Mercy

Welcome to the Remarkable Relationship Show with Mercy Burton Russell, where we find the wonder in your story.  I will be your host for the next hour.  I have over 35 years of experience applying the science of relationship systems to my practice of psychotherapy and leadership consulting.  My intuitive skills allow me to bring clarity and vision to your challenges. I hope you will be surprised in the next hour. My goal today is to bring a fresh perspective to you on all things related to how humans develop their individual brilliance while navigating the excitement, stickiness, and resistance in their relationships.  In my 40 years of working as a Psychotherapist, I have been continually amazed at the ways in which people overcome challenges. I hope to share my experience insights and to stimulate your thinking today. 

The topic of our show today is wealth emotions and the family anxiety about money runs in families of all financial and social classes.  How family members interact  with respect to their resources is a window into the emotional maturity of the family as a group and each individual.  A story about one couple in their families will illustrate how a clear calm view of anxiety at play can help families navigate financial challenges and enhance their relationships. As I open the show today, I would like to invite you to send me any questions you have about relationships, of any kind. I would love to know what you’re thinking and struggling with so that I can lend an ear. Of course, I will offer you my thoughts as well. If you have any suggestions for topics for the show, I would welcome that as well. My interests are broad and my resources are deep to contact me. Please email me at mercy@leadershipwithmercy.com. My website is leadershipwithmercy.com. If you would like to learn more about me and my work, or to schedule a private session with me. 

Today, I’m going to talk about money management and wealth in the family. I want to say upfront that what I’m sharing today is based on some work that I did a while ago and in the form of a paper that I wrote for a professional group. So it’ll, there are times when it’ll probably sound fairly formal. This is part of who I am and how I’ve developed as a professional. I hope to make it easy for you to listen to.  Money is a common source of stress and conflict in families, regardless of how much money the family has. We’ve all seen dramatic battles in the wealthiest of families over inheritances, over inheritances in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of assets and in the poorest of families over pittances many uncharitable and penny pinching behaviors of the wealthy reflect a fundamental anxiety about resources present in all social and economic classes. 

These dynamics about money reflect the emotional process in the family., The likelihood  I’m going to use the term ‘emotional process’ a lot here. So let me explain what I mean, family members, as well as members of any human social group relate emotionally to each other in predictable patterns. However, the intensity of these reactions varies from one family to the next.  The emotional patterns follow the same laws, like the laws of physics. However, the way the emotional pattern surfaces can be different in different families. Sometimes the pattern is more evident in how people marry or drink or parent or in physical symptoms. When some families, it is evident in how the family interacts around money and resources. Today, I am talking about these patterns through the lens of wealth in finances and physical assets in the family. The emotional process is the pattern of how family members react to each other emotionally, by looking at how the family manages money through decisions about income, production, expenditures, saving, building wealth and estate planning. 

It is possible to see patterns of anxiety and strengths in the family. Keeping an eye on pressures from the physical and social environment is important to assess the resilience and adaptability of the family.  By looking at the emotions, underlying financial difficulties and successes, there can be emotions about success as well as problems.  Let’s just clarify that it is also possible to gain a more objective and pragmatic view of individual and family resources. From this perspective, the family can make improved decisions about important financial matters. So the important thing is we’re going to keep an eye on how anxiety about money travels through financial interactions in the family. So I’m going to begin by talking about the roots of financial dynamics and how the evolution of human society is organized around natural resources for the survival of the family. This is a broad view. 

However, this to me is the framework that sets up a calmer, , a little bit more objective view of the emotions in one’s own family. It’s a practice I’ve exercised and I’ve found it very useful. I hope you do too. Following that, I will outline how different aspects of financial and research management reflect the emotional process in the family. When one can see the emotions at work under spreadsheets, it is possible to gain clarity and make decisions that are more positive for everyone involved. Finally, I will describe in depth one couple’s conflicts about wealth in the context of their multi-generational families. This illustrates how getting a handle on the emotional process can guide an individual in navigating a challenging conflict about wealth. Now, I like the word money in this discussion because it brings with it the punch of worry and anxiety that I am addressing. 

Here I will use it primarily when I’m referring to currency dollars and cents, I’m going to use the word wealth, which I believe is sort of a broader and somewhat calmer view of a term to include not only cash, but other assets such as real estate, stocks and bonds, art, et cetera,. I’ll broach this subject from the fundamental quality of wealth, which is the flow of energy for today. We’re talking about the accountant’s balance sheet. What is wealth to the family? Emotional unit families live in social groups and negotiate with the larger group for their share of resources. As social groups have become more complex. These negotiations have been removed from direct interpersonal interactions. The transfer of money or currency has come to represent the transaction. The family makes the social group with society for a share of resources. 

Now, before social groups evolved into states, 5,700 years ago, resources in the social group were shared directly. Even if distributed by a Chief.  Families varied in their ability to forage, hunt, grow crops and, and stay dry. Some would have more than enough for their own family and others would not have enough. Some would be able to store enough away for a barren season. Others would have to depend on their tribe mates for help. The relative ability of a family to have enough food in adequate shelter would depend on the pool of talents among family members and their ability to cooperate as tribes began to barter the exchanged resources, essential for survival, as well as objects that came to have symbolic value, such as shells, parrots, metals for jewelry. These symbolic objects became the basis of currency coins and bills that represent gold stores. For example, there’s no intrinsic value in the piece of paper. 

That’s a hundred dollars bill, right? It represents theoretically gold sitting in some bank somewhere in truth. This currency has no intrinsic value nor do diamonds actually, or works of art. In this respect, these currencies of wealth are not essential for survival or quality of life. They are more pure representations of the flow of energy in the complex social structures of states.  Individuals exchanging different talents for currencies became the common translation of value of that talent. Whether it was physical labor, craft skills services and healing, religious BOS trade marketing, money and market economies developed in state societies. Greater sophistication of technology and population size resulted in greater specialization of these talents and a more complex method of distribution of food and resources in this level of organization. Families began to use money or currency as a vehicle in the process of resource distribution, getting their food, getting their shelter. The food producers, for example, no longer control food distribution. The bureaucratic leader, or the marketer, the businessman does. 

The businessman has really become sort of an intermediary in a more complex society. There is greater variation among families and their relative abilities to generate resources. There are more ways in which any family defines itself to the larger society and the pool of resources. Some families would be more engaged in the production of valued physical resources. Others would be more engaged in activities that are valued in the maintenance of the state society. Bureaucratic governmental positions, social activities that involve managing groups, the families who accrue wealth do so on the basis of their interest in pursuing wealth and or in the pursuits that society will reward with disproportionate distribution of resources or in their interest in ability to comprehend and negotiate directly in the market economy of their society. For example, basically making money on the flow of money. And this is what we see, of course, in people who are invested in the stock market. The pressures of social status produce a secondary economy of wealth. 

If valued enough, socially, some members may forego accumulation of monetary wealth for the benefits of wealth.  For example, access to higher social rank education, comfortable housing and opportunities for the same benefits for their children. This has been at work in its least in prior times. For example, with Ministers and Priests, there are also families that accommodate living in lower rank social groups with less wealth. It’s important to note that families of low social rank may bind the anxiety of living with fewer resources and greater physical vulnerability with belief systems such as religious beliefs. In other words, they accommodate to having less with a belief that this is good and that they are good people,families that negotiate successfully with a larger society, for a share of resources, grew a buffer to environmental stresses. The failure of a family to negotiate successfully can expose the family unit to greater environmental stress. 

A simple example is the ability of a family to pay energy bills in extreme weather. Such as the 100 plus to temperatures in Arizona this summer, for example, or to invest in efficient energy systems that reduce the cost of electricity or gas bills. Families that cannot afford the cost of this energy, cost of air conditioning or efficiency mechanisms may actually end up endangering the health of the elderly. We know that there are people who die during heat waves due to large social changes, such as increased population, immigration or discovery of new natural resources. Families must often change their negotiation skills across generations. The pressures of togetherness can prevent a family from benefiting from the differing traits of individuals, particularly the younger generation who can see emerging trends in changing social conditions. So for the older generations, this togetherness may result in the older generations pressuring the younger generation to stay in the same geographic area and to work in the same field. An example of this is in the coal mining regions of the Appalachia. A young man may be expected to go into the mines like his father and grandfathers, even though coal mining is a threatened industry. Now I do want to mention that in Appalachia, there’s a really, actually quite progressive trend to provide training to younger generations in new energy technologies. This allows the family members to stay in close proximity while adapting to changing economic demands. But this tension is going to exist. 

Tolerance in the family for individuality and differences can enhance a family’s adaptation to environmental changes. These changes can be new technology. For example, if the family is progressive in that they look toward changes in the future. Then new technology will give opportunities. New generations will take different educational pathways. The changes in commerce in the marketplace will open up new opportunities. There can be social and class shifts, up and down. We’re seeing some of that right now, the United States with sort of the waning middle class. There are shifts in immigration and immigration patterns. And then, an increased anxiety in society. So all to say,  these are the environmental changes that a family is dealing with generation to generation. Opportunities for earning money change and the social valuation of professional skills change. The complexity of economic systems changes and adapts to an ever broadening set of interlocking systems. You know, we know how complex this is, right? Families are impacted by these changes in the accumulation and distribution of changes of, of resources among its members. That was a mouthful of course to take. And this is Mercy Burton Russell, the Remarkable Relationship Show. Today I’m talking about wealth, emotions in the family and anxiety. What you might say, evolutionary overview to what underlies the family’s interaction anyway forward to seeing you again at the break, 

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Mercy

Hi, tune into my new show, The Remarkable Relationship Show with me, Mercy Russell. I bring a fresh perspective on all things related to how humans develop their individual brilliance while navigating the excitement, stickiness, and resistance in their relationships. Wednesdays from 9 to 10:00 AM, and you can visit my website  leadershipwithmercy.com 

Hello. This is Mercy Burton Russell, with the Remarkable Relationship Show. Today, I’m talking about Wealth, Emotions and the Family, and I’ve just given a large,  evolutionary overview of the family and resources  and the complexity of society as it’s evolved. This is a framework I find helpful in getting myself calm about the  knot of emotions that can run in families about wealth. I’m talking in  a way that I have evolved over the course of my profession. So forgive me if it’s a little formal, the amount  of money that a family earns and accumulates is not in itself, a reflection of what I call differentiation, which is really the ability of an individual to act for themselves and stay connected to the family. Some people call it individuation. 

 I call it differentiation. It’s  about being an individual who can make decisions, even if they aren’t popular with the group. The amount of money does not reflect this degree of maturity, emotional maturity in an individual or in a family,  or successful adaptation. Wealth itself is not a marker of success. We defined it that way socially, but if you look at the emotional health in families, it can vary. All financial rank, great wealth is viewed as a great accomplishment, but it can generate anxiety in a family. Wealth earned in one generation can become an obstacle for the members of future generations to take responsibility for their own lives. Inherited wealth can bring with it pressures for togetherness among family members that inhibit individual initiative when initiative is necessary for adaptation or survival, not only for the individual, but for the group. 

A good example that I found about this was from the State of Vermont of sheep farming in Vermont, and dairy farming. There was a time when Vermont provided the entire dairy for New York and Boston. Then that industry moved to the Midwest as the frontier opened up. And then farmers from  Northern Europe moved to the Midwest and started producing much greater quantities. And some families held on because they were always going to be dairy farming. Others saw the trend, either moved to the crops and and, and the type of farming that they did. This is an example of how a family’s ability to adapt to that can make a difference over time. 

A family that has not accumulated wealth for future generations sometimes can be calmer and more capable of providing an emotional unit that fosters self-sufficiency and social adaptiveness in its members. Other values or principles, which are emotional resources, can be transmitted across the generations that result in decreased vulnerability to environmental or social stressors. All to say, wealth and poverty do not define emotional maturity. Nevertheless, as we know, the ability to earn and accumulate resources is highly valued. Socially, the social group confers extra value to the family that has negotiated successfully. In part, this is earned and valid. The difficulty for the family is keeping a realistic view of its merits; to be overvalued can be an obstacle to seeing the family’s strengths and weaknesses objectively. Which is necessary for continued success. It can also lead to challenges and attacks from others that undermine family functioning and detract from the use of resources for productive ends. 

So we also see this with  the family that is involved in the business that promoted and distributed OxyContin through the United States. The family members are very much in control of that business and very much implicated in the impact of it and have now had to endure significant expense emotionally and financially in trying to defend themselves. So here’s a family that has a lot of money, but nevertheless, the business that’s involved in generates high anxiety among those members. 

So, how does one assess the emotional process at play in the financial life of an individual’s family? A general assessment would start with the net worth of the nuclear family unit of that individual. So by looking at net worth, in other words, the balance of assets and debt management can be evaluated as either responsible or as a symptom of underlying emotional anxiety. 

If the net worth is negative, the negative reflects accumulated debt in contemporary economic systems. Families and businesses can carry large amounts of debt responsibly. If real property real estate, for example, is owned as security against the debt. The debt is less of a risk to the family. If the real property loses either intrinsic or income producing value in the future, the mortgage debt can become negative to a family or a business. When debt is held against the prediction of future earnings, either from income or business revenues, the debt becomes more of a risk and the family unit more vulnerable, more vulnerable to the uncertainty of the future. All these factors need to be looked at in terms of what the families are up against in all levels of social organization. Human families live with the same financial challenge to procure enough food, shelter, and goods to support the adults and the family, and to raise and launch the next generation. Humans vary in their standards of how much is needed for families and their members to negotiate with society. And with each other about the energy necessary to procure goods and a standard of what is enough or desirable. So a family’s lifestyle values and choices match their resources. 

Other indicators of the family’s emotional status with money include how much information individual family members have about the finances of the family. How much energy is spent by family members managing money and assets apart from income producing activities. And the degree of experienced anxiety and conflict among family members about money management, income, production, and expenditures. Lack of information, no energy involvement with finances, and sometimes even absence of conflict and negotiation among family members can be indicators of a family that’s not handling the anxiety well or handling money well. Some people having more information, too much more information than others, energy and anxiety can also be indicators of problems in the family. 

That’s my background. I’m now going to illustrate how these processes are at play in one family. I’m going to be telling a vignette. It’s fairly in depth from one family that tells the story of how the family system, emotional process lived in financial issues. So this should illustrate important principles that can guide us in helping families navigate stressful events around finances. So this is my vignette, a husband and wife with differences in their financial status. And in family patterns of managing money, the husband has a high paying job, has saved a significant part of his income before marriage and receives regular monetary gifts from his family. He is frugal with daily expenses and saves his spending for planned luxuries. His savings are invested primarily in the stock market, in a portfolio managed by a professional investor, despite formal education and finance and economics. He is not interested in managing his investments day to day. 

The wife has an equal level of education and a profession with moderate income potential. She comes to the marriage with debt and no savings. She is frugal by necessity and keeps careful track of her expenditures on an annual basis. She brought debt from her previous marriage, and she’s a single parent. She has difficulty budgeting on a daily or weekly basis and makes impulse purchases on small items. She doesn’t really know how to plan her money. She lives hand to mouth. She has received financial assistance from her family in the past and is responsible to her creditors. Neither spouse is systematic in making long term plans in the form of estate and retirement planning. The husband has certain investment vehicles that are designed for retirement. He actually works in that industry. But other than that has a basic Will in respect to his family, what they accomplished at the time of this incident was a patchwork of mutual and individual efforts. 

The husband made a Will for the, for the wife’s financial protection before their marriage and established a trust for their son. The wife initiated the purchase of long term care insurance. She made a contribution as well in thinking about their future. She, however, does not have a Will nor, at this point, have they revisited the husband’s Will since they married. The husband’s family lives in a similar manner. So we’re going to talk now about where  these two people come from.  We can begin to see the patterns of anxiety that  may be living underneath their  somewhat stable, but tenuous negotiation about finances.  The husband’s family lives in a similar manner as he does. The primary source of their wealth is inherited money that has been invested. They do not manage their own investments. 

A family friend is their professional investor. A family friend from the childhood of the husband’s father. And he makes social visits to the family, but does not provide any kind of details or reports about the status of their investments and earnings. They talk openly about money and they make planned gifts to their children. Now they also finance house mortgages for their children that the children repay responsibly with amortized interest.  They have enough resources to be able to give their children cash, to buy their properties.  But all done  with contracts and responsibly pay back to the husband’s maternal grandparents. His mother’s parents are the source of the inheritance. Their wealth was earned in transportation and building businesses. His paternal grandparents, his father’s parents were well educated professionals with high social ideals who lived comfortably, but did not accumulate wealth, 

and at times relied on family support. The husband’s anxiety is evident only in his lack of involvement in the management of his investments. Which were based primarily on savings from his earnings. At this point, now the wife’s family has not inherited wealth or savings for two generations. In her father’s family,  her father and grandfather were  professionals. Their earnings are modest and lower than the average for their profession. Her paternal grandfather, her father’s father and grandfather were ministers whose families lived in association with the wealthy, but they themselves never owned any property or accumulated any savings or wealth. Her paternal grandmother, her father’s mother, came from a family that had one time owned a valuable piece of waterfront real estate in a major Northeastern city. However, this property and the wealth associated with it, was unwisely sold and spent by the grandmother’s brother. 

The loss of this wealth changed the life trajectory of her grandmother, who had been expected to bring resources into the family with her minister husband. Any wealth and living family members, including her aunts and uncles  has been accrued by the virtue of marriage. So the wife’s parents are frugal,  and the father’s a well educated professional, but they expect the social amenities of a higher income. There’s a history of secrecy in the family around financial matters and ambivalence toward the wealthy and people engaged in the business world. Money is considered to be a negative influence on character and relationships in her father’s branch of the family. Her father,  a physician, did not know which patients paid their bills and which owed him money. He delegated the accounting of his medical practice to his nurse who decided how much money he had to support his wife and six children. Eventually, he accrued a better income in partnership with two physicians with better financial management skills and less anxiety about money. And at the end of his career, he was paid handsomely as a part-time physician. 

At this point, we’re going to take another break. This is Mercy Russel with the Remarkable Relationship Show. Today, I’m talking about wealth emotions in the family. I’ve given an overview  from my perspective on the evolution of family money, in the context of society. And now  I’m talking about a specific family, their family background, and  a conflict in finances and how this view helped them get through that. And so I’ll be back after this break. 

BREAK 

Welcome back. This is Mercy Burton Russell with the Remarkable Relationship Show. Today, I’m talking about wealth, emotions and the family. I’ve given an overview of family management of resources in the context of society. And how dynamics in the family can affect or reflect the emotional stability of the family  in respect to wealth. I’m talking about a specific family,  given a background on the husband’s family and  I’m in the process of  talking about the multi-generational background of the wife’s family. And the purpose of this is to show how her current behavior, in this scenario, was affected by patterns that she was influenced by from previous generations and patterns of her functioning around wealth and money. 

We’ve talked about  her father and her father’s family and the way that anxiety had existed in prior generations.  After a divorce, her father remarried a woman who had wealth from her previous marriage. They enjoyed a comfortable life of travel and generosity. However, at the end of his life, he was disabled from a chronic degenerative illness, and he began to pressure his wife to make large expenditures for travel and his care.  She agreed this behavior was in stark contrast to his conduct in his first marriage, as a frugal humble, although talented physician.  Under the natural anxiety facing his mortality, his spending became irresponsible for the ongoing support of his much younger wife. Both he and his second wife had grown up in Gentile poverty, and they carried anxiety about money throughout their lives, during periods of wealth and poverty, with patterns of under and overspending. 

The wife’s parents were from immigrant families and lived close to poverty.  There was no accumulation of wealth, the exception, however, was her maternal grandmother, her mother’s mother who married twice to a college professor and then an engineer with ample investments. Each time elevating the resources available to her family. When the wife’s mother divorced, for example, she was able to resume her profession because she had kept her license to practice. So this, even though the wife had come from a background of no money, she was very responsible and accountable for her own support. Knowing she had kept her during her whole marriage, that there might be a time when she would need to work again. So she had kept her license. 

She supported herself during this time after her divorce in a modest fashion and accumulated savings responsibly for her retirement. Before she knew she would inherit money from her mother who was married to a wealthy man. The mother’s brother worked as a tradesman. There was no other wealth in the family. Now, the wife’s anxiety is evident in her habit  in the marriage, as she gets together with her husband. And her habit of small item, impulse purchases worry about lack of money and her lack of confidence in her ability to support herself adequately. 

Now, the couple expected to have differences in managing their finances before living together. |The husband had lent money to the wife who at that time was a single parent to purchase a home. She repaid the loan with monthly payments and interest until she sold the house. When she  repaid the entire loan, they had a child. They decided that the wife would take primary care of their child. And they did not rely on her negligible income. This increased the need for them to negotiate about their mutual resources. She continued to work part-time and covered  her professional expenses and discretionary, personal expenses, clothes, coffee, lunch, with friends, that kind of thing that she thought she didn’t really want to have to answer to her husband for.  The husband appeared calmer and more capable about finances than the wife. When anxious, he focused on her spending patterns. 

Her primary effort during this period was to hold herself accountable for her spending patterns, with careful bookkeeping and her part-time income. Now, the evidence of anxiety about money in the husband and, and his parents’ functioning was in their lack of involvement in their investments. So  a significant, critical event was a significant loss. While investments were under the management of a family friend, this drew the husband’s family’s anxiety about money to the wife’s attention. It really wasn’t visible.  After this loss, the husband made general statements about the hopelessness of their financial situation. They were still cons actually in a category, you could consider wealthy and attributed it, but he became anxious and felt hopeless. And they attributed it to his wife’s spending patterns, which had not changed. Initially, she responded by showing him detailed facts about the expenses,  the proportion of discretionary spending to savings and changes in total income, due to a reduction  in her contribution. 

However, she remained in the one down position, as long as she accepted responsibility for her husband’s anxiety about finances. Now, this pattern changed when she identified the factor of the significant investment loss of 50% due to poor investment management during a market downturn as the more realistic source of anxiety. So her husband was up at night worrying about her credit card bill. She felt on the defensive again. And then she thought, what is he really anxious about? Why all of a sudden is he focused on the credit card bill again? And then she realized, oh, there’d been this huge shift in the value of their stock portfolio. Her spending patterns have not changed. Now, the fact that she had raised questions about  his financial manager’s lack of accountability to her husband and his family prior to the loss, gave her confidence in her judgment, despite her lack of knowledge of financial matters and markets. The husband worked in an environment where he had access to the momentary changes in the equities markets. 

When the wife asked about the manager’s advice, because the equity losses were highly publicized in the telecom downturn, the husband brushed the question aside, believing the manager would contact him if he needed to make any changes. Eventually he and his parents found out that the manager had been sick and his replacement had ignored the status of their accounts, neglecting to make necessary changes to prevent losses. Now,let’s just give the background that this wife had spent quite a bit of time looking at these emotional patterns that I’ve discussed before. So she wasn’t coming to this raw, but she had an idea. She’d already been thinking about anxiety in the family and in the multi-generational family. So based on principles she, instead of blaming her husband for their loss and defending herself, the wife recognized that anxiety was at play. They were equals in anxiety about money. 

She then began to make an effort to treat the investments as if they were her own, which they were by virtue of marriage. Since she had no background or experience in investing, she began to manage a small portfolio of stocks as a way of learning about the stock market while exploring other possible investment vehicles, such as real estate. The husband accepted her analysis of the anxiety and became calmer about her spending patterns. They hired a new investment manager closer to home and included the wife in details of the management of the portfolio.  This vignette demonstrates several system principles. And I’ll just go on to talk about what I saw at play here. The first important principle was that each person in the marriage plays a part in the problem. Each person in the family system plays a part in the problem. 

 we’re starting that as a basic assumption.  Each person brings anxiety about money to the relationships. The  wife had a poverty mindset, as I’ve described, coming from a family that had few resources.  Her grandmother, married to a wealthy man, still drew a bath with two inches of water.  The husband’s anxiety took the form of inadequate responsibility for wealth, despite healthy spending and saving patterns. Now this was less evident and less visible. There was always plenty of money. There was wealth in his family and the prior generations.  There had been three generations before there had been significant loss of wealth actually involving the civil war. However, this wasn’t evident because of how well organized the family appeared to be. He and his family appeared to be about money, except for this one element of sort of hands off in terms of managing the investments.  The second important principle here is that families transmit anxiety across generations, which leads to the development of symptoms in members of the younger generation. 

 How the family functions in one generation is going to rain down on subsequent generations. The important thing of course is for the older generation to take as much responsibility for their own anxiety as possible without just passing it along as an inheritance, which is really what had happened in the wife’s family. It’s possible to understand the financial behavior of individuals by looking at the multi-generational experience with wealth or with poverty and family habits and money management can also serve to transmit chronic anxiety. So a family that looks very calm in other aspects of functioning health education, marriage patterns can be passing along anxiety through how they manage money and how they relate to money. The husband’s father in this case was raised by a single mother who left a creative career to enter her profession, to support her children. 

Remember the wealth   in the husband’s family came from the mother’s side. So similar to the wife’s family,  the wife of the couple we’re talking about the husband’s father assumed that his income as a professor would support a family. However, his wife had a trust from her deceased father, which gave them added income each year with this distribution. They were able to maintain a higher quality of life, but there’s still that anxiety there from the father’s family, it’s not visible. It’s  covered up by  these resources from the wife. In addition, they were able to distribute annual gifts to their young adult children, including the husband of the couple. Nevertheless, the husband’s parents lived frugally as did the husband saving their spending for special occasions. The husband’s mother, for example, would not allow her son to take a work study job in college, because there were others who needed it more. 

And he always said, this left him feeling poor as a student, despite the wealth available. Now, the wife had little experience or knowledge about the accumulation of wealth. Her parents never talked about money. They lived in a small community and were viewed as being well off because of the father’s professional position. In fact, they had no savings and their father had a rolling line of credit at the bank to cover extra expenses. There was no expectation. She had no expectation of support from the family, except for her college tuition, financial goals were never discussed in her choice of profession. Like her father and grandfather was dictated by her personal interest and social identity as a professional. She actually rejected her mother’s practical advice which is an interesting note. Her father’s advice when she had money worries was “you’ll be fine.” So nothing substantive, she had little motivation or understanding about making career choices based on financial compensation. 

She assumed that a professional degree in license would provide her with adequate income for a middle class lifestyle, which it actually did not, but she was more responsible than her father in managing her client accounts. Although her profession was a traditional female profession of lower social status than her father’s. So her earnings were naturally lower. This differentiation of self, the wife’s ability to distinguish her thinking from emotion and to act on the basis of principle was what enabled them to manage this conflict. And that’s what’s important as we look at financial issues. There’s  my dissertation  on wealth emotions in the family. 

This is Mercy Burton Russell of the Remarkable Relationship Show. Please submit any kinds of questions or ideas for future shows to me at mercy@leadershipwithmercy.com. 

Thank you, and we’ll see you next week.