Because a distorted relationship with money can have a devastating impact on mental health, we wanted to take a closer look at both the reality based elements and some of the inherent psychological aspects of it. We sat down to speak to Miata Edoga, the CEO and Founder of Abundance Bound, an 18 year old financial education company that focuses on removing mystery around money and committed to strengthening a healthier relationship with money.
Miata is in a unique position to offer an overlapping perspective around the often tricky balance between the examination of our money mindset, along with the practical skills that can help to form a strong financial foundation. As therapists we are always holding in mind the complexity of personal meaning (of money in this instance), generally formed from one’s earliest experiences. There is, therefore, an inherent uniqueness in what money represents and the power it holds for each individual.
We glimpsed into Miata’s real world process and how she navigated her self beliefs and distorted relationship to earning and money, revealing its impact on growth and change, allowing us to inflect on financial anxiety which is so commonplace and pervasive, and explored the intersection of emotion and some of the more destructive elements of money such as measurement of our self value and esteem with it.
Miata, thank you for being with us. Can you begin by telling us more about your company, the community you serve and what issues you address?
So, we just celebrated our 18th birthday! Abundance bound is a financial education company specifically for non-traditional earners. Actors, artists, creative professionals, or people who do not earn a paycheck every two weeks or with any stability, and that is a rapidly growing part of our world. It's projected that 51% of workers will be what we call non-traditional earners in the coming years.
For people, money is a really challenging topic and it's very emotional. It can be very painful. It can create an enormous amount of stress. We know that it disrupts relationships, all of these things. But when you add the complication of not earning with stability, I think it's easy for it to become this major source of trauma. So we very much focus both on the mindset that is required to be a non-traditional earner, but also the very practical management skills.
How does one’s environment impact their relationship to money and shape beliefs or create emotional barriers or distorted emotional attachments?
One of the many problems is that not only are we not as a society taught about money, but for non-traditional earners, most of what is out there, the books, the classes, the gurus, they're all speaking to what you should be doing with your 401k, all of those things that for the non-traditional earner, really often, don't exist.
And so there can also be a tendency to just shut down to just say, “Oh, that that stuff isn't for me” and “I can't do it. I don't have the ability to do it. My life doesn't allow me to do it.”
Which then leads to a cycle of shame, and hiding. So we also focus on very practically how you manage unpredictable income.
How does one straddle the gap or bridge the gap of all these sides? Often that can be very cyclical. What are some very practical skills and behaviors that can actually help with the stress and anxiety?
I think that really the place that we start is grounding people in the fact that they do have a relationship with money. I actually think most of us haven't thought of it that way. We don't think of it like a relationship. We think of it like, “the thing I have to deal with, that is getting in my way, that is causing me problems.” But we don't think of it as a relationship. And so that's really where we start. There are a handful of relationships in your life that you actually do not have a choice whether or not to have. And your relationship with money is one of them. Like genuinely, unless you are truly relinquishing all of your earthly goods and going to live on a mountaintop somewhere, you've had a relationship with money since the day you were born, you weren't aware of it, that's where the relationship began, and you will have it until the day that you die.
So once we accept that as a premise, like any relationship, we really ask our clients to now start thinking of it just like a relationship with a person in their lives. So to actually make it concrete, we know that all the relationships we have are healthy and thriving, or toxic or frightening or somewhere on that spectrum in between. We will always ask people to consider if you have a relationship with a human being and you are committed to having that relationship be a healthy one, a good one, and for whatever reason, you cannot end that relationship, then what is required of me to make the relationship healthy?
And people typically have no problem saying, “Relationships need my time and it needs me to be honest and contain love.” And also addressing poor communication, and having obsessive thoughts about it, is detrimental. But so is ignoring the relationship. In a positive relationship, having a sense of humor is a good balance. So we start by having people list what are the things that they are committed to bringing to healthy relationships. Because at that point we can then say, okay, so now practically, how are you bringing those things to your relationship with money?
And most people will then have a very kind of visceral reaction like “Oh gosh. I'm not honest with the relationship. I'm not consistent. I definitely am not bringing understanding to it. I ignore it.” Either that, or: “I obsess about it, I'm kind of terrified of it.”
We have to work on shifting those things. I think we then have the ability to dive deeper into “what is your personal relationship?” Now people have more of a connection and are able to say, “yeah, my relationship definitely has fear”, or “my relationship has a whole lot of fantasy thinking attached to it.” Or “my relationship really lacks understanding, I have a lot of anger around this relationship.” So now we can really look at what those things are, and that is then what allows an opening to dive deeper into where some of those stories may have come from.
What is the story arch of your personal relationship to money?
I'm the first generation in the United States. My father was from Nigeria, my mother from Panama, and both of my parents really came from pretty significant poverty. My father especially, like we're talking no running water, not always having shelter, that kind of thing. And so they came to the United States and they really fought hard and studied and worked 12 jobs. My dad ended up going to medical school and my mother to law school, and my mom became a lawyer, and my dad became a surgeon. And all of that is an incredible story. And they then brought family members and educated them. But my parents raised me that if you were not suffering, you could not expect financial success. Financial success required, like literally “your fingers should be bleeding”.
If you want to have stability and security, we can understand completely and totally where that story came from and how it served them. But it took me a really long time to understand that I believed suffering was virtuous. I genuinely believed it was virtuous. And anyone who
tried to tell me, maybe you don't have to be working so hard, struggling so much, I was privately really judging that person as like, well, they're not gonna get anywhere in their lives. That meant that I had eleven jobs at one point. I was never sleeping, I cried all the time because I couldn't pay my bills even though I had eleven jobs. But I felt like that was what was required of me, and a significant amount of shame that clearly I was not working hard enough, so bring on job number twelve. So, but it started with me seeing, “Oh, I have a relationship here and what are the realities of that relationship right now?”
There appears to be an emotional thread of both the value and internal virtue system that gets embedded in the meaning making. And thus a sense of derived scarcity, which is on the other end of a seesaw. Feeling the scarcity, being in the chase, that cyclically reinforces the feeling. Having eleven jobs is the chase to fill the misdirected void “I'm never gonna have enough”. We’re noticing a correlation between suffering and stability, it reminds us of relationships that people have with their trauma and their grief. That there has to be this experience of acceptance in order to move forward or through. It sounds like what you're really doing requires being realistic about your own reality and history with money and the impact of this energy, the money energy that's not avoidable. If you really want to change your relationship to money, you have to be willing to bring consciousness to your attitudes towards it.
I had a lot of years of reckoning with my own financial stories and what the results of those were. And for a long time I just wanted someone to tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do and how to fix it. Like, what's the debt plan, what's the tip that's gonna get me out of this mess that I'm in? It really took me a long time to accept that yes, of course there are practical behaviors, but I'm not going to consistently implement those practical behaviors when I don't have awareness of what all the reasons are that I am behaving the way that I am around money.
So what getting conscious means is that it allows me to say, “What's the type of relationship I want to have ?” Like any relationship between two people, there is no perfect marriage. There is an empowering part of saying, what do I want from my relationship with money? How would I actually like it to feel? Is peacefulness an important part for me? Cause there's someone who might say, I want a little excitement, I want some spice in my financial life. Or I might be like, “oh, no, no spice at all, please!” We start to look at what are the behaviors that will actually support that kind of relationship that you'd like to have.
Do you think money is a benign thing that we then come to with all of this history and emotion, trauma, desire? How does that relate to the way that money can define people too, or how the lack of money defines people? How do you speak to the societal component of how we collectively value money as a culture?
I think it's very important that in any conversation about money, we have to acknowledge the sort of significant failures of the system. I am very comfortable going on record as saying that capitalism has essentially been a failed system. And we are seeing the results of that. However, I see my job as helping people exist as powerfully as they can within a system that is absolutely going to be the system for our lifetime. And that doesn't mean we aren't working to shift and improve it. With that said, I do believe that our job as human beings and as people who have committed to helping in this area is to separate our self-worth from some financial result. So once we achieve safety and the ability to provide for our lives, which again is a whole conversation, but once we achieve that, the element that our society has created around keeping up with the Joneses and feeling that I am only defined by this accounting, “I am down here if my bank account is down here and I am up here, if my bank account is up here”, our part of what I believe very strongly is the core of the work is recognizing that the quality of my relationship with money is actually completely separate from the amount of money that I have.
So regardless of the size of one’s coffer, viewing it as a relationship that needs maintenance rather than a direct equivalent of one’s self worth is essential.
There are plenty of people with plenty of money who have really negative toxic relationships with money. And we also know that there are people with very little, who actually have healthy relationships with money. So a big part of the job is saying, how do I look at the qualities of my relationship separate from my results?
A concrete example would be the quality of honesty. So, being willing to be honest about exactly what I have, what my exact debt is, “how I am spending, and what's the average cost of my groceries, etc.?” is part of my willingness to get clear, which is the starting foundation. What you'll then see is that true of all of the qualities of a healthy relationship, is giving it the allowance of time and commitment. Whatever little bit of time we may have, are we willing to bring it to the relationship? So this is how I think the things become concrete, and we're able to move these very real things about how we are thinking and feeling and experiencing money. We're able to bring those into the practical behaviors as well.
Poet and Prose Writer Audre Lorde writes:
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.”
You shared this beautiful story about how your family overcame their financial station and recreated their financial reality. In that process, you had to unlearn some pretty unhelpful messages around money, earning and value. And we’re curious about that awareness and what made you shift? What made you say “this can't be right and there must be a better way?”. Do you think that most of us need to kind of re-evaluate what our first relationship with money was?
I think with all of our relationships, it's always helpful to spend some time thinking about them and what are the ways that we might want to make some shifts or improvements or growth. So I was able to say, alright, I'm working all the time, I'm barely getting any sleep, but I still am struggling to pay my bills and I have amassed thousands and thousands of dollars worth of debt. So I had to get really clear about the realities, and then ask myself what did I believe about money?
I think when you're doing this kind of exercise, putting brainstuff down on the paper is important. I remember writing things like, “making money is hard”, “good people don't care about being rich”. “As an artist, I will always have to be willing to struggle.” “Debt is bad.” These are my “Money Scripts.” So I wrote these things down and then asked myself “which of these beliefs genuinely are serving you?” And I remember the one that I struggled with the most was “Making money is hard”. Why did I believe that making money was hard and really presenting oneself the proof.
It was my parents who taught me this. Who could possibly say their lives weren’t hard? Unpacking that to the place where I was able to say, “But wait, how is that belief serving me now with my life today?” And there's a process, it's not magic. Because I still felt like, well, I'm not gonna become one of those people parading around saying, “you know, money is easy, money goes to me, like water.” I was like, “that's all nonsense.” It was understanding that there actually was a long road in between those two thoughts. From “You gotta have blood coming from your fingers” to then move to a belief “that “money flows like water” with no effort. There was actually a journey there.
I feel like that was the beginning of my process.Once you are able to bring up a crack into one belief system, it's like it almost sets off dominoes, then being like, “well wait, maybe, maybe this isn't true either”. Am I willing to dive into that, and “where did that come from?”.
How can people find you and use your services and what are any last words you have to share?
Our financial empowerment program is without question, the work that I am the proudest of because I believe the community is really important. And I think we have to remove the shame from this conversation with finance and money. There shouldn't be a hint of it there. And I think that the more we're able to work with and dive into these topics and develop our systems with communities of people, the better we do.
We're at abundance bound.com. https://abundancebound.com/
We're on all the social media channels such as Instagram Abundance Bound https://www.instagram.com/abundancebound/?hl=en
Thank you Miata, we are so honored for your time and highlighting the intricate layers of creating a values and needs based relationship with finances.
Pilar Haile-Damato, LCSW and Betsy Chin, AMFT