Karen McCall - Financial Recovery: Developing a Healthy Relationship with Money

Copyright 2011 by Karen McCall

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

MoneyMinder is a registered trademark of Karen McCall.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCall, Karen.

Financial recovery : developing a healthy relationship with money / Karen

McCall ; foreword by John Bradshaw.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57731-928-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Finance, Personal. 2. Money. 3. Finance, PersonalPsychological aspects. 4. MoneyPsychological aspects. I. Title.
HG179.M37414 2011

332.024dc22 2011006703

First printing, May 2011

ISBN 978-1-57731-928-3

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Frances and Vincent Kreizenbeck:

Aunt Fran and Uncle Binnie, you gave me a home,

you gave me your love, you saved my life.

From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.

To honor the confidentiality of my clients, I have changed names and other identifying details. The essential truths of their circumstances and the insights they gained during their process of Financial Recovery are authentic and reflect the dilemmas and discoveries made by many clients with whom Ive worked over the years. In the cases where last names are used, these are professionals who have agreed to share their stories and to be identified.

Does Your Relationship with Money Plunge
You into the Money/Life Drain?

The Key to Understanding Your Needs, Wants,
and Deepest Desires

I am honored to introduce Karen McCalls book Financial Recovery to readers. Having experienced severe poverty in my childhood, I lived the next forty-five years compulsively working and catastrophizing about money. By 1979 I was psychologically counseling fifty-plus hours a week, I was giving frequent seminars for one chemical and two oil companies, and I was directing the Palmer Drug Abuse Program in Los Angeles from my home in Houston. In 1980 I was asked to be on the board of directors of Texas General Oil Company, and they appointed me director of human resources.

As with many of the people whose stories Karen shares, my financial problems were about more than just sound money and debt management; they were about the fear that I would never have enough. I would spend rather lavishly at times, but then I would be ravaged by guilt and driven by a feeling of scarcity. I was clearly addicted to making money. One of the central themes of this book is that financial problems stem from an unhealthy relationship with money, and this was certainly the case for me.

In August 1981 I was spending a week in a small cabin that I owned in Minnesota. In those days, I was jogging about five miles a day, four times a week. On the 13th of August I set out on my daily run. I was quite energized, and before I knew it I had run ten miles and was headed toward a little town called Pequot Lakes. I felt high, in what experts on creativity call the flow. Those who run long distances talk about reaching a state that they describe as an endorphin high. Whatever it is called, I was quite moodaltered. I felt that I could run forever.

As I ran to Pequot Lakes, I looked out at the horizon and saw what seemed to be a cloud formation that outlined the face of Christ. I immediately experienced an auditory intuition that clearly gave me the message, Do the work that you were intended to do, and your money worries will cease.

I was deeply moved and quite perplexed by the experience. Although Id had a strong religious upbringing and studied to be a Catholic priest, at that time I was in a serious state of questioning Christianity, and I had not been to church in years.

In my latest book, Reclaiming Virtue, I named my experience of jogging on the highway to Pequot Lakes a grand will experience. I borrowed this expression from the Jewish philosophertheologian Martin Buber, who believed that each person has a unique purpose or calling. He believed that when a person makes a choice consistent with their grand will (as opposed to their mundane, everyday choices), they are furthering their calling or life purpose.

This is heavy stuff, but it is fully related to the issue of money. The work we do, our life vocation, is the source of income that provides our security, happiness, and freedom. Karen McCall has made the issue of knowing what you need, want, and desire one of the most critical factors in choosing the work you do.

After my grand will experience in 1981, I took part in some very serious therapy that helped me grasp many of the things that Karen has learned through her own suffering and has discussed in this book. Chapters 3 and 7 are the real gems for me; they reinforce the insight I gained in my grand will experience: that a critical issue in working with and handling money is choosing the work that flows from our deepest needs and real wants (what Buddha called right livelihood). I found that the work I was intended to do was teaching specifically, to help people grasp the impact of their childhood abandonment, neglect, and abuse wounds and to teach them how to overcome them. In 1984,I filmed a ten-part PBS series called Bradshaw On: The Family. These programs showed people the impact of family dysfunction and the tools to heal it. I filmed five more PBS series and wrote six books, one to go with each series. By 1992, I was a millionaire many times over. The strange thing is that from 1985 until now I have stopped thinking, worrying, and catastrophizing about money.

Chapter 3 of this book dovetails beautifully with my work regarding childhood abuse, neglect, and abandonment and the shame that naturally follows. In all the work Ive done on this subject, I never fully explored the piece of the puzzle that relates to our money behaviors. Karen has picked up where I left off, illuminating the financial consequences of childhood shame and how we can heal the shame and establish sterling money behaviors.

The wealthiest and most generous people in our culture share the belief that happiness does not come from the raw accumulation of money. Those who desire to accumulate more and more money are involved in an addictive process a kind of endless pregnancy that never reaches fruition.