making a list of things you can do right now to generate income. Ask yourself, “What do you love doing even though you don’t get paid for it?” Whether it’s looking after children, baking, taking care of pets, painting, or organizing clutter, it’s possible to launch a small business on a shoestring budget. Focusing on what you can do, even in small increments, is one of the best antidotes to the sense of helplessness and loss of identity that accompany financial trauma.
“I tell people that they have the ability to create an income no matter what. That is something you cannot lose,” she says. “You can figure something out. If you get the heebie jeebies in the middle of the night, get up and read your list of things you can do to make money. It will reinforce that you are going to be fine. Life might not look so fine at the moment, but in time, everything changes.”
In The Wealthy Spirit: Daily Affirmations for Financial Stress Reduction, Chellie emphasizes the importance of patience, the second gift, which she sees as a strengthening tool for coping with the frustration of waiting for money to come in. Patience allows you to shift attention in a positive way.
“Focus on what you have instead of what you don’t have,” she says. “It’s a gorgeous day. I live in the United States of America. I have freedom. I can go to work. Nothing lasts and this, too, will pass.”
Institutional Betrayal: The Third Wave
The term “institutional betrayal” generally refers to cases of sexual assault where the victim gets blamed by the authorities instead of receiving support. Although it is rarely mentioned in the context of post-disaster trauma, survivors in need of assistance are frequently subjected to verbal hostility, blame, and bureaucratic abuse. In this context, institutional betrayal constitutes what I call “the third wave” of traumatization that occurs after the catastrophic event.
“Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival significantly violate that person’s trust or well-being.”40
Sarah Mahoney’s experience with institutional betrayal lasted for three years after Hurricane Sandy destroyed her home.
“In Kentucky, it would cost $27,000 to fix this little house,” Sarah was told by the insurance adjuster, who showed up soon after the flood. She replied, “Maybe in Kentucky there are no building codes and you can get away with duct tape, but in this part of the world $27,000 will get you a new heating system ($10,000), a new electrical system ($11,000) and some Sheetrock. You won’t be able to replace the bathroom, kitchen, or flooring.” After months of attempting to negotiate, Sarah filed a lawsuit against the insurance company but it was dismissed because, as the CBS News Magazine 60 Minutes reported, her insurance company was among those indicted for filing false engineering reports.
Moving on, she filed an application with New York Rising, a state fund that was administering $33 billion in federal funds allocated to New York State. They “lost” her paperwork six times. After being told in the spring of 2014 that she would finally be getting a check to help pay to lift her house, Sarah was waiting for the check when an engineer from New York Rising called to schedule an inspection of her new construction.
“What new construction?” she asked. “My house has not been touched since Hurricane Sandy.”
She called New York Rising to find out what was going on but no one had any record of her having applied. She and her son went to the office, only to be told that her application was not in the system. Understandably frustrated, she raised her voice. That’s when an armed security guard positioned himself in front of her, with his hand on his holster.
“Mom, it’s not worth getting shot over,” her son cautioned, as he pulled her out of the office. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of society we are becoming when a fifty-year-old woman who lost her home to a natural catastrophe has to endure being threatened by a rent-a-cop carrying a gun.
After three years of paying for an unlivable house—mortgage, taxes, insurance, and water/sewer fees—plus their rental apartment, financial and emotional stress took its toll on her marriage. She and her husband of twenty-five years separated. Eventually, she could not afford to keep paying for both residences.
She says, “One day I got a letter from the mortgage company telling me that I had abandoned the property and it was going to auction.”
Andrea Michaelson reports similar issues:
“New York Rising lost my paperwork for the rebuilding program no less than four times. When I applied to the buyback program, a bureaucrat with extremely long nails sat there licking her fingers. She put three-quarters of the papers into one pile and said, ‘We have to reject these papers because they are not in blue ink.’”
To give her a hand, Andrea’s father, a Vietnam veteran who served in the US Navy, brought in a new round of documents. He, too, reported being harassed by a security guard, who threatened to pull his gun on him.
“I thought you were exaggerating,” he told his daughter.
To Andrea, her dad’s experience validated her own.
“Every time I had to go there I came back emotionally devastated. All I want is information and they treat you like a criminal. You shouldn’t have to go through hostile, damaging, disrespectful hazing when you try to claim what is rightfully yours,” she says. “My dad is now walking in those shoes. He says, ‘I thought you were crazy but something really horrible is happening.’ ”
DARVO
DARVO refers to how institutional abusers react when challenged about their behavior. A relatively new term, it has been introduced into the conversation about sexual trauma by Jennifer Freyd, who has published landmark research on betrayal trauma theory.
Until recently when women in media and politics began speaking out about sexual predators in high places, when a woman was raped or sexually abused, her efforts to report what happened would be met with DARVO:
Deny: The abuser denies the victim’s claim.
Attack: He or she attacks the victim.
Reverse: The abuser reverses
Victim: The victim’s role so that the victim is perceived to be
Offender: The offender.
“The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender.”41
In a post-disaster environment, DARVO behavior consists of repeated demands for the same paperwork and remarks that amount to character assassination. DARVO means “Harass, Abuse, and Blame the Victim.”
One of the most blatant examples of DARVO in action is blaming the island of Puerto Rico for having “poor infrastructure” after the island was devastated by Hurricane Irma.
DARVO: Post-Disaster Edition
Fighting for funds so that you can have a safe roof over your head may not at first seem like a First World issue, but displacement from your home is a survival issue, whether you live in the suburbs of Houston or the mountains of Puerto Rico. It’s important not to get lost in comparing tragedies or believing that because someone else has it worse, your loss doesn’t count.
Many assume that after a natural disaster, your insurance and the government will come through. But it doesn’t take long before you find out that is not how the system works.
“The bank and the insurance company are not your friends,” says lawyer Denis Kelly.
After a natural catastrophe, it can take years of fighting for a fair insurance settlement and to receive government assistance to which you are entitled. Some of the games played include the following:
1. Losing your documents multiple times and then accusing you of not having submitted them.
2. Refusing to look for the documents when you produce proof that they were delivered and signed for by someone at that institution.
3. Being accused of “having something suspicious about your income” because you are self-employed.
4. Being accused of lying by individuals who are lying.
These are all strategies to harass the client.
“Not uncommon,” says Kelly, adding that “there are several special interests involved here: banks, insurance companies, lawyers, and the real estate industry. We don’t realize until we have to deal with it. There are people making lots of money who are geared up and waiting for the next one.”
Empathy and Forgiveness
Financial trauma and institutional betrayal cause emotional damage to millions of innocent people, whose only crime is that they suffered a catastrophic event. The primary loss forces them to make survival decisions at a time when they are in a vulnerable state due to acute stress from the event itself. As discussed earlier, acute stress impairs the ability to think clearly, focus, and make effective decisions.
At this critical time, the gifts of empathy and forgiveness can help to restore faith in ourselves. It may take years before we can forgive the perpetrators of DARVO.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to identify the bad actor or actors. Why did this happen? Does it happen all the time?” asks Kelly. “Do you forgive a bank or do you forgive the woman on the phone who put you through hell?”
Spending hours on the phone each day absorbing insults and false accusations is debilitating. Since each person must endure that alone, connecting with others who are going through something similar goes a long way towards building hope, even when the outcome looks bleak. The gift of empathy opens us up when the tendency to shut down and turn away from the world is often at its greatest. By asking for support we give someone else the opportunity to be generous in giving empathy, a renewable resource that replenishes itself and grows stronger the more we give. Don’t think of it as weakness.
Forgiveness takes time, which brings us back to the second gift—patience. One of the best tools for accessing patience is color breathing, which was first introduced as an emotional first aid technique (See page 63). Breathe in a comforting color and allow it to find its way anywhere in the body where there is tension or discomfort. Exhale the unwanted sensations by breathing out a different color. It takes just a minute for frustration to release, clearing the mind.
In all honesty, it is unlikely that anyone who is fighting DARVO with multiple institutions simultaneously is going to be in a forgiving mood—at least not now. More important when it comes to financial trauma, is learning to forgive ourselves and acknowledging the hurt and shame we feel without self-judgment.
How Good Can It Get?
Cynthia Sue Larsen, author of High Energy Money, suggests learning how to infuse your relationship with money with positive intentions. Instead of focusing on what is wrong, she recommends using a power question:
“How good can my relationship with money get?”
This one simple question can stop the negative spiral of self-blame and despair so that we can inch our way to a cautious new optimism.
Your current financial position may not be your own fault, but you will have to deal with hostile individuals whose job is to get you to give up and go away. If you can give yourself a twenty-four-hour hiatus once a week and use the time to unwind, you will have more energy for the next round. Be patient with yourself. When you feel overwhelmed, it’s because the situation is overwhelming. Give yourself a break.
Keys to Getting Through Financial Trauma
Prosperity Prayer
Since 2001, Lynn Robinson’s Prosperity Prayer has helped thousands of people in financial crisis. Regardless of your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof, the Prosperity Prayer quiets anxiety about generating money.
Dear God (or Spirit/the Universe/Pachamama),
I surrender my financial affairs and concerns about money to your Divine care and love.
I ask that you remove my worries, anxieties, and fears about money and replace them with faith.
I know and trust that my debts will be paid and money will flow into my life.
I have only to look to nature to see proof of the abundance you provide.
I release all negative thoughts about money and know that prosperity is my true state.
I commit to being grateful for all that I now have in my life.
I learn to manage my finances wisely, seeking help where needed.
And finally, I ask you to help me understand my purpose in life and to act on that purpose with courage and strength. I know that prosperity will come, in part, by doing work I love.
Please help me use my skills and knowledge to be of service in the world.
Thank you, God.
Amen.