Chapter 1: What is the main reason people sabotage their money decisions?
You can be smart, capable, fully across what you should be doing with money, and still not do it. You know you should ask for the raise, you know you should start investing, and you know you should probably stop spending on things that you don't care about. And yet, you don't do the things that you know you should.
And what today's guest wants to tell you is it's because you're avoiding something and you'd do anything to keep avoiding it, including sabotaging your money life. Charlotte Cummings has spent years as a counselor and now helps people through change therapy. In her training, she found something that can be applied to so many areas of your life.
Many of us have an unbearable feeling and we will do anything to make sure we don't feel it.
This is it. This is the thing that is behind why you do what you do when you know what you know. This idea that we all have one or sometimes two feelings that we are completely on the run from, that we structure our lives around avoiding and we just don't want to feel this feeling.
Whether we realize it or not, we often build a lot of our life around avoiding that feeling. even if it means you miss out on what you truly want.
I've stayed in jobs too long. I've accepted less pay than I should. I've not taken opportunities because I haven't thought I was good enough to put myself out there for them. So, welcome to Making Sense.
It's the podcast for people who want financial freedom without giving up their coffee. I'm Frances Cook, a financial journalist and fellow financial freedom seeker who makes money simple for you. Today, it's the hidden psychology that sabotages your money decisions. And... how to take back control.
This episode of Making Sense is supported by Odoo, the affordable way to get your business working smarter. Go to odoo.com, that's O-D-O-O.com for more. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's so good because I really love bringing in people with sort of alternative perspective. And you've worked as a counselor for years.
You now help people manage change in their lives as well, which must be fascinating to be part of. But one of the things that you have seen and practiced a lot through your work is this idea of an unbearable feeling. I want you to tell me what that is.
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Chapter 2: How can you identify your unbearable feeling?
Is it like the classic, like go back to your childhood or something like that?
When you first feel this feeling in your early years, you end up going, oh, I really hate this. I don't want to feel this again. This is really awful. I'm not going to put myself in a position where I feel this again. So it's kind of like we make a little promise to ourselves from that first experience of the feeling where we go, I don't want to feel this again. I'm going to avoid this one.
How much are we aware of these things? Like, do we tend to know on some level what our unbearable feeling is or does it sit quite deep?
Yeah, most of the time it sits beneath the surface and people will talk to you about the things that they struggle with. Like people will say, oh, I'm a people pleaser. You know, my struggle is that I'm a people pleaser. Or they'll talk about something that they don't like, like I'm a control freak. And the questions really become, why are you that way?
For what reason are you doing those things? And then we can get to kind of digging and exploring around what is it that you were avoiding by being that person?
Super interesting. Okay, so if you're sort of listening to this and thinking, oh, I don't know what my unbearable feeling is, you might start with something like, okay, I know this causes me problems and you might sort of start excavating on what's causing that, why am I doing it? And that could lead you to your unbearable feeling?
Absolutely. And the best question you can ask is how come? How come I'm doing that? How come I struggle with that? How come that's showing up in my life? Like, what are the reasons why you are being the way that you are? And I think sometimes that's one of our struggles as humans is we put a lot down to personality. We kind of say, well, that's just how I am. This is my personality.
But actually your personality built on the basis of some of those really early childhood experiences that you had. And we've ingrained those patterns and ways of being over time. But your personality doesn't need to be fixed, doesn't need to follow you around as if it's kind of able to cause havoc in your life.
And so often those things that we hold dear to us, like even stories like I'm a perfectionist, right? Or how come? Why are you a perfectionist? What does it help you to avoid to be a perfectionist? And I think one of the key things with unbearable feelings that I find incredibly interesting is that they actually cause some really good things in our lives.
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Chapter 3: What are common unbearable feelings that affect financial decisions?
Let your software work for you so you can handle the important stuff. Try Odoo for free for 15 days, no card details required. That's odoo.com for more. So when you talk to people about figuring this out, where do you start this conversation to help them figure out what their unbearable feeling is?
Yeah, so usually it's, you know, tell me about life, what's going on at the moment, what are the challenges that you're experiencing? But then we're getting into what is behind the pain that you're experiencing. So how come these things have happened? How come these patterns are following you around?
You know, if people are doing the same things over and over and getting the same results and going, huh, you know, I'm unhappy. Here I am again. Or, you know, something is going wrong here. Then we're getting into digging behind the scenes and trying to find that kind of that basement level of what's the assumption or the belief that this all relies on. So we have our conscious thinking.
We have thoughts, cognitions that float around in our mind all day. But there are reasons why we think the way that we do. There are reasons why we feel the way we do, why we behave the way that we do. And we're wanting to get behind that to go, what is it that we believe that's behind our thoughts, our behaviors and our emotions?
Is that the sort of thing where someone would need to sit down with a person like yourself who's trained in this? Or is it possible to do by yourself or with friends? How self-aware do you need to be to figure this out? I think...
Self-awareness is a great muscle to be able to flex sometimes. And I know that at the moment, accessing something like therapy is a luxury for a lot of people. I've got a couple of podcast episodes on this that are free for people to access and to have a listen and do their own reflection. But you can also sit down with that really good friend who's great at causing and questioning you.
Most of us have one of those people in our lives that we can chat with. Or talk this through with a partner if you've got one and see if you can work out what are our unique unbearable feelings and then how are they... playing out in our lives, how they're playing out in our relationship. What's the kind of, we call it a cross-matching. What's the interplay between those two things?
But you can certainly have a really good go at working this out yourself.
It's funny that you mention about couples because do you find there's often quite an interplay? Yeah. Yeah, hit me with that.
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Chapter 4: How do childhood experiences shape our unbearable feelings?
Or the person who's got really poor boundaries and they aren't protecting their time for their relationship. Or the person who's never kind of speaking up in the relationship and saying what it is they actually want. All of that really impacts our relationships. And it's often the interplay between our respective unbearable feelings that is the cause of conflict in our relationships.
The person we love the most also sees the worst of us. And if you've got some overreactions, which we all have, if there are some areas of your life where you do overreact and you know it, then your unbearable feeling is most likely at play there. When you show up in the world in a way that you think, what the heck was that? Who was that? was that me?
And if somebody had taped you and you heard it back, you'd be like, oh, you know, that was terrible. Do I really say that? Or do I let that escalate that far? You know, where we are under that level of stress, where we are overreacting, I promise you, your unbearable feeling is right there. Okay, so red flag on that one. Absolutely.
And then so often what couples get really good at doing is pushing each other's buttons. So, you know, an amazing skill of a long-term relationship is the ability to very efficiently wind the other person up and to know what it is that gets a reaction out of them. And for couples, I call this the dance.
It's like we have this little, you'll start to notice this next time you're having a disagreement. It's like you have these predictable steps between you. You know, I do this and then you do that and then I respond with this. And most of our fights are actually really boring as couples because they're just the same things on loop. And then we end up with this massive emotional hangover from.
It's pretty awful. And we can solve a lot of our relationship challenges by being aware of the feelings that we find most difficult and looking after our partner in that way. Like if you know that your partner has a particular unbearable feeling, you're going to want to interact with them in a way that avoids provoking that. Let's say it develops for you as a young child.
Your emotional growth and maturity kind of is stunted at that point in that space. And you behave like that six-year-old again, like that eight-year-old. You go right back to not having the skills to be able to deal with this feeling, which is why people then start behaving in ways that are uncharacteristic.
It must be interesting working in this space. I imagine it prompts some self-reflection too.
Are you comfortable saying you're unbearable? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Mine's rejection. So I had two massive experiences of burnout really young. Like I was in year 13, the last year of high school, covered in shingles. I was an absolute mess. I had really high expectations of myself, really didn't want to let other people down, was a real people pleaser in relationships and friendships.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can help you confront your unbearable feelings?
Also, one of the things that is really powerful that we need to remember about our relationships is that when one of us changes, the relationship changes. Because it's like picking up the goalposts and moving them automatically breaks that dance, automatically changes the dynamic between you. And that is a really important thing for people to feel empowered around.
You making changes, changes your relationship.
You're giving me so much food for thought in this. Okay, if someone is listening to this and there's only one thing they do differently after this, what do you hope it would be?
Get curious about what's driving you, why the things that are issues in your life have been following you around. what it is you'd like to be different and what's standing in your way. I've got an old Irish great aunt who used to have this fabulous saying, and I'm not going to do the accent, but she would talk about, I can't get out of my own way.
And I think that's so true of something like unbearable feelings, our fears. where actually we sometimes think, oh, life's hard and it's like this and I'm being held back by this and this is difficult. Well, actually so often we're the person that is getting in our own way. So being reflective, getting curious about where in life are you getting in your own way?
Are you being your own worst enemy that you can actually have complete control over that? In a time of human history when there is not much that we are in control of, we are in control of ourselves.
what's going on and how we relate to the world and the people around us, especially the people we love, how we see opportunities, how we find our way through the world, how we feel on a day-to-day basis. So being reflective about what's happening internally for us is just so important.
Oh, couldn't agree more. Absolutely couldn't agree more. It's like the flip side of the other saying that I also really like, wherever you go, there you are.
Absolutely.
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